Sanskrit name for the Hindu war god Murugan/Skanda, meaning 'son of the Pleiades (Krittikas).'
Karthikeya is one of the most ancient and revered names in the Hindu pantheon, designating the god of war, wisdom, and victory — known across South Asia by a constellation of names: Skanda, Murugan, Subrahmanya, Shanmukha. The name Karthikeya specifically derives from *Krittika*, the Sanskrit name for the Pleiades star cluster, because according to the Puranas, the infant war-god was nursed and raised by the six Krittika stars, each manifesting as a celestial mother. The name therefore encodes an astral origin myth: a child of the stars, raised by fire and sky.
Karthikeya is the son of Shiva and Parvati — or, in some accounts, born directly from Shiva's divine seed carried by fire and river — and his mythology spans the *Skanda Purana*, the longest of the eighteen major Puranas, as well as the Mahabharata and countless Tamil devotional texts. In Tamil Nadu he is worshipped as Murugan, arguably the most beloved deity of Tamil culture, and temples to him dot the hills of South India, Sri Lanka, and wherever Tamil communities have settled worldwide. His iconography — peacock mount, vel (spear) in hand, radiant with youth — represents the ideal of both martial courage and spiritual clarity.
As a given name, Karthikeya is most common in Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada-speaking families. Parents who choose it are conferring not merely a name but an entire mythological lineage, an aspiration toward the divine qualities of valor, beauty, and transcendence that the god embodies. Outside South Asia, the name travels with the diaspora, carrying its full weight of meaning.