Vishvarupa

Vishvarupa is the son of Tvashtri, the artisan of the gods, and he is described as having three heads. The tradition puts them to work: one head drinks soma, one drinks liquor, one eats food, and the image is memorable enough that his other name, Trishiras, the three headed one, travels as far as the first.

The trouble is his mother. She is of the asura side, and Vishvarupa, who serves as the chaplain of the gods and speaks their portion of the sacrifice aloud, is said to have promised the offering to the gods with his voice and to have given a share to his mother's kin in secret. It is a very precise kind of offence. He does not attack anybody, he does not defect, and the sacrifice he conducts is conducted correctly. What he does is misdirect the share, which in a religion whose central act is the correct allotment of an offering is the worst thing an officiant can do, and it is exactly the failure that the Aditya gods of contract and apportionment exist to punish.

Indra kills him for it, and in the older telling Trita Aptya is involved in the killing or takes the guilt of it. The heads come off, and in some versions birds fly out of them. What the tradition does not do is treat the episode as a straightforward victory. Vishvarupa is a brahmin and a priest, killed while holding an office, and the atlas holds him as a divine figure rather than a monster for that reason: the shape of the story is a murder inside the sacrificial system, not a dragon slaying. The dragon slaying is the next thing that happens, and it happens because of this.

Killing a brahmin is the gravest offence the ritual literature knows, and Indra has done it. The consequences are worked out at length in the later texts, and they are worked out as a problem of accounting rather than of conscience: the guilt is a substance, it exists, and it has to go somewhere. In the standard treatment it is divided and distributed, to the earth, to the trees, to the waters and to women, each of which receives a share along with a compensating boon. The god is cleared. The cost is spread across the world.

The second consequence is narrative. Tvashtri, who made the thunderbolt Indra kills with, has now lost a son to it, and the tradition has him produce Vritra afterwards specifically to avenge the killing. That turns the central deed of Vedic myth, the slaying of the serpent and the release of the waters, into the second half of a revenge sequence rather than a self contained triumph. The artisan supplies the weapon, then supplies the enemy.

This is the part of the material that the epic and Puranic literature found most useful, because it gives Indra a moral history. A king of the gods who has incurred brahminicide, been purified by a distribution of guilt, and then killed the avenger sent against him, is a very different figure from the straightforward champion of the earliest hymns. The atlas keeps the sequence together for that reason. Vishvarupa is a minor figure by any count of verses, and removing him would leave the two most important things about Indra unexplained.