The Descent into Night

Passages from Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri, with remarks by the Mother on Sri Aurobindo and Savitri

As we approach 2025, I deem it appropriate to quote at some length certain passages from Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri.

In Book II, The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, Sri Aurobindo describes King Aswapati’s exploration of the worlds behind our own. The Book begins with these lines:

ALONE he moved watched by the infinity 
Around him and the Unknowable above. 
All could be seen that shuns the mortal eye,
All could be known the mind has never grasped;
All could be done no mortal will can dare.
A limitless movement filled a limitless peace.
In a profound existence beyond earth’s
Parent or kin to our ideas and dreams
Where Space is a vast experiment of the soul,
In an immaterial substance linked to ours
In a deep oneness of all things that are,
The universe of the Unknown arose.
A self-creation without end or pause
Revealed the grandeurs of the Infinite:
It flung into the hazards of its play
A million moods, a myriad energies,
The world-shapes that are fancies of its Truth
And the formulas of the freedom of its Force.
It poured into the Ever-stable’s flux
A bacchic rapture and revel of Ideas,
A passion and motion of everlastingness.
...
The Eternal’s stillness saw in unmoved joy
His universal Power at work display
In plots of pain and dramas of delight
The wonder and beauty of her will to be.
All, even pain, was the soul’s pleasure here;
Here all experience was a single plan,
The thousandfold expression of the One.
...
The heaven-hints that invade our earthly lives,
The dire imaginations dreamed by Hell,
Which if enacted and experienced here
Our dulled capacity soon would cease to feel
Or our mortal frailty could not long endure,
Were set in their sublime proportions there.

In Canto Three, The Glory and the Fall of Life, Sri Aurobindo describes the grandeurs of the world of Life. Yet, to Aswapati…

All this seemed only a bright desirable dream 
Conceived in a longing distance by the heart
Of one who walks in the shadow of earth-pain. 

Then, turning his mind to the advent of life on Earth:

In the crude beginnings of this mortal world
Life was not nor mind’s play nor heart’s desire. 
When earth was built in the unconscious Void
And nothing was save a material scene,
Identified with sea and sky and stone
Her young gods yearned for the release of souls 
Asleep in objects, vague, inanimate.
...
This solid mass which brooked no throb of sense 
Could not contain their vast creative urge: 
Immersed no more in Matter’s harmony,
The Spirit lost its statuesque repose.
In the uncaring trance it groped for sight,
Passioned for the movements of a conscious heart, 
Famishing for speech and thought and joy and love, 
In the dumb insensitive wheeling day and night 
Hungered for the beat of yearning and response. 
The poised inconscience shaken with a touch,
The intuitive Silence trembling with a name,
They cried to Life to invade the senseless mould 
And in brute forms awake divinity.
...
Life heard the call and left her native light.
Overflowing from her bright magnificent plane
On the rigid coil and sprawl of mortal Space,
Here too the gracious great-winged Angel poured
Her splendour and her swiftness and her bliss,
Hoping to fill a fair new world with joy.
As comes a goddess to a mortal’s breast
And fills his days with her celestial clasp,
She stooped to make her home in transient shapes;
In Matter’s womb she cast the Immortal’s fire,
In the unfeeling Vast woke thought and hope,
Smote with her charm and beauty flesh and nerve
And forced delight on earth’s insensible frame.
Alive and clad with trees and herbs and flowers
Earth’s great brown body smiled towards the skies,
Azure replied to azure in the sea’s laugh;
New sentient creatures filled the unseen depths,
Life’s glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts, 
Man dared and thought and met with his soul the world. 
But while the magic breath was on its way,
Before her gifts could reach our prisoned hearts,
A dark ambiguous Presence questioned all.
The secret Will that robes itself with Night
And offers to spirit the ordeal of the flesh,
Imposed a mystic mask of death and pain.
Interned now in the slow and suffering years
Sojourns the winged and wonderful wayfarer
And can no more recall her happier state,
But must obey the inert Inconscient’s law,
Insensible foundation of a world
In which blind limits are on beauty laid
And sorrow and joy as struggling comrades live.
A dim and dreadful muteness fell on her:
Abolished was her subtle mighty spirit
And slain her boon of child-god happiness,
And all her glory into littleness turned
And all her sweetness into a maimed desire.
To feed death with her works is here life’s doom. 
So veiled was her immortality that she seemed, 
Inflicting consciousness on unconscious things, 
An episode in an eternal death,
A myth of being that must for ever cease.
Such was the evil mystery of her change.

