Vasukiवासुकि

Vasuki (वासुकि) is the king of the nagas, the divine serpents, a son of the sage Kashyapa and Kadru and sovereign of the serpent realm. Of all the myriad snakes of Hindu myth, his fame rests on a single, colossal act of service: when the gods and asuras churned the ocean of milk for the nectar of immortality, Mount Mandara was the churning-rod — and Vasuki was the rope. Wound around the mountain, hauled back and forth for an age between gods at the tail and demons at the head, he endured the churning that yielded the treasures of the cosmos, from Lakshmi to the nectar itself. Tradition adds that the ordeal wrung from him torrents of venom, part of the poison that Shiva swallowed to save the world.

Shiva's ornament

Vasuki's second station is around the neck of Shiva, who wears the serpent king coiled at his throat as an ornament — the lord of ascetics garlanded with the lord of snakes. In the traditions of eastern India the snake goddess Manasa is reckoned Vasuki's sister, tying him into the living serpent cults of Bengal. He is named among the serpents honoured at Naga Panchami, the annual festival of snake worship, and in the Bhagavad Gita Krishna declares 'among serpents I am Vasuki' — the god's own measure of his pre-eminence.