Nirriti

Who Nirriti is

Nirriti is the goddess nobody wants to meet. Her name is an ordinary Vedic word that means dissolution: things falling apart, bodies wasting, luck running out. When the poets speak to that word as a person, she is Nirriti.

The Rigveda has no hymn in her praise. She appears about a dozen times, and almost every time someone is asking her to leave. One hymn, 10.59, sung over a man who is close to death, ends four verses in a row with the same wish.

Let Nirriti go away to places far from here.

Other verses say the same in other words. A prayer to Varuna asks him to drive her far off (1.24). A healer says he has brought his patient back out of her lap (10.161). A funeral verse asks the earth to keep the dead man out of her lap, as a mother would (10.18). When a dove flies into a house and settles by the hearth, the family takes it for her envoy and sings a hymn to turn the visit into a harmless one (10.165).

The Atharvaveda gives her a little more shape. She binds people. A charm for a sick man speaks of a collar that Nirriti has fastened on his neck, and of fetters made of iron, and it bows to her as it unties them (6.63). Another verse speaks of a black bird as her mouth.

The priests of the Brahmanas worked out where she lives and what belongs to her. Her colour is black. Her quarter is the south-west. Her share of the grain is the husk. Any spot where the ground has split open by itself, or where no plants will grow, is hers. The Shatapatha Brahmana goes further and says that Nirriti is this earth itself, in the mood in which it takes back whatever decays.

So she is worshipped, though in an unusual way. A king about to be crowned makes his very first offering to her, in a crack in the ground to the south, and walks away without looking back. The builders of the great fire altar carry three black bricks to the south-west for her and do the same. Each of these rites gives her what is hers so that she will leave everything else alone.

What became of Nirriti

Nirriti never became one of the great goddesses of the Puranas. What happened to her is stranger. She kept her name and her quarter of the sky, and in many later texts she turned into a male god, the guardian of the south-west.

The Mahabharata still knows her as a woman. In the long list of births in the Adi Parva (section 66 of Ganguli's translation) she is the wife of Adharma, wrongdoing, who was born when creatures first began to eat one another. The Rakshasas are called Nairritas, children of Nirriti, after her, and she has three more sons with grim names: Fear, Great Fear and Death. The same chapter, a few lines earlier, lists a Nirriti among the eleven Rudras, the sons of Sthanu. That Nirriti is male. Both ideas were clearly already in the air.

Later tradition settled the matter by giving the south-west to a guardian called Nirriti or Nairrita, one of the eight keepers of the directions beside Indra in the east, Agni in the south-east, Yama in the south and Varuna in the west. Reference works that summarise the temple manuals and the Vishnudharmottara Purana describe him as dark and fierce, carrying a staff, and riding a man, a lion or a donkey. He is carved in that form on the outer walls of many temples, in his own corner.

The goddess did not vanish entirely. Some Puranic lists, as encyclopedias report them, make her a daughter of Adharma and Violence, and the mother of Fear and of Hell. Others treat her as the same person as Jyeshtha or Alakshmi, the elder sister of Lakshmi, who stands for bad luck and is asked to stay out of the house.

That request is the oldest part of her and it has never changed. The Rigveda does not ask Nirriti for anything except her absence. The Brahmanas feed her in a crack in the ground and walk away. A household today that sweeps misfortune out of the door before it invites Lakshmi in is doing what the hymn did when it said: let Nirriti go far from here.

See how the Vedic gods became the Puranic ones →

Stories of Nirriti

At a glance

Who Nirriti is

What became of Nirriti

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