Eventually, in Canto Seven, The Descent into Night, Aswapati sets out to probe this evil mystery.

A mind absolved from life, made calm to know,
A heart divorced from the blindness and the pang, 
The seal of tears, the bond of ignorance,
He turned to find that wide world-failure’s cause.

Thus begins Aswapati’s descent into the nether worlds. It certainly isn’t for the squeamish. Spoiler alert: it ends on a supremely uplifting note.

The world grew full of menacing Energies,
And wherever turned for help or hope his eyes,
In field and house, in street and camp and mart 
He met the prowl and stealthy come and go
Of armed disquieting bodied Influences.
A march of goddess figures dark and nude 
Alarmed the air with grandiose unease;
Appalling footsteps drew invisibly near,
Shapes that were threats invaded the dream-light, 
And ominous beings passed him on the road 
Whose very gaze was a calamity:
A charm and sweetness sudden and formidable, 
Faces that raised alluring lips and eyes
Approached him armed with beauty like a snare, 
But hid a fatal meaning in each line
And could in a moment dangerously change.
...
A tract he reached unbuilt and owned by none: 
There all could enter but none stay for long.
It was a no man’s land of evil air,
A crowded neighbourhood without one home, 
A borderland between the world and hell. 
There unreality was Nature’s lord:
It was a space where nothing could be true,
For nothing was what it had claimed to be:
A high appearance wrapped a specious void. 
Yet nothing would confess its own pretence 
Even to itself in the ambiguous heart:
A vast deception was the law of things;
Only by that deception they could live.
...
Joy nurtured tears and good an evil proved,
But never out of evil one plucked good:
Love ended early in hate, delight killed with pain, 
Truth into falsity grew and death ruled life.
A Power that laughed at the mischiefs of the world, 
An irony that joined the world’s contraries
And flung them into each other’s arms to strive,
Put a sardonic rictus on God’s face.
...
The Fiend was visible but cloaked in light;
He seemed a helping angel from the skies:
He armed untruth with Scripture and the Law;
He deceived with wisdom, with virtue slew the soul 
And led to perdition by the heavenward path.
A lavish sense he gave of power and joy,
And, when arose the warning from within,
He reassured the ear with dulcet tones
Or took the mind captive in its own net;
His rigorous logic made the false seem true. 
Amazing the elect with holy lore
He spoke as with the very voice of God.
...
Agony and danger stalked their trembling prey 
And softly spoke as to a timid friend:
Attack sprang suddenly vehement and unseen;
Fear leaped upon the heart at every turn
And cried out with an anguished dreadful voice;
It called for one to save but none came near.
All warily walked, for death was ever close;
Yet caution seemed a vain expense of care,
For all that guarded proved a deadly net,
And when after long suspense salvation came
And brought a glad relief disarming strength,
It served as a smiling passage to worse fate.
...
Then the scene changed, but kept its dreadful core: 
Altering its form the life remained the same.
A capital was there without a State:
It had no ruler, only groups that strove.
He saw a city of ancient Ignorance
Founded upon a soil that knew not Light.
There each in his own darkness walked alone:
Only they agreed to differ in Evil’s paths,
To live in their own way for their own selves
Or to enforce a common lie and wrong;
There Ego was lord upon his peacock seat
And Falsehood sat by him, his mate and queen:
The world turned to them as Heaven to Truth and God.
...
Amid her clashing creeds and warring sects
Religion sat upon a blood-stained throne.
A hundred tyrannies oppressed and slew
And founded unity upon fraud and force.
Only what seemed was prized as real there:
The ideal was a cynic ridicule’s butt;
Hooted by the crowd, mocked by enlightened wits, 
Spiritual seeking wandered outcasted, —
A dreamer’s self-deceiving web of thought
Or mad chimaera deemed or hypocrite’s fake,
Its passionate instinct trailed through minds obscure 
Lost in the circuits of the Ignorance.
A lie was there the truth and truth a lie.
Here must the traveller of the upward Way —
For daring Hell’s kingdoms winds the heavenly route —
Pause or pass slowly through that perilous space,
