Dyausद्यौस्

Dyaus (द्यौस्), the bright sky, is at once one of the oldest gods in the Indian record and one of the least worshipped. His name and title — Dyaus Pitṛ, Sky Father — are exactly cognate with the Greek Zeus Pater and the Latin Jupiter, all descending from the chief sky god of the Indo-European proto-pantheon. Yet by the time of the Ṛgveda he has no independent hymns to speak of and almost no mythology of his own. He survives as a venerable parent: the father of Ushas the dawn, of Agni in some verses, and — with the earth — of gods and men together.

Sky and Earth

Dyaus appears in the hymns almost always as half of the dual divinity Dyāvā-Pṛthivī, Sky-and-Earth, invoked together as the universal parents who generated the gods and who sustain all creatures between them. The poets picture him as a bull roaring in the storm, or as a black horse of night studded with the pearls of stars; his fertilising rain is the seed with which he impregnates the earth. A myth found across the Indo-European world — the sky father overthrown or displaced by his warrior son — flickers here too: a stray Vedic verse has Indra seize his father by the foot, a fragment the tradition never elaborated.

The faded god

Why Dyaus withered while his Greek and Roman cousins reigned is one of the standing puzzles of comparative mythology. In India the sky father's functions had already passed to younger, more vivid gods — Indra took the storm, Varuna the celestial order — leaving Dyaus a title rather than a personality. Later literature remembers the name chiefly in other connections: the Mahābhārata tells of a Vasu called Dyaus whose theft of the sage Vasishtha's cow condemned him to mortal birth as Bhishma. As a god of cult, however, the Vedic sky father had no afterlife; his importance is to the historian, for whom he is the clearest single link between the religion of the Veda and the common Indo-European past.