Parvati's name means she of the mountain, daughter of the Himalayas
Parvati is the Hindu goddess whose birth was meant to coax the ascetic Shiva into marriage. Daughter of the mountain king Himavan, mother of Ganesha and Kartikeya, she is both Gauri, the golden, and Kali, the dark. One of her names may even record her mother pleading with her to stop fasting.
Parvata is a Sanskrit word for mountain, and Parvati takes her name from her father Himavan, lord of the peaks and personification of the Himalayas. Many of her epithets repeat the idea, such as Girija and Shailaputri, both meaning daughter of the mountains. With Lakshmi and Sarasvati she forms the Tridevi, and she is honoured as a goddess of power, nourishment, love, devotion and motherhood.
In the Puranas she is the rebirth of Sati, Shiva's first wife, who gave up her body after her father Daksha insulted Shiva. Her new birth is cast as a cosmic plan to pull Shiva out of withdrawal and into household life. Theologically she is his shakti, the creative energy without which he is incomplete, so the pair balance renunciation against life in the world. In temples she is often represented by the yoni alongside Shiva's linga, together symbolising regeneration.
Her history is layered. The name Parvati is absent from the Vedas, though a goddess called Uma-Haimavati appears in the Kena Upanishad, from around the middle of the first millennium BCE; the scholar David Kinsley cautions that linking her with the later goddess is largely conjecture. She is Shiva's wife in the Ramayana and Mahabharata of the epic period, 400 BCE to 400 CE, but her stories gain rich detail only in Kalidasa's plays and the Puranas. Albrecht Weber argued she fuses several goddesses, gentle and fierce. In the Harivamsa she is Aparna, the one who took no food, and is called Uma when her mother cries u mā, oh, don't.
Artists usually show her fair and kindly in a red sari, with two arms beside Shiva or four alone, often with Ganesha on her knee and one hand raised in the gesture meaning fear not. Bronze is the favoured material, stone the next. As Gauri she can be golden-skinned to honour ripened harvests, while as Kamakshi a parrot sits by her shoulder as a sign of love. Indian classical dance even has a two-handed gesture dedicated to her as divine mother.
Source: Parvati
