times in the RgVeda, always in hymns to the Vi’svadevas. 
This name means, as Abel Bergaigne pointed out and everyone 
agrees, non-né unipéde ‘not-born singlefoot’. There has been 
much scholarship expended on this name for a god: the ‘Not- 
born Singlefoot’, but no one has seen how perfectly it fits a 
mushroom. A mushroom is uwnipéde: to this day every German 
child still learns at his mother’s knee the riddle: 
Sag’ wer mag das Mannlein sein 
Das da steht auf einem Bein? 
Children: Gluckpilz! Fliegenpilz! 
Less familiar to us urbanized westerners, living divorced 
the land and unfamiliar with the elementary facts of nature that 
our ancestors well knew, isnon-né. All plants are born of seed, 
except mushrooms. They are non-né. The spores of a mush- 
room are too small for the eye to see: they require a micro- 
scope. Mushrooms were, as Early Man saw it, miraculously 
conceived, by the lightningbolt of the Almighty in mother earth 
softened by the rain. There is a verse in the RgVeda that says 
Parjanya, the god of Thunder, was the father of Soma, and 
according to another verse, ‘the gods, those fathers with a 
commanding glance, laid the Somic germ’. In Aja Ekapdd we 
have the perfect binomial for a mushroom! 
Aja Ekapad is accompanied in five citations by another 
divinity, Ahi Budhnya, the serpent of the depths, a chthonic 
being who invariably guards the holy plant throughout Asia. 
That Aja Ekapdad is another name for Soma, perhaps already 
archaic in Vedic times, finds support in RgVeda X 65.13, where 
the epithet proper to Soma, * Mainstay of the Sky’, is applied to 
him. In RgVeda X 82.6 Aja appears, not now linked 
to Ekapad, but to the navel, nabni, also endlessly applied to 
Soma, and thus two seemingly disparate metaphors are recon- 
ciled in the divine mushroom, both proper to Soma. 
Here is Renou’s translation of the second half of the verse we 
are discussing, X 82.6: 
Dans le nombril du Non-ne (est) fixe le Un (comme les rais sur la 
roue), en lequel tous les etres se tiennent-depuis-toujours. 
In the navel of the Not-born (is) fixed the One (like the spokes on 
the wheel), in which all beings stand from all time. 
22) 
