# SAVITRI: a Legend and a Symbol

Sri Aurobindo

Book One

THE BOOK OF BEGINNINGS


Canto V

THE YOGA OF THE KING: THE YOGA OF THE SPIRIT'S FREEDOM AND GREATNESS


This knowledge first he had of time-born men.

Admitted through a curtain of bright mind

That hangs between our thoughts and absolute sight,

He found the occult cave, the mystic door

Near to the well of vision in the soul,

And entered where the Wings of Glory brood

In the silent space where all is for ever known.

Indifferent to doubt and to belief,

Avid of the naked real's single shock

He shore the cord of mind that ties the earth-heart

And cast away the yoke of Matter's law.

The body's rules bound not the spirit's powers:

When life had stopped its beats, death broke not in;

He dared to live when breath and thought were still.

Thus could he step into that magic place

Which few can even glimpse with hurried glance

Lifted for a moment from mind's laboured works

And the poverty of Nature's earthly sight.

All that the Gods have learned is there self-known.

There in a hidden chamber closed and mute

Are kept the record graphs of the cosmic scribe,

And there the tables of the sacred Law,

There is the Book of Being's index page;

The text and glossary of the Vedic truth

Are there; the rhythms and metres of the stars

Significant of the movements of our fate:

The symbol powers of number and of form,

And the secret code of the history of the world

And Nature's correspondence with the soul

Are written in the mystic heart of Life.

In the glow of the spirit's room of memories

He could recover the luminous marginal notes

Dotting with light the crabbed ambiguous scroll,

Rescue the preamble and the saving clause

Of the dark Agreement by which all is ruled

That rises from material Nature's sleep

To clothe the Everlasting in new shapes.

He could re-read now and interpret new

Its strange symbol letters, scattered abstruse signs,

Resolve its oracle and its paradox,

Its riddling phrases and its blindfold terms,

The deep oxymoron of its truth's repliques,

And recognise as a just necessity

Its hard conditions for the mighty work,-

Nature's impossible Herculean toil

Only her warlock-wisecraft could enforce,

Its law of the opposition of the gods,

Its list of inseparable contraries.

The dumb great Mother in her cosmic trance

Exploiting for creation's joy and pain

Infinity's sanction to the birth of form,

Accepts indomitably to execute

The will to know in an inconscient world,

The will to live under a reign of death,

The thirst for rapture in a heart of flesh,

And works out through the appearance of a soul

By a miraculous birth in plasm and gas

The mystery of God's covenant with the Night.

Once more was heard in the still cosmic Mind

The Eternal's promise to his labouring Force

Inducing the world-passion to begin,

The cry of birth into mortality

And the opening verse of the tragedy of Time.

Out of the depths the world's buried secret rose;

He read the original ukase kept back

In the locked archives of the spirit's crypt,

And saw the signature and fiery seal

Of Wisdom on the dim Power's hooded work

Who builds in Ignorance the steps of Light.

A sleeping deity opened deathless eyes:

He saw the unshaped thought in soulless forms,

Knew Matter pregnant with spiritual sense,

Mind dare the study of the Unknowable,

Life its gestation of the Golden Child.

In the light flooding thought's blank vacancy,

Interpreting the universe by soul signs

He read from within the text of the without:

The riddle grew plain and lost its catch obscure.

A larger lustre lit the mighty page.

A purpose mingled with the whims of Time,

A meaning met the stumbling pace of Chance

And Fate revealed a chain of seeing Will;

A conscious wideness filled the old dumb Space.

In the Void he saw throned the Omniscience supreme.


A Will, a hope immense now seized his heart,

And to discern the superhuman's form

He raised his eyes to unseen spiritual heights,

Aspiring to bring down a greater world.

The glory he had glimpsed must be his home.

A brighter heavenlier sun must soon illume

This dusk room with its dark internal stair,

The infant soul in its small nursery school

Mid objects meant for a lesson hardly learned

Outgrow its early grammar of intellect

And its imitation of Earth-Nature's art,

Its earthly dialect to God-language change,

In living symbols study Reality

And learn the logic of the Infinite.

