Vritra

Summary

Vṛtra is the great serpent of the Rigveda who held back the waters in the mountain, and the best-known enemy of Indra. The hymn also calls him ahi, "the serpent". His mother is Danu, from whom the Dānavas, enemies of the gods, take their name. Monier-Williams says the hymns make him the image of a power of darkness and drought that seizes the clouds, keeps back the waters and darkens the sky, and that he is called in some accounts a son of Tvaṣṭṛ, the craftsman of the gods, in others a son of Danu.

His story is hymn 1.32. Vṛtra lay on the mountain, and the waters were held back beside him. Tvaṣṭṛ made Indra the thunderbolt; Indra drank Soma from three beakers and struck down "the firstborn of the serpents", cutting him to pieces with the bolt as an axe fells tree trunks to the ground. Footless and handless, Vṛtra had still challenged him, and Indra struck him between the shoulders; he lay with his limbs scattered like a river that has burst its banks, and the torrents he had encompassed with his greatness now ran over him. Then Indra struck his mother Danu, and the mother lay above her son as a cow lies beside her calf, and the waters carried his hidden body down into a long darkness. Before this the waters had stood guarded by the serpent, like cattle held by a thief; when Indra had killed Vṛtra he uncovered the opening of the waters that had been closed, and the seven rivers ran. The lightning, thunder, hail and mist that Vṛtra spread around himself were of no use to him. Then fear entered Indra's heart after the killing, and he crossed ninety-nine rivers like a frightened hawk, as if he saw someone coming to avenge the serpent.

The idea the story turns on is that Vṛtra does nothing except cover and hold. The water is there, but shut in the mountain, and people, cattle and crops wait. His name comes from the Sanskrit verb vṛ, "to cover, enclose, restrain", and the hymn uses the same verb for Indra's deed: apa vavāra, "he took the cover off" the opening of the waters. The killing in this hymn is the lifting of a cover, after which Indra gives life to the sun, the dawn and the sky. That is why one of Indra's best-known titles is vṛtrahan, "slayer of Vṛtra", a title also given to Agni and to Sarasvatī. The word vṛtra itself is a common noun in the hymns for an obstacle or an enemy, used in the plural, "the vṛtras", and the hymn calls Indra's enemy "the most vṛtra of vṛtras". In Iran the word stayed the name of an obstacle and never became a serpent, and its smiting became a god, Verethragna, Victory.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. It is a reading proposed on the method: the Indian structural essay calls him "the dragon who holds back the rain" but does not read his name. Monier-Williams places vṛtra under the verb vṛ, which he glosses "to cover, screen, veil, conceal, surround, obstruct", "to close (a door)" and "to keep back, restrain", and renders the name "coverer, investor, restrainer". Its first letters, v-r-t, are Arabic waraṭa, and the first sense Lane gives for it is "he veiled, concealed, hid, or covered". The warṭa is a low piece of ground with no road out of it, the mud that sheep fall into and cannot leave, a pit dug in a mountain as a trap for whoever falls in, and then perdition and any affair hard to escape. On this reading the name holds both the act and the place: Vṛtra is the one who covered the water, and the water lay in a warṭa in the mountain until Indra lifted the cover.

Linguistic Root

Attested forms

The later Indian lexicographers add other senses of vṛtra: a thunder-cloud, darkness, a mountain. All of them turn on what covers and hides.

Warṭa

Lane: waraṭahā, "he veiled, concealed, hid, or covered it"; warraṭahu and awraṭahu, "he made him fall into that from which he could not extricate himself". The warṭa is first the thin mud into which sheep fall and cannot get out, or a low piece of ground with no road leading to escape, which Abū ʿUbayd gives as the primary sense. Al-Aṣmaʿī says it is a deep hollow such as may be in a mountain, hard to climb out of for whoever falls into it; then it came to mean any perdition and any affair hard to escape.

The sounds: Sanskrit v answers Arabic w, as in Varuṇa; vocalic ṛ answers r; t answers ṭ, because ṭ, t, dh and ẓ form one group that becomes t in the Indo-European languages, ṭ losing its emphasis. The final -ra drops as the suffix -ra drops in Indra. But Sanskrit grammar counts the t as part of the suffix -tra, so the reading w-r-ṭ takes a suffix letter as a root letter.

