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Gayatri

Personification of the Gayatri Mantra

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Through Vedas, Saraswati and Puranas

Lab · Class 6–7Vedic Age

Origin

Gayatri was the name initially applied to a metre of the Rig Veda consisting of 24 syllables. In particular, it refers to the Gayatri Mantra and the Goddess Gāyatrī as that mantra personified. The Gayatri mantra composed in this triplet form is the most famous. Most of the scholars identify Gayatri as the feminine form of Gayatra, another name of the Vedic Solar god which is also one of the synonyms of Savitri andSavitṛi.

Scholar Dominik Haas argues that the goddess Savitri, as the embodiment of the Gayatri Mantra, is rooted in the post-Vedic period. First, with the Jaiminiya Upanishad Brahmana as a female counterpart to Savitr who the mantra extolls, although he argues this is a weak deification and better understood as simply a quality. Second, with the Gopatha Brahmana, in which Savitr and Savitri become the parents of the Vedic student inducted with the upanayana, and Savitri is declared the mother of the Vedas who students ought to worship. The Savitri Upanishad includes a prayer to her as a goddess. Then with the Mahanarayana Upanishad, she is extolled, explicitly linked with the Gayatri Mantra, and extolled as the same goddess as Saraswati; Haas suggests that prior evocations of her were ambiguous on whether they truly meant the mantra or rather the Gayatri meter, and this was the first unambiguous evocation of her as this mantra, as well as of this mantra as the mother of the Vedas. The exaltation of the Gayatri Mantra, which emerged as the Vedas fell out of focus, only escalated the prominence of this goddess, with the Mahabharata going so far as to declare the Vedas originated by coming out of her mouth.

Simultaneously, Haas notes a Vedic goddess, Sūryā, a daughter of Savitr, and who in this relation became described as sāvitrī in the Atharva Veda but having nothing whatsoever to do with the Gayatri Mantra. Given aspects such as an early swayamvara wedding where her radiant beauty made many gods attempt to woo her, he connects her to an early Indo-European prototype, connecting her to such figures as Helen of Troy. Persisting to the Mahabharata, with the story of Savitri and Satyavan, these two goddesses were first fused into one through Ashwapati praying to her for a daughter. He argues this conflation of the two goddesses would have come to a shock to the ancient audience, and that this may have had a "comical aspect".Additionally, he suggests the person of Savitri, the heroine of this story, unifies their qualities as both radiant and wise. But altogether, he suggests, this gave her both a form and agency which pushed a story forward. Haas hypothesizes that the story came during a time where the goddesses were beginning to be fused, but the process was not complete; as late as the Harshacharita, the two were portrayed as friends. But the importance of the Mahabharata story, combined with the prominence of the Gayatri Mantra, meant the fusion of the two into one, along with another strong tradition of fusing her with Saraswati as the mantra became a symbol of knowledge.

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