The Ideal must be Nature's common truth,

The body illumined with the indwelling God,

The heart and mind feel one with all that is,

A conscious soul live in a conscious world.

As through a mist a sovereign peak is seen,

The greatness of the eternal Spirit appeared,

Exiled in a fragmented universe

Amid half-semblances of diviner things.

These now could serve no more his regal turn;

The Immortal's pride refused the doom to live

A miser of the scanty bargain made

Between our littleness and bounded hopes

And the compassionate Infinitudes.

His height repelled the lowness of earth's state:

A wideness discontented with its frame

Resiled from poor assent to Nature's terms,

The harsh contract spurned and the diminished lease.

Only beginnings are accomplished here;

Our base's Matter seems alone complete,

An absolute machine without a soul.

Or all seems a misfit of half ideas,

Or we saddle with the vice of earthly form

A hurried imperfect glimpse of heavenly things,

Guesses and travesties of celestial types.

Here chaos sorts itself into a world,

A brief formation drifting in the void:

Apings of knowledge, unfinished arcs of power,

Flamings of beauty into earthly shapes,

Love's broken reflexes of unity

Swim, fragment-mirrorings of a floating sun.

A packed assemblage of crude tentative lives

Are pieced into a tessellated whole.

There is no perfect answer to our hopes;

There are blind voiceless doors that have no key;

Thought climbs in vain and brings a borrowed light,

Cheated by counterfeits sold to us in life's mart,

Our hearts clutch at a forfeited heavenly bliss.

There is provender for the mind's satiety,

There are thrills of the flesh, but not the soul's desire.

Here even the highest rapture Time can give

Is a mimicry of ungrasped beatitudes,

A mutilated statue of ecstasy,

A wounded happiness that cannot live,

A brief felicity of mind or sense

Thrown by the World-Power to her body-slave,

Or a simulacrum of enforced delight

In the seraglios of Ignorance.

For all we have acquired soon loses worth,

An old disvalued credit in Time's bank,

Imperfection's cheque drawn on the Inconscient.

An inconsequence dogs every effort made,

And chaos waits on every cosmos formed:

In each success a seed of failure lurks.

He saw the doubtfulness of all things here,

The incertitude of man's proud confident thought,

The transience of the achievements of his force.

A thinking being in an unthinking world,

An island in the sea of the Unknown,

He is a smallness trying to be great,

An animal with some instincts of a god,

His life a story too common to be told,

His deeds a number summing up to nought,

His consciousness a torch lit to be quenched,

His hope a star above a cradle and grave.

And yet a greater destiny may be his,

For the eternal Spirit is his truth.

He can re-create himself and all around

And fashion new the world in which he lives:

He, ignorant, is the Knower beyond Time,

He is the Self above Nature, above Fate.


His soul retired from all that he had done.

Hushed was the futile din of human toil,

Forsaken wheeled the circle of the days;

In distance sank the crowded tramp of life.

The Silence was his sole companion left.

Impassive he lived immune from earthly hopes,

A figure in the ineffable Witness' shrine

Pacing the vast cathedral of his thoughts

Under its arches dim with infinity

And heavenward brooding of invisible wings.

A call was on him from intangible heights;

Indifferent to the little outpost Mind,

He dwelt in the wideness of the Eternal's reign.

His being now exceeded thinkable Space,

His boundless thought was neighbour to cosmic sight:

A universal light was in his eyes,

A golden influx flowed through heart and brain;

A Force came down into his mortal limbs,

A current from eternal seas of Bliss;

He felt the invasion and the nameless joy.

Aware of his occult omnipotent Source,

Allured by the omniscient Ecstasy,

A living centre of the Illimitable

Widened to equate with the world's circumference,

He turned to his immense spiritual fate.

Abandoned on a canvas of torn air,

A picture lost in far and fading streaks,

The earth-nature's summits sank below his feet:

He climbed to meet the infinite more above.

The Immobile's ocean-silence saw him pass,

An arrow leaping through eternity

Suddenly shot from the tense bow of Time,

A ray returning to its parent sun.

