Devalok
Folk tale · 2 tellings · Pan-India, South India

The demon who could burn with a touch

Who is in it

  • Bhasmasura the popular demon
  • Vrikasura the Puranic cousin
  • Shiva the boon-giver who must flee
  • Vishnu the trickster (Mohini or brahmachari)
  • Mohini the popular form of the trickster
  • Narada advises the demon (Bhagavata)

Texts: Bhagavata Purana

The story, beat by beat

  1. A demon worships Shiva with terrible austerities, offering pieces of his own body.
  2. He asks that whoever he touches on the head should die, and Shiva grants it.
  3. He turns at once to test it on Shiva.
  4. Shiva runs, and the demon chases him across the worlds to Vishnu's door.
  5. Vishnu comes out in disguise and flatters the demon into doubting the boon.
  6. He suggests the demon prove it on his own head.
  7. The demon touches his head and is destroyed.

boon trick dance self destruction

How it is told, place by place

Base telling · Primary text (translation)

Bhagavata Purana 10.88 (Vrikasura)

Pan-India Vaishnava

The Bhagavata tells it of a demon named Vrikasura. On Narada's advice he went to Kedarnath and worshipped Shiva by cutting off pieces of his own flesh for the fire, until on the seventh day Shiva came out of the fire to stop him. Asked what he wanted, the demon asked for death to fall on anyone whose head he touched. Shiva gave it and regretted it in the same breath, because Vrikasura reached for Shiva's own head. Shiva ran. He ran through the worlds with the demon behind him and came at last to Vishnu's abode. Vishnu stepped out as a young student of the Veda, all courtesy, and asked the great demon why he was running after a madman like Shiva; surely the word of someone so unstable was worth nothing, and the only way to know was to test the boon on his own head. Vrikasura, flattered and confused, did, and his head burst. The name Mohini is nowhere in the chapter; the disguise is a brahmachari.

Srimad-Bhagavatam 10.88 (Bhaktivedanta Vedabase) § 14-36

Folk documentation

Regional Bhasmasura (Karnataka, Kerala, Bhojpuri, Sri Lanka, Thailand)

South India · Yakshagana, Kathakali; Bhojpuri dance; Sinhala and Thai texts Folk

The version most Indians know has a demon named Bhasmasura, said to be born from Shiva's own ash, and a dancer. Having won the ash-touch boon and chased Shiva, he is met by Vishnu as Mohini, the loveliest woman in the worlds, who agrees to be his if he can match her step for step. She dances; he copies; she raises her hand to her head; he raises his, and is ash. The dance of undoing is a set piece of Yakshagana on the Karnataka coast, of Kathakali, of Bhojpuri and Indo-Caribbean dance, and the demon turns up merged with Ravana in the Thai Ramakien and in a Sinhala goddess-tale.

What is different here:

Named Bhasmasura, not Vrikasura; the trickster is Mohini and the trick is a dance; the ash-touch boon; no Purana cites it.

Bhasmasura — Wikipedia

Sources: Srimad-Bhagavatam 10.88 (Bhaktivedanta Vedabase); Bhasmasura — Wikipedia

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