The Name on Every Offering

The gods were losing their war with the asuras, and Indra went alone to the Manasa mountains to think. What he needed was a general.

There he heard a woman cry out, and he drove off the asura who had seized her. Her name was Devasena, and she asked Indra to find her a husband. "He must be able to conquer gods and asuras alike," she said.

Indra knew of no such person. But that morning he saw the sun and the moon rise together, and Agni, carrying the offerings of the sages, pass into the disc of the sun. "If Agni had a son now," he thought, "that son would be the one." He took Devasena to Brahma, and Brahma said, "It shall be as you intend."

Not long afterwards the seven great sages held a sacrifice, and Agni came down to carry their offerings to the gods. On his way out he saw the wives of the sages. They shone, the epic says, like altars of gold.

Agni lost his heart to all of them at once. He also knew it was wrong. "These women are faithful to their husbands," he told himself. "I may not so much as look at them with longing."

So he did a strange thing. He became the household fire in their homes, so that he could at least see them every day as they tended him. He stayed a long time. It only made him more wretched, and at last he went away into a forest, meaning to put an end to himself.

Someone had been watching him all this while. Svaha, a daughter of Daksha, had loved Agni for years, and he had never noticed. Now she saw her chance.

She took the shape of the wife of the sage Angiras and went to him in the forest. "Agni, I love you," she said. "The other wives know your heart too, and they have sent me."

Agni was overjoyed and took her as his bride. Svaha went away holding his seed in her cupped hands, and then she stopped to think. "If anyone sees me like this, those women will be blamed for what they never did."

So she became a bird. She flew to the White Mountain, where seven-headed serpents kept guard, and dropped what she carried into a golden lake.

Six times she went to Agni, each time in the shape of a different wife. The seventh she could not manage. Arundhati, the wife of Vasishtha, was so devoted to her husband that Svaha could not put on her form at all.

From the golden lake a child was born with six faces. By the fourth day his limbs were fully formed. He roared, and the three worlds shook. He drew his bow and split the Krauncha mountain. They called him Skanda.

The forest people began to whisper that the six wives were his mothers. The sages believed it and sent their wives away, all but Arundhati.

"The child is mine," Svaha told them, again and again. "Your wives are not his mother."

The sage Vishvamitra, who had seen everything, said the same. The sages would not take their wives back.

Agni came to the mountain to see his son. He turned himself into a goat-faced pedlar, the epic says, and amused the boy with toys.

Indra came too, with an army, afraid of this child. The fight ended with Indra asking Skanda to be king of the gods, and Skanda refusing.

"You are my king," said the boy. "Tell me what to do."

"Then lead my armies," said Indra. So Skanda became the general of the gods, and Devasena became his wife.

The six wives came to him in their disgrace. "Let us be your mothers," they said. He agreed, and they were set in the sky as the stars called the Krittikas.

Last came Svaha. "I am your mother. I have loved Agni since I was young, and he does not understand. I want to live with him for ever."

"From today," said Skanda, "whatever people offer to gods or ancestors in the fire, they shall offer with your name. So you will always be with him."

In another book of the Mahabharata, the sage Vasishtha tells the birth of the same child while explaining where gold comes from. Here Svaha is not mentioned at all.

An asura named Taraka, made proud by a boon, was tormenting the gods. They could father no child to fight him, because the goddess Uma had cursed them all to be childless. Agni alone had not been present when the curse was spoken. So the gods hunted for Agni until they found him inside a sami tree.

"Why have you come?" he asked.

"We have a task for you," said the gods. "Give us a son with your own energy, one who can free us from Taraka. You are the only refuge we have left."

"So be it," said Agni, and he went to the river goddess Ganga.

Ganga received the seed of fire, and it grew in her as flames grow in the wind. It was more than she could bear. When an asura somewhere gave a terrible roar, she lost her last strength.

"I cannot carry this any longer," she told Agni. "I am not casting it off from whim. I am worn out."

"Bear it," said Agni. "You can bear the whole earth."

She could not. She set the child down on the slope of Mount Meru and it lay there blazing.

"What does it look like?" Agni asked.

"Like gold," said Ganga. "Like you. The whole mountain is lit by it, and everything near it seems turned to gold."

The child slid into a thicket of reeds and grew there. The goddess of the Krittika stars found him and nursed him, and so he is called Kartikeya. Because he was hidden in the reeds he is called Guha, the secret one.

And gold, Vasishtha says, is Agni's own offspring, which is why it is the purest of all things that are given.