A Cannabis indica strain, originally from India. (as the name implies)
The plant is short and bushy with a small amount of leaves, making it very suitable for inside cultivation.

I'm no pot connoisseur, but as far as I can tell Shiva's effects are pretty typical to nearly pure Indica strains: very relaxing and floaty, not particularily sociable. Still, Shiva buds really spiced up a certain parties in 2000.. :)

About a quarter of the way into the gazillion or so volumes of the men's adventure series The Destroyer by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir, the authors introduced the concept that Remo Williams, the invincible hero, was an avatar of Shiva. Stories would begin with the death of an innocent who would be reassured by an otherworldly voice that he or she would be avenged. At the end, when Remo faced off against the villain, he would go into a sort of trance and recite the "death, the shatterer of worlds" speech before turning his opponent into chopped liver. When I left off reading the series (back in high school, a little over a decade ago) Remo was still unaware of this supernatural aspect of himself.

According to the appendix of the American Heritage Dictionary:

The Sanscrit word shiva comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *kiwos, meaning (roughly) "friend" -- the "beloved" or "auspicious" one, or "member of the household." This makes the word cognate with Latin civis, ancestor of English words like "civic" and "civilian," and with the native English word hind. It comes from the hypothetical PIE root *kei- which is believed to have meant "home," "place of rest," found in words like *koimos, ancestor of English home and Greek koiman ("to put to sleep"), the "cem-" part of the English word "cemetary."

Originally a pre-vedic 'lord of the animals', perhaps originating in the Indus Valley civilization. Shiva was the great destroyer-creator and master of life and death who sat on a tiger skin. His entranced dance was said to maintain the world. His followers were primitivists who rejected civilised behavior and social norms. He was the god of outcastes, nomads and the common people. The cult of Shiva became a repository of left hand path Dravidian religion. Associatd with sexuality (the phallus being his symbol) the origins of Tantra are found in his cult. Later he becomes absorbed into the Vedic tradition and is mystified as the great transcender. The original Shiva is now largely lost. The Vedic Shiva is a permanently entranced Yogi whose teachings help his followers escape reality and achieve a transcendental state of consciousness. He acts through his Shakti, manifest as Durga and Kali.

(Hinduism, Sanskrit)

In Vaishnavism the demigod in charge of annihiliation and the mode (guna) of ignorance; one of the ishvara, the Hindu trinity. However, in Shaivism, Shiva is considered Sri Bhagavan, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Himself.

In Final Fantasy VII, Shiva is the name of a "summon" monster connected to the Shiva summon materia. When summoned, a woman all of blue showers the battlefield in ice. It is also worth noting that Shiva appears as a summon of some kind in most of the Final Fantasy games, though FFVII is the one which uses a "materia" mechanism.

Shiva is an ice element materia. This means that when it is paired with the elemental materia in either weapons or armor, the character either attacks or defends with ice. If this pair is equipped in armor, all ice attacks on the character will be absorbed or drained; if equipped in a weapon, every attack with the weapon will deal all damage as if an ice attack were made.

Levels

As with many materia in FF7, Shiva has different levels, five to be exact. It starts on level one, with subsequent levels requiring increasing amounts of AP:

• Level 2: 4000AP
• Level 3: 15000AP
• Level 4: 30000AP
• Level 5: 50000AP

For a summon materia, 50000AP is small. The biggest materia in the game, Knights of the Round, requires 50000AP for level 2 (500000AP for level 5). Shiva is the second summon materia that can be found in the game.

Attributes

Equipping a Shiva materia will cause the following status changes:

• Magic: +1
• MaxHP: -2%
• MaxMP: +2%