Amrita

Amrita is not found, gathered or grown. It has to be manufactured, and the manufacture requires the gods to work with their enemies, which is what makes the story worth telling. The devas, weakened and facing defeat, are advised that the ocean of milk holds the drink of deathlessness and that they cannot raise it alone. They propose an alliance to the asuras on the promise of an equal share.

The apparatus is cosmic. The mountain Mandara becomes the churning stick and the serpent Vasuki the rope wound round it, with the asuras taking the head and the devas the tail. Vishnu takes the form of a tortoise and goes under the mountain so that it will not sink. The churning brings up treasure after treasure before it produces what it was for: the moon, the wish granting cow, the celestial physician's art, the goddess Sri. It also brings up the poison halahala, which threatens everything alive until Shiva drinks it and holds it in his throat, which is why he is called the blue throated one.

Last comes Dhanvantari, rising out of the water with the vessel of amrita in his hands. The alliance ends there. The asuras seize the vessel, and Vishnu takes the form of Mohini, a woman of such beauty that they agree to let her serve it out fairly, and she gives it to the devas alone. One asura slips into the line in disguise and drinks; the sun and moon see him and tell her, and she takes off his head before the amrita passes his throat. The head lives, because the drink had already reached it. That is Rahu, who swallows the sun and the moon in revenge and lets them go again, which is what an eclipse is.

A myth about a drink nobody can obtain would not by itself organise anything. Amrita organises a great deal, because of a detail attached to the struggle over the vessel: during the flight and the fighting, drops fell to earth. Four places in northern India claim them, and the Kumbh Mela is held in rotation at those four river sites on that account. It is among the largest gatherings of people anywhere in the world, and its calendar is set astrologically, so a story about spilled liquid governs both where and when tens of millions of people travel.

The word travels further than the myth. Amrita is a-mrta, not-dead, a negated participle, and the same Indo-European formation stands behind Greek a-mbrotos and so behind ambrosia. The two traditions inherited one word for the substance that stops death, and each built a different story around it. In Sanskrit the adjective stayed productive: amrita can qualify anything deathless, and the noun is used for the sweetness of a teaching or the taste of liberation, so a term from a churning myth becomes ordinary religious vocabulary.

Buddhism took it up in that abstract sense, where amrita most often means the deathless state itself rather than a liquid, and Vajrayana practice uses consecrated substances under the name. Sikhism gives the word a concrete ritual life again: the amrit of the Khalsa initiation is sugar water stirred with a double edged sword while scripture is recited, and it is a distinct thing from the Puranic drink, sharing the name and the claim about deathlessness rather than the myth. The atlas holds that Sikh substance as its own entry.