Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone

Something or someone is lying ‘Across the path of the divine Event’. Amal Kiran has explained to us that this divine Event, this momentous happening, is the awakening of the Gods, the cosmic powers of light and progress. Lying across the path of that divine Event is ‘The huge foreboding mind of Night’. ‘Foreboding’ means a sense that something bad is going to happen; ‘fore’ is familiar to us in the word ‘before’; someone who is ‘to the fore’ is up in front, far ahead, a leader; ‘foresight’ is the capacity to see ahead and plan wisely for the future. The second part of the word occurs in the phrase ‘this bodes no good’, meaning that there are signs or omens that things may go badly wrong.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;
A nameless movement, an unthought Idea
Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,
Something that wished but knew not how to be,
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance

Of this passage, the Mother says:

This is the description – a very wonderful description– of the beginning of Aspiration: how in the Nothingness, in the Inconscient, stirred the first movement of Aspiration. There was no mind, so it did not think. Even the vital was not organised, so it did not know how to be. But it stirred slowly to wake up the Inconscient towards something – without knowing what it was. This is the first vibration which preceded even form, the first beginning of Aspiration towards the possibility of knowing.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

A single line with a powerful rhythm like a bell tolling, or a gong striking resonantly: here there are no difficult words, all of them are familiar to us, and yet the line is so mysterious: what does it mean? Amal Kiran, one of Sri Aurobindo’s poet disciples, was for 13 years in the 1930s and early 40s the only person to whom Sri Aurobindo was revealing parts of his poem and allowing him to ask questions, giving him clarifications which now help us greatly in understanding Savitri. Amal Kiran has written about this line in a letter. Let us have a look at what he says:

It was the hour before the Gods awake

Why does Sri Aurobindo not write “awoke”? The reason is that he is pointing not to an event which happened once but to one that constantly and repeatedly happens. … What Sri Aurobindo posits in this line is a religio-mythic concept that has been part of India’s temple-life for millennia: the daily awakening of the Gods.

The Gods are the Powers that carry on the harmonious functions by which the universe moves on its progressive path. According to an old belief, based on a subtle knowledge of the antagonism between the Lords of Falsehood and the Lords of Truth, the period of the night interrupts the work of the Truth-Lords by its obscuration of sight and by its pulling down of the consciousness into sleep. Each day with the onset of darkness the Gods are stopped in their functions by the Demons: the Gods pass into an oblivious slumber. Each day with the advent of light they emerge into activity and continue their progress-creating career. Traditionally the moment of their awaking, termed “Brahma-muhurta”, is 4 am. Every temple in Indiarings its bells and clangs its cymbals at 4 am to stir the deities no less than the devotees into action. The “hour” therefore which Savitri depicts at its start may be taken, if we are to be literal, as 3–4 am. The termination of this hour [the awakening of the Gods], is “the divine Event” mentioned in the second line….

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri]

Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;
A fathomless zero occupied the world.

‘Her eyeless muse’: ‘muse’ can be a verb; ‘to muse’ means to think deeply, to meditate; here it is a noun, meaning a state of dreamy contemplation. This power of Night has a mind, but no power of vision, it is ‘eyeless’; yet it has a foreboding that some dreadful change is approaching; this state is a ‘sombre symbol’ of something ‘opaque, impenetrable’: ‘opaque’ means that we cannot see through it, it is not transparent, light cannot pass through it because it is ‘impenetrable’, ‘Her eyeless muse’: ‘muse’ can be a verb; ‘to muse’ means to think deeply, to meditate; here it is a noun, meaning a state of dreamy contemplation. This power of Night has a mind, but no power of vision, it is ‘eyeless’; yet it has a foreboding that some dreadful change is approaching; this state is a ‘sombre symbol’ of something ‘opaque, impenetrable’: ‘opaque’ means that we cannot see through it, it is not transparent, light cannot pass through it because it is ‘impenetrable’, nothing can penetrate into it or pass through it; ‘impenetrable’ also means that we cannot understand it. That eyeless muse of the mind of Night is a dark ‘sombre symbol’, which makes us almost feel the opaque and impenetrable ‘abysm of the unbodied Infinite’, the infinite unmanifest, like a deep dark limitless ocean. ‘Abysm’ means a very deep place, so deep that it cannot be measured, and it is sometimes used for the deepest part of the ocean. In this hour before the dawn, it feels as if the whole world has been invaded, occupied by ‘a fathomless zero’. In a physical sense ‘fathom’ is the unit used to measure how deep the sea is. It is also used in a psychological sense: when we try to fathom something, as we are doing now, we try to measure its depths, get to the bottom of it, understand it; if it is unfathomable or ‘fathomless’ we cannot measure it, it is beyond our grasp. Such a deep mysterious nothingness and emptiness occupied the wholeworld at that dark hour. In her sketch for the Meditations on Savitri paintings, the Mother has imaged this moment as an eye: the mind of Night, not entirely closed, not asleep, but absorbed in its foreboding muse, dreading and resisting the coming of the light and the awakening of the gods.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

