MARVEL comic fans know the Juggernaut, aka Cain Marko, as an unstoppable, helmeted brute who crashes through brick walls without taking a single scratch.
In modern English, we use the word to describe anything that seems overwhelmingly powerful, relentless and impossible to halt, whether it’s a championship football team, a tech giant or a comic book villain.
But is Marvel’s Juggernaut named after a Hindu deity?
The word “juggernaut” actually traces its roots back centuries to India and a massive religious ritual.
It is an Anglicised derivative of Jagannatha, a Sanskrit name meaning “Lord of the Universe”.
Jagannath is one of the titles of the Hindu deity Vishnu and his avatar, Krishna.
The term entered the English language in the 17th century, as European traders and travellers brought home tales of the annual Ratha Yatra, or chariot festival, held in the coastal city of Puri, in Odisha.
During this festival, enormous multi-storey wooden chariots carrying huge idols of Lord Jagannath are pulled through the streets by thousands of passionate devotees.
Early European visitors, traders and Christian missionaries sent back dramatic and heavily exaggerated reports of the spectacle.
They claimed that fanatical pilgrims would deliberately throw themselves beneath the towering, heavy wooden wheels of the chariot to be crushed to death as a form of sacrifice.
Historically, however, mainstream Hinduism and the worship of Jagannath have no concept of human sacrifice.
Modern historians note that these deaths were mostly tragic accidents caused by massive, surging crowds in narrow streets rather than intentional acts of ritual suicide.
Still, the sensational stories captivated the Western imagination.
So when Marvel Comics creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced the unstoppable villain Juggernaut in The X-Men #12 back in 1965, they were drawing on a word born from a centuries-old misunderstanding of an ancient Indian festival.
