Lakshmi

Lakshmi is the goddess of shri, a word covering wealth, beauty, fortune, splendour and legitimate sovereignty at once, and the single most important thing the tradition says about her is that she moves. She is chanchala, unsteady, and the texts are candid that she leaves. A king who rules badly loses her; a household that is filthy, quarrelsome or lazy loses her. This is not a threat attached to the cult from outside. It is the theology: fortune is understood as a presence that can be hosted and can depart, rather than as a possession.

That is why Diwali is principally hers, and why the observance takes the form it does. Houses are cleaned thoroughly, debts are settled, accounts are closed and new ledgers opened, lamps are lit at every doorway and window, and doors are left open at night. The lamps are not decorative in intention; they mark a house as ordered and awake so that she will enter it rather than pass on.

Her iconography is stable across two thousand years. She stands or sits on a lotus, gold coins falling from one lowered hand, the other raised in reassurance. In the Gaja-Lakshmi form she is flanked by elephants pouring water over her from raised trunks, and this is among the oldest attested religious images in India, appearing on early Buddhist railings at Bharhut and Sanchi as well as in Hindu and Jain contexts. She rises from the churning of the ocean of milk and chooses Vishnu, and the choosing is hers.

She is worshipped by Jains and Buddhists as well, and she has no dark aspect and no wrathful form, which among major Hindu goddesses is unusual. Her sister Alakshmi, misfortune, absorbs that function and is sent away rather than served.

In most contexts Lakshmi is described as Vishnu's consort, which sounds like a subordinate position. In Shri Vaishnavism, the South Indian tradition of Ramanuja and the Alvar poets, it is a doctrinal office, and the question of exactly what it entails split the tradition into two schools that have not reunited.

The shared position is that Vishnu is unapproachable directly. He is just, and a soul that has done what souls do could not survive an unmediated encounter with justice. Shri, that is Lakshmi, is the one who intercedes: she is purushakara, the agent of mediation, who recommends the soul to him and moderates his response. She is not a courtesy title on the temple wall. She is the reason the system works at all, and Shri Vaishnava temples place her shrine accordingly.

The split concerns how much the soul does. The Vadakalai, the northern school, associated with Vedanta Desika, hold the position often illustrated by the monkey: the infant monkey grips its mother, and while the mother does the carrying, the young one must hold on. Some effort is required, and the soul must at least turn and grasp. The Tenkalai, the southern school, hold the position illustrated by the cat: the kitten is carried by the scruff and does nothing whatever, and grace is entirely unearned, since any contribution the soul made would make salvation a wage rather than a gift.

The disagreement extends to Lakshmi's own status, whether she is infinite like Vishnu or an exalted soul, and to whether her mediation is strictly necessary or an expression of his own inclination. Litigation between the two schools over temple rights ran through the colonial courts and into the modern Indian ones.

Anyone who has met the cat-hold and monkey-hold images in a Western book on grace and free will has met a genuinely Indian argument, worked out in Tamil and Sanskrit over centuries.