Opponent of that glory of escape,

The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail

Lashing a slumbrous Infinite by its force

Into the deep obscurities of form:

Death lay beneath him like a gate of sleep.

One- pointed to the immaculate Delight,

Questing for God as for a splendid prey,

He mounted burning like a cone of fire.

To a few is given that godlike rare release.

One among many thousands never touched,

Engrossed in the external world's design,

Is chosen by a secret witness Eye

And driven by a pointing hand of Light

Across his soul's unmapped immensitudes.

A pilgrim of the everlasting Truth,

Our measures cannot hold his measureless mind;

He has turned from the voices of the narrow realm

And left the little lane of human Time.

In the hushed precincts of a vaster plan

He treads the vestibules of the Unseen,

Or listens following a bodiless Guide

To a lonely cry in boundless vacancy.

All the deep cosmic murmur falling still,

He lives in the hush before the world was born,

His soul left naked to the timeless One.

Far from compulsion of created things

Thought and its shadowy idols disappear,

The moulds of form and person are undone:

The ineffable Wideness knows him for its own.

A lone forerunner of the Godward earth,

Among the symbols of yet unshaped things

Watched by closed eyes, mute faces of the Unborn,

He journeys to meet the Incommunicable,

Hearing the echo of his single steps

In the eternal courts of Solitude.

A nameless Marvel fills the motionless hours.

His spirit mingles with eternity's heart

And bears the silence of the Infinite.


In a divine retreat from mortal thought,

In a prodigious gesture of soul-sight,

His being towered into pathless heights,

Naked of its vesture of humanity.

As thus it rose, to meet him bare and pure

A strong Descent leaped down. A Might, a Flame,

A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes,

A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire,

Enveloped him with its stupendous limbs

And penetrated nerve and heart and brain

That thrilled and fainted with the epiphany:

His nature shuddered in the Unknown's grasp.

In a moment shorter than death, longer than Time,

By a Power more ruthless than Love, happier than Heaven,

Taken sovereignly into eternal arms,

Haled and coerced by a stark absolute bliss,

In a whirlwind circuit of delight and force

Hurried into unimaginable depths,

Upborne into immeasurable heights,

It was torn out from its mortality

And underwent a new and bourneless change.

An Omniscient knowing without sight or thought,

An indecipherable Omnipotence,

A mystic Form that could contain the worlds,

Yet make one human breast its passionate shrine,

Drew him out of his seeking loneliness

Into the magnitudes of God's embrace.

As when a timeless Eye annuls the hours

Abolishing the agent and the act,

So now his spirit shone out wide, blank, pure:

His wakened mind became an empty slate

On which the Universal and Sole could write.

All that represses our fallen consciousness

Was taken from him like a forgotten load:

A fire that seemed the body of a god

Consumed the limiting figures of the past

And made large room for a new self to live.

Eternity's contact broke the moulds of sense.

A greater Force than the earthly held his limbs,

Huge workings bared his undiscovered sheaths,

Strange energies wrought and screened tremendous hands

Unwound the triple cord of mind and freed

The heavenly wideness of a Godhead's gaze.

As through a dress the wearer's shape is seen,

There reached through forms to the hidden absolute

A cosmic feeling and transcendent sight.

Increased and heightened were the instruments.

Illusion lost her aggrandising lens;

As from her failing hand the measures fell,

Atomic looked the things that loomed so large.

The little ego's ring could join no more;

In the enormous spaces of the self

The body now seemed only a wandering shell,

His mind the many-frescoed outer court

Of an imperishable Inhabitant:

His spirit breathed a superhuman air.

The imprisoned deity rent its magic fence.

As with a sound of thunder and of seas,

Vast barriers crashed around the huge escape.

Immutably coeval with the world,

Circle and end of every hope and toil

Inexorably drawn round thought and act,

The fixed immovable peripheries

Effaced themselves beneath the Incarnate's tread.

The dire velamen and the bottomless crypt

Between which life and thought for ever move,

Forbidden still to cross the dim dread bounds,

The guardian darknesses mute and formidable,

Empowered to circumscribe the wingless spirit

In the boundaries of Mind and Ignorance,

Protecting no more a dual eternity

Vanished rescinding their enormous role:

Once figure of creation's vain ellipse,

The expanding zero lost its giant curve.

