Garuda is the great eagle (or eagle-man) who serves as the mount (vahana) of Vishnu, and the king of birds. His birth-story is one of bondage and release: his mother Vinata is enslaved through a wager to her sister Kadru, the mother of the snakes (nagas), and Garuda wins her freedom by fetching the amrita, the nectar of immortality, from the gods, past fire and guardians that cannot stop him. Even Indra's thunderbolt cannot wound him, and when Vishnu offers him a boon he asks to be immortal without drinking the nectar and to fly above Vishnu's banner. Because of this myth snakes are both his food and his hereditary enemies, and Garuda is invoked against snakebite and poison.
Garuda's myth reaches its fullest early telling in the Mahabharata's Astika Parva, and some scholars trace his figure back further still, to hints in the Rigveda of a great solar bird called Garutman, though the connection between this Vedic hint and the fully formed epic and Puranic Garuda remains a matter of scholarly reconstruction rather than a documented, unbroken line. Garuda's enmity with snakes is itself given a genealogical origin in the epic: his mother Vinata and the mother of the nagas, Kadru, are sisters, so the eagle and the serpents he preys upon are, in the myth's own logic, first cousins locked in a rivalry that began generations before Garuda himself was born.