Vat Savitri Vrat · Vat Savitri

Culture of origin: Hindu · Cultural

Holiday sources: Hinduism

Vat Savitri recalls the story in the Mahabharata of Savitri, who laid the body of her husband Satyavan under a banyan tree, followed Yama, god of death, as he took his soul, and by her devotion won back his life. Married women fast for their husbands' long and prosperous life and wind a thread around the trunk of a banyan (vat) tree. This is the northern date, the new moon that ends Jyeshtha by the full-moon-to-full-moon reckoning; Vat Purnima, the same rite, falls on the following full moon.