Hindu Gods and Goddessesदेवी-देवता

The Great Goddess

The Goddess as the supreme reality — Mahadevi, of whom Durga, Kali, Lakshmi, Saraswati and Parvati are aspects. The centre of Shaktism, one of the major traditions of Hinduism, and the subject of the Devi Mahatmya.

The Invincible

The warrior goddess who destroys Mahishasura — worshipped across India during Navaratri and, in Bengal and the east, at Durga Puja. In Shakta theology she is not an assistant to the gods but the supreme reality from whom they draw their power.

She Who Is Time

The fierce form of the Goddess — black, garlanded with skulls, standing on Shiva. Central to Bengali and tantric Shaktism, and understood not as a goddess of destruction but of time, which destroys everything and is not therefore evil.

Goddess of Fortune

The goddess of fortune, abundance and wellbeing, and the consort of Vishnu. Worshipped at Diwali in nearly every Hindu household, and understood in Sri Vaishnavism not as an attendant of the supreme but as inseparable from it.

Goddess of Knowledge

Goddess of knowledge, music, speech and the arts — and, in the Rigveda, a river. Worshipped at Vasant Panchami by students and musicians, and the deity before whom children are traditionally taught to write their first letters.

The Daughter of the Furrow

The wife of Rama and the heart of the Ramayana — found in a ploughed furrow, married at Mithila, carried off to Lanka, and in the end returned to the earth she came from. Worshipped as Lakshmi's descent and as a goddess of the earth in her own right.

She Who Is Called Desire

The goddess of Nilachal Hill in Assam, worshipped as a cleft in the rock kept wet by a spring — no image, no face. The most important seat of tantric Shaktism in India, and the one great shrine where a goddess's menstruation is the central sacred event of the year.

The River Goddess

The Ganges as a goddess — a river worshipped as a living deity along its whole course, held to purify what is immersed in it, and central to Hindu death rites. Also one of the most polluted major rivers in the world, which is a fact the tradition now has to hold alongside the other.

The Beloved of Krishna

Krishna's beloved, and in several traditions the personification of devotion itself. A relatively late arrival in the textual record who became, within a few centuries, inseparable from him — her name spoken first in the greeting Radhe Krishna.

The Ten Wisdom Goddesses

The ten wisdom goddesses of the Shakta Tantras — Kali, Tara, Tripura Sundari, Bhuvaneshvari, Bhairavi, Chhinnamasta, Dhumavati, Bagalamukhi, Matangi and Kamalatmika. Not ten deities but one Shakti counted ten ways, deliberately spanning a sixteen-year-old beauty, an old widow and a goddess who has cut off her own head.

The Beauty of the Three Worlds

Third of the Mahavidyas and supreme goddess of the Srikula — known as Lalita, Shodashi and Rajarajeshvari. Approached less through an image than through the Sri Chakra and the Srividya mantra, hers is the most philosophically elaborated system in Shaktism.

The Fish-Eyed Queen of Madurai

Born from fire with three breasts, raised as a warrior, crowned as the Pandya sovereign, and married to Shiva only after she had conquered the eight directions. The goddess whose name the temple carries and who is worshipped there before her husband.

The Three Pindis of Trikuta

Three natural rock formations in a cave on a Jammu hillside, worshipped as Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati in one. India's most-walked pilgrimage after the Kumbh, with no image, no priest-mediated sanctum figure, and a goddess whose story turns on a refusal.

Daughter of the Sky

The dawn: twenty-one hymns, the finest poetry in the Rigveda, and a goddess who wakes every living thing and wastes a little of everyone's life doing it. Cognate with Eos, Aurora and Easter — and almost completely forgotten in India.

The Nine Nights, One Each

Nine forms of Durga, one for each night of Navaratri — Shailaputri to Siddhidatri. A list of nine names in a protective hymn that became the structure of the largest goddess festival in the world.

The Only Female Avatar

Vishnu as a woman — the single female descent in the whole avatar scheme. She distributes the nectar so the gods get it, makes a demon burn himself, and overcomes Shiva, and every one of those is accomplished without a weapon.

Daksha's Daughter, Who Would Not Be Insulted

Shiva's first wife, who gave up her body at her father's sacrifice because he had insulted her husband — and whose scattered body became the fifty-one Shakti Peethas. She died before Shiva, not after him, which is the fact the practice named for her obscures.

Daughter of the Mountain

Shiva's consort and the benign form of the Goddess — daughter of the Himalaya, mother of Ganesha and Kartikeya, and the figure through whom the ascetic Shiva is drawn back into the world.

Sister of Death

The Yamuna as a goddess — daughter of the sun, twin sister of Yama, and the river of Krishna's Braj. Second only to the Ganga in sanctity, and among the most polluted rivers in the world.

She Who Carries Across

The second Mahavidya, and the one goddess that Hindu and Buddhist Asia visibly share. Blue-black, standing on a corpse, with a Buddha seated in her hair — and in her defining Hindu story, nursing Shiva after he swallows the poison that would have ended the world.

