She Who Fills the Realm of Earth

Question: I've read that there is a version of the Vritra myth where Sarasvati kills Vritra. What do you think of the idea?

This is a fun one. Actually, there's not an alternate version of the myth, really; anywhere the myth of Vritra's slaying is retold, you will almost always see it attributed to Indra. However, there is a single mention in the Rigveda, in a hymn specifically dedicated to Sarasvati, that suggests that she might have killed Vritra. Griffith's translation of the lines says:

May the divine Sarasvatī, rich in her wealth, protect us well,
Furthering all our thoughts with might
Whoso, divine Sarasvatī, invokes thee where the prize is set,
Like Indra when he smites the foe.
Aid us, divine Sarasvad, thou who art strong in wealth and power
Like Pūṣan, give us opulence.
Yea, this divine Sarasvatī, terrible with her golden path,
Foe-slayer, claims our eulogy.

Sarasvati is here directly compared to Indra and his prowess at smiting enemies, and in the verse where she is called in this (embarrassingly poor) translation "foe-slayer", the actual word used for her is vritragni, which translates more literally as slayer of Vritra and is a cognate to Indra's traditional title of vritrahan.

So what we really have is a single line in a single hymn that calls Sarasvati by the title Vritra-Slayer, or thereabouts. To our knowledge, however, there is no alternative version of the myth that actually describes Sarasvati slaying Vritra, nor rewrites that story to make it about her exploits rather than Indra's. So in that case, the question is really why that epithet is given to her here, and what it might mean.

There are tons of possible philosophical interpretations. For example, the hymn is here praising Sarasvati's powers over wealth and good fortune, so it may be calling her the slayer of Vritra symbolically; as it says in earlier lines, he who calls upon Sarasvati to succeed smites his foe like Indra in battle, so it might be viewed as Sarasvati granting her supplicants this symbolic power to succeed. It might also be suggesting that she lent her divine aid, in a symbolic or spiritual sense, to Indra himself, and that this in part enabled him to succeed in slaying Vritra. It might be referring to the fact that Sarasvati is the goddess of the river that bears her name, and that as a water goddess she symbolically defeats Vritra, bringer of drought, with her life-giving waters. Or it might be a purely metaphorical title, with nothing to do with Vritra himself at all, that is intended to showcase Sarasvati's great spiritual might and how important she is to her worshipers.

But if you guys would follow me down the rabbit hole of comparative mythology for a second, here's an interesting tidbit: this myth is actually one of the many places where Persian and Hindu mythology intersect and probably share common roots. Vritragni is exceptionally close to verethragna, which happens to be the ancient Avestan term for "slayer of the dragon" or "slayer of the evil" and the major epithet of the god Vahram, the warrior and god of victory among the Yazata. And, just as we see among the Deva, while there's one major god who bears the name vritrahan/verethragna, there is also one major goddess who is referred to as the slayer of the dragon in a single other instance. In the Persians' case, it is Anahita - like Sarasvati, a goddess of waters and a benevolent figure who responds to the requests of her worshipers for wisdom and aid - who grants to the hero Thraetaona her own magical power so that he will be able to successfully defeat Azhi Dahaka, the great dragon of Persian mythology.

Of course, Sarasvati and Anahita aren't the same person; their pantheons have been separated (violently and with great dislike for one another) for thousands of years, and the two of them, even if they might have shared some common roots or influences in the past, are clearly no longer even remotely the same figure. But we still may be seeing an echo of both cultures telling the same incredibly ancient story, still lingering on after century upon century of retelling with new cultural additions and interpretations. In Anahita's case, she clearly did not go fight the dragon; she bestowed a boon of victory on a supplicant who offered her the proper praise and sacrifices, and he went out and actually did the deed. In Sarasvati's case, we have no reason to think she ever fought Vritra herself, and plenty of evidence that Indra did, but it wouldn't be a stretch at all to think that she might have granted Indra her support, just as the Vedic hymn above calls upon her to grant it to others who offer her their devotion.

So, we doubt, in this case, that Sarasvati was ever actually believed to be the dragon-slayer instead of Indra. But that doesn't mean she's any less amazing or powerful, simply that she chooses to manifest that power in a less direct manner.

See You Next Fall

Question: The autumn season seems to get the short end of the stick when it comes having gods representing it. Think you could come up with a list of a couple that do exclusively deal with that season?

Man, this question just begs for me to retell a Slavic myth that expressly explains why there is no deity for Autumn. The Slavic goddesses include Morena for winter, Vesna for spring and Zhiva for summer, but autumn is unrepresented.

As those of you who are interested in Stribog already know from this old post, that god once fell in love with Chors, the beautiful goddess of the moon. He was too clumsy and socially inept to court her, however, and in addition she was in turn in love with Radegast, the god of the stars and protector of the night skies. Radegast never noticed Chors' interest, but she in turn never noticed Stribog, and eventually the wind god decided to win her through trickery and sneaked into Radegast's palace by day in order to steal his star-spangled cloak. Swathed in the cloak, he waited until nightfall and stole into Chors' bedroom; believing that it was Radegast returning her love at last, she welcomed him with open arms.

