Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

hierarchy of the ordered Powers,

      The high changeless values, the peaked eminences,

      The privileged aristocracy of Truth,

      And in the governing Ideal’s sun

      The triumvirate of wisdom, love and bliss

      And the sole autocracy of the absolute Light.

      August on her seat in the inner world of Mind,

      The Mother of Might looked down on passing things,

      Listened to the advancing tread of Time,

      Saw the irresistible wheeling of the suns

      And heard the thunder of the march of God.

      Amid the swaying Forces in their strife

      Sovereign was her word of luminous command,

      Her speech like a war-cry rang or a pilgrim chant.

      A charm restoring hope in failing hearts

      Aspired the harmony of her puissant voice:

      “O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.

      I have come down into the human world

      And the movement watched by an unsleeping Eye

      And the dark contrariety of earth’s fate

      And the battle of the bright and sombre Powers.

      I stand upon earth’s paths of danger and grief

      And help the unfortunate and save the doomed.

      To the strong I bring the guerdon of their strength,

      To the weak I bring the armour of my force;

      To men who long I carry their coveted joy:

      I am fortune justifying the great and wise

      By the sanction of the plaudits of the crowd,

      Then trampling them with the armed heel of fate.

      My ear is leaned to the cry of the oppressed,

      I topple down the thrones of tyrant kings:

      A cry comes from proscribed and hunted lives

      Appealing to me against a pitiless world,

      A voice of the forsaken and desolate

      And the lone prisoner in his dungeon cell.

      Men hail in my coming the Almighty’s force

      Or praise with thankful tears his saviour Grace.

      I smite the Titan who bestrides the world

      And slay the ogre in his blood-stained den.

      I am Durga, goddess of the proud and strong,

      And Lakshmi, queen of the fair and fortunate;

      I wear the face of Kali when I kill,

      I trample the corpses of the demon hordes.

      I am charged by God to do his mighty work,

      Uncaring I serve his will who sent me forth,

      Reckless of peril and earthly consequence.

      I reason not of virtue and of sin

      But do the deed he has put into my heart.

      I fear not for the angry frown of Heaven,

      I flinch not from the red assault of Hell;

      I crush the opposition of the gods,

      Tread down a million goblin obstacles.

      I guide man to the path of the Divine

      And guard him from the red Wolf and the Snake.

      I set in his mortal hand my heavenly sword

      And put on him the breastplate of the gods.

      I break the ignorant pride of human mind

      And lead the thought to the wideness of the Truth;

      I rend man’s narrow and successful life

      And force his sorrowful eyes to gaze at the sun

      That he may die to earth and live in his soul.

      I know the goal, I know the secret route;

      I have studied the map of the invisible worlds;

      I am the battle’s head, the journey’s star.

      But the great obstinate world resists my Word,

      And the crookedness and evil in man’s heart

      Is stronger than Reason, profounder than the Pit,

      And the malignancy of hostile Powers

      Puts craftily back the clock of destiny

      And mightier seems than the eternal Will.

      The cosmic evil is too deep to unroot,

      The cosmic suffering is too vast to heal.

      A few I guide who pass me towards the Light;

      A few I save, the mass falls back unsaved;

      A few I help, the many strive and fail.

      But my heart I have hardened and I do my work:

      Slowly the light grows greater in the East,

      Slowly the world progresses on God’s road.

      His seal is on my task, it cannot fail:

      I shall hear the silver swing of heaven’s gates

      When God comes out to meet the soul of the world.”

      She spoke and from the lower human world

      An answer, a warped echo met her speech;

      The voice came through the spaces of the mind

      Of the dwarf-Titan, the deformed chained god

      Who strives to master his nature’s rebel stuff

      And make the universe his instrument.

      The Ego of this great world of desire

      Claimed earth and the wide heavens for the use

      Of man, head of the life it shapes on earth,

      Its representative and conscious soul,

      And symbol of evolving light and force

      And vessel of the godhead that must be.

      A thinking animal, Nature’s struggling lord,

      Has made of her his nurse and tool and slave

      And pays to her as wage and emolument

      Inescapably by a deep law in things

      His heart’s grief and his body’s death and pain:

      His pains are her means to grow, to see and feel;

      His death assists her immortality.

      A tool and slave of his own slave and tool,

      He praises his free will and his master mind

      And is pushed by her upon her chosen paths;

      Possessor he is possessed and, ruler, ruled,

      Her conscious automaton, her desire’s dupe.

      His soul is her guest, a sovereign mute, inert,

      His body her robot, his life her way to live,

      His conscious mind her strong revolted serf.

      The voice rose up and smote some inner sun.

      “I am the heir of the forces of the earth,

      Slowly