Mistress of the Worlds

The fourth Mahavidya, and the one who is space itself — the room in which everything else happens. Her seed syllable hrīṃ is treated in the Tantras as the feminine counterpart of om, and the Devi Gita is spoken in her voice.

She Who Ripens and Consumes

Fifth of the Mahavidyas — red, blood-smeared, garlanded with severed heads, and holding a book and a rosary. She governs the process by which things ripen toward their end, and the heat of the practice that ripens a practitioner.

She Whose Head Is Severed

The sixth Mahavidya, and the most startling image in Hindu iconography: a goddess who has cut off her own head, drinks the blood from her own neck, and stands on a copulating couple. Every element of it is an argument about where energy comes from and where it goes.

The Goddess of Smoke

The seventh Mahavidya: old, alone, hungry, dressed as a widow, riding a crow on a chariot with no horses. She is everything Hindu practice normally treats as inauspicious, gathered into one figure and worshipped anyway.

She Who Stills

The eighth Mahavidya, yellow from head to foot, seated on a golden throne with a club raised in one hand and an opponent's tongue held in the other. Her domain is stillness — the arresting of motion, of speech, and of the impulse to act.

The Outcaste Goddess of Speech

The ninth Mahavidya: dark green, playing a veena with a parrot on her hand, and worshipped with ucchishta — food already eaten from, which every other Hindu ritual treats as unofferable. She is the goddess of speech, music and everything the purity order excludes.

She Whose Self Is the Lotus

The tenth and last Mahavidya — golden, seated on a lotus, bathed by four elephants. She is Lakshmi, placed at the end of a sequence that runs through cremation grounds, severed heads and widowhood, and arrives at abundance.

She Who Is Full of Food

Parvati as the goddess who feeds — with a ladle in one hand and a bowl of rice in the other, and Shiva standing before her holding out a begging bowl. Kashi's own goddess, and the deity behind the temple kitchen, the langar and the Annakut.

Slayer of Chanda and Munda

The goddess who received her name by bringing two demons' heads to Durga. Emaciated to the bone, garlanded with skulls, seated on a corpse — and, on a hill above Mysuru, the serene tutelary of a dynasty. The same name covers both, and the distance between them is the point.

Mother of the Vedas

The goddess of the verse recited at dawn, noon and dusk by more people than any other in Hinduism. Five-faced, swan-borne, called Vedamata — and the subject of a long, uncomfortable and now largely resolved argument about who was permitted to say her mantra.

The Cool One

The goddess of smallpox, worshipped on a donkey with a winnowing fan and a pot of cold water. Her disease was eradicated by vaccination in the 1970s; her cult was not. One of the clearest windows in Hinduism onto how a village goddess actually works.

The Goddess Who Is a Plant

Holy basil, growing in a raised planter in the courtyard, watered every morning and given a lamp every dusk — and married to Vishnu once a year in a full wedding with guests, music and a canopy. The most-worshipped goddess in India by number of households, and the one with no temple.

The Unbound

A goddess whose name means boundlessness, who has not a single hymn addressed to her alone, and of whom the Rigveda says: Aditi is the sky, the air, the mother, the father and the son; Aditi is all the gods and everything that has been born and is yet to be born.

The Broad One

The earth: one Rigvedic hymn to herself, six shared with the sky, and the sixty-three verses of the Atharvaveda's Bhumi Sukta — the finest hymn to the earth in Indian literature, whose line "the earth is my mother and I am the son of the earth" is quoted wherever Indians argue about the environment.

Speech, Who Speaks for Herself

One hymn, eight verses, spoken in the first person by a goddess who says she carries Mitra and Varuna, makes whom she loves into a sage, and pervades heaven and earth. The oldest text the Shakta tradition claims, and it is recited at every Durga Saptashati.

The Waters, Who Are Mothers

Four Rigvedic hymns to the Waters, always feminine and always plural. Of every deity in this encyclopedia, they are the one whose worship never stopped: their verse is said at every Hindu bath, sipping and consecration, and has been for three thousand years.

Night, Who Is Asked to Be Easy to Cross

Eight verses to the Night, who comes looking about with many eyes, sends the birds to their nests and the cattle to their stalls, and is asked to keep off the wolf and be easy to get across. One of the few Vedic goddesses who made it into living Shakta liturgy.

The Forest, Who Does Not Ask After the Village

Six verses to the goddess of the wilderness — the only hymn of its kind in the Rigveda, and the finest nature writing in it. She has no cult, no temple and no descendants; what she named survives in the sacred groves.

Un-Order, and the South-West Corner

The goddess of decay, misfortune and dissolution — worshipped not to be favoured but to leave. Her offerings are black, made at night on broken pots, facing away. Her name is why every Indian vastu consultant says nairritya.

Shachi, Whose Name Means Power

Indra's wife, who says in her own Rigvedic hymn that she is the banner and the head and that her husband will do as she says. Speaker of one of the strangest dialogues in the Veda, outwitter of a usurper, and — as Aindri — one of the Seven Mothers carved in temples across India.

