Daksha

Daksha holds a great sacrifice and leaves one guest off the list on purpose: Shiva, the ash smeared ascetic god he married his daughter Sati to against his own judgment. Sati goes uninvited and is turned away at the gate with insults aimed at her husband. In the Puranic telling she cannot bear the humiliation and gives up her body in the sacrificial fire, sometimes by yogic will and sometimes by leaping into the flames outright, accounts differ on the mechanism though not on the outcome.

When word reaches Shiva he tears a lock of his matted hair from his head and strikes it against the ground, and from it rises Virabhadra, a form of himself built purely for destruction, alongside the fierce goddess Bhadrakali. They fall on the sacrifice grounds, scatter the assembled gods and sages, and Virabhadra beheads Daksha before the rite can finish. The gods, Brahma and Vishnu chief among them, beg Shiva to relent, and Daksha is restored to life, but the head that is found and fitted to bring him back is a goat's, not his own. The Shiva Purana and the Bhagavata Purana both carry the episode as the founding grievance between the two households, and the Puranic sources broadly agree that it establishes Shiva's claim to a share of every subsequent sacrifice, which his exclusion from Daksha's rite had denied him.

Outside the one story everyone remembers him for, Daksha's standing job in the tradition is population. As one of the Prajapatis, the lords of creatures charged by Brahma with filling the world, he is credited with a very large family of daughters, the Puranas differ on the exact count, and with marrying most of them outward into the pantheon rather than keeping a lineage of his own. The best known set is the twenty seven star wives given to the moon god Chandra, personifications of the lunar mansions, of whom Chandra is said to have favored one, Rohini, over the rest, drawing Daksha's anger a second time and a curse that leaves the moon waxing and waning ever since.

Sati, wife of Shiva, is the daughter later ages remember; the other Puranic accounts count Aditi, mother of the Adityas, among his daughters as well, though the Rigveda names Daksha himself as a son of Aditi in one hymn and her father in the next, a circularity the commentarial tradition treats as evidence of how old and how tangled the genealogy already was by the time the Puranas fixed it in prose. The name Daksha, able or skillful, fits a figure whose whole function is the practical work of populating a cosmos that Brahma has only just opened.