Bhudeviभूदेवी

Bhudevi (भूदेवी), the Earth goddess, is among the oldest divine conceptions in India and one of the most quietly persistent. As Pṛthvī, the broad one, she is invoked in the Veda, paired with Dyaus, the sky, as the primordial parents; as Bhūmi or Bhudevi she becomes in later tradition a consort of Vishnu, the ground of existence personified as a goddess of nurture and inexhaustible forbearance.

In the Veda

The most remarkable early document of her worship is the Prithvi Sukta of the Atharvaveda, a long hymn to the earth that praises her soils, scents, waters and peoples, and asks that what is dug from her may grow back. Its refrain, that the earth is mother and the speaker her child, states a relation the tradition never abandoned; the daily gesture of asking the earth's pardon before setting foot on her at morning descends from the same sensibility.

The rescue by Varaha

Her central Puranic story is the rescue. When the asura Hiranyaksha dragged the earth to the depths of the cosmic ocean, Vishnu descended as Varāha, the great boar, slew the demon and raised Bhudevi from the waters on his tusks. Varaha images across India show the colossal boar with the small, composed figure of the goddess lifted on his arm or tusk, one of the most tender juxtapositions in Hindu art. Tradition weds her to her rescuer, and in southern Vaishnava iconography Vishnu stands flanked by Sridevi, fortune, and Bhudevi, the earth, his two consorts and the two forms of his bounty.

Daughters of the earth

The goddess touches the epics through Sita, found in a furrow and received back into the earth at the end of the Ramayana, earth-born and earth-returned. Srivaishnava tradition reveres the Tamil poet-saint Andal as an incarnation of Bhudevi herself. Through all of it runs a single attribute: patience. To bear everything, as the earth bears all that walks and is built upon her, remains the tradition's byword for the goddess and its highest praise of endurance.