Ashta Lakshmiअष्टलक्ष्मी

The Ashta Lakshmi are eight forms of Lakshmi, and the list is the most useful thing about them because it is an argument:

Money is one of eight. The others are food, nerve, standing, children, winning through, learning, and the goddess herself — and the set exists to say that śrī, the quality Lakshmi is named for, covers all of them.

The arrangement is comparatively late and the lists vary; the anchor is the Ashtalakshmi Stotram, eight stanzas of three lines each, which is recited across South India and increasingly everywhere, and which is where most people meet the eight.

Its best-known building is modern and was put up in 1976 at Besant Nagar in Chennai, on the shore, with the eight shrines arranged on different levels so that a visitor climbs through them.

Shri comes first, and long before the eight. The Sri Sukta, appended to the Rigveda, is Lakshmi's oldest sustained text, and what it asks for is instructive: cattle, horses, food, gold, servants, and the departure of her elder sister Alakshmi. Prosperity in that hymn is already plural — it is not a request for money but for a household that works. The Lakshmi page carries śrī and its history.

Gaja Lakshmi is genuinely ancient. One of the eight is far older than the set. Gaja Lakshmi — the goddess on a lotus flanked by two elephants pouring water over her — appears on Sanchi and Bharhut railings from around the second and first centuries BCE, on coins of several dynasties, and on temple lintels across India and Southeast Asia. It is one of the oldest continuously used images in Indian art and it predates the Ashta Lakshmi enumeration by a millennium.

That matters for reading the set: the eight are not eight equally old goddesses. They are one very old image and one very old idea, with a list built around them later.

The Pancharatra background. The Lakshmi Tantra, a Pancharatra text, develops Lakshmi as the active power of Narayana with many aspects, and Sri Vaishnava theology treats her as inseparable from him. The impulse to enumerate her forms belongs there.

The list is not fixed. This should be stated plainly, because the eight are often presented as canonical. Versions differ: some replace Dhairya with Vira, some give Aishwarya or Saubhagya, some substitute Dhanya for Anna. The number eight is stable; the membership is not. The Ashtalakshmi Stotram — which is itself of uncertain date and authorship, and is sometimes attributed without evidence to a classical author — is what standardised the commonest version.

And the set is recent in temples. There is no ancient Ashta Lakshmi temple. The Chennai temple dates from 1976; Hyderabad's and the others are later or contemporary. What the set has instead is a hymn, and the hymn did the work.

Eight seated goddesses on lotuses, distinguished by what they hold, usually shown in a row or a circle around a central Lakshmi, and standardised by print more than by stone.

Adi Lakshmi — four hands, a lotus and a flag; the plainest.

Dhanya Lakshmi — eight hands, holding sheaves of paddy, a sugarcane, bananas and a mace. The grain is the identifier.

Dhairya Lakshmi — eight hands with the discus, conch, bow, arrow, trident and a manuscript; armed, which the others are not.

Gaja Lakshmi — the classical image: seated or standing on a lotus with two elephants raising pots and pouring water over her. Four hands, two lotuses, abhaya and varada. This one is a thousand years older than its neighbours and looks it.

Santana Lakshmi — six hands, two water vessels, and a child on her lap.

Vijaya Lakshmi — eight hands, discus, conch, sword, shield, noose.

Vidya Lakshmi — four hands with a book and a rosary, which brings her visually very close to Saraswati; the two are distinguished by the lotus seat and the red cloth.

Dhana Lakshmi — six or eight hands, with gold falling from the lower right hand, a pot of coins, and the discus and conch.

Colour. Each has an assigned colour in the print tradition — the sequence runs through red, gold, green and white — and the assignments vary between publishers, which is a good sign of how recent the standardisation is.

The gold from the hand. Across all the wealth-bearing forms the single most recognisable element: an open right hand, palm down, with coins falling. It is the gesture of giving, not of holding.

The eight, as above. None has a row of its own here — they are aspects rather than deities with separate cults, and only Gaja Lakshmi could arguably support one.

Lakshmi. The set is hers; her page has the goddess, the śrī history and the owl.

Gaja Lakshmi. The ancient image, and the one member with an independent life. She appears on Sanchi and Bharhut, on Gupta and Chalukya coins, on doorway lintels across India, in Nepal, and in Southeast Asia. In Odisha she has her own festival, Gaja Lakshmi Puja, kept in Kartika with considerable scale.

Kamalatmika. The Tantric Lakshmi, tenth of the Dasha Mahavidya, with fierce epithets the Ashta Lakshmi do not carry. A different system, and her page says so.

Sridevi and Bhudevi. Vishnu's two consorts in the Sri Vaishnava arrangement, flanking him at Tirumala. Prithvi's page carries Bhudevi and insists on the distinction.

Alakshmi / Jyeshtha. Lakshmi's elder sister and opposite, driven out before Lakshmi is invited in. Her own page.

Varalakshmi. The form addressed in the Varalakshmi Vratam, the great Friday vow of Shravana kept across the southern states — the single largest Lakshmi observance in India outside Diwali.

Not the Ashta Bhairava, Ashta Matrika or Ashta Siddhi. Several eights; unrelated.

The set has no narrative, and for once the reason is not antiquity but the opposite: it is too recent and too abstract to have accumulated one. Eight qualities do not have adventures.

What exists belongs to Lakshmi herself, and her page carries it:

The churning. She rises from the ocean and chooses Vishnu. The Mohini and Dhanvantari pages carry the rest of that sequence.

