Agniअग्नि

Agni (अग्नि), fire, is the god with whom the Ṛgveda begins: its very first word is his name, and its first hymn praises him as the purohita, the household priest of the sacrifice. After Indra he is the most-hymned deity of the Veda, and in the sacrificial religion that the Veda serves he is indispensable in a way no other god quite is. The offering poured into the fire is carried by Agni to the gods; he is their mouth, and the messenger who moves between earth and heaven. Without him the entire system of exchange between men and gods cannot function.

The threefold fire

The hymns delight in Agni's multiplicity. He is born three times, in the fire on earth, the lightning of the mid-air, and the sun in heaven, and is reborn daily, kindled each dawn from the fire-sticks, at once the youngest of the gods and the most ancient. He hides in the waters and in plants; he devours the forest and purifies the offering. The ritual tradition institutionalised him as the three fires of the śrauta sacrifice, the householder's fire, the offering fire and the southern fire, and the agnihotra, the twice-daily oblation, remained for centuries the elementary act of Vedic piety. In the Upaniṣadic reinterpretation, Agni is interiorised as the digestive and vital fire within the body.

The later Agni

In Purāṇic Hinduism Agni cedes prominence but not function. Iconography shows him red-bodied, sometimes two-headed, flame-haired, riding the ram, and as one of the Aṣṭa-Dikpālas he guards the south-east, still called the āgneya corner. In the Rāmāyaṇa it is Agni who returns Sītā unscathed from the fire, attesting her purity; in the Mahābhārata he consumes the Khāṇḍava forest with Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa's aid. Every Hindu wedding still circles the fire, with Agni as witness to the vows, and the last rite of a Hindu life delivers the body to him.

Legacy

Agni's endurance lies in his ubiquity rather than his cult. He has few temples, yet he attends more Hindu rituals than any deity with many: kindled at weddings, festivals, consecrations and funerals, and honoured wherever the homa, the fire-offering, survives, which is to say wherever Hindu ritual survives at all. The Vedic insight persists unchanged: fire is the visible presence of the divine in the human world, and whatever is truly given must pass through it.