The old adamantine vetoes stood no more:

Overpowered were earth and Nature's obsolete rule;

The python coils of the restricting Law

Could not restrain the swift arisen God:

Abolished were the scripts of destiny.

There was no small death-hunted creature more,

No fragile form of being to preserve

From an all-swallowing Immensity.

The great hammer-beats of a pent-up world-heart

Burst open the narrow dams that keep us safe

Against the forces of the universe.

The soul and cosmos faced as equal powers.

A boundless being in a measureless Time

Invaded Nature with the infinite;

He saw unpathed, unwalled, his titan scope.


All was uncovered to his sealless eye.

A secret Nature stripped of her defence,

Once in a dreaded half-light formidable,

Overtaken in her mighty privacy

Lay bare to the burning splendour of his will.

In shadowy chambers lit by a strange sun

And opening hardly to hid mystic keys

Her perilous arcanes and hooded Powers

Confessed the advent of a mastering Mind

And bore the compulsion of a time-born gaze.

Incalculable in their wizard modes,

Immediate and invincible in the act,

Her secret strengths native to greater worlds

Lifted above our needy limited scope,

The occult privilege of demigods

And the sure power-pattern of her cryptic signs,

Her diagrams of geometric force,

Her potencies of marvel-fraught design

Courted employment by an earth-nursed might.

A conscious Nature's quick machinery

Armed with a latent splendour of miracle

The prophet-passion of a seeing Mind,

And the lightning bareness of a free soul-force.

All once impossible deemed could now become

A natural limb of possibility,

A new domain of normalcy supreme.

An almighty occultist erects in Space

This seeming outward world which tricks the sense;

He weaves his hidden threads of consciousness,

He builds bodies for his shapeless energy;

Out of the unformed and vacant Vast he has made

His sorcery of solid images,

His magic of formative number and design,

The fixed irrational links none can annul,

This criss-cross tangle of invisible laws;

His infallible rules, his covered processes,

Achieve unerringly an inexplicable

Creation where our error carves dead frames

Of knowledge for a living ignorance.

In her mystery's moods divorced from the Maker's laws

She too as sovereignly creates her field,

Her will shaping the undetermined vasts,

Making a finite of infinity;

She too can make an order of her caprice,

As if her rash superb wagered to outvie

The veiled Creator's cosmic secrecies.

The rapid footsteps of her fantasy,

Amid whose falls wonders like flowers rise,

Are surer than reason, defter than device

And swifter than Imagination's wings.

All she new-fashions by the thought and word,

Compels all substance by her wand of Mind.

Mind is a mediator divinity:

Its powers can undo all Nature's work:

Mind can suspend or change earth's concrete law.

Affranchised from earth-habit's drowsy seal

The leaden grip of Matter it can break;

Indifferent to the angry stare of Death,

It can immortalise a moment's work:

A simple fiat of its thinking force,

The casual pressure of its slight assent

Can liberate the Energy dumb and pent

Within its chambers of mysterious trance:

It makes the body's sleep a puissant arm,

Holds still the breath, the beatings of the heart,

While the unseen is found, the impossible done,

Communicates without means the unspoken thought;

It moves events by its bare silent will,

Acts at a distance without hands or feet.

This giant Ignorance, this dwarfish Life

It can illumine with a prophet sight,

Invoke the bacchic rapture, the Fury's goad,

In our body arouse the demon or the god,

Call in the Omniscient and Omnipotent,

Awake a forgotten Almightiness within.

In its own plane a shining emperor,

Even in this rigid realm, Mind can be king:

The logic of its demigod Idea

In the leap of a transitional moment brings

Surprises of creation never achieved

Even by Matter's strange unconscious skill.

All's miracle here and can by miracle change.

This is that secret Nature's edge of might.

On the margin of great immaterial planes,

In kingdoms of an untrammelled glory of force,

Where Mind is master of the life and form

And soul fulfils its thoughts by its own power,

She meditates upon mighty words and looks

On the unseen links that join the parted spheres.