A power of fallen boundless self awake
Between the first and the last Nothingness,
Recalling the tenebrous womb from which it came,
Turned from the insoluble mystery of birth
And the tardy process of mortality
And longed to reach its end in vacant Nought.

This ‘power of fallen boundless self’ is the mind of Night: a divine power, but cut off from its origin by a fall into unconsciousness; it has emerged from the inconscient, ‘the tenebrous womb from which it came’. ‘Tenebrous’ means dark, shadowy. It remembers the darkness of inconscience from which it has come, and like many of us when first waking up in the morning, it wants to go back into that state, to go back to sleep. Life and the ongoing slow cycle of emerging into consciousness through birth and death and rebirth seem too difficult for it, an ‘insoluble mystery’ and a ‘tardy process’ which is lasting far too long. That foreboding mind of Night longs to reach its end, to fall asleep again forever in total unconsciousness, ‘vacant Nought’.

We could say that the struggle between two powers, the dark foreboding mind of Night which longs for everything to dissolve again into nothingness and emptiness, and the power of the Dawn, Savitri, who brings the new Light and the eventual triumph of a higher light that can transform even the mind of Night, is the underlying theme of the whole of this marvellous poem, which begins with the mind of Night resisting the coming of the divine Event, the adventure of Consciousness and Joy, and which ends with Night transformed, as we read in the last lines of the poem :

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri; B00k 1]

An unshaped consciousness desired light
And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change.
As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek
Reminded of the endless need in things
The heedless Mother of the universe,
An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.

In the darkness there is ‘An unshaped consciousness’, without form, without life or mind, and yet somehow conscious, which ‘desired light’. And ‘a blank prescience’ is there, a foreknowledge. ‘Prescience’ means ‘knowing in advance’: ‘science’ means ‘knowledge’, ‘knowing’, and the prefix ‘pre’ means ‘before’, ‘ahead’. In that consciousness there is something that looks ahead and feels that change must come; but it is ‘blank’, empty; it does not know what will come; and yet it ‘yearns’: it longs for that change to come, although itseems very far away, ‘distant’. That desire, that yearning for change, for the coming of light, Sri Aurobindo says, is like a child laying its finger on its mother’s cheek. The Mother of the universe has not been paying attention, she was ‘heedless’; but now this small blind movement of consciousness reminds her of the endless unsatisfied need in things. The ‘sombre Vast’, the huge darkness that is occupying the universe, feels the clutch of ‘an infant longing’, a small, helpless longing, that has just been born; but the clutch, the grasp of a small baby can be surprisingly strong: you must have experienced with what strength a tiny baby will clutch your finger.

That small movement came from below, from the darkness, and that is very significant. Sri Aurobindo tells us that two movements are needed to bring about the great change: an aspiration that calls from below and the Divine Grace from above that answers. Here, if we remember what Mother told us, in that tremendous, all-encompassing blackness, all that resistance, there is a tiny little movement of something like aspiration; and a response comes from above. It starts imperceptibly, ‘insensibly’, but as we shall see it becomes something very big and significant compared with the first tiny movement; yet at first the change is very small and slight:

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

All can be done if the god-touch is there.
A hope stole in that hardly dared to be
Amid the Night’s forlorn indifference.

In response to that feeling of difficulty, even impossibility, comes this wonderful line of assurance and promise: ‘All can be done if the god-touch is there’. An eye of deity has come looking for that lost and fallen entity, and surely it is going to help; as a result, ‘A hope stole in’, imperceptibly, like the dawn-light itself. In several significant places in Savitri Sri Aurobindo uses this verb, ‘to steal in’, meaning to enter very silently and inconspicuously, without being noticed. This hope almost does not have the courage to exist in the midst of all the hopelessness and ‘forlorn indifference’ of the Night. ‘Indifference’ is a state of not caring; it is not responding to the message of hope that the scout from the sun is bringing. ‘Forlorn’ means feeling lost, abandoned, sad at being alone, unhelped. That is how we feel when we lose touch with the Light; even if the Light comes looking for us, we may not notice it at first, in our despair and hopelessness. Nevertheless, the hope has come, something is going to change.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

One lucent corner windowing hidden things
Forced the world’s blind immensity to sight.

