Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      Communicates with Heaven, tampers with Hell.

      This is the little surface of man’s life.

      He is this and he is all the universe;

      He scales the Unseen, his depths dare the Abyss;

      A whole mysterious world is locked within.

      Unknown to himself he lives a hidden king

      Behind rich tapestries in great secret rooms;

      An epicure of the spirit’s unseen joys,

      He lives on the sweet honey of solitude:

      A nameless god in an unapproachable fane,

      In the secret adytum of his inmost soul

      He guards the being’s covered mysteries

      Beneath the threshold, behind shadowy gates

      Or shut in vast cellars of inconscient sleep.

      The immaculate Divine All-Wonderful

      Casts into the argent purity of his soul

      His splendour and his greatness and the light

      Of self-creation in Time’s infinity

      As into a sublimely mirroring glass.

      Man in the world’s life works out the dreams of God.

      But all is there, even God’s opposites;

      He is a little front of Nature’s works,

      A thinking outline of a cryptic Force.

      All she reveals in him that is in her,

      Her glories walk in him and her darknesses.

      Man’s house of life holds not the gods alone:

      There are occult Shadows, there are tenebrous Powers,

      Inhabitants of life’s ominous nether rooms,

      A shadowy world’s stupendous denizens.

      A careless guardian of his nature’s powers,

      Man harbours dangerous forces in his house.

      The Titan and the Fury and the Djinn

      Lie bound in the subconscient’s cavern pit

      And the Beast grovels in his antre den:

      Dire mutterings rise and murmur in their drowse.

      Insurgent sometimes raises its huge head

      A monstrous mystery lurking in life’s deeps,

      The mystery of dark and fallen worlds,

      The dread visages of the adversary Kings.

      The dreadful powers held down within his depths

      Become his masters or his ministers;

      Enormous they invade his bodily house,

      Can act in his acts, infest his thought and life.

      Inferno surges into the human air

      And touches all with a perverting breath.

      Grey forces like a thin miasma creep,

      Stealing through chinks in his closed mansion’s doors,

      Discolouring the walls of upper mind

      In which he lives his fair and specious life,

      And leave behind a stench of sin and death:

      Not only rise in him perverse drifts of thought

      And formidable formless influences,

      But there come presences and awful shapes:

      Tremendous forms and faces mount dim steps

      And stare at times into his living-rooms,

      Or called up for a moment’s passionate work

      Lay a dire custom’s claim upon his heart:

      Aroused from sleep, they can be bound no more.

      Afflicting the daylight and alarming night,

      Invading at will his outer tenement,

      The stark gloom’s grisly dire inhabitants

      Mounting into God’s light all light perturb.

      All they have touched or seen they make their own,

      In Nature’s basement lodge, mind’s passages fill,

      Disrupt thought’s links and musing sequences,

      Break through the soul’s stillness with a noise and cry

      Or they call the inhabitants of the abyss,

      Invite the instincts to forbidden joys,

      A laughter wake of dread demoniac mirth

      And with nether riot and revel shake life’s floor.

      Impotent to quell his terrible prisoners,

      Appalled the householder helpless sits above,

      Taken from him his house is his no more.

      He is bound and forced, a victim of the play,

      Or, allured, joys in the mad and mighty din.

      His nature’s dangerous forces have arisen

      And hold at will a rebel’s holiday.

      Aroused from the darkness where they crouched in the depths,

      Prisoned from the sight, they can be held no more;

      His nature’s impulses are now his lords.

      Once quelled or wearing specious names and vests

      Infernal elements, demon powers are there.

      Man’s lower nature hides these awful guests.

      Their vast contagion grips sometimes man’s world.

      An awful insurgence overpowers man’s soul.

      In house and house the huge uprising grows:

      Hell’s companies are loosed to do their work,

      Into the earth-ways they break out from all doors,

      Invade with blood-lust and the will to slay

      And fill with horror and carnage God’s fair world.

      Death and his hunters stalk a victim earth;

      The terrible Angel smites at every door:

      An awful laughter mocks at the world’s pain

      And massacre and torture grin at Heaven:

      All is the prey of the destroying force;

      Creation rocks and tremble top and base.

      This evil Nature housed in human hearts,

      A foreign inhabitant, a dangerous guest:

      The soul that harbours it it can dislodge,

      Expel the householder, possess the house.

      An opposite potency contradicting God,

      A momentary Evil’s almightiness

      Has straddled the straight path of Nature’s acts.

      It imitates the Godhead it denies,

      Puts on his figure and assumes his face.

      A Manichean creator and destroyer,

      This can abolish man, annul his world.

      But there is a guardian power, there are Hands that save,

      Calm eyes divine regard the human scene.

      All