Rudra

Also Known As: Sanskrit रुद्र; “the Roarer” or “the Howler,” and by another reading “the Red One”
Region/Culture: South Asia
Mythos: Hindu Mythology, Indian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: A storm god of the wilderness whose far-flying arrows carry disease and sudden death, yet whose hands also hold a thousand cooling remedies.
Role in Mythos: The fearsome outsider of the Rigveda and father of the storm-riding Maruts, propitiated so that his shafts fall on neither people nor their herds.
Relation to Humans: Vedic worshippers approached him with open dread, begging him to keep his arrows from their families, horses, and cattle. In the same breath they asked for his medicines, since the god who sent the fever was also the physician who could lift it.

The storm comes down off the mountains in a single voice, and that voice has a name. Before the rain there is the howl of it, wind flattening the tall grass and the cattle turning their heads toward the dark. The poets of the Rigveda heard a god in that sound and called him the Roarer. They did not sing to him the way they sang to open-handed Indra or to bright Agni on the hearth. They sang to him carefully, the way a person speaks to something that might turn.

Rudra stands at the edge of the Rigveda, and he seems to prefer it there. Only three whole hymns address him directly, a thin share for so large a presence, and even those spend much of their breath asking him to keep his distance. He belongs to the wilderness and the high country, to the roads that run past the last house and the sickness that arrives with no messenger. His arrows are the thing everyone remembers. He carries a bow strung for shafts that travel far, and where they land men weaken, animals fall, and children burn through the night. The singers plead with him to turn that bow aside, to loose it on someone else, to spare their people and their horses and their cows.

His body, where the hymns describe it at all, is vivid and strange. He is babhru, tawny or coppery, his hair worked into a braided coil that sits on his head like a shell. The poets grant him firm limbs and beautiful lips and hang a gleaming, many-hued necklace at his throat, the ornament of a god who is dangerous and splendid at once. He keeps to the mountains. When he moves it is with the whole weather behind him, and the sky he rules is not empty.

It is full of his sons. The Maruts are young storm-gods, and the Rigveda makes Rudra their father again and again. They ride the heavens in golden armor and bright helmets, and when they split the clouds with their weapons the rain comes down. Picture them for a moment as the Vedic poets did: a war-band of the storm, glittering, loud, tearing the sky open on their father’s account. Where they pass, the land floods and the rivers rise.

The one sustained encounter the hymns preserve is not a battle but a negotiation. In the hymn that opens by naming him Father of the Maruts, the poet asks him plainly to let his kindness come near, and not to shut the singer out from the sight of the sun. Praise piles on praise, and every line of it is doing the same quiet work, coaxing the great wrath to pass over. The poet asks that Rudra’s missile turn aside, that the anger of the impetuous one avoid them, that the strong bow be drawn back from their princes and their offspring. It is worship shaped like a plea for mercy.

And yet the same mouth that fears him asks him to heal. Rudra holds a thousand medicines, the jalasha, the cooling balm, and the hymns call him the best of physicians. The worshipper who begs to be spared the arrow asks in the next breath to reach a hundred autumns on the strength of Rudra’s remedies, to be protected from disease and from the sudden death that comes without cause. This is the whole of him. He wounds and he mends, and the two powers are not in tension for the people who sang to him. They are the same divine authority over life, seen from its two ends.

Where he came from is written into his name. Most read Rudra from the root meaning to howl or to cry, so that he is the sound of the storm made into a person. Others hear “the red one” in it, the color of destruction. The later ritual known as the Satarudriya, the litany of the hundred Rudras, takes this a step further and scatters him across the world, a Rudra in the trees and the waters, on the roads, among archers and thieves and the wild things, until the single god of the wilderness has become the wilderness itself, watching from every direction. That same litany reaches for a softer word to hold him. It calls him shiva, kindly, auspicious, a coaxing adjective laid over a fearful god.

His limits are the strange part. For all his violence he can be bargained with, and the whole practice of his worship assumes it. He is kept apart from the central rites, given the leftover of the offering and honored beyond the settled ground rather than at its heart. He was a god you paid to go away. His power was real, but it ran on the fear that kept him fed and at a distance, and the moment that fear organized itself into ritual, it also fenced him in.

Centuries on, the coaxing word would harden into a name of its own and attach to a later, larger god who gathered new stories around him. But the Rigveda keeps Rudra himself out on the ridge line, tawny and armed, where the storm begins and the arrow is already on the string.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Rudra?

Rudra is a fierce storm god of the Rigveda, the earliest layer of Hindu scripture, associated with wind, wilderness, disease, and healing. His name means “the Roarer” or “the Howler,” and Vedic worshippers approached him with dread, praising him mainly to keep his violence away.

What are Rudra’s arrows?

Rudra’s arrows are the weapons through which he sends sickness and sudden death to people and their cattle. He is described as an archer with a bow strung for far-flying shafts, and many of his hymns are direct pleas for him to turn those arrows aside and spare the worshipper’s family and herds.

Is Rudra good or evil?

Rudra is neither simply good nor evil but both at once. The same god whose arrows bring plague and death also possesses a thousand healing remedies and is called the best of physicians, able to grant long life and protect people from disease.

Who are the Maruts, and is Rudra their father?

The Maruts are a band of young storm-gods who ride the sky in golden armor and split the clouds to release the rain. The Rigveda repeatedly names Rudra as their father, making him the head of a whole company of the storm.

How is Rudra related to Shiva?

Rudra is the Vedic forerunner of the later god Shiva. The word shiva, meaning “kindly” or “auspicious,” began as a soothing epithet used to appease the dangerous Rudra, and over the post-Vedic centuries it grew into the name of a distinct and larger deity with his own body of myth.