Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

grey python Night.

      A dense and nameless Nothing conscious, mute,

      Which seemed alive but without body or mind,

      Lusted all beings to annihilate

      That it might be for ever nude and sole.

      As in a shapeless beast’s intangible jaws,

      Gripped, strangled by that lusting viscous blot,

      Attracted to some black and giant mouth

      And swallowing throat and a huge belly of doom,

      His being from its own vision disappeared

      Drawn towards depths that hungered for its fall.

      A formless void oppressed his struggling brain,

      A darkness grim and cold benumbed his flesh,

      A whispered grey suggestion chilled his heart;

      Haled by a serpent-force from its warm home

      And dragged to extinction in bleak vacancy

      Life clung to its seat with cords of gasping breath;

      Lapped was his body by a tenebrous tongue.

      Existence smothered travailed to survive;

      Hope strangled perished in his empty soul,

      Belief and memory abolished died

      And all that helps the spirit in its course.

      There crawled through every tense and aching nerve

      Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail

      A nameless and unutterable fear.

      As a sea nears a victim bound and still,

      The approach alarmed his mind for ever dumb

      Of an implacable eternity

      Of pain inhuman and intolerable.

      This he must bear, his hope of heaven estranged;

      He must ever exist without extinction’s peace

      In a slow suffering Time and tortured Space,

      An anguished nothingness his endless state.

      A lifeless vacancy was now his breast,

      And in the place where once was luminous thought,

      Only remained like a pale motionless ghost

      An incapacity for faith and hope

      And the dread conviction of a vanquished soul

      Immortal still but with its godhead lost,

      Self lost and God and touch of happier worlds.

      But he endured, stilled the vain terror, bore

      The smothering coils of agony and affright;

      Then peace returned and the soul’s sovereign gaze.

      To the blank horror a calm Light replied:

      Immutable, undying and unborn,

      Mighty and mute the Godhead in him woke

      And faced the pain and danger of the world.

      He mastered the tides of Nature with a look:

      He met with his bare spirit naked Hell.

      End of Canto Seven

      Canto Eight

      The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness

      Then could he see the hidden heart of Night:

      The labour of its stark unconsciousness

      Revealed the endless terrible Inane.

      A spiritless blank Infinity was there;

      A Nature that denied the eternal Truth

      In the vain braggart freedom of its thought

      Hoped to abolish God and reign alone.

      There was no sovereign Guest, no witness Light;

      Unhelped it would create its own bleak world.

      Its large blind eyes looked out on demon acts,

      Its deaf ears heard the untruth its dumb lips spoke;

      Its huge misguided fancy took vast shapes,

      Its mindless sentience quivered with fierce conceits;

      Engendering a brute principle of life

      Evil and pain begot a monstrous soul.

      The Anarchs of the formless depths arose,

      Great Titan beings and demoniac powers,

      World-egos racked with lust and thought and will,

      Vast minds and lives without a spirit within:

      Impatient architects of error’s house,

      Leaders of the cosmic ignorance and unrest

      And sponsors of sorrow and mortality

      Embodied the dark Ideas of the Abyss.

      A shadow substance into emptiness came,

      Dim forms were born in the unthinking Void

      And eddies met and made an adverse Space

      In whose black folds Being imagined Hell.

      His eyes piercing the triple-plated gloom

      Identified their sight with its blind stare:

      Accustomed to the unnatural dark, they saw

      Unreality made real and conscious Night.

      A violent, fierce and formidable world,

      An ancient womb of huge calamitous dreams,

      Coiled like a larva in the obscurity

      That keeps it from the spear-points of Heaven’s stars.

      It was the gate of a false Infinite,

      An eternity of disastrous absolutes,

      An immense negation of spiritual things.

      All once self-luminous in the spirit’s sphere

      Turned now into their own dark contraries:

      Being collapsed into a pointless void

      That yet was a zero parent of the worlds;

      Inconscience swallowing up the cosmic Mind

      Produced a universe from its lethal sleep;

      Bliss into black coma fallen, insensible,

      Coiled back to itself and God’s eternal joy

      Through a false poignant figure of grief and pain

      Still dolorously nailed upon a cross

      Fixed in the soil of a dumb insentient world

      Where birth was a pang and death an agony,

      Lest all too soon should change again to bliss.

      Thought sat, a priestess of Perversity,

      On her black tripod of the triune Snake

      Reading by opposite signs the eternal script,

      A sorceress reversing life’s God-frame.

      In darkling aisles with evil eyes for lamps

      And fatal voices chanting from the apse,

      In strange infernal dim basilicas

      Intoning the magic of the unholy Word,

      The ominous profound Initiate