The ‘gate of dreams’ is a part of the sky that is full of light. ‘Lucent’ means ‘full of light’. That corner of the sky is like a window onto the invisible worlds, allowing their magic light to enter our world. That little glow of light in a far-off nook of heaven ‘Forced the world’s blind immensity to sight’. Now that the gate of dreams has been opened, even though it is only ‘ajar’, only a little bit open, the light can pour through, and that is enough to force all the huge blackness of the sleeping world to see. If everything is completely dark, we cannot see anything, however much we strain our eyes and peer into the shadows to make out something; but as soon as there is a little light, we cannot avoid seeing, whether we want to or not. By using the word ‘forced’ Sri Aurobindo again gives a hint of the reluctance of the dark side of Nature that would prefer to remain blind and asleep and unconscious.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak
From the reclining body of a god.

Then another beautiful image: a ‘cloak’ is a big garment that we can wrap around us if it is cold or raining. The darkness falls away like a cloak and reveals the body of a god ‘reclining’, lying down. This is an image from the Vedas, where it is said that the darkness falls away and reveals the beautiful limbs of Usha, the goddess of the Dawn.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Your Content Goes Here

A glamour from unreached transcendences
Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,
A message from the unknown immortal Light
Ablaze upon creation’s quivering edge,
Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues
And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.

‘Glamour’ is a quality of magical attraction. This ‘glamour’ of the dawn light comes ‘from unreached transcendences’. What is ‘transcendent’ is beyond everything that we know or can know, beyond the whole creation. This light of the symbol dawn comes not just from the other side of the earth or the solar system or the universe, but from other dimensions that we know nothing about. It is ‘iridescent’. This word is similar in its suggestion to ‘opalescent’; it means ‘shining with all the colours of the rainbow’. Iridescent colours may be more vivid and intense than opalescent ones, which are milky and pale. The ‘glamour’ which comes with the dawn is ‘Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen’, the Unseen with a capital U, suggesting the ultimate unseen existence beyond all the forms of the manifestation. It is a message, ‘A message from the unknown immortal Light’, which comes to express something from the undying Light that is ‘Ablaze upon creation’s quivering edge’, on the very edge of creation, where the manifest and the unmanifest, the transcendent existence beyond, are very close together. Dawn brings that message of new light every day. That is where this light of the symbol dawn has come from, and arriving here, in our world, the Dawn goddess builds up her ‘aura’, her beautiful atmosphere of glorious colours, ‘magnificent hues’. She buries a seed of that glory, that grandeur, of all that wonderful Light, ‘in the hours’, in our time. If we bury a seed in the ground it maylie there dormant for a long time, but when its time comes, it will sprout and grow. The Dawn is bringing a seed of ‘the unknown immortal Light’ and planting it in the soil of human time; when the moment is right, it will emerge and blossom here in the material world. That is the promise implied in the message that the symbol Dawn brings.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

An instant’s visitor the godhead shone.
On life’s thin border awhile the Vision stood
And bent over earth’s pondering forehead curve.

That ‘godhead’, the beautiful Goddess of the Dawn, is a ‘visitor’; she stays with us for only an instant, a moment: the moment of dawn does not last long. Sri Aurobindo says that she stood ‘On life’s thin border awhile’, just for a moment. If we think about life on earth, there is the mass of matter which constitutes our globe, and everything that is alive forms a very thin layer on its surface, a ‘border’ between the material mass and the inanimate atmosphere. There she stands, ‘awhile’, just for a short time, and bends ‘over earth’s pondering forehead curve’. The area of your face between youreyebrows and your hairline is your ‘forehead’. It is curved. Sri Aurobindo, as if taking a viewpoint from out in space, sees the curve of earth’s surface like a forehead, with ‘the Vision’, the Dawn Goddess, much larger, bending over that curve. He says that the curve, which is like a forehead, a brow, is ‘pondering’, which means ‘thinking’, ‘musing’; onthe earth’s surface, there is not only a thin layer of life, thereis also a layer of mind.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss
In colour’s hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
It wrote the lines of a significant myth
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,
A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.

