Devalok ← All gods
Also calledJatavedasVaishvanaraPavakaHavyavahana

At a glance

TraditionVedic
ElementFire

in the hearth, on the altar, in the lightning and in the sun

WorkCarries every offering up to the gods; his mouth is their mouth

Who Agni is

Agni is fire, and the Rigveda never lets you forget that he is also a person. He is the flame on the altar and the flame in the kitchen. The poets find him in the lightning and in the sun as well. The very first hymn of the Rigveda is addressed to him.

He has a job that no other god can do. The gods live in heaven and people live on earth, and something has to carry the offerings from one to the other. Whatever is poured into the fire, Agni takes up in his smoke and delivers. For this reason the hymns call him the priest of the gods, their messenger and their mouth. Only Indra has more hymns in the Rigveda, and every one of its old family books opens with hymns to Agni.

The poets say he is born three times: in heaven, among men, and in the waters. Among men he is born whenever two sticks of wood are rubbed together until a spark jumps. One hymn calls him the lord of the house, and he lives in every home that keeps a fire.

He is not always willing. One of the best-loved Vedic stories tells how he ran away from his work and hid in the water, and how the gods had to coax him back. Another tells how a king carried him east across north India in his own mouth.

Agni is the messenger between earth and heaven.

From the Vedas to the Puranas

What became of Agni

Agni never turned into another god. He is still Agni in the Puranas and still Agni today. What changed is his rank.

In the Rigveda he is one of the two greatest gods. At least two hundred hymns are his, more than any god but Indra, and one hymn (2.1) goes so far as to say that he is Indra, Vishnu, Varuna, Rudra and the rest, all in one. Nothing can be offered to any god except through him.

By the time of the Mahabharata he is easier to push around. A sage named Bhrigu curses him to eat everything, clean and unclean alike, and Agni is so hurt that he withdraws from every sacrifice until Brahma softens the curse and declares that whatever fire burns becomes pure. A king feeds him ghee for twelve years without a pause and he falls ill from it. To get well he has to burn a whole forest, and seven times the elephants and snakes of that forest put him out. In the end he needs Krishna and Arjuna to help him. Throughout these stories he takes his orders from Brahma.

His greatest child passes to another god as well. In one part of the Mahabharata the war-god Skanda, whom we also call Kartikeya, is simply the son of Agni and his wife Svaha. In other tellings, and in the Puranas, Agni only carries the seed of Shiva, and the child is Shiva's son. The epic itself says that Agni and Rudra are one, which is how the handing-over is explained.

Later tradition makes him one of the guardians of the directions, with the south-east as his quarter, and one of the Puranas, the Agni Purana, is said to have been recited by him.

And yet no god is met more often. Every Hindu wedding is held before him: the old household manuals have the couple walk around the fire, and the Mahabharata calls him the witness who lives inside every creature. In the Ramayana it is Agni who rises from the flames with Sita and declares her blameless. The great gods of the Puranas have temples. Agni has every lamp, every kitchen and every sacred fire.

See how the Vedic gods became the Puranic ones →

Related gods

VedicIndra VedicRudra