Vritra

The channels were still there. That was the strange part. The stone beds ran down off the mountain exactly as they always had, scoured and pale and shaped by water, and there was no water in them, and there had not been for longer than anyone wanted to count. The cattle stood in the dust and did not low. Somewhere up on the slope a shape lay across the rock with the whole flood folded inside it, breathing, patient, in no hurry at all.

His name is not really a name. Vṛtra is an ordinary Sanskrit noun meaning a covering, an obstruction, the thing that stands in the way, and the poets who sang about him knew it. One line of the oldest account calls him “Vritra, worst of Vritras,” using the word as a title and a common noun in the same breath, the way you might call someone the worst of thieves. He is an obstacle that grew a body. Everything the stories say about him follows from that, including his shape, which is barely a shape at all.

The Rigveda is oddly specific about what he lacked. He had no feet and no hands. He came at the god of storms anyway, and the hymn is faintly contemptuous about it, comparing him to a weak man picking a fight he has no equipment for. He was emasculated and still claimed to be a bull. Yet he had shoulders, because the thunderbolt went in between them, and he had enough mass that when he came down he came down the way felled trees come down, in lengths, across the ground. Later listeners turned this into ninety-nine coils and a proper dragon. The oldest poem is stranger and better: a limbless immensity with a spine, lying on a mountain, holding a river system in its gut.

The killing is the founding act of the Vedic world. Tvashtar, the divine craftsman, hammered out the thunderbolt. Indra drank soma from three vessels and went up the mountain. He struck once. The waters came down like cattle released from a pen and ran to the sea, and light came with them, because the same blow that opened the rivers is credited with giving life to the sun, the dawn and the sky. Before that stroke the world was closed. After it there were seven rivers, and a god with a permanent epithet: Vritrahan, the smasher of Vritra.

What happens next in the hymn is the part nobody expects. The corpse lies in the streambed like a burst bank, and the water, described as taking courage, begins to run over the top of him and carries the body off unnamed into the dark. His mother Danu is struck down above him, and the poem lays them out with a domestic tenderness that has no business being there, the mother above and the son beneath, like a cow lying beside her calf. Then the god who has just won runs away. Fear takes him, and he goes over ninety-nine rivers like a hawk that has been startled, and the poet asks him outright who he thought was coming to avenge the dragon. The hymn never answers.

The epics answered it, at length, and made Vritra a far more uncomfortable figure. In the Mahabharata he is not born but manufactured. Tvashtar had already fathered a three-headed ascetic who recited the Vedas with one mouth, drank wine with another, and seemed to swallow the horizon with the third; Indra, unnerved by the young man’s discipline, sent celestial dancers to break his concentration, failed, and killed him with the thunderbolt instead. Even dead the heads glowed. Indra talked a passing woodcutter into severing them, and out of the mouths flew partridges, quails and sparrows. Tvashtar heard, poured an offering into the fire, and out of it stood Vritra, made expressly to settle the account.

That Vritra beats Indra. He swallows him whole, and the gods have to invent the yawn to get him out, which is why, the text says, yawning has clung to the breath of living things ever since. Indra retreats. The gods go to Vishnu, who advises peace, and a treaty is brokered in which Vritra names his own terms: no death by anything dry or wet, by stone or by wood, by a weapon held or a weapon thrown, in daylight or in darkness. He is satisfied. He should not have been. At dusk, on the shore, Indra saw a hill of sea foam, which is not dry and not wet and not a weapon, and Vishnu went into the foam, and that was the end of Vritra.

Then the drought came back, and this time the god caused it. Because Vritra and the three-headed ascetic were both brahmins, the killing brought brahmahatya, the sin of killing a priest, and it came out of the body in person and fastened on Indra. He fled to the edge of the world and hid in the water, coiled, the text says, like a writhing snake, and while he lay there the trees died, the rivers stopped, the reservoirs emptied and the rains failed. The obstruction had simply changed hands.

None of the Iranian material has any of this. The Avestan cognate, Vərəθraγna, is a neuter noun meaning the smiting of resistance, and it became a god of victory with no serpent anywhere near it. Émile Benveniste and Louis Renou argued in their 1934 study Vṛtra et Vṛθragna that this is the older arrangement, and that the dragon is an Indian development on a root that originally meant nothing more than breaking through what blocks you. The reading is contested and has been since they published it. It also fits the evidence in front of us, which is a monster named after a common noun, with no limbs, whose only real ability is to be in the way.

That ability is considerable. He immobilises water, which in a monsoon economy is the same as immobilising everything, and the older hymns add cattle and sunlight to his hoard, so that the sky itself is part of what he has shut up. He is proof against weather, since hail and mist and lightning are his own conditions and do him no harm. In the epic he wins his fight and eats his opponent. His weaknesses are the exact shape of his strength. An obstacle is defined by the thing that gets through it, and Vritra is built to be broken: by a bolt made specifically to break him, by soma-strength, by a loophole in a contract he wrote himself, by a substance that fits none of his categories. He is undone twice by definitions, which is a peculiar fate for a creature made out of one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Vritra in Hindu mythology?

Vritra is the serpent or dragon of the Rigveda who holds the world’s waters trapped inside a mountain until the god Indra kills him with a thunderbolt. He is the chief adversary of Indra, and the killing is the most frequently retold event in the oldest layer of Hindu tradition. In later texts he is also called an asura and is treated as a brahmin.

What does the name Vritra mean?

Vritra comes from a Sanskrit noun meaning a covering, an obstacle, or a thing that stands in the way. The Rigveda uses the word as both a proper name and a common noun in the same line, calling him “Vritra, worst of Vritras.” The name describes his function rather than his appearance.

How did Indra kill Vritra?

In the Rigveda, Indra drinks soma, takes up a thunderbolt fashioned by the craftsman god Tvashtar, and strikes Vritra between the shoulders on the mountain, releasing the seven rivers. The Mahabharata tells a longer version in which Vritra is protected by a treaty against death by anything dry or wet, stone or wood, weapon or missile, by day or by night. Indra kills him at dusk with a mass of sea foam, with Vishnu hidden inside it.

Why was killing Vritra a sin for Indra?

In the Mahabharata, Vritra and Tvashtar’s three-headed son were both brahmins, so their killing incurred brahmahatya, the sin of killing a priest. The sin took physical form, pursued Indra, and drove him to hide in water at the edge of the world. While he was in hiding the trees withered, the rivers stopped and the rains failed.

What did Vritra look like?

The Rigveda describes him as footless and handless, lying along a mountain, and falling like tree trunks cut down by an axe, with shoulders broad enough to take a thunderbolt between them. It never gives him a full body. Later tradition made him a coiled dragon, but the oldest source leaves him deliberately shapeless.

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Indra, Vishnu, Soma, Agni, Varuna, Rudra, Asura, Naga, Surya, Ushas, Zahhak, Illuyanka, Tiamat, Typhon, Apep/Apophis