Naag Panchami

Worship invokes the great nagas by name — Shesha/Ananta (Vishnu’s cosmic couch), Vasuki (who churned the ocean), Takshaka and Kaliya. The day’s charter is the tale of King Janamejaya’s snake-sacrifice (Sarpa Satra), held to avenge his father, which was dragging every serpent into the fire.

The sage Astika — son of the serpent-goddess Manasa — won the boon that halted the sacrifice on this very day, sparing the snakes. So serpents are said to be grateful, and invoking Astika is held to protect from snakebite. In eastern India and Mithila it is Manasa (Bishahari), not the male nagas, who stands at the centre.

In Mithila the serpent-goddess is Bishahari (Vishahara, “destroyer of poison” — Manasa), sister of Vasuki. Her worship peaks in the Madhushravani vrat kept by newly-married women, when brides model Nag-Nagin and Bishahari figures from rice-paste, henna and vermilion and hear the goddess’s myth across the days.

Its heart is the Bihula–Lakhindar legend: the merchant Chand Saudagar refuses to worship Manasa, who kills his sons by snakebite; his last son Lakhindar, bitten on his wedding night, is floated downriver by his bride Bihula, who wins back his life from the gods by her devotion — and finally compels Chand’s worship.

The worship is timed to the monsoon, when flooding drives cobras and kraits from their holes into homes and paddy — exactly when snakebite peaks. By offering milk at the snake-hole and bowing to the cobra, the community petitions the snake not to bite — appeasement, not mastery — and the no-digging rule reduces dangerous encounters.

Snakes are revered as guardians of water, treasure and fertility (the goddess Bishahari also cures disease). One honest caveat: the popular milk-feeding of captive cobras is condemned as cruel — snakes cannot digest milk, and charmers’ handling is illegal under the Wildlife Protection Act; clay and rice-paste worship is the kinder, and the older Maithil, way.

Snake-worship is among the oldest layers of Indian religion — pre-Vedic serpent cults later woven into the Puranic frame, where the serpent is at once feared (poison) and revered (water, fertility, and Shesha-Ananta as the cosmos’s very support). Naag Panchami’s pan-India charter is the sage Astika halting King Janamejaya’s snake-sacrifice on this day; the western strand instead sings of Krishna dancing on Kaliya. But eastern India and Mithila belong to the goddess: Manasa — Bishahari, the poison-remover, sister of Vasuki and mother of Astika, whose Bihula–Lakhindar epic, recited each monsoon, renews her worship and binds Naag Panchami to Mithila’s great newlywed vrat, Madhushravani. Beneath the devotion lies a clear-eyed ecology: revere the snake that guards the paddy and the water, and forbid the killing of it.