Devalok ← All gods
Also calledSharvaBhavaPashupatiUgraIshanaMahan Deva

At a glance

TraditionVedic
WeaponA strong bow and swift arrows

the hymns beg him to aim them elsewhere

HairBraided

the same word later used for Shiva's matted locks

Who Rudra is

Rudra is the god the Vedic poets were afraid of.

Most hymns of the Rigveda invite a god to come closer. The hymns to Rudra ask him to keep his distance. He is an archer with a firm bow and swift arrows, and what the singers want most is for those arrows to land on somebody else. "Do not harm us, great or small," they say. "Do not harm our children, our cattle or our horses. Let your arrow pass us by."

Yet the same hymns call him the best of all physicians. His hand is full of healing herbs, and he has a thousand medicines. The singers beg him for a hundred winters of life. For the Vedic poets, the one who sends the sickness is also the one who can take it away.

They describe him clearly. His hair is braided, his colour is tawny, and he wears gold. He is young and fierce, and he rides in a chariot. He is the father of the Maruts, the storm gods who race across the sky.

He is not one of the great gods of the Rigveda. Only three whole hymns out of more than a thousand are his. He stands at the edge of things. The later Vedic books place him in the mountains and the north, and they tell again and again how the other gods tried to leave him out of the sacrifice, and what it cost them.

Let your arrow pass us by, Rudra. You have a thousand medicines.

From the Vedas to the Puranas

What became of Rudra

Rudra became Shiva. No other god changed so much between the Vedas and the Puranas, and the change can be followed text by text.

In the Rigveda the word shiva is not a name. It means kindly or auspicious, and one verse (10.92.9) uses it to describe Rudra, as other verses use it of other gods. It is what a frightened worshipper would hope he might be.

The next layer is the Yajurveda, which holds a long litany to him called the Shatarudriya. Here he has grown. He is given a hundred names and found everywhere, in the streams and the dust and the green leaves. Several of those names will be familiar: the dweller in the mountains, the lord of cattle (Pashupati), the one with braided hair, the blue-necked one. The litany pays homage to "the auspicious and the more auspicious", in the words that later became the mantra namah shivaya. It gives no story about the blue neck. The tale of the poison came afterwards.

The Brahmanas, the books of ritual, give him his first stories. A weeping child is given eight names, and among them are Mahan Deva, the Great God, and Ishana, the Ruler. The gods go up to heaven and leave him behind, and he comes after them with his weapon raised until they give him a share. Whatever is left on the ground after a sacrifice is his. Readers of the Puranas will recognise in this the outline of a later and much larger story, the sacrifice of Daksha.

Then comes the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, in the last centuries before the common era, and it says something new. "There is one Rudra only; they do not allow a second." The outsider of the hymns has become the one Lord who makes the worlds and takes them back, and the text keeps calling him shiva, the blessed one.

By the time of the epics and the Puranas that description has become his name. Shiva, Mahadeva and Maheshvara are what people call him, and Rudra remains as the name of his fierce side. The wife, the sons, Kailash, the Ganga and the third eye all belong to the Puranic age. The bow, the braided hair, the mountains and the healing hand were there from the first hymn.

See how the Vedic gods became the Puranic ones →

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