Agni- Hindu GodDeity"God of Fire"

The First Word

The Rigveda opens with his name. Agním īḷe puróhitam: "I praise Agni, the divine priest." Before any other god is addressed, before Indra or Varuna or the Maruts, there is fire. More than two hundred hymns in the Rigveda are addressed to Agni, and none of them treat him as ordinary.

The Shatapatha Brahmana says Agni was born from Prajapati's mouth. He is literally the mouth through which the gods eat. The Rigveda calls him the child of two mothers: the two fire sticks whose friction brings him forth. He is hidden in all wood, waiting to be awakened. He is hidden in water, which should be impossible, but rivers run warm where he lies beneath them. The priests who churned the fire sticks each morning were not creating fire. They were finding it.

The Flight

Every sacrifice in the three worlds passed through Agni's body. The ghee and the soma, the grain and the milk: everything the priests poured into the flames became his to carry to the gods. The burden was enormous. Agni fled.

He hid first in plants. The plants scorched and withered. He moved to trees. The trees smoldered. He sank into the waters, and even the waters grew warm. The fish and frogs, scalded by his heat, reported his hiding place to the gods.

The gods came to him. The Rigveda's hymns 10.51 through 10.53 preserve the conversation: Agni arguing that the work was too much, the gods arguing that no one else could do it. They offered him a boon. He would receive the first portion of every sacrifice. Whatever was cast into the fire would be as if placed directly in the gods' own mouths. Agni accepted and returned to the altar.

Every ritual that begins with an offering to Agni before any other god reenacts this agreement.

The Burning of Khandava

Agni came to Krishna and Arjuna disguised as a Brahmin, shaking with hunger. He had tried to consume the Khandava forest and failed. Indra kept sending rain to protect his ally Takshaka, the serpent king who lived among the trees. Every time Agni's flames rose, the rain beat them down.

Agni asked the two warriors for help. Arjuna took up his bow and held off Indra's storms, shooting arrows into the clouds until the rain stopped. Krishna guarded the perimeter. Agni poured into the forest. The Mahabharata describes him devouring it for days, consuming everything from the canopy to the roots. Takshaka escaped. His son Ashvasena escaped. Almost nothing else survived.

In gratitude, Agni arranged for Arjuna to receive the divine bow Gandiva and two inexhaustible quivers from Varuna, and for Krishna to receive the Sudarshana Chakra. These weapons shaped the rest of the Mahabharata.

Sita's Fire

After Rama destroyed Lanka and recovered Sita, he would not take her back. She had lived in another man's house for months. The Ramayana's Yuddha Kanda says Rama told her he had fought the war for honor, not for her, and that she was free to go wherever she wished.

Sita ordered a pyre built. She walked around it once, invoked Agni as her witness, and stepped into the flames. The fire did not touch her. Agni himself rose from the pyre carrying Sita in his arms, and declared before the assembled gods and warriors that she was pure. The fire that consumes the guilty had refused to consume her.

Svaha

Svaha fell in love with Agni. Without her, no offering reaches the gods: her name is the word the priest cries as he pours ghee into the flames. The Devi Bhagavata Purana tells how she won him. She took the forms of six of the seven wives of the Saptarishi, the great sages, and went to Agni in each disguise. Only Arundhati's form she could not take, because Arundhati's devotion to her husband Vasishtha was too powerful to imitate. When the deception was discovered, six of the sages' wives were cast out by their husbands for an infidelity they had not committed. Svaha revealed her true identity and became Agni's wife.

No sacrifice is complete without the cry of "Svaha!" at the moment the offering enters the fire.

The Last Fire

When a life ends, Agni performs his final service. The funeral pyre is his last act of priesthood: the fire that warmed the house and carried the daily offerings now takes the body. The Rigveda's funeral hymn (10.16) speaks directly to Agni, asking him to burn gently, to carry the dead to the world of the fathers, and to let the goat sent with the body lead the way.

The eldest son lights the pyre. The Garuda Purana prescribes the rites: the body is washed, wrapped in white cloth, and placed on wood with the head pointing north. The son circles the pyre and touches the torch to his parent's mouth, the place where Agni was first born from Prajapati. Smoke rises. What was a person becomes ash and offering.

Agni is the first god a Hindu encounters, present at the wedding fire around which the couple walks seven steps. He is the last god, too.