Daksha holds a great sacrifice and leaves one guest off the list on purpose: Shiva, the ash smeared ascetic god he married his daughter Sati to against his own judgment. Sati goes uninvited and is turned away at the gate with insults aimed at her husband. In the Puranic telling she cannot bear the humiliation and gives up her body in the sacrificial fire, sometimes by yogic will and sometimes by leaping into the flames outright, accounts differ on the mechanism though not on the outcome.
When word reaches Shiva he tears a lock of his matted hair from his head and strikes it against the ground, and from it rises Virabhadra, a form of himself built purely for destruction, alongside the fierce goddess Bhadrakali. They fall on the sacrifice grounds, scatter the assembled gods and sages, and Virabhadra beheads Daksha before the rite can finish. The gods, Brahma and Vishnu chief among them, beg Shiva to relent, and Daksha is restored to life, but the head that is found and fitted to bring him back is a goat's, not his own. The Shiva Purana and the Bhagavata Purana both carry the episode as the founding grievance between the two households, and the Puranic sources broadly agree that it establishes Shiva's claim to a share of every subsequent sacrifice, which his exclusion from Daksha's rite had denied him.