Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

the ritual of her Mysteries.

      There suffering was Nature’s daily food

      Alluring to the anguished heart and flesh,

      And torture was the formula of delight,

      Pain mimicked the celestial ecstasy.

      There Good, a faithless gardener of God,

      Watered with virtue the world’s upas-tree

      And, careful of the outward word and act,

      Engrafted his hypocrite blooms on native ill.

      All high things served their nether opposite:

      The forms of Gods sustained a demon cult;

      Heaven’s face became a mask and snare of Hell.

      There in the heart of vain phenomenon,

      In an enormous action’s writhen core

      He saw a Shape illimitable and vague

      Sitting on Death who swallows all things born.

      A chill fixed face with dire and motionless eyes,

      Her dreadful trident in her shadowy hand

      Outstretched, she pierced all creatures with one fate.

      When nothing was save Matter without soul

      And a spiritless hollow was the heart of Time,

      Then Life first touched the insensible Abyss;

      Awaking the stark Void to hope and grief

      Her pallid beam smote the unfathomed Night

      In which God hid himself from his own view.

      In all things she sought their slumbering mystic truth,

      The unspoken Word that inspires unconscious forms;

      She groped in his deeps for an invisible Law,

      Fumbled in the dim subconscient for his mind

      And strove to find a way for spirit to be.

      But from the Night another answer came.

      A seed was in that nether matrix cast,

      A dumb unprobed husk of perverted truth,

      A cell of an insentient infinite.

      A monstrous birth prepared its cosmic form

      In Nature’s titan embryo, Ignorance.

      Then in a fatal and stupendous hour

      Something that sprang from the stark Inconscient’s sleep

      Unwillingly begotten by the mute Void,

      Lifted its ominous head against the stars;

      Overshadowing earth with its huge body of Doom

      It chilled the heavens with the menace of a face.

      A nameless Power, a shadowy Will arose

      Immense and alien to our universe.

      In the inconceivable Purpose none can gauge

      A vast Non-Being robed itself with shape,

      The boundless Nescience of the unconscious depths

      Covered eternity with nothingness.

      A seeking Mind replaced the seeing Soul:

      Life grew into a huge and hungry death,

      The Spirit’s bliss was changed to cosmic pain.

      Assuring God’s self-cowled neutrality

      A mighty opposition conquered Space.

      A sovereign ruling falsehood, death and grief,

      It pressed its fierce hegemony on the earth;

      Disharmonising the original style

      Of the architecture of her fate’s design,

      It falsified the primal cosmic Will

      And bound to struggle and dread vicissitudes

      The long slow process of the patient Power.

      Implanting error in the stuff of things

      It made an Ignorance of the all-wise Law;

      It baffled the sure touch of life’s hid sense,

      Kept dumb the intuitive guide in Matter’s sleep,

      Deformed the insect’s instinct and the brute’s,

      Disfigured man’s thought-born humanity.

      A shadow fell across the simple Ray:

      Obscured was the Truth-light in the cavern heart

      That burns unwitnessed in the altar crypt

      Behind the still velamen’s secrecy

      Companioning the Godhead of the shrine.

      Thus was the dire antagonist Energy born

      Who mimes the eternal Mother’s mighty shape

      And mocks her luminous infinity

      With a grey distorted silhouette in the Night.

      Arresting the passion of the climbing soul,

      She forced on life a slow and faltering pace;

      Her hand’s deflecting and retarding weight

      Is laid on the mystic evolution’s curve:

      The tortuous line of her deceiving mind

      The Gods see not and man is impotent;

      Oppressing the God-spark within the soul

      She forces back to the beast the human fall.

      Yet in her formidable instinctive mind

      She feels the One grow in the heart of Time

      And sees the Immortal shine through the human mould.

      Alarmed for her rule and full of fear and rage

      She prowls around each light that gleams through the dark

      Casting its ray from the spirit’s lonely tent,

      Hoping to enter with fierce stealthy tread

      And in the cradle slay the divine Child.

      Incalculable are her strength and ruse;

      Her touch is a fascination and a death;

      She kills her victim with his own delight;

      Even Good she makes a hook to drag to Hell.

      For her the world runs to its agony.

      Often the pilgrim on the Eternal’s road

      Ill-lit from clouds by the pale moon of Mind,

      Or in devious byways wandering alone,

      Or lost in deserts where no path is seen,

      Falls overpowered by her lion leap,

      A conquered captive under her dreadful paws.

      Intoxicated by a burning breath

      And amorous grown of a destroying mouth,

      Once a companion of the sacred Fire,

      The mortal perishes to God and Light,

      An Adversary governs heart and brain,

      A Nature hostile to the Mother-Force.

      The self of life yields up its instruments

      To Titan and demoniac agencies

      That aggrandise earth-nature and disframe:

      A