Aarti (also arti) is the Hindu devotional rite in which one or more lamps, usually fed with clarified butter or camphor, are waved in a circular motion before the image of a deity, normally to close an act of puja. It is accompanied by the singing of hymns, the ringing of bells and often the blowing of a conch, and at its end the worshippers pass their hands over the flame and to their faces, drawing the light and the deity's grace toward themselves. The rite belongs to the wider logic of image worship as hospitality: light is offered to an honoured guest much as food, flowers and incense are. Its most public form is the grand riverbank aarti performed each evening at Varanasi, Haridwar and other holy cities, where ranks of priests raise tiered lamps to the river Ganga herself, watched by thousands.
Historians of Hindu ritual generally locate aarti's rise not in the Vedic sacrificial tradition, which centered on fire offered directly into a consecrated altar rather than waved before an image, but in the later bhakti-era culture of temple image worship that flourished from roughly the Gupta period onward, when devotion increasingly centered on darshan, the visual exchange of seeing and being seen by the deity's image; the scholar Diana Eck, in her study of pilgrimage and sacred seeing in Hindu practice, has described aarti's offered light as extending that logic of darshan, letting worshippers behold the deity's form made momentarily more visible by the lamp's illumination in the dim interior of a shrine.