The Birth of Kartikeya

Kartikeya — the elder brother of Ganesha — was born in a way unlike any other god in the literature.

The story begins with a demon named Tarakasura. He had done long austerity to please Brahma, and had won a strange boon: he could be killed only by a son of Shiva. He chose this condition deliberately, because at the time he asked for the boon, Shiva had no wife. Sati was gone. Parvati had not yet been born. Shiva was sitting in his deep meditation. A son of Shiva was effectively impossible, and Tarakasura was, by his own calculation, immortal.

Armed with this boon, Tarakasura terrorised the worlds. He defeated the gods. He took their cities. He drove them out of their heavens. The gods went begging to Brahma to revoke the boon, and Brahma — who had given it — could not.

So the gods turned to a complicated plan. They arranged for Parvati to be born to Himavat. They arranged for her tapasya. They arranged for Shiva to come down from his meditation. They arranged the wedding. (We told all this in the earlier chapters.) Now they needed the son to actually be born.

But here things became unusual. Shiva and Parvati’s meditative practice was so intense that the heat of it began to disturb the worlds. The gods, growing impatient, sent Agni — the fire-god — to collect the divine seed.

Agni came in the form of a parrot, asking alms. Parvati was annoyed at the intrusion but charitable; Shiva, recognising what was happening, parted with the seed. Agni took it.

But Agni could not hold it. The seed was too hot. It burned through him. He passed it to Ganga, the river-goddess. She could not hold it either. She set it down among the reeds of a marsh-land called Sharavana (in Tamil tradition).

Out of the reeds the seed grew not as one boy but as six — six beautiful babies, born at the same moment in the marsh.

Six women, the Krittikas (the Pleiades — the cluster of six stars in the night sky), came down and adopted the six babies. Each took one and nursed him.

Word reached Parvati. She rushed down. When she gathered all six babies in her arms together, the act of her embrace fused them. They merged into one boy with six faces — one face for each of the Krittikas who had nursed him.

That boy was Kartikeya — “son of the Krittikas.” He is also called Skanda (the leap-born), Subrahmanya (devoted to brahman), Murugan in Tamil tradition, Kumara (the youth), and Shanmukha (“six-faced”).

He was born already a young man. He did not pass through infancy the slow way. By the day after his merging, he was tall, fierce, armed with a spear, mounted on a peacock that the gods had given him. The peacock had wings of every colour. In one hand Kartikeya held the spear. In the other, depending on which face was speaking, a different weapon.

The gods came to him. “There is a demon named Tarakasura,” they said. “He cannot be killed by anyone but you. We need you to lead our army.”

Kartikeya — barely a day old, in a sense, but six-faced and six-armed — accepted the command. He was made Senapati — the general of the gods’ army.

The next story is the battle.