Prabhasaप्रभास

Prabhasa (प्रभास) is one of the eight Vasus, the elemental gods of the Vedic pantheon, and personifies radiance, the splendour of light at dawn. Like his brothers he has almost no independent cult; his name survives because of a single story in which the Vasus, as a group, fall to earth.

The theft of the cow

The Mahabharata's first book tells how the eight Vasus, wandering with their wives, came upon the hermitage of the sage Vasishtha and his wish-granting cow Nandini. At his wife's urging, one of the Vasus, named Dyaus in some tellings and identified with Prabhasa in others, carried the cow away. Vasishtha cursed all eight to be born as mortals. The river goddess Ganga agreed to bear them to King Shantanu and to release seven of them from human life at birth by drowning them; but the brother who had actually taken the cow was condemned to a long life on earth. He was born as Bhishma, the terrible grandsire of the Kuru line, whose vow of celibacy and death-delayed end frame the entire epic.

The lists of the Vasus vary from text to text, and Prabhasa's place in the story is not fixed. What remains constant is the shape of the tale: even gods of light are bound by consequence, and a single act of appropriation can cost a celestial his heaven.