Manifesting Power: Indra’s Slaying of Vṛtra as Kratophany of the Vedic Kings
The Ṛigvedic myth from pre-Hindu India in which the god Indra slays the dragon Vṛtra has been considered the most important myth of the Vedic Indians (Frawley 31). However, even the oldest Indian scholar Yāska, writing shortly after the final collection of the Ṛigvedic texts in 600 B.C., was uncertain how to interpret this epic victory (Dandekar 142). For scholars since then, the slaying of Vṛtra has symbolized the release of rains or rivers, the Āryan tribes’ conquest of their enemies, or the creation of the world out of Vṛtra’s body (O’Flaherty 148). Though the socio-cultural context of the Ṛigveda indicates problems in each of these interpretations, they all may point to Indra as being a manifestation of creative power for the Vedic Indians, as embodied in their nobility. Mircea Eliade’s theory of kratophanies has the potential to elucidate why the Āryan tribes may have needed such a multivalent expression of power during their migration into India.
For Eliade, myth is a sacred history that narrates through the acts of supernatural beings how some aspect of reality came into existence, establishing a paradigm for all human actions (Myth 5). In this story, most prominently depicted in hymn I.32 of the Ṛigveda, Indra wields his divine weapon, the vajra, against the demonic Vṛtra, who is holding the waters prisoner on the mountains. After a legendary battle, the god slays Vṛtra, freeing the waters and in the process bringing forth the light. While supernatural beings and the origin of waters and light are clearly present, it is unclear what sort of paradigm this myth might represent without looking closer at Vedic culture.
Though there is some disagreement over the exact age of the Ṛigveda (Griswold 67-9), most of the hymns seem to have been composed by 1000 B.C. at the latest, by many families living around the Sarasvatī river in the Punjab region of India (Gonda 1). Before their migration, the Indo-European clans may have primarily been cattle-breeders divided between nomadic and settled life with no formal political unions, though they would usually act together in times of war (Griswold 7-10). By roughly 1500 B.C. the pre-Āryan tribes split from the Iranian branch and their shared Varuṇa-religion (Griswold 22-3) and began moving southeast from Central Asia in what is generally characterized as a “mission of conquest and colonization” (Dandekar 169). The scholar H. D. Griswold suggests that the Āryans migrated in multiple bands over several centuries, entering India through waves of both peaceful penetration and armed force against the dark-skinned natives; and though they certainly fought against the aboriginal Dasyus, the Āryan tribes may frequently have warred amongst themselves (34-6). The Ṛigveda mentions five Āryan tribes, to all of whom the god Indra belonged, and it is possible that the hostile Dasyus halted the Vedic Indians in the Punjab region until the five tribes had banded together with enough strength to make the final push towards the Ganges river (Griswold 45-7).
Vedic society eventually settled into a caste system centered around two main classes, the noble or warrior class of the Kṣatriyas, and the priestly Brāhman class (Frawley 101-2). The Vaiśya class contained the rest of the Āryan subjects, common farmers and merchants, while non-Āryan peoples under Vedic rule were relegated to the Śudra class at the bottom of the social structure (Griswold 51). However, the Ṛigveda and its accompanying religion belonged solely to the higher castes, while the masses remained spectators of the rituals (Oldenburg 206). The Vedic monarchy had been strengthened by war against the Dasyus, and many of the Vedic gods may have been patterned after the nobility, especially Indra (Griswold 47). War was portrayed as a struggle between good and evil, but it was often the priestly prayers and mantras that were thought to determine victory (Frawley 102). This is clearly shown by Indra and Vṛtra’s use of magic in the myth. Though the main rituals were already established when the Vedic tribes migrated into India, the hotar, or chief priest, composed most of the Ṛigvedic hymns under contract to the wealthy Kṣatriya class (Griswold 48). The rituals were performed in exchange for a dakṣiṇa, or sacrificial fee (Griswold 49), wealth won by the nobility in battle (Frawley 103), which sets up an interesting relationship between the warring rulers and the conception of the religious texts.
