Ushas

Before the sun, the cattle. The poets who made the Rigveda watched the eastern sky turn from ash to rose and described what they saw as a herd of red cows let out of a dark stall, and behind the herd, standing in a chariot, a young woman who had just finished dressing. She arrived every morning. She had arrived every morning for as long as there had been mornings, and she would go on arriving long after everyone watching her had died, and the hymns say both halves of that in the same breath.

Uṣas is dawn, and the word is not a title. It is the ordinary Vedic noun for daybreak, and the goddess is what that noun becomes when a poet addresses it directly and expects an answer. Her name descends from Proto-Indo-Iranian *Hušā́s and behind that from Proto-Indo-European *h₂éwsōs, the same root that gave Greek Eos, Latin Aurora, Lithuanian aušrà, and the word for east across much of Europe. She is one of the very few figures in the Rigveda whose identity can be traced syllable by syllable back out of India and into a shared prehistory. Around twenty hymns are addressed to her by the strictest count and roughly twice that by a looser one. Either way, no other goddess in the collection comes close.

She is called Daughter of Heaven, divó duhitā, and the Heaven in question is Dyaus, the sky father whose name is cognate with Zeus. Her sister is Ratri, Night, and the two of them share a single road. They travel it in turn, moving in opposite directions along the same path, immortal, of different colours, and, the hymn insists, entirely without quarrel: Night resigns the dwelling and goes. Her relation to Surya is the one place the record breaks down. Some hymns make the sun her lover, pursuing her across the sky and never closing the gap; others make him her son, born out of her each morning. The sources do not agree, and there is no reconciling them without picking a side.

The physical descriptions are consistent enough to reconstruct. She is young, newly born with every daybreak, and the same hymns call her ancient of days, decking herself in the self-same raiment she has always worn. She puts on her embroidered garments the way a dancer does, tying them on in order to be looked at. She rides high, sometimes in a hundred chariots at once, and the team is either purple steeds or red cows, the poets untroubled by the difference because the point is the colour. Her light spreads west across the whole sky the way a flood rolls out its water. She is a bride dressed by her mother in one verse and, in another, a woman with no brother who must go out and find men for herself. Elsewhere she is simply the eye of the gods, the one who sees everything as it actually is.

The morning goes like this. The grey drains out of the east, birds come off the branches, and in every house someone crouches over cold ash and coaxes a fire up, so the smell of smoke reaches the courtyard at the same moment the light does. The herds are turned out. The hymns are frank about who is meant to profit: shine richly on those who worship, one poet asks, and let the tight-fisted traders sleep on unwakened.

Her work is larger than making things bright. She is the daily evidence that ṛta, the order underneath everything, is still holding, and the hymns return to this obsessively. She does not break the law of Order. She does not miss the place appointed to her. She has never once transgressed the divine commandments, and she keeps Varuna’s eternal statute, crossing thirty regions in turn and arriving blameless. When she rises she makes every pathway easy to travel. She is even identified with dakṣiṇā, the priest’s fee, which makes the light itself a payment arriving for services rendered. Cattle, horses, sons, and renown all come with her, and they come to the household that has already bought them. Nothing in the Rigveda is free.

She opens what the dark had shut. The verses describe her laying the darkness open the way a stall is opened for the cows, covered treasures becoming visible again, and a dark monster driven off by nothing more elaborate than the spread of her brightness. Evil spirits go out with it. Nothing in the ritual day can begin before her: the fire is kindled at her coming, the Soma is pressed, the Ashvins yoke their chariot and follow her out on paths of gold, and the entire apparatus of Vedic worship is timed off a woman standing in the east.

