Varaha Avatar -- The Boar Who Lifted the Earth

At the beginning of creation, the Bhagavata says, Brahma looked for a place for the creatures he was about to make, and found none: the earth had sunk into the waters at the bottom of the universe. As he wondered what to do, a tiny boar, no bigger than a thumb, came out of his nostril -- and in a moment, as Brahma and his sons watched, it grew to the size of an elephant and then of a mountain, roaring until the heavens echoed.

The boar was Vishnu. He sniffed out the earth's scent as a boar searches for food, plunged into the ocean, and found her at its depths. He lifted her on the tips of his white tusks and rose out of the water, the earth with all her mountains resting on his tusk like a lotus carried by an elephant coming out of a lake.

Why had the earth sunk? In the Bhagavata's fuller telling, it was the work of Hiranyaksha, the "golden-eyed" demon, twin brother of Hiranyakashipu. Hiranyaksha, swollen with power from his boons, had pressed the earth down into the ocean and roamed it looking for an opponent worthy of him. When Varaha rose with the earth, Hiranyaksha attacked him with his mace; Vishnu fought and killed him. His brother's death is what turned Hiranyakashipu into Vishnu's bitter enemy -- the hatred that sets up the story of Prahlada and the Narasimha avatar.

The Bhagavata also tells why the brothers were born as demons at all. They were Jaya and Vijaya, Vishnu's own doorkeepers in Vaikuntha, cursed to be born three times as his enemies after turning away the four Kumaras at his gate. Hiranyaksha and Hiranyakashipu were the first of those births.

Earlier still, Vedic texts already speak of a boar that raised the earth from the waters; the Puranas made it Vishnu. They also made the boar a symbol of the Vedic sacrifice itself. In the hymn the sages sing to Varaha in the Bhagavata, each part of his body is a part of the ritual -- his snout the sacrificial ladle, his tongue the pravargya rite, his tusks the opening and closing rites. Hence the name Yajna-Varaha, "the sacrifice-boar": the god who lifts the earth is the same as the rite that sustains it.

Varaha's best-known image is the great relief at Udayagiri near Vidisha, carved in the early fifth century: a man's body with a boar's head, one foot raised on a serpent king, the small figure of the earth goddess clinging to his tusk, and rows of sages and gods looking on. Kings of the time took him as a symbol of the ruler who rescues and protects the land. For devotees, the meaning is simpler and closer. Whatever has sunk out of reach, the story says, God will dive for it -- and bring it back lovingly, as Varaha holds Bhudevi.