A prayer upon his lips and the great Name.
If probed not all discernment’s keen spear-point,
He might stumble into falsity’s endless net.
Over his shoulder often he must look back
Like one who feels on his neck an enemy’s breath;
Else stealing up behind a treasonous blow
Might prostrate cast and pin to unholy soil,
Pierced through his back by Evil’s poignant stake.
So might one fall on the Eternal’s road
Forfeiting the spirit’s lonely chance in Time
And no news of him reach the waiting gods,
Marked “missing” in the register of souls,
His name the index of a failing hope,
The position of a dead remembered star.
...
This No-man’s-land he passed without debate;
Him the heights missioned, him the Abyss desired:
None stood across his way, no voice forbade.
For swift and easy is the downward path,
And now towards the Night was turned his face.
A greater darkness waited, a worse reign,
If worse can be where all is evil’s extreme.
...
There Life displayed to the spectator soul
The shadow depths of her strange miracle.
A strong and fallen goddess without hope, 
Obscured, deformed by some dire Gorgon spell,
As might a harlot empress in a bouge,*
Nude, unashamed, exulting she upraised
Her evil face of perilous beauty and charm
And, drawing panic to a shuddering kiss
Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts,
Allured to their abyss the spirit’s fall.
Across his field of sight she multiplied
As on a scenic film or moving plate
The implacable splendour of her nightmare pomps. 
On the dark background of a soulless world
She staged between a lurid light and shade
Her dramas of the sorrow of the depths
Written on the agonised nerves of living things: 
Epics of horror and grim majesty,
Wry statues spat and stiffened in life’s mud,
A glut of hideous forms and hideous deeds 
Paralysed pity in the hardened breast.
...
An inexorable evil’s worshipper,
She made vileness great and sublimated filth;
A dragon power of reptile energies
And strange epiphanies of grovelling Force
And serpent grandeurs couching in the mire
Drew adoration to a gleam of slime.
...
A race possessed inhabited those parts. 
A force demoniac lurking in man’s depths
That heaves suppressed by the heart’s human law, 
Awed by the calm and sovereign eyes of Thought, 
Can in a fire and earthquake of the soul
Arise and, calling to its native night,
Overthrow the reason, occupy the life
And stamp its hoof on Nature’s shaking ground.
...
In street and house, in councils and in courts
Beings he met who looked like living men
And climbed in speech upon high wings of thought 
But harboured all that is subhuman, vile
And lower than the lowest reptile’s crawl.
...
He strove to shield his spirit from despair,
But felt the horror of the growing Night
And the Abyss rising to claim his soul.
Then ceased the abodes of creatures and their forms 
And solitude wrapped him in its voiceless folds.
...
He was alone with the grey python Night.
A dense and nameless Nothing conscious, mute,
Which seemed alive but without body or mind,
Lusted all beings to annihilate
That it might be for ever nude and sole.
As in a shapeless beast’s intangible jaws,
Gripped, strangled by that lusting viscous blot, 
Attracted to some black and giant mouth
And swallowing throat and a huge belly of doom, 
His being from its own vision disappeared
Drawn towards depths that hungered for its fall.
A formless void oppressed his struggling brain,
A darkness grim and cold benumbed his flesh,
A whispered grey suggestion chilled his heart;
Haled by a serpent-force from its warm home
And dragged to extinction in bleak vacancy
Life clung to its seat with cords of gasping breath; 
Lapped was his body by a tenebrous tongue. 
Existence smothered travailed to survive;
Hope strangled perished in his empty soul,
Belief and memory abolished died
And all that helps the spirit in its course.
There crawled through every tense and aching nerve 
Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail
A nameless and unutterable fear.
As a sea nears a victim bound and still,
The approach alarmed his mind for ever dumb
Of an implacable eternity
Of pain inhuman and intolerable.
This he must bear, his hope of heaven estranged;
He must ever exist without extinction’s peace
In a slow suffering Time and tortured Space,
An anguished nothingness his endless state.

