Six sparks and a pool of reeds

The story begins with a world that has run out of ordinary remedies. Three asura brothers, Surapadman, Simhamukha and Tarakasura, had been granted a power so complete that no one the gods could name was able to stand against them. The heavens were emptied and the gods were in hiding. What was needed was someone who did not yet exist.

In the Kanda Puranam it is Shiva who answers. From his faces come six sparks of fire, and the fire is too much for anyone to hold. Vayu, the wind, carries it and cannot bear it; Agni, fire itself, takes it and cannot bear it either. It is given to the Ganga, and the river's water begins to boil away. The river carries the sparks at last to the Saravana pool, a lake thick with reeds, and there the six sparks become six children.

Six star-maidens, the Krittikas, the Pleiades, come to nurse them. That is where two of his most widely used names come from: Kartikeya, the one of the Krittikas, and Saravanabhava, the one born among the reeds of the Saravana pool.

Then Parvati comes to the pool and takes the six children into her arms at once, and in that embrace they become one child with six faces and twelve arms. The Tamil tradition hears in the name Kandan, or Skanda, the sense of something joined into one.

The six faces are never simply ornament. Devotional tradition reads them in many ways, as the six directions including up and down, as the six abodes, as six ways the one god turns towards the world. What the story itself insists on is simpler: the child is made of fire no one else could carry, and is made whole by a mother's embrace.