Lakshmi leaves. Indra slights the garland Durvasas gives him; Lakshmi withdraws from the three worlds; heaven loses its prosperity and its strength, and the gods are reduced until the ocean is churned to recover her. The Tridevi page uses it: a goddess whose departure disables the king of the gods is not an ornament to his court.

Alakshmi first. In the churning accounts, Alakshmi — misfortune — emerges before Lakshmi. The elder sister is the one who arrives first, and Diwali's cleaning is about getting her out before the other is invited. The Jyeshtha and Nirrti pages carry that.

Gaja Lakshmi's silence. The one member with a two-thousand-year history has, remarkably, no story attached to the image at all. Nobody explains who the elephants are or why they are pouring water. The most economical reading is that the image is older than any of the texts that might have explained it — a royal consecration, an abhisheka, with the king replaced by the goddess — and that it was already ancient when the Puranas arrived. This encyclopedia treats unexplained images as evidence, and this is one of the largest.

And the vow stories. What the Ashta Lakshmi have instead of myth is vrat katha — the household narratives attached to Varalakshmi and the Friday vows, in which a woman keeps the observance and her household is restored. The Santoshi Mata page describes that genre and what it is for.

The Ashtalakshmi Stotram. The set's real life. Eight stanzas, one per form, each closing with a refrain calling on the goddess to come — jaya jaya he madhusūdana kāminī — and it is recited on Fridays, at Diwali, in temples, in households and on an enormous quantity of recorded audio. For most people the Ashta Lakshmi are this hymn.

Friday. Lakshmi's day, and the day of the Ashta Lakshmi observances.

Varalakshmi Vratam. The second Friday of Shravana, or the Friday before the full moon — kept by married women across Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka. A pot is decorated as the goddess's face, a thread is tied, the katha is read, and women of the neighbourhood are invited and given tamboolam. It is among the largest women's observances in India.

Diwali. Lakshmi Puja on the new moon of Kartika — the account books opened in Gujarat and Maharashtra (chopda puja), the house cleaned and lit, and Alakshmi driven out first.

Gaja Lakshmi Puja. In Odisha, in Kartika, a substantial festival in its own right with pandals and community worship.

Kojagari Lakshmi Puja. The full moon of Ashvin in Bengal, Odisha and Assam — the night the goddess is said to go about asking ko jāgarti, who is awake, and households stay up.

In the household. A print of the eight on the shrine wall is among the commonest religious objects in Indian homes.

A necessary statement. These observances are undertaken for prosperity, children, learning and success, and that is what the katha and the hymn describe. DharmSetu records them as practised and makes no claim whatever about outcomes. No vow, hymn or offering affects income, employment, examinations, fertility or the result of any contest, and nothing here is financial or medical advice.

Ashtalakshmi Temple, Besant Nagar, Chennai (Tamil Nadu) — consecrated 1976, built on the shore at Elliot's Beach, with the eight shrines on four levels so that the path through them ascends. The best-known Ashta Lakshmi temple anywhere, and a modern foundation.

Ashtalakshmi Temple, Vasavi Colony, Hyderabad (Telangana) — the other large one; also modern.

Ashtalakshmi temples in Bengaluru, Visakhapatnam, Kolhapur and across the diaspora — nearly all twentieth- or twenty-first-century.

Mahalakshmi Temple, Kolhapur (Maharashtra) — a Shakti Peetha, and one of the great Lakshmi temples of India. Not an Ashta Lakshmi temple, and far older.

Mahalakshmi Temple, Mumbai; Padmavathi Thayar at Tiruchanur beside Tirumala; Lakshmi Narasimha temples across the south.

Gaja Lakshmi on the lintels of a very large number of temple doorways across India, and on the Sanchi and Bharhut railings — which is where the oldest member of this set is actually to be seen.

The pattern is worth stating: the set is modern and its temples are modern, while one of its members is among the oldest images in Indian art. Both facts are true of the same eight goddesses.

Prosperity, itemised. The Ashta Lakshmi's value is the list, and specifically that money is item eight of eight. Grain, courage, children, victory, learning and the goddess herself occupy the other seven, and the set exists to insist that śrī — the quality that makes a household or a person flourish — is not reducible to income. That is a claim worth having in a tradition whose goddess of fortune is otherwise very easy to misread as a goddess of money.

Dhairya Lakshmi is the surprising one. A form of the goddess of prosperity whose domain is nerve — the capacity to keep going when things are bad. Nothing else in the Indian pantheon assigns that to a goddess of fortune, and it implies a definition of prosperity that includes being able to withstand its absence.

One ancient member in a modern list. Gaja Lakshmi is on Sanchi; the Ashta Lakshmi temple at Besant Nagar was built in 1976. A set can be recent and still be made partly of very old material, and reading the eight as uniformly ancient — which popular accounts do — gets both halves wrong.

A hymn, not a temple, did the work. The Ashta Lakshmi spread through the Ashtalakshmi Stotram and, in the twentieth century, through cheap print and recorded audio, in exactly the way the Santoshi Mata page describes for a Friday vow and a film. The mechanism by which a Hindu enumeration becomes standard is usually invisible; here it is a text people could buy.

The open hand. The gesture the set is built on — palm down, coins falling — is not a goddess holding wealth but a goddess letting go of it. Lakshmi's whole theology turns on that: śrī is not a stock but a flow, which is why the Kubera page distinguishes the treasury from the fortune, and why Lakshmi is proverbially said not to stay where she is hoarded.

And the sister at the door. No account of Lakshmi is complete without Alakshmi, who comes out of the ocean first and is swept out of the house before the lamps are lit. The tradition that itemised eight kinds of good fortune also kept a name for the absence of it, and put the two in the same family.