* Textual note: A bouge (French) is a shady bar, a dive (in the sense of disreputable or run-down bar or nightclub).

The next canto begins with these lines:

Then could he see the hidden heart of Night:
The labour of its stark unconsciousness
Revealed the endless terrible Inane.

Source: Deepdreamgenerator / AIVision

Let us pause here and take in something the Mother once told a disciple.¹

[All that Sri Aurobindo has revealed in Savitri] is his own experience, and what is most surprising is that it is also my own experience. It is my sadhana which he has described. Each object, each event, each realisation, all the descriptions, even the colours are exactly what I saw and the words, the phrases are also exactly what I heard. And all this before having read the book. I read Savitri many times afterwards, but earlier, when he was writing he used to read it to me. Every morning I used to hear him read Savitri, at night he would write and in the morning read it to me. And I observed something strange — day after day, the experiences he read out to me in the morning were those I had had the previous night, word for word. Yes, all the descriptions, the colours, the pictures I had seen, the words I had heard, all, all, I heard it, put by him into poetry, into miraculous poetry. Yes, they were exactly my experiences of the previous night which he read out to me the following morning. And it was not just one day, but for days and days together. And every time I used to compare what he said with my previous experiences and they were always the same. I repeat, it was not that I had told him my experiences and that he had noted them down afterwards, no, he knew already what I had seen. It is my experiences he has presented all along and they were also his experiences. It is, moreover, the picture of our adventure together into the unknown or rather into the Supermind.

These are experiences lived by him, realities, supracosmic truths. He experienced all these as one experiences joy and sorrow in a physical manner. He has walked in the darkness of inconscience, even in the neighbourhood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition, and he has emerged from the mud, the world-misery, to breathe the sovereign plenitude and enter the supreme Ananda. He has traversed them all, these realms, borne the consequences, suffered and endured physically what one cannot imagine. Nobody till today has suffered like him. He has accepted suffering to transform suffering into the joy of union with the Supreme. It is something unique and incomparable in the history of the world. It is something that has never happened, he is the first to have traced the path in the Unknown so that we may be able to walk with certitude towards the Supermind.

We should also take note of the following statements by Sri Aurobindo²: “The Mother’s consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play” (13 November 1934); “Mother and I are one but in two bodies”; “The Mother and I are one and equal” (June 1935).

Back to Savitri:

