Mind is a mediator divinity:
Its powers can undo all Nature’s work:
Mind can suspend or change earth’s concrete law.

Mind is a mediator divinity’: a divine power which works between spirit and matter; it has powers which ‘can undo all Nature’s work’; whatever is done by material nature, Mind has the power to undo it, and it can ‘suspend or change earth’s concrete law’, all the apparently fixed laws of matter. To ‘suspend’ means to set aside for a short time, while ‘change’ implies a lasting effect. We have heard the phrase “mind over matter”, and know that to a certain extent mind can control matter; it helps us to arrange things the way we want to have them: mind gives us technology by which we can control matter to a certain extent; but it is difficult for us to believe that mind has the power to change the laws of nature. With our limited surface mind and the feeble will that goes with it, with our limited life energies, we cannot do it; but if the full power of Mind is set free, or if we go to inner planes where mind can work more freely, then apparently miraculous things can happen.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

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;

One of the amazing things that the power of Mind can do is to put the body into a state of apparent sleep or trance, and use that sleep-state of the body as a powerful weapon. Here ‘arm’ means a weapon. By Mind, the breath can be held still; even the ‘beatings of the heart’ can be stopped, so that Mind can escape from the body and find ‘the unseen’ and do ‘the impossible’. This is a yogic achievement. Someone who has undergone a great transformation as Aswapati has can experience this. Earlier on we read that he could continue to live even when the breath had stopped and the heart had stopped beating. Yogis can do this using the power of Mind over the body. A more familiar use of the Mind is to communicate an ‘unspoken thought’ without any outer means; without speaking or writing a letter, sending an e-mail or anything like that, it is possible to share athought with someone at a distance simply by the ‘thinking force’ of Mind.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

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.

There is a plane of universal Mind. On that plane, Mind is a ‘shining emperor’: it rules everything there; on that plane, life, substance and soul are ruled by ‘Mind’. Here, in ‘this rigid realm’, life and mind and soul are ruled by matter; the characteristic of matter is inertia, stability, it is ‘rigid’; but Sri Aurobindo says that even here ‘Mind can be king’. Mind works with ‘Idea’, with mind formations; and here Sri Aurobindo gives a capital ‘I’, referring to the creative ‘Idea’, a mental formation that contains a creative truth and power of self-expression. ‘Idea’ is a ‘demigod’, it is half divine; it has its own logic, its own way of acting and expressing itself; in a ‘transitional moment’, when things are ready to change, when with a little pressure things or circumstances can tip and alter, the Mind can bring about new things, ‘Surprises of creation’, unexpected things that have never before been achieved ‘Even by Matter’s strange unconscious skill’. What miracles Matter has worked out by its ‘strange unconsciousskill’! Nowadays we can see films of outer space, galaxies and nebulas that are vast and beautiful, and here on earth too, if we look around there are such surprising and amazing things that Matter has achieved. Material energy has done so much, but the power of Mind can bring about even more surprising things.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

She turned against the evil she had helped
Her engined wrath, her invisible means to slay;

She had helped all kinds of wrong things – ‘evil’: magic can be used in very harmful ways. But now she will serve a ‘spiritual will’; so against ‘the evil she had helped’ she turns ‘Her engined wrath’ and ‘her invisible means to slay’. When she sends out a movement of anger, a powerful machinery goes into actionagainst whatever she is angry with, and she has invisible ways to kill and destroy; now she turns that ‘wrath’, anger, and ‘her invisible means to slay’ against all the wrong things, ‘the evil’ that she was helping before.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Volume 1]

In shadowy chambers lit by a strange sun
And opening hardly to hid mystic keys
Her perilous arcanes and hooded Power
Confessed the advent of a mastering Mind
And bore the compulsion of a time-born gaze.

Her house has ‘shadowy chambers’, dim private rooms which are ‘lit by a strange sun’ that is not the material sun we are used to here; those chambers are locked and it is difficult to open them, even if you have the right ‘mystic keys’; the keys are hidden and not easy to find. Inside are kept ‘Her perilous arcanes and hooded powers’. The word ‘arcane’ is normally used as an adjective meaning ‘secret’; it comes from a Latin word meaning a chest or box, so it suggests something that is kept hidden; here Sri Aurobindo is using it as a noun: inside those rooms are dangerous secrets and mysterious powers in disguise. ‘Perilous’ means ‘full of danger’ or ‘peril’; ‘hooded’ means veiled, disguised. When Aswapati entered there and found them, they ‘Confessed the advent of a mastering Mind’: they accepted that he is powerful enough to master and control them with his mind. ‘Advent’ means ‘arrival’ or ‘coming’. Those secret powers ‘bore the compulsion of a time- born gaze’: although Aswapati has been born in human time, he is able to control them with a look.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

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.

