Serpent Darts

The war raged on, and the tide of it surged back and forth, and among the demon champions none was more terrible than Indrajit, the conqueror of Indra, Rāvaṇa’s mightiest son, the master of sorcery and of the celestial weapons, and it was he who now dealt the vānara host its first great blow, and brought Rāma and Lakshmaṇa themselves to the very edge of death.

Indrajit’s terror was that he fought by sorcery, from concealment, wrapped in illusion, striking where he could not be seen or struck. He rose invisible into the sky above the battle, hidden by his magic arts, and from that concealment he loosed upon Rāma and Lakshmaṇa a weapon of dreadful power: the Nāgapāsha, the noose of serpents, the serpent-darts, arrows that became living venomous serpents, that wrapped and bound and pierced their victims with a thousand poisoned coils.

Unseen, unassailable, Indrajit poured this weapon down upon the two princes, and the serpent-darts took hold of them, binding them in coils of living venom, piercing them with a thousand poisoned fangs, and Rāma and Lakshmaṇa, the invincible brothers, the heart and strength of the whole army, fell, bound and pierced and sinking toward death under the venom of the serpent-weapon.

It was a catastrophe, and the tellers render the despair of it fully, for the fall of the two princes threw the whole host into anguish. Rāma and Lakshmaṇa lay bound in the coils of the serpent-darts, unconscious, sinking, poisoned, seemingly dying, and around them the vānara army, which had drawn all its heart and hope from them, sank into despair.

If Rāma and Lakshmaṇa died, the war was lost, the whole enterprise ruined, Sītā doomed to remain forever in her captivity, and all the long labour of the road and the alliance and the crossing come to nothing. The leaders gathered in grief and dread around the fallen princes, watching them sink, helpless to save them, the venom working, the coils tightening, death approaching, and the whole cause of righteousness lying bound and dying upon the field under the sorcery of Indrajit.

It was the darkest hour of the war, the moment when it seemed that evil’s cunning had struck down good’s strength, that the champions of dharma were to die bound and poisoned by a foe they could not even see or strike.

And in that darkest hour came the deliverance, and it came from the sky, and it was one of the great sudden reversals of the epic. For the serpent-darts were serpents, living venomous serpents, and there is in all the worlds one being before whom all serpents flee in terror, one whose very presence is death to snakes, the great eagle Garuḍa, the king of birds, the eternal enemy and devourer of serpents, the mount of Vishṇu himself.

And now, drawn by the extremity of the moment, or by the deep bond between Garuḍa and the divine, or by the working of a providence that would not let the champions of righteousness die, Garuḍa came, descending out of the sky in all his majesty, the mighty eagle, the terror of serpents, coming to the aid of the bound princes.

And at his mere approach, the serpent-darts fled. The living serpents that bound and pierced Rāma and Lakshmaṇa, feeling the approach of their eternal devourer, of the one being they could not endure, loosed their coils and fled in terror, unwound themselves from the princes and scattered, abandoning their victims to escape the eagle whose very presence was their death.

The coils fell away; the venom’s grip was broken; and Rāma and Lakshmaṇa, freed of the serpent-weapon, revived, their strength returning, their wounds healing under the grace of Garuḍa’s coming, restored from the very edge of death to life and vigour, delivered from the sorcery that had nearly destroyed them by the sudden majestic intervention of the king of birds.

Garuḍa, having freed them, blessed them, and there passed between the great eagle and Rāma a moment of recognition, for there was a deep and ancient kinship between them, the eagle being the eternal mount and companion of Vishṇu, of whom Rāma was the descent; and having accomplished his deliverance, Garuḍa rose again into the sky and departed, leaving the princes restored and the host lifted from despair to rejoicing.

The darkest hour had passed; the champions of dharma were saved; the sorcery of Indrajit had been undone not by any strength of the army but by the sudden grace of a power from the sky, come at the extremity of need to rescue the cause of righteousness from the death that had seemed certain.

Let us mark the meaning the tellers give to this deliverance, for it is not merely a lucky rescue but a sign.

The serpent-darts represent the cunning of evil, the sorcery that strikes from concealment, the poison that binds and destroys by stealth what it cannot overcome by open strength; and their undoing by Garuḍa represents the truth that such cunning, however deadly, is not finally sovereign, that there is a power above it that can undo it, that the coils of evil’s craft, however tightly they bind the good, can be loosed by a grace that comes when it is most needed.

The champions of dharma were bound and dying by evil’s cunning; and they were delivered, not by their own strength, which had failed, but by a grace from above, that came in the darkest hour and scattered the serpents and restored the fallen.

It is the story’s assurance, sounded at the war’s darkest moment, that the cause of righteousness, however desperate its extremity, is not abandoned; that when the good are bound and sinking under the cunning of evil, deliverance can come, sudden and majestic, from a power that evil cannot withstand; and that the coils of the serpent, however deadly, flee before the wings of the eagle, as the craft of evil, however cunning, flees before the grace that guards the righteous.

So Rāma and Lakshmaṇa were restored, and the host rejoiced, and the war went on, but the demons had learned that even their mightiest sorcery could not finally destroy the champions of Rāma, that a power watched over them that could undo the deadliest craft, and the confidence of Lankā was shaken further, while the cause of Rāma, delivered from its darkest hour, gathered its strength again for the combats still to come, the greatest of which were now approaching, as Rāvaṇa, alarmed by the failure even of Indrajit’s sorcery, prepared to send against Rāma his most terrible weapons and, at last, to enter the battle himself.