Savitri, the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s Vision (age 78)

For over four decades and more, Sri Aurobindo had been silently working on an epic poem, Savitri. Choosing the Savitri-Satyavan legend in the Mahabharat, he had started developing it on his own lines as far back as in Baroda. He converted it from a simple tale lauding the potency of conjugal fidelity into a poem of humanity uplifted by Divine Grace from darkness to Light, from death to Immortality. As he explains, he wrote the poem for himself. He used it in the manner of the Vedic Rishi using the mantric utterance for the ascension of his consciousness. He revised it from each successive level of consciousness he attained, so that certain portions received as many as twenty revisions or so. The result is a rare perfection. It is his testament to humanity, The Life Divine in poetry.

He perceived and noted: “The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.”