Brahma and Vishnu quarrel over who is greater; Shiva appears as a column of fire without end; Brahma flies up as a gander and Vishnu digs down as a boar; Vishnu admits failure, Brahma lies with the ketaki as witness and is cursed. Tamil tradition roots the pillar at Tiruvannamalai.
Shiva Purana (Vidyeshvara and Shatarudra Samhitas)
Pan-IndiaShaiva
In the Shiva Purana's telling the quarrel between Brahma and Vishnu turns into open combat before the fiery column appears to part them. The two search it in bird and boar form, fail, and Vishnu confesses. Brahma, unwilling to lose face, produces the ketaki flower as a witness to a summit he never saw. Shiva then brings forth Bhairava from the space between his brows to answer Brahma's pride; Bhairava threatens the head that spoke the lie, and Brahma is told he will have no honour or worship on earth. The ketaki is excluded from Shiva's offerings, while Vishnu is treated with respect and goes unpunished. In the serialised paraphrase used here the column of fire is described as a manifestation later than the fight itself.
What is different here:
Base telling. Bhairava's threat to (or cutting of) the fifth head links this story to the Brahmahatya cycle (see brahma-fifth-head).
The Linga Purana devotes a chapter to the origin of the linga in which the same contest between Brahma and Vishnu is settled by the column of light, and Shaiva calendars connect that night with Mahashivaratri, the night on which form and formlessness first met in Shiva. The chapter could not be read in translation during research, so only its title and the Shivaratri association are recorded here.
What is different here:
Frames the event as a night, remembered at Shivaratri, rather than as a day lit by a lamp; chapter wording unverified.
In the Kurma Purana's version there is no ketaki and no flower-witness. At a gathering of sages Brahma announces himself the supreme creator of all things; Shiva appears as an endless pillar of light; the council accepts Shiva's supremacy, but Brahma will not bend. Angered by that obstinacy, Shiva in his terrible Bhairava form cuts off one of Brahma's heads.
What is different here:
No boar-and-gander search and no lying flower; the trigger is Brahma's arrogance before the sages, and the beheading is immediate.
The Tamil temple tradition keeps the contest and the curse but not the beheading. Shiva rises as a vast fire to end the dispute between Vishnu and Brahma; the boar comes back defeated from below and the swan finds no summit above; Brahma's deception with the flower earns him the curse of no worship while Vishnu's honesty is praised. Shiva then settles as the hill itself, Arunachala, 'the holy fire hill', and promises to be present in the flame every year. A second temple legend has Parvati doing penance here after covering Shiva's eyes in play, and being taken back on the full-moon day of Karthigai, so the festival remembers both the fire and the reunion.
What is different here:
The pillar becomes a hill; the beheading is dropped and Brahma stays intact in the iconography; the district's official account has no ketaki; the Parvati penance is a second charter for the same site.
South India · TiruvannamalaiShaiva🪔 Karthigai Deepam
On the full moon of the Tamil month Karthigai, when the moon stands in the Krittika star, a huge cauldron of ghee is lit on the summit of the Annamalai hill and seen for miles around; the flame stands for the column of light in which Shiva showed himself to Brahma and Vishnu. The lamp burns for many days and draws vast crowds. The same festival also carries the story of Kartikeya and the six Krittika maidens.
What is different here:
The story is told through the lamp rather than the text: the day, not the night, is the anniversary.
On the west wall of Chola temples, directly behind the linga in the sanctum, a niche shows Shiva stepping out of a flaming linga with a gander flying above and a boar burrowing below — the whole story in one image. Seventh-century Tamil saints already sing of it, and the Pullamangai temple of the early tenth century is among the earliest carved examples; a Chola bronze of the scene is in the Metropolitan Museum.
What is different here:
Iconographic version: no dialogue, no curse; the two searchers are shown still searching.