One half of his body was of a lion and the other half of a man. He had matted hair on his head, large moustaches on the face and terrible teeth in the mouth. His paws had terrible nails on them. Hiranyakashipu remembered his first death wish, "To be killed by some one who is neither human nor beast." It was also the twilight hour, neither day nor night, the second death wish. The demon king hit Narasimha with his mace but Narasimha brushed it aside swiftly. It was twilight and Narasimha caught hold of the demon Hiranyakashipu.
He sat on the threshold of the court room, placed the body of the demon on his thighs, and pierced his nails into the body of the demon and broke open his stomach. The demon was killed on the spot in a moment. The place was neither inside nor outside. This was Hiranyakashipus third death wish. Lord Narasimha was furious and roared. However, he was pacified when Prahlad touched his feet and goddess Lakshmi also tried to cool him. Lord Narasimha then made Prahlad the King.
Story of the 4th Avatar of Lord Vishnu, Narasimha, Hiranyakashipu (the brother of Hiranyaksha who was killed by the Varaha Avatar of Lord Vishnu) wanted to take revenge on the devotees and in particular on Lord Vishnu, fourth Avatar, Lord Vishnu, Nar
Stone relief shows that the Ashura victim, hold a sword in right hand and shield in left, in conflict of your description of 'mace'. Can you explain the variation?
Can any one identify the type/name of sword in Ashura's hand? It seem more of hoplite sword than Khanda to me?
Well back to your own thread, and I can see that you have gained some weight, good for you. Now can you please answer throw light on my query stipulated in post 154, that is, Stone relief shows that the Ashura victim, hold a sword in right hand and shield in left, in conflict of your description of 'mace'. Can you explain the variation?
I have seen at least 40 or so image, stone reliefs, statutes etc where Asura always hold a sword and shield, in direct contrast of description in myth of mace.
I was watching this thread with half-an-eye, so to speak, from the mailed extracts that come to one of posts to threads followed, and didn't realise what was going on until just now.
An Asura is not all Asuras; I am more than surprised that you have not caught on, on your own. Or perhaps you are putting the pagans to the test. Whatever.
As you should be well aware, given the breadth and depth of knowledge that you have demonstrated in the past, the etymology of Asura is not demon; it became so. When the tribes were together in the Oxus-Jaxartes region, a religious split of some sort seems to have occurred. This may have happened either before Zarathustra preached, or the split may, in fact, have been his preaching; he may have said the sorts of things that led to the split. Before the split, we don't know what the original majority belief was. After the split, one side held that Ahura Mazda, the 'Asura Medha', Asur-like Intelligence, was the greatest of the Iranian divinities; the other held that these were Titan-like creatures, immortals but not the ones to be worshipped, fearful even to the Gods but defeated by them in battle, and the realm of Heaven, Indraloka, occupied after the defeat. I am compressing huge masses of myth into one or two lines, with some inevitable distortion. On the Indian side of the split, the Asuras and the Suras, or Devas, the Gods, contended for power, fought bitter battles, and finally the matter was settled at the time of the Churning of the Ocean. I will not go into details of that as it is freely available, and as you are already familiar with it, beyond a shadow of doubt. On the Iranian side, amusingly, the matter was seen in a mirror; Ahura Mazda presided over the Gods, fighting the unquiet spirits, the Daiva, led by Angra Mainyu. On the Indian, Indra, unhonoured by the Iranians, but very well-known to Alternative, as the wielder of the thunderbolt, hence the successor to Dyaus Pitar, the Jupiter of the Romans, Zeus of the Greeks, or even Odin - now, hear this - the eldest/most powerful of the Aesir. Just say Aesir out loud a couple of times, think of the meaning of Odin ("furiously excited mind") and think about it.
An aside - in the Germanic pantheon, Thor was the mighty thunder-god, presiding over the air, master of thunder and lightning, wielding the unstoppable Hammer of Thor, which destroyed its enemy and returned to Thor's hand.
Now was that Chakra or Vajra?
Thor was part of a trinity; the others were Odin (or Wotan), the Furious (a common characterising of this God seems to have been a restless but overpowering intelligence, so Ahura Mazda, asuric intelligence, or Wotan, the furious of mind, better, the furiously active intelligence) and Frikko, the peaceful and contemplative, worshipped by a phallus (which leads me to wonder about 'integrationists', who famously show that a merging of the Indo-Aryan and indigenous cosmogonies occurred, and one sign was the adoption of the Pasupati god, worshipped by phallic symbol worship, the linga).
Before returning to the Asura, let me also dangle before you the battle between Aesir and Vanir, and leave you to speculate how much one of the two Hindu epics was native composition in India, and how much pre-supposed this faint memory of a common myth of the battle between Asura and Vanara (I am not an expert in Sanskrit, but I do remember that the Vedic monkey was 'kapi', not 'vanara'; so where did this mythical, strong, passionate bunch of forest-dwellers, almost human, able to shift their shape, just like Odin, come from?).
Back to the asura. The Asura was not utterly beyond the 'pale'; he/she was god-like, but born in the wrong faction. Asura heroes abound in Hindu mythology; it is probably best to make this a bottle party; each one bring your own Asura story to the discussion. There were, in fact, many asuras, as many as there were devas. And the mace, as it now becomes clear, was a personal weapon of Hiranyakasipu, a powerful asura; it was not a universal asura weapon.
On a digression: there are daiva moments to be borne, in the 24 hour clock; there are also asuric moments. A boy born in that asuric moment was promptly named after the bravest of the asura warriors, the invincible prince of Lanka, who defeated Indra and was renamed by his father. For that reason, and also because of the noble poem in blank verse written by Michael Madhusudan Dutt, that boy, most Bengalis, in fact, think fairly positively about Ravana and Indrajit. It may be of passing interest that Indrajit, opposed to the lord of thunder and lightning, battled him from behind the clouds, hidden from sight.
Back to the point: a mace was Hiranyakasipu's weapon, not the generic weapon of asuras, who carried straight swords, the typical infantry sword, in battle. I cannot imagine the khadga used in battle; it was an executioner's sword, a palace guard's ceremonial weapon, used in sacrifice to decapitate hapless animals dragged there, earlier, the horse, the bull, now, the buffalo, the goat, chickens.....
Now what happens next?
PS: 'Death wish' is an inept translation; it is better rendered as 'death condition', the conditions that Hiranyakasipu demanded as a boon at the hands of the lord after satisfying him with intense prayer and meditation; that he should die at the hands of neither human nor animal, neither during the day nor the night, not inside nor outside, not through any weapon, not on the earth nor in the air; so, at the hands, not the weapon, of the Man-Lion, at the hour of sunset, on the sill of the door, pinned down on the monster's lap.
is a Sanskrit word meaning both thunderbolt and diamond.[1] As a material device, the vajra is a ritual object, a short metal weapon - 
