The Day the Sun Went Dark

The gods and the demons had churned the ocean together, and the drink of deathlessness had come up out of it at last. Then they fought over it. Vishnu took the form of an enchantress, charmed the demons and carried the drink away from them, and the gods sat down to share it.

One of the demons was not fooled. His name was Rahu. He put on the look of a god, sat down among the gods, and drank with the rest.

The Sun and the Moon saw him.

"That one is no god," they said. "That is Rahu."

The drink was already in Rahu's mouth. It had gone as far as his throat when Vishnu's discus flew and took off his head.

The body fell and rolled, and the earth shook with her mountains and forests and islands. But the head had tasted the drink. It rose into the sky, huge as a mountain peak, roaring.

From that day there has been a feud between Rahu's head and the two who gave him away. To this day, the epic says, he swallows the Sun and the Moon.

The Sun brooded on it.

"I spoke up for the good of the gods," he thought. "And I alone pay for it. Rahu comes to devour me before their very eyes, and they sit and bear it quietly. Nobody helps me. Very well. Then let the worlds burn."

He went to the mountains of the west, and from there he began to pour out his heat.

It was the middle of the night. The great sages felt it first and went to the gods.

"A terrible heat is rising in the dark," they said. "Every heart is afraid."

Gods and sages went together to Brahma, the Grandfather. "What is this heat? The Sun has not even risen. What will become of us when he does?"

"He means to rise today and burn everything to ash," Brahma said. "But I made the remedy ready long ago."

The remedy had come out of a broken egg.

Vinata, a wife of the sage Kashyapa, had asked for two sons stronger than all the thousand serpent children of her sister Kadru. She laid two eggs, and they were kept in warm jars. Five hundred years went by. Kadru's thousand eggs hatched. Vinata's did not.

She could not stand the waiting. She broke one egg open. Inside was a child whose upper body was fully formed and whose lower body was not.

The child was angry. "You broke my shell too soon," he said, "and for that you shall be a slave. Leave the other egg alone. Wait five hundred years more, and the son inside it will set you free." Then he rose into the sky.

His name was Aruna. The second egg, left in peace, gave the great bird Garuda.

It was Garuda, newly hatched, who carried his brother on his back across the ocean and set him down in the east, on the very morning the Sun had chosen for burning the world.

"Aruna is vast and bright," Brahma told the gods. "He shall stand in front of the Sun as his charioteer and take the fierceness of the rays on himself. So the worlds will be safe."

Aruna did as the Grandfather ordered. The Sun rose that day veiled by Aruna's body, and nothing burned. Aruna has kept that place ever since. He is the charioteer of the Sun, the epic says, always seen in the hour of morning.

Long before anyone spoke of Rahu, the poets of the Rigveda had another name for the thing that puts out the sun.

A hymn in the fifth book begins as an ordinary invitation. The stones have pressed the Soma. Indra is called to come and drink at the noon offering. Then, in the fifth verse, the daylight goes.

"O Surya," the poet says, "when Svarbhanu, child of the Asuras, pierced you through with darkness, every creature looked like a man who is lost and does not know where he is standing."

The hymn gives two verses to what was done about it. Indra struck down Svarbhanu's magic, which had spread itself below the sky. And the priest Atri went looking for the Sun. He set his pressing stones, he served the gods with praise, and he prayed. With his fourth prayer he found Surya, hidden in a gloom that had stopped him in his work.

In between, one verse is spoken by a frightened voice. It seems to be the Sun's own.

"I am yours, Atri. Do not let the oppressor swallow me in his anger. You are a true friend to me. You and King Varuna, be my helpers."

Atri helped. He set the eye of Surya back in heaven and made Svarbhanu's magic vanish. The last verse is a family's boast, and a fair one. "The Atris found the Sun again. Nobody else had the power to do it."

The priestly books that came after tell it as a matter for the gods alone, with no Atri in it. The Taittiriya Samhita says the gods wanted to set the Sun right and struck the darkness off him piece by piece. The first darkness they struck off became a black sheep. The second became a brightly coloured one, and the third a white one. What they cut from the upper part of the bone became a barren ewe, and the gods wondered to whom they should offer it. Sheep, by this account, are made of an old eclipse.

The Shatapatha Brahmana is shorter still. Svarbhanu struck the Sun with darkness, it says, and he did not shine. Soma and Rudra took the darkness away, and freed from that evil he burns up there now.