The Ṛigveda primarily focuses on the main gods and the Soma sacrifice (Oldenburg 5), and was a priestly textbook written with the practical interest of serving this ritual (Griswold, 55-6). Jan Gonda contests this view however, positing that many of the hymns were used on other religious occasions (2). Regardless, the Soma offering was the main sacrificial ritual of the Vedic Indians (Macdonell 7), and Indra was considered the main god of that ritual. The hymns praise Indra as the drinker of Soma above all the other gods and the noon Soma pressing was dedicated to him alone (Oldenburg 241). In the myth, Indra drinks three vats of Soma before confronting Vṛtra, a practice the Kṣatriya may have picked up in order to banish fear and restore vigor before battle (Dandekar 176). In brief, the ritual consisted in a portion of milk, meat, vegetables, or Soma being offered into the sacred fire with the rest consumed by the sacrificer (Heesterman, Inner 89). Fixed and spontaneous prayers accompanied the offering (Oldenburg 232) with the purpose of mediating between the sacred and profane worlds (Smith 173). J.C. Heesterman claims that battle and catastrophe had originally belonged to the essence of the sacrifice, including the slaying of Vṛtra as part of the Soma ritual (Inner 86-7), which allowed the Vedic Indiands to enact “the periodical regeneration of the cosmos, the winning of life out of death” (Inner 26).
There seems to be little evidence to connect this specific myth directly to the Soma ritual, though the immense number of hymns composed in Indra’s honor attests to his importance in the Vedic religion (Gonda 3). The Ṛigvedic text clearly shows that Indra-worship was rapidly succeeding the earlier Varuṇa-ruled religion (Dandekar 179). Beyond the offering of sacrifice before battle, in which the priests presumably called on Indra for help, the god was also invoked to bring rain, crops, cows, and strong children (Griswold 43, 207). The sacrificial poems of the Ṛigveda were recited by the hotar in order to celebrate the deeds and splendor of the god as well as to narrate the wishes of man (Oldenburg 214, 235). This praise sought to confirm or strengthen the deity (Gonda 77) and to give him the pleasure of performing new acts inspired by memories of former deeds (Oldenburg 234). Though the first stanzas of the Ṛigvedic poems often invoked the gods to the sacrifice, Gonda sees hymn I.32 as being instead a commemoration of that mythic conflict and an appeal for the god to reiterate his heroic deed (6, 11, 102). Scholars have offered varied perspectives on what Indra’s deed may actually have meant for the Vedic Indians, but like all myths this meaning may remain dependent upon subjective interpretation.
The most prevalent school of interpretation treats the Ṛigvedic mythology as a set of primitive belief that all phenomena of nature are animate and divine (Macdonell 2). From this perspective, Indra is a storm god, and Vṛtra is the withholder of rain (Griswold 88), either a personification of the droughts or dust storms that afflicted the Punjab region before the summer monsoon season (Griswold 33). The vajra is the lightning bolt (Macdonell 55) with which Indra frees the rains from the bellies of the cloud-mountains (Griswold 182). In another naturalistic interpretation, Hermann Oldenburg sees the myth as the freeing of seven earthly rivers from the earthly mountains (76). This theory relates the mythic rivers to actual geography, as the most prominent feature of the Punjab region is its seven rivers (Griswold 30), which the Vedic Indians must have relied upon to support their life in the arid Indian climate. Conversely, Alfred Hillebrandt argues that Vṛtra was an ice-giant and Indra a sun god who freed the waters from the grip of winter, making this an older myth from a northern climate, later developed into a rain mythology (vol. 2, 112-26, Griswold 181). From yet another set of perspective, B. G. Tilak considers the winning of the light to be a yearly myth reflecting the relation of the sacrifice to the solstices (Frawley 33), and in the later ritual texts of the Brāhmaṇas, Vṛtra is the moon swallowed by Indra as the sun during the new moon ritual (Macdonell 159). The Brāhmaṇas also describe Vṛtra as the darkness cleaved by sunrise (Heesterman, Ancient 100).
Problematic to these natural interpretations is that Indra’s name does not seem to designate any phenomenon of nature (Macdonell 54). There were already both a rain god and a sun god in the Vedic pantheon, called Trita Āptya and Sūrya, although Indra gradually took over their functions in his rise to prominence in the Vedic texts (Dandekar 151-6). Furthermore, the Ṛigveda does not refer explicitly to the phenomena of either rain or snow (Oldenburg 76-7), and descriptions of the vajra as metallic and four or hundred-angled may be too specific to be symbolic of lightning (Dandekar 147). Though sacrifices were performed to bring rain, it seems likely that the Vedic priests and nobility had more pressing social concerns to express in their mythology.
