Pushan

The Rigveda gives Pushan eight hymns of his own, and across them he is consistently a god of connection rather than confrontation. His name is generally traced to a root meaning to nourish or to cause to thrive, and the hymns cast him as the deity who keeps herds fat, marriages fruitful, and travelers safe on roads that had no signposts and few reliable landmarks. He is asked repeatedly to drive away wolves and bandits from the path, to find what is lost, whether an animal or a person, and to lead the traveler's cattle home by evening.

Two details set him apart from the Vedic pantheon's more commanding figures. He drives a chariot pulled by goats, a humble animal beside the horses of Indra or the Ashvins, which fits a god whose work is done on foot beside herdsmen rather than from a battlefield. And he carries an ankusha, a goad for driving cattle, instead of a thunderbolt or a bow. Later tradition also assigns him a special role at death: because he knows every road in life, he is asked to guide the departing soul safely on the road it must travel after the body is left behind, linking his everyday pastoral function to one of the tradition's largest questions.

Pushan belongs to the Adityas, the sons of the goddess Aditi, a group that later Puranic literature expands to include Vishnu himself, and some scholars read Pushan's pastoral, way-finding character as an older, more local layer of solar worship that predates the grander solar theology built up around Surya and Vishnu in later texts.

Pushan's standing falls sharply between the Vedic hymns and the later Puranic stories, and one episode explains why. When Daksha holds his great sacrifice and pointedly leaves Shiva off the guest list, the insult reaches Shiva's wife Sati, who dies of the shame, and Shiva's fury tears Virabhadra into being from his matted hair to destroy the rite. Among the gods who suffer for merely attending is Pushan: accounts differ on the exact cause, some naming Rudra himself as the striker in the older Taittiriya Samhita telling, others naming Virabhadra in the fuller Puranic version, but the result is the same. Pushan's teeth are knocked from his mouth, sometimes because he smiled or laughed at the chaos, sometimes simply because he was caught eating the sacrificial oblation when the attack came.

The consequence becomes a fixed part of his later iconography: Pushan is shown toothless, reduced to eating gruel or mashed offerings because he can no longer chew solid food, an odd and almost comic diminishment for a god once addressed in the Rigveda as the one who finds what is lost and never loses the way himself. Scholars of Vedic religion read the story as a record of an older pastoral god being pushed to the margins as the Puranic pantheon reorganizes itself around Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma, with the physical mutilation standing in for the god's loss of standing in the wider tradition.

The episode is one of the few points where Pushan's myth intersects directly with Daksha's own story, since both figures suffer at the same sacrifice for the same reason, caught in a family quarrel between Shiva and his father in law that neither of them started.