‘Recondite’ means ‘secret’ or ‘little known’, ‘hidden away’.The Vision is ‘interpreting’: as I am trying to interpret to you the ‘recondite beauty’ of Sri Aurobindo’s wonderful images, she is interpreting a secret ‘beauty and bliss’ that are hidden away behind the veil of appearances, translating the beauty and bliss of the higher subtle planes into a language of symbolic significant colours that have a ‘mystic sense’, a mystic meaning like ‘hieroglyphs’. This is the word that we use for the ancient Egyptian picture writing. The word actually means ‘sacred signs’. Not everybody could read that writing, much less actually write it. It was a secret script for people who had been specially educated to understand it. In the same way, we need some special teaching, some initiation, to be able to understand the mystic meaning of the symbolism of the colours that dawn brings into the sky. The Dawn Goddess uses the colours to write ‘the lines of a significant myth’. In Savitri Sri Aurobindo is re-telling us this significant myth, this ancient Vedic symbolic story of the inner meaning of Dawn, the meaning of the rising Sun and its return to the sky of our consciousness that has been dark, moonless and starless. What do these things mean? They are images, hieroglyphs that have a deep inner significance. At this moment, in the early morning, chasing away the darkness, the coming of Dawn is writing the lines of a significant myth which tells of‘a greatness of spiritual dawns’. That is the inner sense of thiswhole passage. If we read it to ourselves very quietly, alone, indrawn in a meditative mood, we may experience an inner dawn in our own consciousness. The physical dawn is the symbol of such spiritual dawns. ‘Code’ is secret writing. The Vision is using the whole sky as a page on which to write the lines of the significant myth of Dawn, in code, in the secret language of symbolic colours and lines.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed
Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares;
A lonely splendour from the invisible goal
Almost was flung on the opaque Inane.

It has been such an extremely dark night, but now Sri Aurobindo seems to suggest that it is a particularly glorious dawn. Every day the dawn comes, but he says that on that day, it was almost as if ‘the epiphany was disclosed’. An ‘epiphany’ is a revelation of the Divine. It is a Greek word, with a meaning similar to our Indian word ‘Darshan’: the Divine is revealed. Sri Aurobindo says that our thoughts and hopes are like ‘signal flares’, signs of that epiphany, that revelation, signs that the Divine Presence exists somewhere. When you are lost at sea, if you are well-prepared you will have a flare-gun with you and in an emergency you can send up a signal flare to say ‘I am here’. Our highest thoughts, our deepest hopes, are ‘signal flares’ indicating that the Divine Presence exists and is waiting to be found. That epiphany is ‘the invisible goal’ of our human journey. On this special morning, in this particularly beautiful dawn, some sign of that glory is seen: ‘A lonely splendour from the invisible goal / Almost was flung on the opaque Inane’. ‘Flung’ means ‘thrown’; we could think of the glorious radiance of the dawn being projected, as if onto a screen. A screen has to be ‘opaque’: itshould not let the light pass through but must reflect it back so the picture can be seen. Here the screen is ‘the Inane’. This word is normally used for something meaningless, stupid, but here it is with a capital Ietter ‘I’; that makes us think, as Sri Aurobindo very often makes us think, of the original root meaning of the word; the root of this word is from Latin ‘anima’, which means ‘soul’: something that is ‘inane’ is without a soul, soulless. Here it refers to the blankness of the empty universe before the coming of Dawn; when she appears a wonderful expression of the supreme Light   which is the goal of the journey of evolution is projected onto the blank opaque soullessness of the Night.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Ambassadress twixt eternity and change,
The omniscient Goddess leaned across the breadths
That wrap the fated journeyings of the stars
And saw the spaces ready for her feet.

The Dawn Goddess, Sri Aurobindo says, is an ‘Ambassadress’. This is the feminine form of the word ‘ambassador’. An ambassador is a person sent to represent one country to another.   Here Sri Aurobindo uses the feminine form of the word, because the one carrying the message is the Dawn Goddess. She is carrying a message between the realms of Eternity and the world of change that we live in. ‘Twixt’ is a poetic word meaning ‘between’. We may wonder whether there is any connection between the eternal world and our world of constant change; here Sri Aurobindo says that the Dawn Goddess comes as an ambassadress: she brings something of eternity here, and perhaps she carries back some message of aspiration and hope from the material world to the eternal planes. Sri Aurobindo describes her as ‘omniscient’, all-knowing, all-seeing. He pictures her as vast, leaning across the ‘breadths’, the broad spaces, ‘that wrap the fated journeyings of the stars’, that enclose or envelop the orbits of the stars. He says that those journeyings of the stars are ‘fated’. This suggests two things: first that the orbits of the stars are fixed, determined by some inevitable laws of fate; but it also reminds us that human beings often feel that the movements and relationships of the stars carry some power of fate or destiny which may be significant in the circumstances of our lives; that is why people turn to astrologers, to try to get some light on their individual fate or destiny. The Dawn Goddess looks at the broad spaces in which the stars move, and sees where she can next place her feet. Sri Aurobindo paints this picture on a vast scale: he takes us away from the flat earth we normally live on and out into the vastnesses, and makes us see the Goddess moving there.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Once she half looked behind for her veiled sun,
Then, thoughtful, went to her immortal work.