Radegast, however, was severely displeased when his cloak detailing the proper positions of the stars was missing when he needed to make his nightly rounds, and after thrashing all his servants and scouring his palace, he eventually discovered what Stribog had done. He went to Svarozhich and Prove to demand that Stribog be punished for his crime, and they ruled that since the child Chors was now carrying was conceived by trickery and rape, it would be taken away from Stribog so that he would not reap the reward of offspring from his behavior. Chors, humiliated and horrified, tried to plead with the gods to save the baby's life, and when they said that they didn't know what they would need another goddess for anyway, passionately begged that the unborn girl be given the post of the goddess of autumn, the in-between time that none of the other seasonal goddesses oversaw. After deliberation, however, the gods decided that autumn wasn't important enough to need a totem goddess, being merely an uncomfortable transition zone between summer and winter rather than a real season, and that there was no reason to appoint anyone its guardian.

As a result of this ruling, the baby was taken from Chors by Svarozhich, who dissolved her into nothingness and decreed that she had only ever been a dream. The proto-Slavic word for dream is yesen, and thereafter the season of autumn was called sen in honor of the girl who would have been its goddess had she lived.

So there's one mythology that straight-up tells you that there's nobody in charge of autumn, and furthermore why it's so. Svarozhich is downright dismissive of the idea, in fact - he says basically that if he makes an exception and declares autumn a real thing, soon everybody is going to just decide to assign a name and totem to random period of time throughout the year and everything will be chaos.

But for the non-Slavs, there are two major reasons you don't see a lot of autumn gods. One is differences in climate across the world, and the other is the fact that that role is usually overseen by the harvest goddess.

For plenty of cultures, and thus their mythologies and religions, the familiar European/North American Spring-Summer-Autumn-Winter cycle is not mirrored in their local environment. In places where autumn doesn't really exist, or at least doesn't exist in a way that differentiates it much from the climate at other times, there's no point to an autumn god existing. The Alihah, for example, are the gods of a region that not only doesn't really have autumn, it barely has seasons at all, with an average deviation of barely 20 degrees celsius between the coldest and hottest times of the year. Since the most marked climate difference in their environment is that between day and night - the latter usually significantly colder than the former - they instead have various gods in charge of the sunlit day hours and celestial night hours. India is another good example, with some regions of the subcontinent substituting monsoon season and its aftermath where more northwesterly peoples would expect to experience autumn (they don't really have spring, either, or at least not in the protracted couple-of-months way Europe does). Nigeria, homeland of the Yoruba, is basically 27 degrees celsius year-round, and its ancient peoples wouldn't know what autumn was if it wandered up and bit them (but let them tell you about the rainy season versus the dry season!).

So autumn doesn't get a lot of help in various parts of the world simply because, well, it doesn't exist there. It's the same reason that you don't get very many frost or snow gods near the equator, or see as many gods of fish in landlocked cultures. (Spring is occasionally in the same boat, but because the idea of "drought/flooding/winter's over, the world is returning to life again" is closer to universal, you'll see more gods of springtime.)

The other major reason you don't see very many autumn gods is that their role is usually totally taken up by the harvest gods. The major aspect of the autumn season, in those cultures that have one, is that it's the end of summer and the time that food is harvested and laid in for the coming winter. But since harvest - and by extension all kinds of ideas of fertility and support of humanity - is such a massively important idea for most mythologies, it naturally usually has its own totem gods already, and an autumn god wouldn't be doing or representing much that they weren't already. The Slavs not only think autumn is silly, but they also don't need an autumn goddess because Mokosh, Moist Mother Earth, is already fulfilling most of that role by being the most important deity of the season as her crops are reaped and her offerings given in thanks for her bounty. When people are already going to be spending most of autumn celebrating Cronus, Demeter, Mokosh and Osiris, do they really need another person who's there because of the time of year but not doing anything new?

So I can't give you much of a list of autumn-oriented gods, because they're frankly very rare beasts. The most major is probably Sarasvati of the Devas, who is sometimes referred to as the alternative name Sharada ("autumnal") and associated with the season thanks to many of her major festivals taking place before the onset of winter (or is it the other way around?). The Greek Anemoi, the four winds, are assigned to a season each as well as a direction, so you can look to Euros, the east wind, for a representative of the declining months of the year. The Roman god Vertumnus is usually considered a fertility god as well as a representative of all the changing seasons, which includes the autumnal months. Various other gods are often theorized to be in charge of autumn, including Veles among the Slavs, Cernunnos and the Matrones among the Celts and even Sif thanks to a possible connection between her golden hair and golden fields of wheat, but these are mostly guesses based on their associations with the harvest (and in the case of Veles, at least, pretty obviously contradictory to the rest of Slavic myth).

But, as always with things that there aren't many gods of - more room for new Scions to take those spots!