Lakshmiलक्ष्मी

Lakshmi is the goddess of fortune, wealth and beauty, the consort of Vishnu and one of the Tridevī alongside Saraswati and Parvati. Her older name, Śrī, means splendour, auspiciousness, the quality that makes kings legitimate, harvests abundant and households flourishing; Lakshmi is that quality made a person. No Hindu deity is more universally welcomed. Her image stands in shops and kitchens as readily as in temples, and the invocation of Śrī prefaces names, letters and account books across the subcontinent.

In the texts

Śrī appears in late Vedic literature, and the Śrī Sūkta, a hymn appended to the Ṛgveda, remains her most recited praise. Her defining myth comes with the churning of the ocean of milk: as gods and demons churned for the nectar of immortality, Lakshmi rose from the waters seated on a lotus and chose Vishnu as her lord. The tradition holds that she accompanies him in every descent, as Sītā beside Rama and as Rukmiṇī beside Krishna, so that fortune is never parted from the preserver of the world. Her restlessness is proverbial: wealth, like the goddess, does not stay where it is not honoured.

Iconography

Lakshmi is shown as a golden-complexioned woman of great beauty, seated or standing on a lotus, dressed in red and gold. Two of her hands hold lotuses; from another, gold coins stream into the world. In the ancient and much-loved Gajalakshmi image, a pair of elephants flank and bathe her with upraised trunks, an emblem of royal consecration that appears on some of the earliest Buddhist monuments as well as Hindu ones. In Bengal her vehicle is the owl. The tradition also worships her eightfold, as the Aṣṭalakṣmī, distributing her bounty across grain, cattle, courage, progeny and knowledge as well as coin.

Worship

Lakshmi's great festival is Diwali, when lamps are lit and doorways cleaned and decorated to draw her into the house for the year ahead; merchants traditionally open new account books under her patronage. She is honoured weekly on Fridays, at harvest festivals, and in the Vaishnava temple liturgies of the south, where the theology of the Śrī Vaiṣṇava school gives her a distinctive role as the compassionate mediator between the devotee and Vishnu, the one who inclines the lord towards grace.