101 years ago
The Mother’s final arrival in Pondicherry and the influenza pandemic of 1918
The Sadhana and the work were waiting for the Mother’s coming.
— Sri Aurobindo (in a letter of16 September 1935)
On 18 May 1916 the Mother disembarked at Yokohama. The first year of her stay in Japan was spent for the most part in Tokyo, the next three years mainly in Kyoto. She left Japan in March 1920 and arrived in Pondicherry on 24 April.
It was during her stay in Japan that the influenza pandemic of 1918 ravaged the world. Presumed to have begun when sick farm animals infected soldiers in Kansas, spreading and mutating into a lethal strain as troops carried it to Europe, it exploded across the world with unequaled ferocity and speed. The influenza virus of 1918 killed a likely 50 million and possibly as many as 100 million, with most of the deaths occurring in a horrendous twelve weeks in the fall of that year. (In 1918 the world’s population was a mere 1.8 billion.)
At first, even as it was spreading explosively, the disease bore little resemblance to its first violent outbreak in Kansas. Troops called it “three-day fever.” On 20 August 1918, a British medical journal stated that the epidemic “has completely disappeared.” But the virus had not disappeared. As John M. Barry writes in The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History,
It had only gone underground, like a forest fire left burning in the roots, swarming and mutating, adapting, honing itself, watching and waiting, waiting to burst into flame…. In 1918 each initial burst of lethality, isolated though it may have seemed, was much like a first bubble rising to the surface in a pot coming to boil.
In all of Labrador, at least one-third the total population died…. In Frankfurt the mortality rate of all those hospitalized with influenza was 27.3 percent…. In Gambia, 8 percent of the Europeans would die, but from the interior one British visitor reported that
I found whole villages of 300 to 400 families completely wiped out, the houses having fallen in on the unburied dead, and the jungle having crept in within two months, obliterating whole settlements.
The virus would kill 7 percent of the entire population in much of Russia and Iran, and in Japan it attacked more than one-third of the population. The most terrifying numbers would come from India. In Bombay the case mortality rate for influenza reach 10.3 percent. But then the explosion of disease ended, and it ended abruptly. According to Barry,
A graph of cases would look like a bell curve—but one chopped off almost like a cliff just after the peak, with new cases suddenly dropping to next to nothing. In Philadelphia, for example, the disease was ripping the city apart, emptying the streets, sparking rumors of the Black Death. But new cases dropped so precipitously that only ten days later … the order closing public places was lifted. By the armistice on November 11, influenza had almost entirely disappeared from that city.
On 20 April 1963, the Mother recounted her own brush with the 1918 influenza:
There was an epidemic of influenza, an influenza that came from the war (the 1914 war), and was generally fatal. People would get pneumonia after three days, and plop! finished. In Japan they never have epidemics (it’s a country where epidemics are unknown), so they were caught unawares; it was an ideal breeding ground, absolutely unprepared—incredible: people died by the thousands every day, it was incredible! Everybody lived in terror, they didn’t dare to go out without masks over their mouths. Then somebody whom I won’t name asked me (in a brusque tone), “What Is this?” I answered him, “Better not think about it.” “Why not?” he said, “It’s very interesting! We must find out, at least you are able to find out whatever this is.” Silly me, I was just about to go out; I had to visit a girl who lived at the other end of Tokyo (Tokyo is the largest city in the world, it takes a long time to go from one end to the other), and I wasn’t so well-off I could go about in a car: I took the tram.... What an atmosphere! An atmosphere of panic in the city! You see, we lived in a house surrounded by a big park, secluded, but the atmosphere in the city was horrible. And the question, “What Is this?” naturally came to put me in contact—I came back home with the illness. I was sure to catch it, it had to happen! (laughing) I came home with it.
Like a bang on the head—I was completely dazed. They called a doctor. There were no medicines left in the city—there weren’t enough medicines for people, but as we were considered important people (!) the doctor brought two tablets. I told him (laughing), “Doctor, I never take any medicines.” “What!” he said. “It’s so hard to get them!” “That’s just the point,” I replied, “they’re very good for others!” Then, then ... suddenly (I was in bed, of course, with a first-rate fever), suddenly I felt seized by trance—the real trance, the kind that pushes you out of your body—and I knew. I knew: “It’s the end; if I can’t resist it, it’s the end.” So I looked. I looked and I saw it was a being whose head had been half blown off by a bomb and who didn’t know he was dead, so he was hooking on to anybody he could to suck life. And each of those beings (I saw one over me, doing his “business”!) was one of the countless dead. Each had a sort of atmosphere—a very widespread atmosphere—of human decomposition, utterly pestilential, and that’s what gave the illness. If it was merely that, you recovered, but if it was one of those beings with half a head or half a body, a being who had been killed so brutally that he didn’t know he was dead and was trying to get hold of a body in order to continue his life (the atmosphere made thousands of people catch the illness every day, it was swarming, an infection), well, with such beings, you died. Within three days it was over—even before, within a day, sometimes. So once I saw and knew, I collected all the occult energy, all the occult power, and ... (Mother bangs down her fist, as if to force her way into her body) I found myself back in my bed, awake, and it was over. Not only was it over, but I stayed very quiet and began to work in the atmosphere.... From that moment on, mon petit, there were no new cases! It was so extraordinary that it appeared in the Japanese papers. They didn’t know how it happened, but from that day on, from that night on, not a single fresh case. And people recovered little by little.
I told the story to our Japanese friend in whose house we were living, I told him, “Well, that’s what this illness is—a remnant of the war; and here’s the way it happens...!” Naturally, the fact that I repelled his influence by turning around and fighting ... [dissolved the formation]. But what power it takes to do that! Extraordinary.
He told the story to some friends, who in turn told it to some friends, so in the end the story became known. There was even a sort of collective thanks from the city for my intervention.... But the whole thing stemmed from that: “What Is this illness? You’re able to find out, aren’t you?” (Laughter) Go and catch it!
But that feeling of being absolutely paralyzed, a prey to something—absolutely paralyzed, you can’t ... You are no longer in your body, you understand, you can’t act on it any more. And a sense of liberation when you are able to turn around.