Vritra

Vritra is the serpent or dragon of drought in the Rigveda, a footless, handless monster who held back the world's waters until the storm god Indra killed him with the thunderbolt and set the rivers free.

The Story

The fight between Indra and Vritra is the central myth of the Rigveda, the oldest of the Hindu scriptures. Hymn 1.32 tells it most fully. Vritra, also called Ahi, "the serpent," lay coiled upon the mountain, holding back the waters. Indra, fortified with three bowls of the sacred drink soma, took up the vajra, the thunderbolt that the craftsman god Tvashtr had made for him, and struck the serpent down. The waters that Vritra had enclosed burst free and rushed to the sea "like lowing cows." Vritra's mother, Danu, fell beside her son.

The hymns return to this victory again and again, and Indra's most common title is Vṛtrahan, "slayer of Vritra."

Appearance and Powers

The name Vritra comes from a root meaning "to cover" or "enclose," so he is the "Obstructor." Hymn 1.32 calls him footless and handless, a great serpent stretched across the mountains. His power is simply to block: to hold back rain and rivers so that the world dries out. After his death he lies "like a broken reed" while the waters flow over him.

Origins and Later Versions

Many scholars read the myth as a story of the monsoon breaking a drought, or of the creation of an ordered world from a closed-up chaos. The linguist Calvert Watkins traced its formula, "he slew the serpent," across many Indo-European traditions and compared it with the Hittite storm god's fight with the serpent Illuyanka and Greek Zeus's battle with Typhon. In Iran the related word appears in the name of Verethraghna, a god of victory.

Later Hindu texts retell the story very differently. In the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata Purana, Tvashtr creates Vritra to avenge his son, whom Indra had killed. The gods can defeat him only with a new weapon made from the bones of the sage Dadhichi, who gives up his life for it. The Bhagavata Purana even portrays Vritra as a devoted worshiper of Vishnu who welcomes death, and Indra suffers guilt for killing a Brahmin.

Legacy

Vritra's defeat is one of the oldest dragon-slaying stories in the world, and it set the pattern of the storm god against the serpent that runs through Near Eastern and European myth. Read more on our famous dragons page and the India and Southeast Asia section of Dragons Across Cultures.

Related

• Typhon: Typhon is the most fearsome monster of Greek myth, a giant with a hundred serpent heads who challenged Zeus for rule of the cosmos and was struck down by thunderbolts.
• Aži Dahāka: Aži Dahāka is the three-headed dragon of Zoroastrian myth, created by the evil spirit Angra Mainyu, who becomes the tyrant Zahhāk with serpents growing from his shoulders in Ferdowsi's Persian epic, the Shahnameh.
• Jörmungandr: Jörmungandr is the Midgard Serpent of Norse mythology, a child of Loki so huge that it encircles the world under the ocean and bites its own tail, and Thor's destined enemy at Ragnarök.
• Nāga: Nāgas are serpent beings of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain tradition, often cobras or half-human figures with cobra hoods, who live in underwater or underground kingdoms, guard treasure, and control rain and water.
• Tiamat: Tiamat is the primordial salt-water sea goddess of the Babylonian creation epic Enūma Eliš, who raised an army of monsters against the gods and was split in two by Marduk to make heaven and earth.
• Famous Dragons
• Dragons Across Cultures
• The History of Dragons

Sources and Further Reading

• Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, trans., The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India (Oxford University Press, 2014)
• Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, trans., The Rig Veda: An Anthology (Penguin Classics, 1981)
• Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford University Press, 1995)

Cite this entry: “Vritra,” Draconika Encyclopedia of Dragons, https://www.draconika.com/dragons/vritra.