Through the ages Vishnu has come down to the world again and again, each time the balance of dharma tilted toward ruin. Now the long Dwapara age was drawing to its close, and the weight pressing on the world belonged to the demons. Vishnu had beaten them before, in a war whose memory still unsettled the heavens, and they had not stayed beaten. They had returned in human bodies, wearing crowns, and as kings they crushed the Earth with the same cruelty they had once carried into battle. Their armies filled every province. The people were ground down beneath them, the yajnas, the great fire-rites, were falling silent, and the Earth could carry them no longer.

The Earth Becomes a Cow

At last, crushed beneath that weight, the Earth took the form of a cow and came to Brahma, trembling, her eyes wet. Her body sagged and her steps faltered, as if the injustice of whole lifetimes had been strapped across her back. The mountains shook on her and the oceans heaved. I can carry no more, she wept. So many lawless men have settled their weight on me that my back is breaking, and I have no strength left to hold them up. Lift this burden from me, or I will sink away into Rasatala, the world below, and drag creation down after me.

Brahma knew the weight was past his own hands. He gathered the gods and led them to the one shore where the worst crises find their last answer, the shore of the ocean of milk, where Vishnu lies at rest on the coils of his endless serpent. The Earth’s cry seemed to travel with them, pulling the whole sky along to that far water.

The Praise of the Gods

At the shore the gods pressed their palms together and praised him. Lord, they said, you alone can lift this weight. You made the worlds, you hold them, you keep them safe. The Earth has come to you for shelter, and her pain has gone past bearing. Then the Earth found her own voice and reminded him of every time he had already carried her. Once, when the whole world lay drowned under a single sheet of water, he had taken the shape of a great boar and raised her up on his tusk. Another time he had wrested her free from the grip of the demon king Bali. Each rescue the gods recalled left them surer of the one thing they had come to hear, that however vast the danger, that same power would put on a body and come down once more.

Two Hairs, One Black and One White

Vishnu calmed the gods, and then he gave a sign none of them forgot. From his own body he drew out two hairs, one of them deep black, the other pure white. These two will go down to the Earth, he told them. The black hair was himself, his own dark portion, and it would be born as Krishna in the house of Vasudeva, the eighth child of Devaki. The white would come as Balarama, the elder, through Rohini, Vasudeva’s other wife. So it was settled in that one moment that the avatar would not arrive alone. From his first breath a brother would stand beside him, the one who would be his shield at every turn.

The gods received their own charge. Each was to send a portion of himself down among the Yadavas, born as ordinary men, so that a whole generation would grow up around the avatar: friends, kinsmen, warriors, allies, a hundred hands ready for the work ahead. The company was being seeded into the world years before the need for it would come.

The Plan Turns Toward Mathura

Now the plan had a direction, and it pointed straight at Mathura, the city on the bank of the Yamuna where the cruelty of the age had gathered to a single point in Kansa. One of the demons Vishnu had cut down long before had taken flesh again as the son of King Ugrasena, and he had drawn others of his defeated kind around him until his court and his frontier were thick with them. And here is the strange shape of the plan, worth stopping on. The rescue of the entire world was set to begin in the dark of a prison cell, where a mother named Devaki would soon lose one newborn after another.

The Earth’s plea had been heard. The vow was bound. All that remained now was the waiting: for the eighth child, when the dark portion would come down into a prison cell at midnight. The next episode belongs to that night.

Source: Harivamsha (the khila-parva of the Mahabharata), Vishnu Parva, chapters 30 to 45; critical edition (P. L. Vaidya, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune). Told as story, following the original sequence of events.