Amrita

Also Known As: Sanskrit amṛta, literally “not dead”, meaning immortal or immortality; in the Vedas an epithet of soma, in the epics and Puranas the nectar of immortality won from the churned ocean
Region/Culture: South Asia
Mythos: Hindu Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: Whoever drinks it cannot die, which is why gods and Asuras alike laboured for it and why a single stolen mouthful was enough to make a demon’s severed head immortal.
Role in Mythos: It is the prize of the churning of the ocean, the stake in the war between the gods and the Asuras, and the ransom Garuda carried off to free his mother.
Relation to Humans: In the Vedic hymns the priests who pressed and drank soma claimed a share of this immortality for themselves. In the epics the nectar is kept from mortals entirely, and humans meet it only through what it left behind, such as the sacred kusa grass it once rested on.

The sea had been churned so long it had stopped being sea. Trees torn from the slopes of a mountain had fallen into it, the gums and juices of countless herbs had bled into the water, and under all that grinding the milky ocean thickened into clarified butter. Out of that rich, heavy swell a figure rose carrying a white pot. He was Dhanwantari, the physician of the gods, and the pot held amrita, the drink that ends death. Everyone on the shore wanted it. Only half of them were going to get it.

The word is older than the story. In Sanskrit amṛta means “not dead”, and it is built the same way as the Greek ambrosia, a negative placed in front of the word for mortal, a pairing historical linguists trace to one ancient compound. In the Rig Veda it is less a separate substance than a quality, and the thing that has it is soma. Finnian Moore Gerety of Oxford describes Vedic soma as a god, a plant and a ritual drink all at once, known by the epithet amṛta, “immortal” or “immortality”. Priests pounded the plant, soaked it overnight, pressed it with stones, strained the juice through sheep’s wool and mixed it with milk, honey or barley. One hymn, the forty-eighth of the eighth book in Griffith’s translation, carries the boast in a single line: “We have drunk Soma and become immortal.” What that plant actually was is lost. Gerety notes there is no academic consensus, and that Brahmins who moved away from the Vedic heartland substituted other plants long ago.

By the time of the great epics, the nectar has left the pressing stones and gone to the bottom of the sea. The Mahabharata sets the scene on Mount Meru, where the gods, having practised penances for amrita, are told by Narayana to churn the ocean together with the Asuras, and so obtain amrita along with every drug and gem. Nobody can lift Mount Mandara to serve as the churning staff until the great serpent Ananta tears it up, woods and all. The king of the tortoises agrees to carry it on his back. Vasuki the serpent becomes the rope, and as the two sides haul on him, black vapours and flames pour from his mouth and gather into clouds charged with lightning that rain down on the exhausted gods. The mountain crushes the creatures of the deep. The ocean turns to milk and then to butter, and it begins to give things up: the Moon, the goddess Lakshmi, a white horse, the gem Kaustubha, and at last Dhanwantari with his white vessel of nectar. The elephant Airavata follows. So does the poison Kalakuta, which threatens to burn up creation until Shiva swallows it and is named Nilakantha, the blue-throated.

The other tellings agree on the machinery and quarrel over the details. The Vishnu Purana opens with a curse. The sage Durvasas gave Indra a garland, Indra’s elephant threw it to the ground, and the sage swore that Indra’s rule over the three worlds would be overturned. Vegetation withered, sacrifices stopped, and the weakened gods lost their battles. Vishnu told gods and demons to throw every kind of medicinal herb into the sea of milk, to take Mandara for the stick and Vasuki for the rope, and to churn. In this version Vishnu himself becomes the tortoise that serves as the pivot, and the poison is taken by the serpent gods rather than by Shiva. Out come the cow Surabhi, the wine goddess Varuni, the Parijata tree, the Apsarasas, the moon, the poison, Dhanwantari with the cup of amrita, and finally Sri, standing on a lotus. The Ramayana has the mountain begin to sink until Vishnu takes the form of a tortoise to hold it, and it saves the nectar for last, after the physician, the nymphs, Varuni, the horse and the gem.

