TYPE: Goddess of Emotional love
KNOWN PERIOD OF WORSHIP: Circa 1000 BCE and earlier until present day.
ORIGIN: Hindu (Epic and Puranic)
SYNONYMS: Bhumidevi [Southern India]
LITERARY SOURCES: Later Puranic literature—the works of Vidyapati (1352-1488), including the Brahma-Vaivarta-Purana
INFORMATION: Radha is a goddess whose role is limited to that of a favored mistress of Krsna. She only emerges fully as a goddess from the twelfth century CE onward and she is one of the central figures in the poetry of Vidyapati, who places her as a cosmic queen. One of the creation accounts describes how Krsna divides himself into two parts, one of which is Radha. THey make love for an age and their sweat and heavy breathing become the world's oceans and winds. Radha gives birth to the golden egg of the universe, which floats on the primal waters for a year until the god Visnu emerges. Other mythology accounts that Radha enjoys an illicit relationship with an adolescent Krsna. Their tryst is set in the village of Vraja and in the surrounding forests at a time before Krsna takes as his consort Rukmini and later Satyabhama.
Radha is sometimes considered to the an avatara of Laksmi and thus a consort of Krsna and, in southern India, as Bhumidevi, she becomes associated with Sarasvati. She always stands as the personification of emotional love in stark contrast to Sati, the faithful and legitimate consort of Visnu's other avatara, Rama. In the bhakti cult she symbolizes the yearning of the human soul to be drawn to Krsna.
ATTRIBUTE: a lotus.