The Three Goddesses

Saraswati, Lakshmi and Parvati — the counterpart to the Trimurti, and in Shakta theology its precondition. Nine nights of Navaratri divided three and three and three, and a first verse that says Shiva cannot stir without her.

The Seven Mothers

Seven goddesses carved in a row on temple walls across India, each carrying a god's weapon and riding his mount — and one who carries nobody's. The set began as child-seizing spirits and was made into mothers, and the join is still visible.

The Sister in the Middle

Krishna and Balarama's sister, Arjuna's wife, Abhimanyu's mother — and the third deity on the platform at Puri, smaller than her brothers and without arms. The one member of India's most famous triad whom almost nobody can name.

She Who Wore the Garland First

The only woman among the twelve Alvars, and the only one worshipped as a goddess. She tried the garland on before giving it to God, wrote the thirty verses recited at every Margazhi dawn, and refused to marry anyone else.

The Boar-Faced Commander

A woman with a boar's head, carrying a plough and a pestle, worshipped at night. One of the Seven Mothers — and the only one with a large cult of her own, as Dandini, the commander of the Goddess's army.

The Goddess Who Had to Be Accepted

The serpent goddess of Bengal, Assam and Bihar — rejected by her father, disfigured by her stepmother, and refused worship by a merchant whose seven sons she killed one by one. Her literature is about a goddess forcing her way into a pantheon that did not want her.

The Sixth Day

The goddess of children and childbirth, worshipped on the sixth day after a birth in a rite performed across India — and, in Bengal, on a sixth day in almost every month. Her name is a number, her mount is a cat, and behind her stands a class of powers that used to take children rather than protect them.

The Mother of Contentment

A goddess who entered the Hindu pantheon within living memory, and whose rise a 1975 film turned into a nationwide cult. Sixteen Fridays, jaggery and roasted gram, and nothing sour in the house — the most documented arrival of a deity in Indian history.

The Head That Was Rejoined

Parashurama's mother, beheaded at her husband's order by her own son and then restored — and, as Yellamma of Saundatti, the goddess of one of the largest surviving devadasi traditions in India, a practice prohibited by law since 1982.

Mother of Rain, and of the Pox

The great village goddess of the Tamil country — of rain, of the pox, of the fields and of whoever asks. Carried by indentured labourers to Singapore, Malaysia, Fiji, Guyana and South Africa, which makes her the most travelled village deity in India.

The Eight Kinds of Having Enough

Lakshmi in eight forms — grain, courage, offspring, victory, knowledge, wealth, elephants and the primordial. A late set with an enormously popular hymn, and the clearest statement Hinduism makes that prosperity is not only money.

The Sixty-Four, in a Circle with No Roof

Sixty-four goddesses in a ring of niches around an open courtyard with no roof — a temple form that exists nowhere else in Indian architecture, built for a Tantric cult that has almost entirely lapsed.

The Elder Sister

Lakshmi's elder sister — poverty, quarrel and inauspiciousness — who came out of the ocean first. She had temples and sculptors in the Pallava and Chola period and was abandoned by the twelfth century, and in Tamil her name is still an insult.

The Woman Who Wrote the Letter

Krishna's chief queen, who chose him herself, wrote to him to come and take her, and arranged the escape. At Pandharpur she is Rakhumai, standing in her own shrine a little apart from his.

The Auspicious Fierce One

Kali as the good — born from Shiva's lock to kill Darika, and worshipped across Kerala as the goddess of the village and the household. Her Kodungallur festival is among the loudest and most contested in India.

The Goddess on the Cockerel

A Gujarati goddess who rides a cockerel, and the presiding deity of India's hijra communities. Her temple at Becharaji is one of the few places in Hinduism where gender variance has an ancient religious home.

She Who Dwells in the Vindhyas

The girl exchanged for Krishna on the night he was born, who slipped out of Kamsa's hand and went to live in the Vindhya hills. One of north India's great Shakta seats, and the Goddess's own stated address.

The Widow Who Argued With Shiva

Kamadeva's wife, who watched her husband burned to ash for doing what the gods sent him to do — and said so. The lament Kalidasa gives her is one of the great speeches in Sanskrit.

The First of the Seven

The first Matrika, Brahma's power in female form, riding a swan with a rosary and a water pot. In Odisha and Rajasthan she steps out of the set entirely and becomes a goddess in her own right.

Shiva's Power, With the Bull and the Crescent

The second Matrika: Shiva's energy in female form, on Nandi, with the trident and the crescent moon. Not Parvati — a distinction the sculpture keeps and most captions do not.

The Spear, on a Peacock

The third Matrika: Murugan's power in female form, on a peacock with his spear. Her name means girlhood — and it is the name Nepal gives its living child goddess, who is a different tradition entirely.

The Discus and the Conch, on Garuda

The fourth Matrika, at the centre of the row: Vishnu's power in female form, riding Garuda with his discus and conch. Not Lakshmi, and not Vaishno Devi.

The Wife Who Could Not Look at Him

Surya's wife, who could not endure her husband's heat, left her shadow in her place and ran away as a mare — and whose father solved it by putting the sun on a lathe.