The churning of the cosmic ocean had produced the amrita, the nectar of immortality, but before the gods could secure it the demons had taken the pot and were on their way with it, arguing among themselves about the distribution but firmly in possession of the nectar that would make them permanently unconquerable.
The gods followed, then fell back. The demons were too strong and too united in their possession of the prize. Whatever intervention came would need to be something other than force.
Vishnu became a woman.
Not a woman in disguise. Not a woman superficially. He became, in his full divine capacity, a woman of such beauty and such grace that the very sight of her caused the demons to stop moving and stop arguing and forget, momentarily, what they were holding and where they were going.
She approached them. Her name was Mohini — the enchantress, from the Sanskrit root for bewilderment, for the enchantment that overtakes the mind when beauty operates on it without the steadying influence of wisdom. She smiled. She asked what they had.
‘Amrita,’ they said. They wanted to impress her. This is one of the more human moments in divine mythology: the demons, who had just achieved the greatest possible prize by outwitting all of heaven, found themselves primarily interested in impressing someone attractive.
Mohini offered to distribute it fairly. The demons, charmed past reason, agreed. They handed her the pot of nectar and sat down in orderly rows, and the gods also sat down in orderly rows, and Mohini began to serve.
She served the gods first. She moved from god to god, pouring the nectar, and as she moved she was also, in the way that someone of extraordinary presence moves, the entire focus of the room. The demons watched her. They did not watch what was in their own cups. By the time she had served every god and moved to the demons’ row, the pot was empty.
A demon named Rahu had noticed. He had disguised himself as a god and slipped into the gods’ row and drunk some of the nectar before the sun and moon, who recognized him, raised the alarm. Vishnu cut off his head with the Sudarshana Chakra. But the nectar had already passed Rahu’s throat — his head became immortal, and from that head come the celestial bodies that periodically swallow the sun and moon in eclipses, the cosmic revenge for the betrayal.
Mohini disappeared. Vishnu returned to his own form. The demons, staring at empty cups and each other, understood what had happened. They attacked. The war that followed — the gods now immortal, fighting the demons who had lost the prize — ended with the demons driven back.
The Mohini avatar is unique among the Dashavatara in several ways. It is the only feminine form. It is the only avatar whose weapon is not force or cosmic power but beauty and wit — the form of wisdom that recognizes the right tool for the situation and is not attached to what that tool should look like.
There is another Mohini story, sometimes told separately: that Shiva heard about the Mohini form and asked to see it, and Vishnu obliged, and when Shiva saw Mohini he was, briefly, entirely overcome — and from the union of Shiva’s desire and Mohini’s divine nature, a son was born who is worshipped particularly in South India. Even the destroyer is not immune to the enchantress who is also the preserver.
The Mohini avatar is the teaching that in the arsenal of the divine, charm is as legitimate as power. That sometimes the right response to force is not counter-force but something unexpected: not a warrior with a weapon, but a smile that asks the opposition to choose trust and finds, to everyone’s surprise, that they do.