Makara

On the outer wall of an old South Indian temple, water slides from a stone mouth and falls into the tank below. The mouth belongs to a creature with the snout of a crocodile and the curling trunk of an elephant, its edges worn smooth by a thousand monsoons. Pilgrims cup their hands beneath it and drink without a second glance. They have been drinking from the makara for centuries, and it has never once bitten.

That restraint is a small miracle, because the makara is built entirely out of things that bite, crush, and drag. It is a composite animal, assembled from parts that have no business sharing a body. The jaws and head come from a crocodile. The trunk belongs to an elephant. The body is a fish, scaled and cold, tapering into a fish’s or a dolphin’s tail. Older Sri Lankan carvings add still more: the feet of a lion, the ears of a boar or a mouse, the tusks of a wild pig, the eyes of a monkey, the spreading plume of a peacock. Six or seven creatures fused into one, depending on who is carving. The proportions drift from region to region and century to century. Sometimes it is mostly crocodile with a swimmer’s tail; sometimes it is mostly fish with a beast’s grinning head. The modern eye tends to settle it toward the marsh crocodile or the great water monitor, the real animals lurking behind the myth.

Its name gives away almost nothing. Makara is simply a Sanskrit word for a sea-creature, a water-monster, and the ambiguity is the point. It rose out of the Vedic imagination of the deep, the thing that lives where the water goes dark and cold, and it never settled into a single story of its own. It has no birth myth, no death, no character. What it has instead is a job, and the job is to carry gods.

The river goddess Ganga rides the makara. When she pours down from heaven to run through the world as the Ganges, the beast is beneath her, and the great sacred river moves at the speed of a swimming monster. Varuna, the old Vedic lord of the waters and the western ocean, rides it too, seated on what the texts plainly call the water-monster vehicle. The river Narmada claims it as well. Where the makara is not carrying a deity outright it lends the gods its shape in miniature, curled into the makarakundala, the crocodile-headed earrings worn by Shiva, by Vishnu, by the sun god Surya. Even desire answers to it. Kama, the flower-arrowed god of love, flies a banner with a makara on it, which is why one of his names is Makaradhvaja, the one whose flag bears the sea-beast.

Most of all it guards doorways. Walk into almost any Hindu or Buddhist temple and the makara is there before you, doubled. Two of them face each other across the entrance, and the arch over the deity springs directly out of the open jaws of one, rises to a peak where a lion-like Face of Glory snarls down at the worshipper, and pours back down into the waiting jaws of the other. This is the makara-torana, the threshold arch, and the makara is the single most frequently carved creature in the whole tradition of Hindu and Buddhist stonework. It is the mouth you must pass through to reach the god. In the Tibetan world it becomes the chu-srin, the water-monster, and its jaws take on a stranger duty still: on ritual weapons, on the vajra and the crescent flaying knife, the blade is shown emerging from the makara’s open mouth, the cutting edge born out of the beast that swallows.

It even holds a place in the sky. Makara is the Indian name for Capricorn, the tenth sign of the zodiac, and each January the festival of Makara Sankranti marks the sun’s turn back toward the north, into the house of the sea-goat.

For all these gentle, load-bearing, structural roles, the makara keeps its teeth. The clearest look at what it can do comes from the story of Gajendra, the king of elephants. He waded into a lotus lake to gather flowers for worship, and a crocodile living in the water, named in the tellings as a makara, closed its jaws on his leg and would not let go. The two of them fought at the water’s edge for a thousand years, the elephant hauling back toward land, the beast hauling him down. Gajendra’s enormous strength drained away hour by hour until there was nothing left of it. At the very end he lifted a single lotus in his trunk, held it up out of the water, and called on Vishnu. The god came at once and sent his discus, the Sudarshana chakra, which took the crocodile’s head off in a single turn. Both of them were released in that moment, because both had been cursed into their shapes: the crocodile a fallen celestial, the elephant a proud king. Even the monster, it turned out, had only been waiting to be let go.

That is the makara’s whole nature in one scene. Its power is patience and a grip that does not open, the endurance of the deep water itself, the certainty that whatever goes under stays under. It is at home where mortals are weakest, out past their depth, in the dark below the lotus flowers. But its strength is also its cage. It belongs to the water and cannot follow onto dry land; on the temple threshold it is only worked stone, holding up an arch. Against a god it is nothing, a head removed between one breath and the next. And the jaws that never loosen are the very thing that traps it in the story, still clamped shut when the discus arrives, unable to do the one thing that might have saved it, which is let go.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Makara in Hindu mythology?

The Makara is a composite water-beast of Hindu and Buddhist mythology, combining the head and jaws of a crocodile, the trunk of an elephant, and the scaled body and tail of a fish. It serves as a divine mount, a guardian of temple thresholds, and the emblem of the zodiac sign Capricorn. Its name is simply the Sanskrit word for a sea-creature or water-monster.

What animals is the Makara made of?

The Makara is a hybrid assembled from several creatures: a crocodile’s head and jaws, an elephant’s trunk, and a fish’s scaled body and tail. Older Sri Lankan carvings add the feet of a lion, the ears of a boar, the tusks of a wild pig, the eyes of a monkey, and the tail-plume of a peacock, fusing six or seven animals into a single form.

Which gods ride the Makara?

The Makara is the vahana, or divine mount, of the river goddess Ganga, the river Narmada, and Varuna, the Vedic god of the ocean. It is also the emblem of Kama, the god of love, whose banner bears a makara and earns him the name Makaradhvaja.

What happens to the Makara in the story of Gajendra?

In the tale of Gajendra Moksha, a makara-crocodile seizes the elephant king Gajendra by the leg in a lotus lake and holds him through a thousand-year struggle. When Gajendra lifts a lotus and calls on Vishnu, the god beheads the crocodile with his Sudarshana discus, freeing both the elephant and the beast, who had been a cursed celestial.

Is the Makara connected to Capricorn?

Yes. Makara is the Sanskrit name for Capricorn, the tenth sign of the zodiac, and the winter festival of Makara Sankranti marks the sun’s entry into this sign as it turns back toward the north.

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