Kārttikeya is the son of Śiva and Pārvatī, born for a single purpose: to command the divine army against Tārakāsura, who could be killed by no one else. He is known by more names than almost any other deity, and in the south he is a major god in his own right. AdiVeda’s holdings for him are small, and this page says so rather than padding them out.
Why he had to be born
Tārakāsura’s boon made him invulnerable to everything except a son of Śiva — and Śiva, withdrawn after Satī’s death, had no intention of fathering one. The whole sequence of Pārvatī’s austerities and the divine marriage exists to produce this child. That is the argument of The Wedding of the Mountain and the Destroyer; the war itself is told in The General of the Gods.
The names, and where they come from
He is Skanda; Kumāra, the youth; Ṣaṇmukha, the six-faced; Subrahmaṇya; and, across Tamil country, Murugan, where his cult is old and largely independent of the northern narrative. The name Kārttikeya itself records his fostering: the six Kṛttikās — the stars of the Pleiades — nursed the child, and the six faces are usually explained by that fostering, one for each.
What to recite
This is currently the only Kārttikeya text published here.
Related on AdiVeda
Sources
The birth is the subject of Kālidāsa’s Kumārasambhava — literally “the birth of Kumāra” — and is narrated in the Skanda Purāṇa, which is named for him. A version also appears in the Vana Parva of the Mahābhārata. The Tamil Murugan tradition has its own literature and is not simply a translation of these.