Thence to the initiate who observes her laws

She brings the light of her mysterious realms:

Here where he stands, his feet on a prostrate world,

His mind no more cast into Matter's mould,

Over their bounds in spurts of splendid strength

She carries their magician processes

And the formulas of their stupendous speech,

Till heaven and hell become purveyors to earth

And the universe the slave of mortal will.

A mediatrix with veiled and nameless gods

Whose alien will touches our human life,

Imitating the World-Magician's ways

She invents for her self-bound free-will its grooves

And feigns for magic's freaks a binding cause.

All worlds she makes the partners of her deeds,

Accomplices of her mighty violence,

Her daring leaps into the impossible:

From every source she has taken her cunning means,

She draws from the free-love marriage of the planes

Elements for her creation's tour-de-force:

A wonder- weft of knowledge incalculable,

A compendium of divine invention's feats

She has combined to make the unreal true

Or liberate suppressed reality:

In her unhedged Circean wonderland

Pell- mell she shepherds her occult mightinesses;

Her mnemonics of the craft of the Infinite,

Jets of the screened subliminal's caprice,

Tags of the gramarye of Inconscience,

Freedom of a sovereign Truth without a law,

Thoughts that were born in the immortals' world,

Oracles that break out from behind the shrine,

Warnings from the daemonic inner voice

And peeps and lightning-leaps of prophecy

And intimations to the inner ear,

Abrupt interventions stark and absolute

And the Superconscient's unaccountable acts,

Have woven her balanced web of miracles

And the weird technique of her tremendous art.

This bizarre kingdom passed into his charge.

As one resisting more the more she loves,

Her great possessions and her power and lore

She gave, compelled, with a reluctant joy;

Herself she gave for rapture and for use.

Absolved from aberrations in deep ways,

The ends she recovered for which she was made:

She turned against the evil she had helped

Her engined wrath, her invisible means to slay;

Her dangerous moods and arbitrary force

She surrendered to the service of the soul

And the control of a spiritual will.

A greater despot tamed her despotism.

Assailed, surprised in the fortress of her self,

Conquered by her own unexpected king,

Fulfilled and ransomed by her servitude,

She yielded in a vanquished ecstasy,

Her sealed hermetic wisdom forced from her,

Fragments of the mystery of omnipotence.


A border sovereign is the occult Force.

A threshold guardian of the earth-scene's Beyond,

She has canalised the outbreaks of the Gods

And cut through vistas of intuitive sight

A long road of shimmering discoveries.

The worlds of a marvellous Unknown were near,

Behind her an ineffable Presence stood:

Her reign received their mystic influences,

Their lion-forces crouched beneath her feet;

The future sleeps unknown behind their doors.

Abysms infernal gaped round the soul's steps

And called to its mounting vision peaks divine:

An endless climb and adventure of the Idea

There tirelessly tempted the explorer mind

And countless voices visited the charmed ear;

A million figures passed and were seen no more.

This was a forefront of God's thousandfold house,

Beginnings of the half-screened Invisible.

A magic porch of entry glimmering

Quivered in a penumbra of screened Light,

A court of the mystical traffic of the worlds,

A balcony and miraculous fa(ade.

Above her lightened high immensities;

All the unknown looked out from boundlessness:

It lodged upon an edge of hourless Time,

Gazing out of some everlasting Now,

Its shadows gleaming with the birth of gods,

Its bodies signalling the Bodiless,

Its foreheads glowing with the Oversoul,

Its forms projected from the Unknowable,

Its eyes dreaming of the Ineffable,

Its faces staring into eternity.

Life in him learned its huge subconscient rear;

The little fronts unlocked to the unseen Vasts:

Her gulfs stood nude, her far transcendences

Flamed in transparencies of crowded light.


A giant order was discovered here

Of which the tassel and extended fringe

Are the scant stuff of our material lives.

This overt universe whose figures hide

The secrets merged in superconscient light,

Wrote clear the letters of its glowing code:

A map of subtle signs surpassing thought

Was hung upon a wall of inmost mind.

