Desire Embodied, Burned to Ash and Made Invisible

Kamadeva is desire personified, a beautiful youth with a bow of sugarcane strung with a line of bees and five flower-arrows, riding a parrot, attended by his wife Rati (pleasure) and by the spring. His defining myth turns on a divine necessity: the gods need a son of Shiva to be born who can kill the demon Taraka, but Shiva is lost in meditation, so they send Kama to pierce him with an arrow of desire toward Parvati. Kama succeeds, and Shiva, his meditation broken, opens his third eye and burns the god of desire to ash on the spot.

Rati's grief wins a qualified restoration: Kama lives, but bodiless, which is why he bears the name Ananga, the limbless one, and why desire is understood to be everywhere present yet unseen. The story is not an ascetic condemnation of desire so much as an account of its paradoxical nature; kama is, after all, the third of the four legitimate aims of human life (purusharthas), and the tradition does not treat it as shameful. Kama is celebrated in some regions at Holi, the spring festival.