Lakshmi's Diwali: A Goddess Invited Into Every House

No Hindu festival is more closely identified with a single deity than Diwali is with Lakshmi. The festival of lights rests on the belief that Lakshmi enters and blesses a clean, well lit home and passes over a neglected one, so the days leading up to Diwali are traditionally given to cleaning and decorating the house, and the night itself to lighting rows of lamps, diyas, along windows, doorways and rooflines specifically to invite her in. Lakshmi Puja, formal ritual worship of the goddess, is performed in homes and in businesses on the main night of the festival, and account books are traditionally opened and blessed on the same occasion, since Lakshmi's association with wealth extends directly into commercial life rather than staying confined to the household. Kane's History of Dharmasastra, the standard scholarly reference on the historical development of Hindu ritual practice, traces Lakshmi Puja rites observed at Diwali across centuries of textual and regional variation, confirming a continuous rather than recently invented observance. The scale of the festival, among the most widely observed in the Hindu calendar across India and the diaspora alike, makes Lakshmi's living worship one of the least contestable claims that can be made about any deity in this atlas: an enormous number of households perform some version of the same ritual invitation to her, by name, every year.