Aditi and the Crisis of Contemporary Feminism

There is in the Vedic pantheon a figure that might at first glance seem foreign to contemporary feminist debate, and that is yet perhaps the most radical of all in what it says about the nature of the feminine and about the relationship between the masculine and the feminine in the very structure of the cosmos: Aditi. We devoted an article to her in which we explored her nature as maternal infinite, as the primordial matrix of all existence, as the mother of all the gods. But Aditi deserves to be revisited from the specific angle of contemporary feminism, because what she represents says something that contemporary feminism, in its majority, has not yet fully integrated and whose absence perhaps explains certain of its limits and internal crises.

Contemporary feminism is traversed by deep tensions that weaken it without diminishing the legitimacy of its fundamental struggles. These tensions are real and important: between liberal feminism that seeks equality within existing institutions and radical feminism that questions these institutions themselves, between intersectional feminism that articulates gender, race and class and more traditional feminisms that confine themselves to gender as the main category, between the feminisms of the global North and those of the global South whose priorities and contexts differ profoundly, between feminisms that defend the rights of trans women and those that oppose this in the name of a biological definition of the feminine. These tensions are not mere factional quarrels. They reflect deep disagreements about what the feminine is, about what equality means, and about the paths that lead to emancipation.

Aditi does not offer answers to these questions in the sense of arbitrating between the different positions. What she offers is something more fundamental: a framework within which these questions can be posed differently. Her name, let us recall, means the unlimited, the one who is not bound, the one who precedes all limit and all definition. Aditi is the Mother of all the gods, which means in Vedic cosmology that she is anterior to all distinctions, all hierarchies, all particular attributes. The gods, with their well-defined powers and functions, were born from her. She contains them all without reducing herself to any one of them. She is the infinite of which the finite is the partial manifestation.

What this vision says about the feminine is of a radicality that contemporary feminism has not yet fully explored. In most of the philosophical and religious traditions that followed Vedism, the ultimate principle, the Absolute, was conceptualised as masculine: the Father, the creator God, the Logos, the active Principle. The feminine was either secondarised, or associated with passive matter, with nature to be dominated, with what receives rather than what creates. Feminism has reacted to this subordination by seeking either to affirm the equal capacity of women to exercise roles traditionally held by men, or to valorise a specific feminine, a way of being in the world, of caring, of connecting, that would have been marginalised by patriarchal culture.

Aditi proposes something radically different from both these approaches. She does not say that the feminine is equal to the masculine. She says that the feminine is anterior to the masculine, that it precedes and contains it. She does not say that women can do what men do. She says that the source of all existence, the matrix from which everything emerges, is feminine in the most cosmological sense of the word. This is not a claim to equality. It is an affirmation of anteriority and ontological primacy, which does not devalue the masculine but replaces it in its context: a particular manifestation of a more fundamental reality that is feminine.

This vision has implications that go well beyond the framework of the debate on rights and representations. It says something about the very structure of reality: that the infinite, the unlimited, that which cannot be contained in categories or definitions, is feminine. And that all the particular forms that existence takes, all the gods with their precise attributes, all the beings with their defined identities, emerge from this feminine infinite as islands emerge from the ocean. This metaphor of the ocean is precisely the one the Rig Veda uses to describe Varuna, the companion of Aditi: the infinite ocean in which everything is immersed. Aditi is the mother of Varuna. The maternal infinite precedes and contains the paternal infinite.

What contemporary feminism might learn from Aditi is perhaps first this: that the struggle for equality, however legitimate and necessary it is in the context of the concrete injustices that women suffer in all societies, does not exhaust the question of the feminine. Equality is a claim that operates within the existing framework, that asks institutions and individuals to treat women in the same way as men in the domains where this equity is due. But it does not question the framework itself, it does not ask whether the framework within which equality is claimed is itself structured by values that are fundamentally masculine in the sense that they valorise competition, accumulation, domination and separation.

Aditi questions this framework. She says that the fundamental principle of existence is not competition but containment, not accumulation but generosity, not domination but welcome, not separation but unity. And she says that this principle is feminine, not in the sense that it would be the preserve of biological women, but in the sense that it represents a quality of being that patriarchal cultures have systematically marginalised and devalued in favour of its opposites.

There is in the crisis of contemporary feminism something that resembles the tension between these two levels. The feminism of equality operates at the first level: it asks that women have access to the same rights, the same resources, the same opportunities as men within the existing framework. Radical feminism operates at the second level: it asks whether this framework itself must be transformed, whether a truly egalitarian society should not value differently the qualities that patriarchal culture has associated with the feminine, that is to say care, relationship, vulnerability and interdependence. Aditi suggests that this second level is the most fundamental, and that the first, without the second, risks producing women who succeed in a system whose fundamental values remain those that patriarchy imposed.

But Aditi also tells us something important about the way this second level of transformation can be approached. She is not a goddess of revolt or conquest. She does not wrest power from the masculine gods. She precedes them. She contains them. Her primacy is not the result of a battle but of an ontological reality: she is what she is before anything else exists. This way of being radically feminine without needing to fight the masculine, of preceding it without excluding it, of containing it without crushing it, is perhaps the most subtle and most difficult lesson that Aditi offers to contemporary feminism.

In the civilisation of the 7 Rivers, this vision of Aditi translated into a social organisation in which the feminine did not need to fight for its place because its place was recognised as fundamental. Women composed sacred hymns, drank soma, participated in the sacrifices, occupied leadership roles in certain regions. Not because they had conquered these rights against masculine resistance, but because the worldview that underpinned this civilisation recognised the feminine as fundamental and indispensable at every level of collective life. This recognition was not the fruit of a struggle. It was the fruit of a vision of reality in which Aditi, the infinite mother, preceded and contained all the gods.

What contemporary feminism might draw from this vision is not a utopia to be recreated as such. It is an orientation: the deepest and most lasting transformation is not the one that fights for equality within a system whose fundamental values remain unchanged, but the one that transforms the system itself by recovering the primacy of Aditi, by placing back at the centre of the collective vision those qualities that the maternal infinite embodies: containment, generosity, welcome, interdependence, the anteriority of the bond over separation. This is a deeper revolution than that of equality. And it is perhaps the only one that can truly hold.