Hiranyaksha, the golden-eyed, was a daitya of immense strength, son of Kashyapa and Diti and elder brother of Hiranyakashipu. His name is bound to a single cosmic crime: he seized the earth itself and carried it down into the depths of the primal ocean, leaving the worlds without their foundation.
The boar
To recover her, Vishnu took the form of Varaha, the great boar, counted among the standard ten avataras. Diving through the waters, he found the earth, slew Hiranyaksha in a tremendous duel and raised the goddess Bhudevi on his tusks to her place amid the waters. The image of the boar lifting the earth is older than the demon: in the Shatapatha Brahmana a boar raises the submerged earth as an act of creation, and the Puranas grafted the combat with Hiranyaksha onto that ancient cosmogony. In sculpture the scene became one of the grand set-pieces of Indian art, the colossal boar with the small figure of the earth goddess resting on his tusk.
The first birth
The Bhagavata Purana counts Hiranyaksha and his brother as the first of the three demonic births of Jaya and Vijaya, Vishnu's cursed doorkeepers, who returned to their master's presence through enmity as surely as through love. Hiranyaksha's death set the cycle of the myth in motion, for it was to avenge him that Hiranyakashipu undertook the austerities that made him, for a time, invincible.
Further reading
- Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Penguin, 2009
- Flood, Gavin. An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge University Press, 1996
- Klostermaier, Klaus K. A Survey of Hinduism. State University of New York Press, 2007
- Lipner, Julius. Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. Routledge, 2010
- Stietencron, Heinrich von. Hindu Myth, Hindu History. Permanent Black, 2005
See also
This entry was last revised on 31 July 2026.