Our material Nature seems to be unconscious, but this secret Nature that Aswapati has discovered is conscious; like our earth-Nature, she too has her ‘machinery’ by which she gets things done, but this is a ‘quick’ machinery. The word ‘quick’ sometimes means ‘alive’ and perhaps it means that here. The ‘quick machinery’ of the ‘conscious Nature’ which rules the subtle worlds provides power to Aswapati, arming his ‘seeing Mind’ and his ‘free soul-force’ with ‘a latent splendour of miracle’, allowing him the possibility of performing miracles. Aswapati possesses ‘The prophet-passion of a seeing Mind’: with the intensity of a prophet, he can foresee the future; he also has ‘the lightning bareness of a free soul-force’. The conscious secret nature which Aswapati can now perceive with his ‘sealless’ power of inner vision, arms him with her ‘quick machinery’, which works in an immediate and invincible way; that gives to the action of his ‘seeing mind’ and his soul’s free force ‘a latent splendour of miracle’: he will be able to work miracles if that is needed for the divine purpose, because now he has gained mastery over the secret Nature which rules the subtle worlds.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

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;

Out of ‘the unformed and vacant Vast’, out of an empty and shapeless vastness, the almighty occultist has created his ‘sorcery’, his magic, ‘of solid images’: all the material forms of the universe, stars and atoms and everything in between. He has done this by a ‘magic of formative number and design’: underlying all the apparent forms that our senses experience are mathematical formulas and geometric configurations. Modern physicists need to understand mathematics deeply; they have to use not only algebra but also geometry as they try to penetrate the mysteries of matter and understand how it is formed. He has created ‘fixed irrational links’: fixed connections that do not depend on rational logic, but which ‘none can annul’: nobody can dissolve them. The entire world is a ‘criss-cross tangle of invisible laws’: everything is connected to everything else by invisible rules which hold this ‘seeming outward world’ together. If you go out on a windy day with your hair loose it will get into a ‘tangle’ that will be difficult to comb out; or if there are many creepers in a garden, they may grow together, entwined into an inextricable ‘tangle’. The poet says that this whole ‘seeming outward world’ is a complex, irrational tangle of fixed connections and relationships set up by ‘an almighty occultist’.

[ Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

His infallible rules, his covered processes,
Achieve unerringly an inexplicable
Creation where our error carves dead frames
Of knowledge for a living ignorance.

The ‘rules’ of this ‘occultist’ are ‘infallible’: they cannot fail. His ‘processes’, his ways of doing things are ‘covered’, occult and hidden. Together these ‘rules’ and ‘processes’, achieve this creation ‘unerringly’, without any mistake. The creation is ‘inexplicable’: it cannot be explained because it is so magical. The almighty occultist is making this creation unerringly; but in it ‘our error carves dead frames / Of knowledge for a living ignorance’. We form theories to explain the appearances that we perceive: that is what science is doing all the time. We could even say that this is what science is: ‘dead frames / Of knowledge for a living ignorance’. Our ignorance is living, it is evolving, it is continually exploring, but reason fixes what it finds into ‘dead frames’ which we call knowledge; that is why the ‘frames’ are constantly having to be broken: because our ignorance is growing and living, the frames get broken, and then we make new ones in our attempts to explain this ‘inexplicable Creation’. This is what the ‘almighty occultist’, the Creator, does in the material world. In the subtle worlds, the ‘secret Nature’ is doing something similar:

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

All she new-fashions by the thought and word,
Compels all substance by her wand of Mind.

The secret Nature ‘new-fashions’, reshapes and changes everything ‘by the thought and word’: she does not have to use hands, she can change everything using only the powers of thought and word. She ‘Compels all substance by her wand of Mind’. A ‘wand’ is the stick or rod that a magician waves to do his magic. The secret Nature does her magic by the power of Mind. With Mind she can compel ‘all substance’ to do whatever she wants. Now Sri Aurobindo will tell us more about the power of Mind and what it can do.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Mind is a mediator divinity:
Its powers can undo all Nature’s work:
Mind can suspend or change earth’s concrete law.

