Lakshmi

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Lakshmi is the Hindu goddess of fortune, abundance, and beauty — also called Shri, a name and a word that long predates her as a fixed figure, meaning radiance, auspiciousness, the visible sign that things are going well. She is the consort of Vishnu, the great preserver god, and in the theology that grew around that pairing she is his shakti: the active power through which a transcendent deity reaches into and holds together the world. Where he is the sustaining principle, she is what makes a thing flourish — a household, a harvest, a kingdom, a life.

The name Shri appears already in the Vedic hymns as a quality before it is a person, and the goddess assembles slowly across later literature out of several earlier figures of luck and grain and sovereignty. The myth most often told of her origin is the churning of the ocean of milk, in which gods and demons turn the cosmic sea to draw out its treasures; Lakshmi rises from the waters among them and, of her own choosing, takes Vishnu as her lord. The story matters because it fixes a recurring anxiety in her cult: fortune is real, desired, and unstable — it can be churned up, and it can depart. Her restless counterpart, the goddess of misfortune sometimes called Alakshmi or Jyeshtha, is the shadow the tradition keeps beside her.

Her iconography is remarkably stable. She stands or sits upon a lotus, holds lotuses, and is bathed by elephants pouring water; coins often fall from one open hand. Devotees have worshipped her as the giver of wealth, fertility, and domestic well-being, and her presence is sought at the threshold of new ventures and new years — most visibly at Diwali, the autumn festival of lights, when homes are cleaned and lamps are lit in part to invite her in. In the Shri Vaishnava theology of southern India she is raised higher still, held to be eternal and inseparable from Vishnu, the mediator through whom the soul approaches god; here she is less a giver of goods than the very channel of grace.

The cluster of ideas she carries — that prosperity is a divine person, that the sustaining of the world is a feminine power married to a masculine one, that material flourishing and spiritual favor are spoken of in the same breath — has its closest analogues within India itself, in the other goddesses who are read as the power of a god. Comparisons with fortune deities elsewhere are tempting and partly fair, but Lakshmi is not chiefly a personification of luck; she is the auspicious itself, the condition in which a world is worth living in. What devotees ask of her is not only riches but that things go well, and stay so.

→ In the library: Hymns to the Goddess (Avalon, 1913)

→ Related: Kali · Indra · Soma · Kama