Sri Aurobindo's Savitri: Integrating The Three Goddesses

(This is the fourth article in Aravindan Neelakandan's series on Sri Aurobindo's 'Savitri' and the Sri Lalita Sahasranama. Readers are urged to first read parts one, two, and three).

The quest for wholeness is a perennial theme in the spiritual and psychological traditions of humanity.

In Book Seven, Canto Four of Savitri, the inner quest of Savitri, which she is obliged to take in order to redeem and elevate her soul, leads her to a profound encounter with three divine feminine powers.

Each figure declares, 'O Savitri, I am thy secret soul', revealing that the soul is not a simple, monolithic entity but a complex harmony of fundamental divine-vital forces.

The divine power can also be accompanied by a 'warped echo', a masculine voice from the abyss that represents the egoistic perversion of that same power.

Savitri's journey through this triptych is a process of recognising, understanding, and preparing to integrate these essential aspects of her own being and of the cosmos itself.

The Madonna of Sorrow

Savitri's first encounter is with a figure of profound pathos: 'A Woman sat in a pale lustrous robe' on 'a rugged and ragged soil... Beneath her feet a sharp and wounding stone'. This is the 'Mother of the seven sorrows', who bears the 'seven stabs that pierced her bleeding heart'.

She embodies the divine principle of compassion, empathy, and cosmic endurance. Her power is the world-bearing aspect of divine Will (Ichha−Shakti), the will that consents to suffer with creation for releasing a higher creative energy.

This force is tamasic guna but not as inertia or darkness but in its highest, purest manifestation as a divine stability, profound feeling, and the capacity to bear the 'unwanted tedious labour without joy,/And the burden of misery and the strokes of fate'.

The Madonna of Might

Ascending further, Savitri meets a contrasting figure of formidable power: 'A Woman sat in gold and purple sheen,/Armed with the trident and the thunderbolt,/Her feet upon a couchant lion's back'.

This is the 'Madonna of Might', the divine principle of strength, righteous action, and world-shaking force—the dynamic aspect of divine will (kriya shakti).

She is the executrix of the divine decree, identifying Herself with the great Goddesses of sustenance and war: 'I am Durga, goddess of the proud and strong,/And Lakshmi, queen of the fair and fortunate;/I wear the face of Kali when I kill'.

Her action is swift, absolute, and beyond the limited human dualities of sin and virtue: 'I reason not of virtue and of sin/But do the deed he has put into my heart'. This force represents the divine expression of the rajasic guna: kinetic energy, courage, creative power, and the will to conquer.

Once again, Savitri acknowledges this great power as 'a portion of my soul put forth/To help mankind and help the travail of Time'.

She recognizes that without this force, there can be no change or victory on earth. However, she also sees its critical limitation: power without knowledge is a destructive wind.

She tells the Madonna, 'Thou hast given men strength, wisdom thou couldst not give'.

The Madonna of Light

Savitri's final encounter in this triad is with a being of serene illumination: 'A Woman sat in clear and crystal light' whose 'smile could persuade a dead lacerated heart / To live again and feel the hands of calm'.

This is the Madonna of Light, the divine principle of knowledge, wisdom, harmony, and peace (jnana shakti). She represents the divine form of the sattvic guna: luminosity, balance, truth, and joy. And for the evolving soul, She is the 'Knowledge poring on her cosmic map'.

Savitri acknowledges this Madonna as the power that 'raise[s] the spirit to its forgotten heights'. But she understands that knowledge alone, especially the conceptual knowledge of the mind, is insufficient to transform earthly existence. It can illuminate but cannot remake. True transformation requires a direct descent of the Divine into the very substance of life.

The Perils of Disintegration

The vision presented in Savitri is not merely of three divine powers, but of their essential unity within the integral consciousness of Savitri herself.

She tells each Madonna, 'Thou art a portion of my soul put forth'. The disastrous consequences of their separation are dramatized through the appearance of their 'warped echo', a perverted and diminished counterpart that rises from the depths of human ignorance each time a pure divine force manifests.

This dynamic reveals a critical psychological and spiritual crisis: when the integral powers of the Divine Mother—Love, Might, and Light—are isolated from one another, they become stunted, corrupted, and ultimately ineffective, leading to spiritual stagnation for both the individual and the collective.

Love without Might and Light

The first force Savitri meets, the Madonna of Suffering, is a being of pure divine pity who declares, 'I am in all that suffers and that cries'.

She feels the world's pain with infinite compassion, but she is powerless to end it. She confesses, 'God gave me love, He gave me not his force'.

Divorced from power and wisdom, this divine love degenerates into a passive, sentimental sorrow. Its warped echo is the 'Man of Sorrows', a bitter, complaining victim-consciousness that feels 'nailed on the wide cross of the universe' and believes God created the world for his agony.

To enjoy my agony God built the earth,

My passion he has made his drama’s theme.

This is the origin of a spirituality that either glorifies suffering or cunningly transforms the guilt to make humanity submit to a dogmatic religion.

Collectively, this leads to a loss of true feeling, replaced by a weak sentimentality that tolerates injustice and an impotent rage that breeds resentment but not a true transformation.