The second major school of interpretation considers Indra as a war god conquering the foes of the Āryans. As we have seen, Indra was invoked for success in battle, and in the myth, Vṛtra is called Dāsa, another name for the dark-skinned aboriginal inhabitants of India (Macdonell 64). In this perspective, Indra represents an embodiment of the imperialistic tendencies of the Vedic Indians, and his vajra is a weapon suggestive of ruthless might (Griswold 177-8). Other hymns of the Ṛigveda describe Indra as being a warrior from birth, and as having been born for the purpose of slaying Vṛtra (Macdonnel 56, 158). R. N. Dandekar even suggests that the Ṛigveda portrays Indra’s physical characteristics and excessive drinking of Soma in such human terms that the god may originally have been a Vedic hero or warlord later elevated to godhead for his miraculous deeds (160-2). This seems unlikely though, as Indra was already a deity in the Varuṇa-religion of the earlier Indo-Iranian period (Griswold 23). Regardless, Indra’s chief epithet is Vṛtrahan, the ‘Vṛtra-slayer,’ and though Vṛtra’s name may have derived from the root vṛ, ‘to encompass’ (Macdonell 60, 159), it may also have derived from the root var, ‘to resist,’ making Indra a divine power called upon to overcome enemy resistance (Dandekar 173).
A major challenge to this sociological interpretation may be in determining what waters and lights freed from the mountains may have signified for a war god. In other Ṛigvedic hymns addressing this myth, Indra is said to shatter Vṛtra’s ninety-nine fortresses when he slays the dragon, which may either refer to storm clouds (Macdonell 60) or to river bends in which Vṛtra lays (Oldenburg 75). Vṛtra is sometimes related to the mythic Dāsa warlord Śambara (Oldenburg 83), whose his ninety-nine mountain fortresses Indra destroys with a flood (Frawley 115-6). As such, the fortresses may have been river-dams built by the native peoples (Dandekar 183), but this does not fully explain why a war-god would be concerned with freeing the waters or winning the light.
In antithesis to this interpretation of Indra as a war god, the deity is often called Maghavan, ‘bountiful’ (Griswold 207), and functions to bestow fertility on the Vedic Indians just as much as to destroy their enemies (Hopkins 244). Even in the myth, Indra is compared to “a bull bursting with seed,” and the bull is sacred to the god as exemplary of his virile powers (Hopkins 243). Hymn I.32 relates the freeing of the waters to another of Indra’s deeds, in which he rescues stolen cows from the hostile tribe of the Paṇis (O’Flaherty 152). Cattle may have symbolized both fertility and wealth for the Āryans (Frawley 119), but the Vedic texts display a tendency of drawing playful connections between disparate entities (Smith 30), which makes it difficult to tell what is actually being referred to in the myth. Cows were occasionally homologous to rain clouds and sunbeams (Macdonell 59), mountains or fortresses (Frawley 119), and to Vṛtra’s mother Dānu (Macdonell 158), making it difficult to tell just what Indra freed or where he freed it from, or more importantly, what this heroic action meant for the Vedic Indians.
While the varied interpretations of the myth as portraying natural, martial, or fertile themes each might have some validity, Gonda asserts that Indra’s slaying of Vṛtra is now essentially viewed as cosmogonic, or at least demiurgic (4): “In the beginning was Vṛtra, who covered over all that the Universe needed,” both the cosmic waters and embryonic sun prior to creation (Brown, Creation 91). In this perspective, Vṛtra is cast as the shell of the cosmic egg, and Indra’s slaying of the demon breaks the shell and forces Heaven and Earth apart, allowing the sun to shine and creation to begin (Brown, Creation 96-8). The Brāhmaṇas state that after the battle, Vrṭra’s eyes become ointment and the overflowing waters become darbha grass used in the Soma ritual, while the vajra is the bow held by the sacrificer to symbolize the rebirth of the sun (Heesterman, Ancient 100). In these later texts the freeing of waters and lights disappears entirely from the myth, and it is the gods Agni and Soma whom Indra frees from Vṛtra’s belly with the use of a sacrificial cake (Hillebrandt, vol. 2, 134-6). As Agni and Soma are the two other deities connected with the sacrifice (Macdonell 20), the myth may have eventually been interpreted as a discovery of the ritual (Heesterman, Inner 49). Other hymns of the Ṛigveda equate Agni directly with the fire and sun, and Soma with the flowing waters (Macdonell 91, 107). Indra also recovers both Agni and Soma during his various exploits (O’Flaherty 108, 128). Though these deeds are only briefly alluded to in hymn I.32, the Vedic priests may already have considered Indra’s slaying of Vṛtra as an origin of the sacrifice when the Ṛigveda was being composed.