All once self-luminous in the spirit’s sphere
Turned now into their own dark contraries:
Being collapsed into a pointless void
That yet was a zero parent of the worlds; 
Inconscience swallowing up the cosmic Mind 
Produced a universe from its lethal sleep;
Bliss into black coma fallen, insensible,
Coiled back to itself and God’s eternal joy
Through a false poignant figure of grief and pain
Still dolorously nailed upon a cross
Fixed in the soil of a dumb insentient world
Where birth was a pang and death an agony,
Lest all too soon should change again to bliss.
...
Thus was the dire antagonist Energy born
Who mimes the eternal Mother’s mighty shape
And mocks her luminous infinity
With a grey distorted silhouette in the Night. 
Arresting the passion of the climbing soul,
She forced on life a slow and faltering pace;
Her hand’s deflecting and retarding weight
Is laid on the mystic evolution’s curve:
The tortuous line of her deceiving mind
The Gods see not and man is impotent;
Oppressing the God-spark within the soul
She forces back to the beast the human fall.
Yet in her formidable instinctive mind
She feels the One grow in the heart of Time
And sees the Immortal shine through the human mould. 
Alarmed for her rule and full of fear and rage
She prowls around each light that gleams through the dark 
Casting its ray from the spirit’s lonely tent,
Hoping to enter with fierce stealthy tread
And in the cradle slay the divine Child.
Incalculable are her strength and ruse;
Her touch is a fascination and a death;
She kills her victim with his own delight;
Even Good she makes a hook to drag to Hell.
For her the world runs to its agony.
Often the pilgrim on the Eternal’s road
Ill-lit from clouds by the pale moon of Mind,
Or in devious byways wandering alone,
Or lost in deserts where no path is seen,
Falls overpowered by her lion leap,
A conquered captive under her dreadful paws.
Intoxicated by a burning breath
And amorous grown of a destroying mouth,
Once a companion of the sacred Fire,
The mortal perishes to God and Light,
An Adversary governs heart and brain,
A Nature hostile to the Mother-Force.
...
Then by the Angel of the Vigil Tower
A name is struck from the recording book;
A flame that sang in Heaven sinks quenched and mute; 
In ruin ends the epic of a soul.
This is the tragedy of the inner death
When forfeited is the divine element
And only a mind and body live to die.
For terrible agencies the Spirit allows 
And there are subtle and enormous Powers
That shield themselves with the covering Ignorance. 
Offspring of the gulfs, agents of the shadowy Force, 
Haters of light, intolerant of peace,
Aping to the thought the shining Friend and Guide, 
Opposing in the heart the eternal Will,
They veil the occult uplifting Harmonist.
His wisdom’s oracles are made our bonds;
The doors of God they have locked with keys of creed 
And shut out by the Law his tireless Grace.
...
Assuming names divine they guide and rule.
Opponents of the Highest they have come
Out of their world of soulless thought and power
To serve by enmity the cosmic scheme.
Night is their refuge and strategic base.
Against the sword of Flame, the luminous Eye,
Bastioned they live in massive forts of gloom,
Calm and secure in sunless privacy:
No wandering ray of Heaven can enter there.
Armoured, protected by their lethal masks,
As in a studio of creative Death
The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan
The drama of the earth, their tragic stage.
All who would raise the fallen world must come
Under the dangerous arches of their power;
For even the radiant children of the gods
To darken their privilege is and dreadful right.
None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.
This too the traveller of the worlds must dare.
A warrior in the dateless duel’s strife,
He entered into dumb despairing Night 
Challenging the darkness with his luminous soul. 
Alarming with his steps the threshold gloom
He came into a fierce and dolorous realm
Peopled by souls who never had tasted bliss; 
Ignorant like men born blind who know not light, 
They could equate worst ill with highest good, 
Virtue was to their eyes a face of sin
And evil and misery were their natural state.
...
Ever he deeper probed that kingdom of pain; 
Around him grew the terror of a world
Of agony followed by worse agony,
And in the terror a great wicked joy
Glad of one’s own and others’ calamity.
There thought and life were a long punishment,
The breath a burden and all hope a scourge,
The body a field of torment, a massed unease;
Repose was a waiting between pang and pang.
This was the law of things none dreamed to change:
A hard sombre heart, a harsh unsmiling mind
Rejected happiness like a cloying sweet;
Tranquillity was a tedium and ennui:
Only by suffering life grew colourful;
It needed the spice of pain, the salt of tears.
...
Of such fierce stuff was made up life’s long hell:
These were the threads of the dark spider’s-web
