Tvashtr

In Vedic literature and Brāhmaṇa narratives Tvashtr appears as the divine maker or smith. Some Brāhmaṇa passages (as summarized in secondary discussion) describe Tvashtr creating the being Vṛtra as an act of vengeance—Vṛtra said to be created by Tvashtr to avenge the killing of Trisiras by Indra—and other Rigvedic verses and Brāhmaṇa material attribute to Tvashtr the creation or fashioning of the vajra (Indra's thunderbolt). These layered textual traditions present Tvashtr as an originative artisan whose creations play causal roles in the major divine conflicts of the Vedic corpus.

The supplied Vedic and secondary sources do not provide a consistent iconographic or corporeal description of Tvashtr in the Vedic or Brāhmaṇa layers. Later identification with Vishvakarma in subsequent Hindu literature is associated with a more developed craftsman-architect iconography, but such later iconography is outside the explicit descriptions present in the early Vedic sources cited.

Tvashtr is described in Vedic and Brāhmaṇa material as the divine fashioner: he fashions weapons (including passages that attribute the creation of the vajra to him) and in some Brāhmaṇa narratives is said to have created Vṛtra. His agency is that of a maker whose crafted objects and beings have martial and cosmic consequences in the myths of the gods. Scholarly summaries note that in later Hindu thought the artisan office he embodies is associated with Vishvakarma.