Then there is the cost. One of the Gotama poets, in the middle of praising her, says that she wastes away the life of mortals like a skilled hunter cutting birds to pieces. She diminishes the days of human creatures. She does not interrupt the ordinances of heaven, another hymn allows, although she minishes human generations. The logic is not mystical in the least. She is the last of the endless mornings that have departed and the first of those still to come, and each one that arrives is one that will not arrive again for whoever is watching. The dawn goddess is also the countdown. The Rigveda does not soften this or treat it as a contradiction; the verse that calls her blessed is the verse that calls her a hunter.

Once, she was caught. A hymn to Indra runs through his heroic deeds, the demons and the hundred stone fortresses and the thirty thousand sent to sleep, and then arrives at this: he smote down Heaven’s Daughter for meditating ill, he crushed Uṣas when she lifted herself up in pride, and she fled her chariot in terror when the strong god shattered it. The wreck was left lying in the Vipāś, the river now called the Beas, and she ran far away. It is a strange thing to find in a collection that otherwise cannot praise her enough, and no one has satisfactorily explained what she was supposed to have done. Whatever it was, she is the only figure in the Rigveda celebrated in dozens of hymns and beaten senseless in one.

Her limits follow from what she is. She cannot stay. Every dawn is finished inside the hour, dissolved by the sun she came to announce, which makes her own defeat the single guaranteed event of her existence, repeated daily and never once mourned. She cannot deviate either, because the order she guarantees is also the thing that binds her: appointed place, appointed hour, appointed raiment, no room to move. And she does not withstand force, as the broken car in the Beas makes plain.

Nearly everything known about her sits inside the Rigveda. She did not develop the way her fellow Vedic gods did. Where Rudra grew across a thousand years into Shiva, gathering consorts and epithets and temples as he went, Uṣas simply stopped being written about, leaving almost no later iconography and no myth cycle of her own. What survived was the word. Usha still means dawn, and on the final day of Chhath the offering made standing knee-deep in cold river water as the light comes up is still called the Usha Arghya.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ushas?

Ushas is the Vedic goddess of dawn, and the most exalted goddess of the Rigveda. Her name is simply the Vedic word for daybreak, and she is addressed as the Daughter of Heaven, the daughter of the sky father Dyaus and the sister of Ratri, the night. She is described as a young woman in embroidered garments riding a chariot drawn by ruddy horses or red cows across the eastern sky.

Why does the Rigveda say Ushas shortens human lives?

Because each dawn she brings is one a mortal will never see again. The hymns state it directly: she wastes away the life of mortals like a hunter cutting birds to pieces, and she diminishes the days of human creatures. The same verses that call Ushas blessed and auspicious make this point without any apparent discomfort, treating her as both the gift of a new day and the marker of a shrinking allowance.

Why did Indra destroy the chariot of Ushas?

A hymn to Indra credits him with crushing Ushas when she lifted herself up in pride, shattering her chariot so that she fled from it in terror, and leaving the wreck lying in the river Vipāś, now the Beas. The hymn offers no further explanation and the episode is not developed anywhere else. It sits oddly against the dozens of hymns that praise Ushas without reservation, and what she had actually done remains unexplained.

Is Ushas related to the Greek goddess Eos?

Yes, directly. Ushas descends from Proto-Indo-Iranian *Hušā́s and behind that from the Proto-Indo-European dawn goddess *h₂éwsōs, the same source that produced Eos in Greek, Aurora in Latin, and Aušrinė in Lithuanian. The root also underlies the word for east in a number of Indo-European languages, which makes Ushas one of the most securely reconstructable figures in Vedic religion.

Is Ushas still worshipped in Hinduism?

Not as a major deity with her own cult. Almost all of the material about Ushas comes from the Rigveda, and unlike Rudra, who developed into Shiva, she left no later myth cycle. Her name persists in the ordinary word for dawn, and the morning offering on the final day of the Chhath festival is called the Usha Arghya.

Related Entries

Surya, Indra, Agni, Varuna, Soma, Vayu, Rudra, Aditi, Sarasvati, Vishnu, Eos, Selene, Helios, Nyx, Hemera, Dyaus