The Lalita Sahasranama comes wrapped in its own account of how it came to be. In the Lalitopakhyana, the narrative of Lalita embedded in the Brahmanda Purana, the horse headed sage Hayagriva teaches Agastya the story of the goddess's manifestation from the fire of consciousness, her defeat of the demon Bhandasura, and her enthronement as sovereign of the three worlds, and then, as the teaching's crown, transmits her thousand names. The frame story within the frame says that Lalita herself commanded the eight Vagdevatas, the goddesses of speech who attend her, to compose her praise, so the litany presents itself as the goddess praised in words authored by speech itself.
The names unfold in a deliberate order. They open with Shri Mata, the auspicious Mother, and the great Queen on her lion throne, pass through a head to foot description of her beauty, recount her war and victory, and rise into her metaphysical identities, supreme power, pure consciousness, the kundalini ascending through the six centres, beyond thought and full of bliss. Tradition celebrates the composition's formal perfection, a thousand names in smooth anushtubh metre with, it is claimed, no name repeated and no padding syllables, the litany itself offered as evidence of its more than human authorship. The text's date, like most Puranic material, cannot be fixed with precision.