If this myth indeed revealed the ritual and Indra’s victory was sometimes spoken of as a sacrifice in itself (Brown, Theories 26), it is possible to see how its recitation may have allowed the Brāhmans to reiterate the cosmogonic act. The Ṛigveda however describes Paruṣa as the sacrificial giant from whom the Universe is made, and later Prajāpati becomes the cosmic man (Macdonell 12-3), though Indra may have taken over this role as well during his period of fame. Norman Brown suggests that while some may have taken this demiurgic creation at face value, the sophisticated Āryans saw in the myth “Potenitality striving to overcome Inertia by the aid of Power… in the Universe” (Theories 24). The Kṣatriya may not have paid the Brahmans to indulge in this level of philosophic speculation while wars and society remained disorganized, but it is also possible that the nobility may have benefited from comparison to such manifest creative power.
Having examined the myth through its sociological origins and a variety of interpretations, the application of Eliade’s theories may offer yet another perspective. As stated previously, the myth may have been cosmogonic, and may also have represented a model for how the Vedic Indians acted towards the natural, social, cosmogonic, and ritual worlds. For Eliade, the sacred and religious stand opposed to profane and secular life, but are expressed in historical moments through what he calls Hierophanies (Eliade, Patterns 1-2). “Everything unusual, unique, new, perfect or monstrous at once becomes imbued with magico-religious powers and an object of veneration or fear,” an ambivalence even more clearly expressed when the sacred is revealed as a kratophany, a manifestation of power (Eliade, Patterns 13-14). As opposed to having an anthropological approach that might place the myth in the context of a specific people, Eliade is primarily concerned with how myth brings out certain patterns of meaning (Strenski 105). Theorists such as Malinowski and Lévi-Struass are more concerned with the cultural functions of myth (Malinowski 19) and its linguistic structure (Lévi-Strauss 206-7), in contrast to Eliade, who relies on the development of generalized cross-cultural comparisons that are ungrounded in sociological contexts (Strenski 105). Regardless, Eliade’s concepts may still be useful for establishing what this particular myth meant for the Vedic Indians.
Eliade at first suggests a natural interpretation, treating Indra as a sky-god concretized into the dynamic force of the storm (Eliade, Patterns 52-3). However, Hierophanies of the sky can never be reduced to meteorological phenomena and instead become expressions of power and sovereignty, epiphanies of force and violence upon whose energy life depends (Eliade, Patterns 59, 83). As such, Indra is the epitome of all energy: his weapon denotes strength, his symbol is the bull, and he rules over the Vedic gods and humans as king (Hillebrandt, vol. 2, 99). Indra governs rainfall, fertility, the fields and plough, and the inexhaustible power of generating life (Eliade, Patterns 85). While his name has uncertain meaning for any particular phenomenon of nature (Macdonell 54), it is commonly thought to derive from indu, ‘drop,’ suggesting not only drops of rain and pressed Soma but also the virile power of semen (Dandekar 186). Indra may not directly make the Universe, but he is a personification of the cosmic and biological energy necessary to keep life in motion (Eliade, Patterns 84-6). Of course, it may be difficult to ascribe this role of cosmic progenitor to the sky-gods of other religions, much less to the Vedic religion, without studying the specific socio-cultural contexts. Furthermore, Eliade’s theory operates on the assumption that as a hierophany, myth reveals the sacred, a concept generally viewed as being transcendent and ineffable. While a culture’s mythic expressions of its daily rituals and need for origins may have arisen from functional and creative desires, it seems impossible to prove that all members of that society subjectively viewed these myths as being a manifestation of an inexpressible reality, without asking them in person.
As the progenitors of the Ṛigvedic Indra mythology, the Vedic Kṣatriya may have found it easier to rule their subjects and lead them through the hostile natives into India if their noble strength was perceived by these subjects as vital for the continuation of social and cosmic life. While trying to unite the Vedic tribes in the Punjab region, the emerging nobility may have commissioned the Brāhmans to compose new hymns to the deity who most portrayed these desirable characteristics of courage, virility, and bounteousness. Thus Indra was hailed as the Kṣatriya of the gods, and he gradually took over other deific functions that would grant him the ultimate sovereignty that the nobility required to rule.
In his role as divine king, Indra could bring the rains and daylight, win battles against the Dasyus, make the fields, cows, and women fertile, reveal the sacrificial ritual, and through all these continually recreate the cosmos for the Āryans. Hymn I.32 of the Ṛigveda, the epic commemoration of Indra’s slaying of Vṛtra, is exemplary of this godly will to power because it concentrates all of Indra’s creative functions into one heroic deed. The god’s victory is not simply over a draconic representation of drought, darkness, Dasyu foes, or cosmic disintegration, but may have revealed to the Vedic people that their leaders could overcome any obstacle hindering their growing civilization’s rise to power.
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