Agni

Agni is fire, and the very first hymn of the Rigveda is addressed to him, a placement that reflects his function rather than a ranking of importance. In the logic of Vedic sacrifice Agni is not merely one god among those worshipped but the mechanism of worship itself: he is the mouth of the gods, and an offering placed in the fire is carried up by him as smoke to whichever deity it is meant for. He is thus the priest among the gods and the indispensable intermediary between earth and heaven, present wherever fire is, in the domestic hearth, on the altar, in lightning, in the sun, and in the fire of digestion within the body.

Agni's name shares its Indo-European root with the Latin ignis, source of the English ignite and igneous, a linguistic link that places him, alongside deities such as Dyaus and Ushas, among the clearest cases of a Vedic god's name surviving, transformed, in the vocabulary of distant European languages descended from the same ancestral tongue. Later Puranic iconography gives Agni a fixed visual form distinct from his Vedic abstraction: red-skinned, sometimes shown with two faces or several flaming tongues, riding a ram, and carrying a ladle for pouring oblations, an axe and a flaming torch, images that translate the purely functional Vedic fire-god into the fully pictured, temple-worshippable deity later Hindu art required.

Though the elaborate public fire-sacrifices of the Vedic age are now rarely performed, Agni remains woven into Hindu life at its two most significant thresholds. The Hindu wedding is completed when the couple takes seven steps (saptapadi) around a kindled fire, Agni standing as the divine witness to the marriage, and the same fire receives the body at the cremation that ends a life. In this continuity a deity of the oldest layer of Indian religion is still directly encountered by ordinary people. Agni is described in paradox as ever young, rekindled fresh each day, and yet the oldest of the gods, and as having three or seven flickering tongues. The maintenance of a household or temple fire keeps his presence current in a tradition that has otherwise moved far from the Vedic sacrifice.

Among the most elaborate rites ever built around Agni is the Agnicayana, a complex, days-long Vedic ritual involving the construction of a large fire-altar in the shape of a bird, whose performance in Kerala in 1975 was documented on film and in detailed scholarship by the linguist Frits Staal and colleagues, offering one of the fullest modern records of how an ancient Vedic fire ritual is actually carried out; some orthodox Brahmin communities in Kerala and elsewhere in India continue to perform Agnicayana and the simpler twice-daily Agnihotra fire offering today, making Agni's worship, in its most elaborate form, one of the oldest continuously enacted complex rituals still practised anywhere in the world.