Lakshmi

Before the Puranas told the story of her rising from the churning ocean, an appendix to the Rigveda already addressed her directly by name. The Sri Sukta, a khila, a supplementary hymn attached to the Rigveda rather than part of its core collection, is dated by its language and meter to the late Vedic period, making it the oldest surviving Sanskrit hymn addressed to Sri-Lakshmi and predating the Puranic churning narrative by many centuries. The hymn invokes her under both names together, Sri and Lakshmi, asking for gold, cattle, horses, prosperity and freedom from misfortune and hunger, and associates her from this early point with the lotus and with radiance, imagery the later iconographic tradition of the lotus-seated goddess never departs from. Vedic scholarship treats the Sri Sukta's survival as evidence that Lakshmi's cult identity as goddess of fortune and abundance is considerably older than her incorporation into Vishnu's mythology as his consort, a later development the Puranas narrate but did not originate. Where the churning of the ocean of milk gives Lakshmi a dramatic mythological entrance, the Sri Sukta shows a plainer and older kind of religious fact: a goddess already being asked, directly and by name, for exactly the prosperity she is still invoked for in Hindu practice today.

No Hindu festival is more closely identified with a single deity than Diwali is with Lakshmi. The festival of lights rests on the belief that Lakshmi enters and blesses a clean, well lit home and passes over a neglected one, so the days leading up to Diwali are traditionally given to cleaning and decorating the house, and the night itself to lighting rows of lamps, diyas, along windows, doorways and rooflines specifically to invite her in. Lakshmi Puja, formal ritual worship of the goddess, is performed in homes and in businesses on the main night of the festival, and account books are traditionally opened and blessed on the same occasion, since Lakshmi's association with wealth extends directly into commercial life rather than staying confined to the household. Kane's History of Dharmasastra, the standard scholarly reference on the historical development of Hindu ritual practice, traces Lakshmi Puja rites observed at Diwali across centuries of textual and regional variation, confirming a continuous rather than recently invented observance. The scale of the festival, among the most widely observed in the Hindu calendar across India and the diaspora alike, makes Lakshmi's living worship one of the least contestable claims that can be made about any deity in this atlas: an enormous number of households perform some version of the same ritual invitation to her, by name, every year.