Agni in the Hindu Life, from the Wedding to the Pyre

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.