Aranyani: The Forgotten Goddess

Goddesses were integral to the earliest aspects of Vedic civilisation. But even as the four Vedas – Rig, Sama, Yajur, and Atharva, were finally being written, some of the goddesses that heralded the dawn of civilisation in the subcontinent were already becoming elusive.

So many of the Vedic goddesses disappear entirely from later Shastric literature. But within the Vedas we find so many goddesses and many of them held places of prominence and even overshadowed the male gods, especially the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva that later becomes so central to Hinduism.

But there was one goddess who was so elusive that she had already begun to retreat to the margins of memory even in the Vedic age. Her name is Aranyani.

Locating & Losing Vedic Goddesses

The goddesses revered and mentioned in the Vedas are potent forces whose powers were, over time, slowly assimilated and absorbed within a larger framework of a more patriarchal pantheon. Evocative, esoteric and forgotten, these goddesses represent perhaps the discrete representations of Adi Shakti that were worshipped more concretely before being reduced to myths and inexplicable remnants that we no longer bother to identify or perhaps understand.

It is an evocative roll call that emphasises just how closely these goddesses were rooted in the land and in Prakriti and how closely they were intertwined with the daily lives and beliefs of the people. In that sense they are almost anthropomorphic. Ushas, the harbinger of dawn and goddess of new beginnings; and her sister, Ratri, the goddess of the night. Dhrithri or Prithvi, the mother of Indra and Agni, she is at once the earth and its fecundity, the cow whom Vishnu milks for nourishment and the source of earth’s fertility.

Contrasting with Dhrithri; who is, as the earth, defined with clear boundaries; is the goddess Aditi, the limitless source of all creativity. She is also, like her counterpart, often identified with the nourishing cow. As the mother of the twelve Adityas such as Varuna and Vidhata, she is also worshipped as the “Mother of the Gods.” She is often venerated as the first goddess who contained within her completion, and in this guise Dhrithri as well as the traditionally masculine sky, are included within Aditi. Appropriately, her name Aditi means the one who is limitless and un-bound by or to anything. Subordinate to Aditi is Nirrti, who literally means the absence of law, and is perhaps the precursor of Yama. Or perhaps she is the female energy that enables the god of death.

Quite possibly the female goddesses were our first deities and Sanatan Dharma, later called Hinduism, began by honouring the Sacred Feminine. But with the passage of time the goddesses were blurred and pushed into the background and masculine deities began to dominate and take over the powers of these Vedic goddesses such as the Sun God replacing the goddesses of the Sun. Perhaps the one exception to this assimilative masculine pantheon is the ascetic god, Shiva, whose powers have always been declared incomplete without the female energy. But Shiva, whose earliest worshipped form is posited to be Pashupati, is to begin with a god of the margins, of the exiled, desolate wilderness of unspeakable places. 

Traditions of the Margins

Many local, oral epics and traditions – the ones that exist on the periphery and continue to exist precisely because while existing on the margins they do not threaten the mainstream in any way – continue to present a mythology that stills sings of goddesses and looks at the stories from a more feminine perspective.

In the Kannada oral epic – Male Madeshwara – they still sing of a goddess whose powers were usurped by a male deity who was nonetheless unable to use them until he consumed the goddess and took upon his body the symbol of her power: her fierce, beautiful eyes. The Bhil Mahabharat, an oral epic from a community in Gujarat understands the great battle as a fight over possession of the divine female energy, which is centred in the person of Draupadi.

Much is forgotten and much is lost. All that remains of the 64 Yoginis are the names and the broken ruins of temples that, contrary to all Hindu Shastric temple principles, consisted of an inner sanctorum that was open to the elements. We only recognise the Shodas Matrikas as the goddess whose presence and blessings must be invoked before the beginning of the ritual prayers and rites. The nine days of the Navratri are consecrated to the Devi and apart from their association with the male gods – Ram worshipping the Devi in order to be able to defeat Ravana and the gods approaching the Goddess to rid the earth of the demons they were unable to defeat – we do not know just how, when and why these days were dedicated to the Devi.

Remembering Aranyani

One of the oldest Vedic Goddesses is Aranyani. And even there, in the Vedas, she is elusive. She is mentioned once in the Ṛigveda, in Mandala 10 – hymn 146, which is known as the Aranyani Suktam and considered one of the most beautifully descriptive hymns.

The Vedic hymn describes her as an elusive, wandering goddess. Her abode is the quietest of the glades in the dense green jungles. She is the goddess of the forest and all its abundance. She is the mother of the forest and all wild creatures. And she offers humanity that abundance freely, without asking for anything in return. She offers sustenance to all without tilling the Earth. She is described as one who is always away from humanity, on the margins of the civilized world. She wanders fearlessly and as she dances the closest the writers of the Vedic hymns come to sensing her divine presence is the tinkling of her anklets.

To hear the Aranyani Suktam being chanted:

Aranya in Sanskrit means forest or rather wilderness. I do not know if the word for forest is derived from her name or if she was named for the forest. Other than the hymn – Aranyani Suktam, there is little to be gleaned about her in the Vedas. She remains hidden and mysterious. But clearly, she is honoured as the mother and the guardian of the forests and all the wild creatures in them. It is possible that she was subsumed within the matrix of Prakriti – the Sacred Feminine principle embodied by Nature. It is equally possible that she was a Yakshi, that mysterious group of guardian spirits and deities of the land who were eventually folded into the Vedic world as demigods. Yaksha have been described as Nature – Spirits, guardians of the land and “custodians of the treasures that are hidden in the earth and the roots of the trees”. Yakshas continued to be worshipped in the Vedic period, alongside “the priest-conducted sacrifices of the Vedic period”. It is notable that many ritual pujas and yagnas even today invoke and invite the presence of Yaksha as a part of the rituals.

The echoes of Aranyani can be found in the forest deities that still exist in the margins, in rural regional folklore and ritual – “like Banbibi in Bengal, Vanadevata in the Goa and Konkan region, Vandurga in parts of South India”. Aranyani is no longer worshipped in the subcontinent today. There is only one known temple dedicated to her in – the Aranya Devi temple in Arrah, Bihar.

Clearly, nearly three thousand years after that evocative Vedic description of Aranyani, we have either forgotten her or banished her through our ignorance or, more likely, we are unable to hear the faint tinkle of her anklets as she dances in the ever-shrinking forests.

And yet today, when we need to restore our forests, to regenerate the land we need Aranyani more than ever.

Header Image: “Mumbai Moon 2025”, painting by Jethro Buck