The second force is the Madonna of Might, the warrior goddess who tramples 'the corpses of the demon hordes'. She is the divine strength that battles evil.

However, power without the guidance of love and the vision of knowledge becomes a blind, ego-driven force. Its perversion is the 'dwarf-Titan', the voice of the human ego that boasts, 'What God imperfect left, I will complete'.

This is the force behind humanity's greatest atrocities: science used for destruction and racist eugenics, political systems built on genocidal oppression as well as apartheid, and a relentless will-to-power that is divorced from compassion.

This separation breeds a culture of violence and domination, where strength is mistaken for greatness and conquest for progress.  

Light without Love and Might

The final force is the 'Madonna of Light', the mother of light and gnosis. Yet, her light alone cannot transform the 'intellect's hard and rocky soil'.

Knowledge, isolated from love and the power to act becomes sterile and abstract. Its warped echo is the voice of the 'sense-shackled human mind', which can map the cosmos and analyse the atom but remains trapped in doubt, concluding, 'I know not and perhaps shall never know'.

This is the tragedy of a purely intellectual knowledge that amasses facts but misses the Truth, that builds systems but cannot save the soul. It leads to a collective state of enlightened ignorance, where humanity is proud of its technological achievements but has lost its heart and its will to enact true change, remaining 'human... till in the Inconscient I fall dumb and sleep'.

Integration Beyond Individuation

Savitri's journey past the three Madonnas is not a rejection but a movement toward a deeper integration. She understands that her own being is the crucible where these three fundamental powers—Will (Ichha), Action (Kriya), and Knowledge (Jnana)—must be unified and perfected.

Her onward quest is for the central psychic being, the soul-flame, which alone can master and integrate these forces.

In psychology, a pale reflection of this unification is considered as a core process needed for healthy individual life, failure of which creates pathos and destruction.

Individuation, the cornerstone of Jungian psychology, is the lifelong process by which a person becomes a psychologically 'in-dividual', that is, a separate, indivisible unity or 'whole'.

It involves the conscious integration of the various aspects of the psyche, particularly those residing in the unconscious, to achieve a state of wholeness centred around the Self.

The journey begins with the confrontation with the Shadow, which Jung described as the 'apprentice-piece' of the inner work. The Shadow consists of the repressed, inferior, and even reprehensible tendencies that the conscious ego rejects.

The 'warped echoes' that Savitri encounters—the 'Man of Sorrows' with his self-pity, the 'Dwarf-Titan' with his rapacious ambition, and the 'Doubting Intellectual' with his arrogant agnosticism—are precise and powerful depictions of the Shadow in its Tamasic, Rajasic, and Sattvic forms.

They are the dark, unacknowledged but inevitably present potentials within the human psyche that must be faced and assimilated.

Here Sri Aurobindo provides a clear cartography which is spiritual. He shows that for such assimilation of egos the three Goddesses - the Triple Soul Forces- have to be integrated. He has uncovered a psychic process that Jung has missed out.

While Jung concentrated only on the assimilation of Shadow with the psyche, Sri Aurobindo points out the assimilation happening through harmonising the compartmentalised Soul-Forces by making them complementary to each other.

Thus Jungian individuation can be considered as the psychological reflection of the deeper integration that Savitri effects in her ascent.

This process of integration, which at once is both deeper and higher, that is dramatised in Savitri, finds its Darshanic counterpart in the sacred Sri Lalita Sahasranama, which describes the Divine Mother as the single, all-encompassing reality who is the source and substance of all divine aspects.

Sri Lalita Sahasranama presents the Supreme Goddess not as one power among many, but as the ultimate reality who contains all powers within Herself.

Bhaskararaya's commentary repeatedly emphasizes that She is both saguna (with qualities, such as those embodied by the three Madonnas) and nirguna (beyond all qualities). The Sahasranama describes the state of being that is the Divine Mother; Savitri narrates the process of a divine soul realising that state within the challenging conditions of terrestrial evolution.

The integrated state that Savitri seeks, which is the full expression of the Madonna of Light fused with Might and Compassion, is described by 658^th Name of the Mother. Iccha Shakti jnana Shakti Kriya Shakti svarupini.

Bhaskararaya in his commentary on this name, in the authority of Sanketa Paddhati, says 'Desire is Her head, wisdom Her trunk, action Her feet, thus Her body consists of three forces.'

He also cites Vamakesvara Tantra, which connects the three primordial archetypal functions with these three forces.

According to this Tantra, the Goddess is threefold viz., Brahmam Vishnu and Isa and She is the energies of desire, wisdom and action.

In Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, even as Savitri recognises each of the Madonnas as an important force in her own soul, she refuses to identify herself entirely with any of them. Instead she points out how the integration can be achieved completely only through the Union with the Divine and then bringing back the bliss of the Union into worldly actions to accelerate the upward evolution.

One day I will return, His hand in mine,

And thou shalt see the face of the Absolute.

Then shall the holy marriage be achieved,

Then shall the divine family be born.

There shall be light and peace in all the worlds.

The penultimate Name in Sri Lalita Sahasranama is Om Shivasaktyaikya rupini.