Aditi from Daksha, and Daksha from Aditi

One short passage in the tenth book of the Rigveda has done more to unsettle later readers than anything else said about Aditi. In a hymn on the generations of the gods, Daksha is born from Aditi and Aditi is born from Daksha. The text states the reciprocity as a fact and moves on. It is not an error of transmission, and commentators from the early ritualists onward have offered readings of it rather than corrections: that the two names stand for capacity and boundlessness, which imply one another; that the sequence describes a cycle rather than a line; that the hymn is deliberately describing an origin that cannot be told in order.

The same hymn holds the second difficulty. Aditi bears eight sons. She brings seven of them to the gods and casts the eighth away. That eighth is Martanda, whose name means the dead egg or the dead bird, and he is brought back to be born and to die, which in some readings makes him the ancestor of mortals and in others makes him the sun. The Adityas of the classical lists are not eight and not seven but twelve, so this passage sits inside a tradition that had not yet settled how many there were.

What the atlas takes from both is that Aditi belongs to the oldest and least tidy layer of the material. Her later career, as the wife of Kashyapa and the mother of the gods in the Puranas, is a much more orderly arrangement, and it is a later one. Neither displaces the other, and the pages here keep both.