Illumining the world's concrete images

Into significant symbols by its gloss,

It offered to the intuitive exegete

Its reflex of the eternal Mystery.

Ascending and descending twixt life's poles

The seried kingdoms of the graded Law

Plunged from the Everlasting into Time,

Then glad of a glory of multitudinous mind

And rich with life's adventure and delight

And packed with the beauty of Matter's shapes and hues

Climbed back from Time into undying Self,

Up a golden ladder carrying the soul,

Tying with diamond threads the Spirit's extremes.

In this drop from consciousness to consciousness

Each leaned on the occult Inconscient's power,

The fountain of its needed Ignorance,

Archmason of the limits by which it lives.

In this soar from consciousness to consciousness

Each lifted tops to That from which it came,

Origin of all that it had ever been

And home of all that it could still become.

An organ scale of the Eternal's acts,

Mounting to their climax in an endless Calm,

Paces of the many-visaged Wonderful,

Predestined stadia of the evolving Way,

Measures of the stature of the growing soul,

They interpreted existence to itself

And, mediating twixt the heights and deeps,

United the veiled married opposites

And linked creation to the Ineffable.

A last high world was seen where all worlds meet;

In its summit gleam where Night is not nor Sleep,

The light began of the Trinity supreme.

All there discovered what it seeks for here.

It freed the finite into boundlessness

And rose into its own eternities.

The Inconscient found its heart of consciousness,

The idea and feeling groping in Ignorance

At last clutched passionately the body of Truth,

The music born in Matter's silences

Plucked nude out of the Ineffable's fathomlessness

The meaning it had held but could not voice;

The perfect rhythm now only sometimes dreamed

An answer brought to the torn earth's hungry need

Rending the night that had concealed the Unknown,

Giving to her her lost forgotten soul.

A grand solution closed the long impasse

In which the heights of mortal effort end.

A reconciling Wisdom looked on life;

It took the striving undertones of mind

And took the confused refrain of human hopes

And made of them a sweet and happy call;

It lifted from an underground of pain

The inarticulate murmur of our lives

And found for it a sense illimitable.

A mighty oneness its perpetual theme,

It caught the soul's faint scattered utterances,

Read hardly twixt our lines of rigid thought

Or mid this drowse and coma on Matter's breast

Heard like disjointed mutterings in sleep;

It grouped the golden links that they had lost

And showed to them their divine unity,

Saving from the error of divided self

The deep spiritual cry in all that is.

All the great Words that toiled to express the One

Were lifted into an absoluteness of light,

An ever- burning Revelation's fire

And the immortality of the eternal Voice.

There was no quarrel more of truth with truth;

The endless chapter of their differences

Retold in light by an omniscient Scribe

Travelled through difference towards unity,

Mind's winding search lost every tinge of doubt

Led to its end by an all-seeing speech

That garbed the initial and original thought

With the finality of an ultimate phrase:

United were Time's creative mood and tense

To the style and syntax of Identity.

A paean swelled from the lost musing deeps;

An anthem pealed to the triune ecstasies,

A cry of the moments to the Immortal's bliss.

As if the strophes of a cosmic ode,

A hierarchy of climbing harmonies

Peopled with voices and with visages

Aspired in a crescendo of the Gods

From Matter's abysses to the Spirit's peaks.

Above were the Immortal's changeless seats,

White chambers of dalliance with eternity

And the stupendous gates of the Alone.

Across the unfolding of the seas of self

Appeared the deathless countries of the One.

A many- miracled Consciousness unrolled

Vast aim and process and unfettered norms,

A larger Nature's great familiar roads.

Affranchised from the net of earthly sense

Calm continents of potency were glimpsed;

Homelands of beauty shut to human eyes,

Half- seen at first through wonder's gleaming lids,

Surprised the vision with felicity;

Sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delight

Stretched out in an ecstasy of widenesses

Beyond our indigent corporeal range.

There he could enter, there awhile abide.

A voyager upon uncharted routes

Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown,

Adventuring across enormous realms,

He broke into another Space and Time.


End of Canto Five

End of Book One