The Ascent and Fall of Nahusha

Among the early kings of the Lunar Line was Nahusha, the son of Āyus, and his story is the first of the line's great cautionary tales, a story of a good and righteous man raised to the very throne of heaven and destroyed there by the one enemy that greatness cannot outrun: his own pride.

For Nahusha began as one of the best of kings. He ruled his earthly realm with perfect justice, honoured the gods and his ancestors, performed the sacred rites, followed the scriptures in all things, and through this long discipline of righteousness he built up an immense store of spiritual merit, a punya so great that his own radiance came to rival that of the gods themselves. He was, by every measure, a king deserving of honour.

And it happened, in those days, that the throne of heaven fell empty. For Indra, the king of the gods, had committed a grave sin, the slaying of an enemy by deceit, and to expiate it he had fled his own heaven and hidden himself away, shrinking to the size of an atom and concealing himself within the fibre of a lotus stem in a far northern lake, leaving heaven leaderless and open to its enemies.

And the gods and sages, needing a king to hold the celestial throne until Indra should return, searched all the worlds for a mortal of merit great enough to bear that terrible honour, and their eyes fell upon Nahusha, and they raised him up, with great ceremony, to sit upon the throne of heaven and rule the three worlds as Indra in Indra's absence.

And here begins the fall, and it is worth watching closely, for it is one of the oldest and truest patterns of the human soul. For a while, Nahusha ruled heaven well, upheld by the merit he had earned on earth. But sudden and absolute power, poured all at once upon a soul unprepared for it, is among the most dangerous of all spiritual tests, and it is a test that Nahusha failed. Surrounded by the intoxicating pleasures of heaven, lifted to a height beyond any mortal's due, Nahusha began to change.

His humility, which had been the root of all his virtue, withered. He forgot the teachings that had raised him. And in their place there grew the thing that destroys the great more surely than any enemy: ahankāra, the swelling of the ego, the intoxication of pride, the poisonous belief that because he had been given power he was therefore owed all that power could seize.

And his pride found its object, as pride so often does, in desire. Walking one day in the gardens of heaven, Nahusha saw Sachī, the wife of the fugitive Indra, and was seized on the instant by a lawless lust for her; and armed now with the arrogance of his stolen office, he did not master the desire but commanded its satisfaction. Why has Indra's wife not come to me, he demanded of the gods; am I not king of heaven now? Send her to my chambers.

He would take the wife of the very king whose throne he only borrowed, and he saw in it no wrong, for pride had convinced him that his power made all things his.

Sachī, terrified, fled to the protection of Brihaspati, the preceptor of the gods, who sheltered her; and when the gods and sages came to Nahusha and begged him to master his desire and honour the sacred law of marriage, the infatuated king only mocked them, and pressed his demand the harder. And so Sachī, counselled by the wise Brihaspati, resorted to a stratagem to trap the proud king in his own arrogance. She came to Nahusha and said: I will accept you, Lord; but first you must come to me in greater state than any god before you.

Let your palanquin be borne to me upon the shoulders of the seven great sages themselves, the Saptarishi, the masters of the Vedas; carry yourself so, and I am yours.

And Nahusha, so blinded by lust and arrogance that he saw nothing wrong in yoking the holiest sages of the cosmos to his palanquin like beasts of burden, agreed. He summoned the seven great sages, and among them the mighty Agastya, and set them beneath his palanquin, and made them carry him. The three worlds looked on aghast at the sacrilege.

And as the sages bore him, slowly, with the gravity of their holiness, toward the waiting Sachī, Nahusha, inflamed and impatient, grew angry at their slow pace, and began to goad them to go faster; and at last, in a moment of utter and crowning madness, he kicked the sage Agastya upon the head with his foot, crying "Sarpa! Sarpa!", which is to say, move faster, move like a snake.

And the word he chose became his doom. For the wrath of a great sage is more terrible than any weapon, and Agastya, his head kicked, his holiness desecrated, turned upon the fallen king with blazing eyes and pronounced a curse that fitted the crime with a terrible justice. Since you have kicked a sage and defiled the sacred order, the sage declared, and since you have called us snakes, become a snake; fall from this heaven you have disgraced, and live as a python in the dust of the earth.

And on the instant Nahusha's celestial form withered, all his hard-won merit evaporated in a breath, and he fell headlong from heaven down through the clouds to the earth, to live as a serpent in the forest dust, condemned to crawl there for uncounted ages until, long afterward, the wisdom of a distant descendant should at last release him.

Let us take from Nahusha the lesson his fall was meant to teach, for it is one the whole Lunar Line, and the whole human race, needs to learn and relearn. Here was a man who had earned heaven by a lifetime of genuine righteousness, whose merit was real, whose discipline was real, and all of it was undone, in a breath, by pride. Not by an enemy, not by misfortune, but by the swelling of his own ego once power was given him.

No store of merit, no height of learning, no accumulation of good deeds, can save a soul that has surrendered to pride, for pride corrodes the very virtue that raised it, and turns the righteous man into the tyrant, and casts down from heaven, in a single mad moment, the one who spent a lifetime climbing there.

The higher we are raised, the more deadly the fall that pride prepares for us; and the only safety is the humility that Nahusha lost, the remembering, at every height, that what we have been given is not owed to us, and can be taken back.