Wārā

The Varuṇa page reads the same verb vṛ as Arabic wārā, "he hid, covered". So the names Varuṇa and Vṛtra come from one verb: Varuṇa encloses everything as the sky encloses the earth, and Vṛtra encloses the water and holds it back. The two readings meet in the sense of covering, since the first sense Lane gives for waraṭa is the sense of wārā itself; waraṭa then adds the place from which there is no way out.

The Indian essay reads the name of his enemy Indra as andā, to wet the land with dew and rain, and says that he sends the rain "after killing Vritra, the dragon who imprisoned the waters". On this reading the enemy's name is the warṭa in which the water is held, and the hero's name the wetness that comes out of it onto the land.

Key Mythic Narratives

Vṛtra in the Mahābhārata

The Mahābhārata tells the story another way. Tvaṣṭṛ had a son with three heads, who read the Vedas with one mouth, drank wine with another, and looked with the third as if to swallow the world, and Indra killed him. His angry father kindled the fire and made Vṛtra to kill Indra. Vṛtra grew until he reached the sky, fought Indra and swallowed him; the gods created the yawn, Vṛtra opened his mouth and Indra came out, and since then the yawn belongs to every living breath. The fight went on, Vṛtra prevailed, and the gods turned to Viṣṇu, who advised peace. Vṛtra accepted peace on condition that he should not be killed by anything dry or wet, stone or wood, by any weapon, by day or by night. One evening Indra saw him on the seashore and said: this hour is neither day nor night; and seeing in the sea a mass of foam as large as a hill, he said: this is neither dry nor wet nor a weapon. He hurled it at Vṛtra together with the thunderbolt, Viṣṇu entered the foam, and Vṛtra died. The gloom lifted from the quarters of the sky, a pleasant wind blew, and then the sin of killing a Brahmin overpowered Indra.

The serpent that holds the water in the hymn has become, in the epic, an enemy got round by an oath, and the killer who was afraid at the end of hymn 1.32 now carries the guilt of the killing.

His kin and his enemy

Symbolic Reading

The Indian structural essay makes Vṛtra the "withholder of life": the powers of thirst or chaos that hold back the rain, and the outcome of his killing "relief after hardship", the freeing of the seven rivers. The same essay sets him beside Lotan and Yamm among the Canaanites and Tiamat among the Babylonians, all of them, in its words, the "withholder of life" struck down with a heavenly weapon of thunder and lightning.

The hymn itself brings this reading down to the ground: the waters stand "like cattle held by a thief", herd and water together are what Indra wins back, and the victory ends with the seven rivers running. The Iranist Gnoli, following Benveniste and Renou, holds that the older deed India and Iran inherited was the breaking of an obstacle that held back the flow of the waters, and that the serpent is India's later image of that obstacle.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

At Ugarit Baal strikes Lotan, "the twisting serpent with seven heads", after defeating Yamm, the Sea. In both stories the rain-bringer kills a great serpent, but Lotan is not said to hold back water, and Vṛtra is not said to claim the kingship. The comparison Indra and the Semitic storm gods sets these stories side by side; they belong to the gods' fight with sea and dragon and to the storm and the power over water.

In the North Jörmungandr lies coiled round the whole earth in the sea, and Thor kills it at Ragnarök and dies of its poison; there the serpent is the one that encloses, as Vṛtra encloses the water. In Egypt Apophis blocks the sun's boat every night and would drink the river it sails on, holding the water from the sun as Vṛtra holds it from people, but Apophis returns every night, while Vṛtra is killed once. Among the Greeks Zeus fights Typhon alone with the thunderbolt.

In Iran Tishtrya, the rain star, overcomes the drought demon Apaosha, who stands before the water as a black horse, and Vṛtra's own name lives on in the word for victory, Verethragna. The comparison storm gods across twelve cultures follows the bearer of the thunderbolt and his enemy through other mythologies.

Among the Greeks Cadmus kills a serpent that guards the spring of Ares and keeps his men from the water; once it is dead they can draw water, and he atones for its blood with eight years' service to Ares; see Cadmus.