Ratriरात्रि

Ratri (रात्रि), the night, is the sister and counterpart of Ushas, the dawn. She receives one full hymn in the Ṛgveda — the Rātrī-sūkta of the tenth book — but it is a small masterpiece. The night it describes is not the black, formless dark the Vedic poets feared; that darkness Ratri is asked to drive away. She is instead the starlit night, immortal and many-eyed, who fills the valleys and heights and settles all creatures to rest: the villager, the bird, the beast that walks. The singer asks her protection from the wolf and the thief, and prays that she conduct him safely, like a herd, to the far shore of morning.

Sister of the dawn

Ratri and Ushas form one of the Ṛgveda's characteristic pairs, invoked together as naktoṣāsā — night-and-dawn — two sisters who follow one another endlessly without conflict, weaving between them the alternation of time. Where Ushas is red and gold, Ratri is dark yet shining, adorned with stars as with eyes. The pairing gave the poets one of their favourite figures for the ordered rhythm of the cosmos, ṛta, which the two sisters obey without fail.

Afterlife

Ratri had no independent cult in later Hinduism, but her hymn did not disappear. The Rātrī-sūkta came to be recited in the liturgy of goddess worship, where the tantric and Purāṇic traditions identified the cosmic night with the Great Goddess herself — night as the dissolving, sheltering aspect of the divine feminine. Through that identification the modest Vedic goddess of the starry dark was absorbed into the far larger figure of Devi.