The drink came up. The fight started immediately. In the Mahabharata the Danavas seize the pot, and Narayana answers with his power of illusion, taking the form of a bewitching woman and charming it back out of their hands. The gods drink. One Danava, Rahu, slips into their ranks in the guise of a god and drinks before the Sun and the Moon give him away. Narayana’s discus takes off his head. The head, huge as a mountain peak and already deathless, rises into the sky shrieking, while the trunk falls and rolls until the earth trembles with her mountains, forests and islands. The Mahabharata says that from that day there has been a quarrel between Rahu’s head and the Sun and the Moon, and that to this day the head swallows them. A war follows on the salt shore. Nara and Narayana fight side by side, the discus Sudarsana cuts through the Danava ranks, the enemy hurls whole mountains, and in the end the Danavas flee into the earth and into the sea. Mandara goes back to its place, and Indra and the gods hand the vessel of amrita to Narayana for careful keeping.

It did not stay kept. Earlier in the same book of the Mahabharata, the great bird Garuda goes to steal it to buy his mother Vinata out of bondage to the serpents. The nectar sits behind a wheel of steel, keen-edged and sharp as a razor, revolving without pause, and beyond it two blazing snakes whose gaze burns whatever it falls on to ashes. Garuda shrinks his body and slips through the spokes, blinds the snakes with dust and overcomes them, and flies off with the amrita without tasting it. Vishnu, meeting him in the air, grants him immortality without the drink, and Garuda agrees to become his mount. Indra strikes him with the thunderbolt. Garuda lets fall a single feather, so beautiful that the watching creatures name him Suparna, the fair-feathered, and Indra asks for his friendship instead.

What follows is a con played on the serpents. Garuda sets the pot down on a bed of kusa grass and tells the snakes to bathe and purify themselves before they drink. While they are gone Indra quietly takes the nectar back to heaven. The serpents return to find only the grass. They lick it anyway, and their tongues split in two, which is why a snake’s tongue is forked, and the kusa grass, having touched amrita, has been holy ever since.

For something so fought over, the nectar is curiously featureless. It has no colour in these texts, no taste, no smell. Its power is total and its limits are all about custody. It cannot be taken by force from the gods for long, it is lost the moment its keepers look away, and the one Asura who swallowed some bought an immortal head and nothing else. The poets never needed to describe what it looked like. They only needed everyone to want it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is amrita in Hindu mythology?

Amrita is the nectar of immortality in Hindu mythology. The Sanskrit word amṛta means “not dead”. In the Rig Veda it is an epithet of soma, the ritual drink and god, while in the Mahabharata, Ramayana and Vishnu Purana it is the nectar that the gods and Asuras churn out of the ocean.

How was amrita obtained from the ocean?

The gods and the Asuras churned the ocean using Mount Mandara as the churning staff and the serpent Vasuki as the rope, with a tortoise supporting the mountain. After the ocean turned to milk and butter, many treasures rose from it, and finally the physician Dhanwantari appeared carrying a white vessel of amrita.

Who drank the amrita and who was tricked out of it?

The gods drank the amrita after Vishnu, as Narayana, took the form of a bewitching woman and recovered it from the Danavas. The Danava Rahu disguised himself as a god and drank some, but the Sun and the Moon exposed him and Narayana’s discus cut off his head, which stayed immortal.

Why are snakes’ tongues forked according to the amrita story?

In the Mahabharata, Garuda placed the stolen amrita on kusa grass and told the serpents to bathe before drinking it, and Indra took it back while they were gone. The serpents licked the grass where the pot had rested and the sharp blades split their tongues in two. The kusa grass became sacred from touching the amrita.

Is amrita the same as soma?

In the Rig Veda amrita is not yet a separate drink but an epithet of soma, meaning “immortal” or “immortality”, and one hymn says “We have drunk Soma and become immortal.” In the later epics and Puranas amrita becomes the distinct nectar churned from the ocean of milk.