It is such a beautiful picture: she gives a glance behind to see whether the sun is following her. The sun is still ‘veiled’, hidden; it will rise, unveiled, only after the Dawn has passed This ‘veiled sun’ is Savitri, the sun before it rises above the horizon. Then Dawn moves on: ‘her immortal work’ continues Elsewhere.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

All grew a consecration and a rite.

The passing presence of the Dawn Goddess, bringing the promise of new light, awakens a response in nature. There is a sense of a sacred meaning in everything. ‘Consecration’ means ‘making sacred’. When we offer ourselves to the Divine, we make all the apparently ordinary things sacred, so that they take on a divine significance and meaning. A ‘rite’ is a ritual of worship: actions done in a special way, for the purpose of honouring and invoking the Divine.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Here too the vision and prophetic gleam
Lit into miracles common meaningless shapes;
Then the divine afflatus, spent, withdrew,
Unwanted, fading from the mortal’s range.

‘Here too’, in our human world, the wonderful vision of the divine presence offers its ‘prophetic gleam’. A ‘gleam’ is a soft shining light; the light of the Dawn is ‘prophetic’: a prophet is one who can see into the future and say what will happen. Sri Aurobindo told us earlier that the Dawn-Light is foretelling and promising an ‘epiphany’, a full revelation or darshan of the Divine Presence. Here too, in our human world, that light comes and touches all the ‘common meaningless shapes’ that we see around us every day, and lights them up into something absolutely magical. You might have experienced this when getting up in the very early morning. I remember seeing it once in a railway station somewhere in North India: all the ordinary things looked so beautiful, lit up into magical colours by the first dawn light; everything was ‘Lit into miracles’ and looked beautiful and wonderful. But it lasted only a short time: ‘Then the divine afflatus, spent, withdrew’. ‘Afflatus’ means literally, ‘breath’, but it has come to mean ‘inspiration’, which also has something to do with breath: the divine breath enters for a moment and makes everything divine, fills everything with divine beauty and wonder and significance. Here in the material world, that cannot last long, it is soon ‘spent’ and withdraws because there is no response; it is ‘unwanted’ so it fades away from our ‘mortal range’. The word ‘mortal’ occurs 256 times in Savitri, so it is worth learning what it means. Literally it means ‘subject to death’. Everything that is born is subject to death, it must die. Only the unborn part of us, our true soul, is immortal and can free us from subjection to the law of death. When we take birth in the material world we are born into a world of limitation; our senses are limited, our consciousness is limited, and so our range of experience and understanding is limited, usually to the most material realities that we can touch and see and taste. Finding no response, that vision, that ‘prophetic gleam’ withdraws and fades away so that we can no longer see it or feel it – if we were aware of its presence at all.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

All sprang to their unvarying daily acts;
The thousand peoples of the soil and tree
Obeyed the unforeseeing instant’s urge,
And, leader here with his uncertain mind,
Alone who stares at the future’s covered face,
Man lifted up the burden of his fate.

Everyone wakes up and starts on their daily acts, which are ‘unvarying’: they do not change much, every day they are more or less the same. ‘The thousand peoples of the soil and tree’, all the insects and birds and animals, obey their impulses; they follow the instinctive urge of the moment, not thinking about the future; they are ‘unforeseeing’; they do what instinct drives them to do at each moment. The only one who tries to look into the future is Man. Man is the leading species here: even though our minds are so uncertain, although we live in this half-lit ignorance, still we are the leading species here at present, and the only one that thinks about the future. We cannot see what the future will bring, its face is covered; nevertheless we keep staring at that ‘covered face’, trying to find some clue of what it holds for us, what is going to happen next. When day comes, Man must lift up ‘the burden of his fate’; there has been a respite, the respite that fatigue brings, but now he must again lift up that heavy load, the load of responsibility, the load of destiny. Mother asked Huta to paint a figure like a weight-lifter, standing on the curve of the earth, lifting up his heavy load. Huta says that the Mother liked this image very much; she said ‘One likes to see this picture, because it shows some sense of effort and Aspiration.’

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]