In which the soul was caught, quivering and rapt;
This was religion, this was Nature’s rule.
In a fell chapel of iniquity
To worship a black pitiless image of Power
Kneeling one must cross hard-hearted stony courts,
A pavement like a floor of evil fate.
Each stone was a keen edge of ruthless force
And glued with the chilled blood from tortured breasts; 
The dry gnarled trees stood up like dying men
Stiffened into a pose of agony,
And from each window peered an ominous priest 
Chanting Te Deums for slaughter’s crowning grace, 
Uprooted cities, blasted human homes,
Burned writhen bodies, the bombshell’s massacre.
...
It was a world of sorrow and of hate,
Sorrow with hatred for its lonely joy,
Hatred with others’ sorrow as its feast;
A bitter rictus curled the suffering mouth;
A tragic cruelty saw its ominous chance.
Hate was the black archangel of that realm;
It glowed, a sombre jewel in the heart
Burning the soul with its malignant rays,
And wallowed in its fell abysm of might.
These passions even objects seemed to exude, —
For mind overflowed into the inanimate
That answered with the wickedness it received, —
Against their users used malignant powers,
Hurt without hands and strangely, suddenly slew, 
Appointed as instruments of an unseen doom.
...
In this infernal realm he dared to press
Even into its deepest pit and darkest core,
Perturbed its tenebrous base, dared to contest 
Its ancient privileged right and absolute force: 
In Night he plunged to know her dreadful heart,
In Hell he sought the root and cause of Hell.
Its anguished gulfs opened in his own breast;
He listened to clamours of its crowded pain,
The heart-beats of its fatal loneliness.
...
A prisoner of a hooded magic Force,
Captured and trailed in Falsehood’s lethal net
And often strangled in the noose of grief,
Or cast in the grim morass of swallowing doubt,
Or shut into pits of error and despair,
He drank her poison draughts till none was left.
In a world where neither hope nor joy could come
The ordeal he suffered of evil’s absolute reign,
Yet kept intact his spirit’s radiant truth.
Incapable of motion or of force,
In Matter’s blank denial gaoled and blind,
Pinned to the black inertia of our base
He treasured between his hands his flickering soul.
His being ventured into mindless Void,
Intolerant gulfs that knew not thought nor sense;
Thought ceased, sense failed, his soul still saw and knew. 
In atomic parcellings of the Infinite
Near to the dumb beginnings of lost Self,
He felt the curious small futility
Of the creation of material things.
Or, stifled in the Inconscient’s hollow dusk,
He sounded the mystery dark and bottomless
Of the enormous and unmeaning deeps
Whence struggling life in a dead universe rose.
There in the stark identity lost by mind
He felt the sealed sense of the insensible world
And a mute wisdom in the unknowing Night.
Into the abysmal secrecy he came
Where darkness peers from her mattress, grey and nude, 
And stood on the last locked subconscient’s floor
Where Being slept unconscious of its thoughts
And built the world not knowing what it built.
There waiting its hour the future lay unknown,
There is the record of the vanished stars.
There in the slumber of the cosmic Will
He saw the secret key of Nature’s change.
A light was with him, an invisible hand
Was laid upon the error and the pain
Till it became a quivering ecstasy,
The shock of sweetness of an arm’s embrace.
He saw in Night the Eternal’s shadowy veil,
Knew death for a cellar of the house of life,
In destruction felt creation’s hasty pace,
Knew loss as the price of a celestial gain
And hell as a short cut to heaven’s gates.
Then in Illusion’s occult factory
And in the Inconscient’s magic printing-house
Torn were the formats of the primal Night
And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.
Alive, breathing a deep spiritual breath,
Nature expunged her stiff mechanical code
And the articles of the bound soul’s contract,
Falsehood gave back to Truth her tortured shape.
...
Hell split across its huge abrupt façade
As if a magic building were undone,
Night opened and vanished like a gulf of dream.
Into being’s gap scooped out as empty Space
In which she had filled the place of absent God,
There poured a wide intimate and blissful Dawn; 
Healed were all things that Time’s torn heart had made 
And sorrow could live no more in Nature’s breast: 
Division ceased to be, for God was there.
The soul lit the conscious body with its ray,
Matter and spirit mingled and were one.

1. Mona Sarkar, Sweet Mother: Luminous Notes / Conversations with the Mother recollected by Mona Sarkar (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 2009). In 1967, the Mother wrote to a disciple: “Years ago I have spoken at length about [Savitri] to Mona Sarkar and he has noted in French what I said. Some time back I have seen what he has written and found it correct on the whole.”

2. Sri Aurobindo, The Mother, with Letters on the Mother, pp. 79‒82.