Tvashtri, Indra, and the Weapon He Made

The relationship between the artisan and the storm god is the most developed thing in Tvashtri's record, and it is not comfortable. Tvashtri fashions the vajra, the thunderbolt with which Indra kills Vritra and releases the waters, so the central act of Vedic mythology is performed with a tool the artisan supplied. In several passages Indra also drinks Tvashtri's soma, sometimes with a suggestion of taking rather than receiving, and the relationship in the hymns runs from cooperation to open hostility depending on which poet is speaking.

The hostility has a cause in the narrative. Tvashtri is the father of Vishvarupa, the three-headed being whom Indra kills, and the later tradition has him produce Vritra afterwards specifically to avenge that killing. So the same god forges the weapon and later supplies the enemy. Epic and Puranic versions elaborate this into a full cycle in which Indra's victory carries a debt of brahminicide that has to be discharged, which is a considerable moral complication of a story that in its oldest form is simply a triumph.

None of this makes Tvashtri a rival power. He has no cult, no temple and no iconography of his own, and outside these episodes he functions as an epithet-bearing craftsman invoked for offspring and for well-made things. What he provides the tradition is a way of saying that the instruments of divine action were made by somebody, and that the maker had interests of his own.