Product Description
Even today the true heart of the city of Madurai is the great Meenakshi Amman Temple that is a celebration of the romance of the Princess Meenakshi and Lord Sundareswarar. Meenakshi means the fish-eyed goddess and an aspect of goddess Parvati. Sundareswara, the handsome lord, is an aspect of the great god Shiva. It is impossible to trace back the history to an exact date but Madurai has been a centre of the worship of Meenakshi-Sundareswarar at least from the early years of the first millennium.
The story of Meenakshi begins with the Pandyan King Malayadhwaja and Queen Kanchanmala who performed a yagya to beg the gods for a son. Instead a girl appeared from the yagya fire. The princess was considered to be an incarnation of the goddess Parvati but was born with three breasts. The gods advised the royal couple to bring up their daughter as the heir to the throne and the astrologers predicted that the third breast would disappear when Meenakshi met her husband.
When her father died, young Meenakshi became the queen and began an expedition of conquests that took her to the north. Leading her army and after conquering many kingdoms, when the warrior queen reached Swarga in the Himalayas she came into conflict with the gods. As they were losing the battle the gods requested Shiva to save them and when Shiva appeared on the battlefield Meenakshi’s third breast vanished and she knew she had finally found her husband. Meenakshi requested Shiva to marry her and he very benignly consented.
Shiva told her to return to Madurai and wait for him. He arrived eight days later in the resplendent form of Sundareswarar, the Handsome Lord and married the beautiful Meenakshi in a magnificent ceremony called Thirukalyanam. Lord Vishnu appeared riding on a golden horse to give the bride away. Later the divine couple had a son called Subramanya also called Kartikeya. Later Subramanya will also celebrate his own marriage at Madurai.