The Sri Sukta: Lakshmi's Oldest Surviving Hymn

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.