‘Mind is a mediator divinity’: a divine power which works between spirit and matter; it has powers which ‘can undo all Nature’s work’; whatever is done by material nature, Mind has the power to undo it, and it can ‘suspend or change earth’s concrete law’, all the apparently fixed laws of matter. To ‘suspend’ means to set aside for a short time, while ‘change’ implies a lasting effect. We have heard the phrase “mind over matter”, and know that to a certain extent mind can control matter; it helps us to arrange things the way we want to have them: mind gives us technology by which we can control matter to a certain extent; but it is difficult for us to believe that mind has the power to change the laws of nature. With our limited surface mind and the feeble will that goes with it, with our limited life energies, we cannot do it; but if the full power of Mind is set free, or if we go to inner planes where mind can work more freely, then apparently miraculous things can happen.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

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.

Earlier Sri Aurobindo described Mind as a ‘mediator divinity’; here he speaks of the secret Nature as a ‘mediatrix’. We are familiar with the word ‘mediator’ which is the masculine form of the word; ‘mediatrix’ is its feminine form. This Shakti of the subtle worlds, this Mother of Dreams, is a ‘mediatrix’: she communicates with ‘veiled and nameless gods’, powers ‘Whose alien will touches our human life’. ‘Alien’ means foreign, coming from outside. Those ‘nameless gods’ belong to other worlds but their will affects our human lives. The secret Nature is in touch with powers that are beyond our normal human action. Also she imitates the ‘World-Magician’s ways’. We read about the ‘almighty occultist’ who erects this material world in Space. She copies the way that he does things: he makes fixed processes and physical laws to bind his creation together; in a similar way, she invents certain ‘grooves’, certain tracks and lines to limit ‘her self-bound free- will’: she could do anything she wishes but she binds her free-will and limits its action. She ‘feigns’, pretends that there is a ‘binding cause’ for the ‘freaks’ of her magic, for the impossible things that she does; she pretends that there is a fixed process, that certain words have to be recited, certain rituals and processes have to be performed in order to get a particular result. It is not really like that, but she makes it seem like that.

The lines we are reading now are really not easy to understand. There are many difficult words and Sri Aurobindo is explaining things that we do not usually experience. This section is about occultism, the knowledge and control of subtle powers. The secret Nature, the Shakti of the subtle worlds, is a ‘mediatrix’ working on the borderline between the realm of matter and the subtle realms, making use of possibilities from all the planes to bring about effects here in our world.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

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

‘Thoughts that were born in the immortals’ world’, in the world of the deathless gods. Then, ‘Oracles that break out from behind the shrine’. An ‘Oracle’ is something or someone that answers your questions by revealing a higher or deeper knowledge, a way of receiving guidance from another realm, or the message itself can be called ‘an oracle’. Here Sri Aurobindo mentions ‘Oracles that break out from behind the shrine’ which suggests revelatory messages coming unexpectedly from behind ‘the shrine’, the place where the figure of the deity stands, disclosing snatches of secret knowledge from other worlds. A different kind of message also comes: ‘Warnings from the daemonic inner voice’. Please notice the spelling of this word, it is not ‘demonic’ which would mean from a ‘demon’, an evil spirit; these warnings are coming from ‘the daemonic inner voice’. ‘Daemon’ is a Greek word meaning a guiding spirit. Sri Aurobindo even seems to say that the ‘daemon’ can be an expression of our psychic being. It is a spirit within us that tells us what we should do. The famous example is the Greek philosopher, Socrates, who always had to follow the guidance of his ‘daemon’; even if it was just a matter of turning right or left in the street, he had to follow that inner guidance. Sri Aurobindo uses this word for the inner guiding spirit in several places in the poem. This too is one of the means that the secret Nature uses. Another is ‘peeps and lightning-leaps of prophecy’: ‘prophecy’ is the power of seeing the future; among her ‘occult mightinesses’ she can also offer these ‘peeps’, brief glimpses of what is to come, or a vision of the future that comes like a leaping flash of lightning.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]

Her dangerous moods and arbitrary force
She surrendered to the service of the soul
And the control of a spiritual will.

She is a great enchantress, so her moods are dangerous; she can use her force in ‘arbitrary’ ways, without needing any justification; but now she surrenders all her moods and her force ‘to the service of the soul / And the control of a spiritual will’. There are people who are very interested in magic and occultism; they find books and teachers and gain some powers; but this is a very dangerous business and the Mother did not encourage people to study occultism at all. Both she and Sri Aurobindo have told us that if your purpose is pure, if you truly want to serve the Divine and surrender to the Divine Will and develop in a spiritual way, then some of these occult powers may come to you by themselves, if and when needed. This is what is happening to Aswapati: these occult possibilities are being given to him to be used for a higher purpose.

[Shraddhavan’s English of Savitri, Book 1]