Culture
The Luminous Mother: Madonna of Light In Savitri And Sahasranama
- Saraswati is not merely a deity of memory and learning. She prepares a deserving seeker's mind for greater truths while veiling that very truth from those undeserving of it.
Devi Saraswati by Raja Ravi Varma
(This is the third article in Aravindan Neelakandan's series on Sri Aurobindo's 'Savitri' and the Sri Lalita Sahasranama. Readers are urged to first read parts one and two).
The quest for wholeness is a perennial theme in the spiritual and psychological traditions of humanity. While psychology, mostly in its dominant Western forms, made this quest the be all and end all as an utilitarian science, in the spiritual traditions of India, it is the ground for the spiritual evolution and individual realisation of a larger non-dual oneness.
It is a necessary integrational process which ultimately culminates in the evolutionary ascent and self-realisation of the soul.
This is very elaborately and intricately made clear in Sri Aurobindo's mighty epic Savitri. In it, in Book VII, 'The Book of Yoga', as Savitri undertakes the 'Yoga of the Soul's Release' and achieves 'The Entry into the Inner Countries', She confronts a series of divine archetypes, the 'Triple Soul-Forces'.
These are not external deities but powers of her own being, portions of her soul put forth to engage with the world's evolutionary struggle. She first meets the Madonna of Suffering, a spirit of divine pity who bears the world's grief but lacks the power to save. She then encounters the Madonna of Might, a warrior goddess who battles evil but lacks the ultimate wisdom to transform it.
She still ascends to a higher plane and meets the third and highest of these forces: the 'Madonna of Light'.
Her appearance is an epiphany of pure spiritual substance. Sri Aurobindo describes her thus:
A Woman sat in clear and crystal light:
Heaven had unveiled its lustre in her eyes,
Her feet were moonbeams, her face was a bright sun,
Her smile could persuade a dead lacerated heart
To live again and feel the hands of calm.
A low music heard became her floating voice:
'O Savitri, I am thy secret soul.'
This figure is an embodiment of pure effulgence, joy, and peace.
Her function is explicitly stated as one of spiritual healing and elevation. She has 'come down to the wounded desolate earth/To heal her pangs and lull her heart to rest', and more profoundly, 'To raise the spirit to its forgotten heights/And wake the soul by touches of the heavens'.
However, the full nature of this Madonna is revealed through a powerful dialectic that Sri Aurobindo constructs. Immediately following her speech, a 'warped echo' rises from the 'ignorant nether plane'—the voice of the limited, rational, and ultimately agnostic human intellect.
This is the 'mind of God's great ignorant world', which boasts of its scientific and philosophical achievements, claiming, 'If God is at work, his secrets I have found'. Yet, this intellectual pride culminates in doubt and limitation: 'But still the Cause of things is left in doubt... I know not and perhaps shall never know... Human I am, human let me remain'.
This juxtaposition is critical.
The Madonna of Light is not a personification or even a deification of intellectual brilliance; the poem assigns that quality to her 'warped echo'. Instead, she represents a higher, intuitive, and gnostic knowledge that fundamentally transcends the boundaries and methods of the rational mind.
The Madonna of Light, in Her capacity as a source of higher knowledge and divine utterance, aligns with the archetypal functions of the Goddess Saraswati. However, as established by the context in Savitri, this is not merely the Goddess of conventional learning but of a gnostic, world-transforming wisdom. She has a great function which She should ceaselessly perform:
Because thou art, the soul draws near to God;
Because thou art, love grows in spite of hate
And knowledge walks unslain in the pit of Night.
...
His hunger for the eternal thou must nurse
And fill his yearning heart with heaven’s fire
And bring God down into his body and life.
The Madonna of Light, therefore, represents a supramental truth that cannot be received by the unready vessel of the ordinary human mind. She is the goal, the source of illumination, but a greater transformation is needed for Her power to become fully effective on earth. She ceaselessly works for that.
This establishes the precise qualities for which we must seek and meditate on the corresponding names in Sri Lalita Sahasranama: not names of mere learning, but names that denote a transcendent, self-luminous, and transformative Truth-Consciousness.
Sure enough the 704th Name is Saraswati. Bhaskararaya in his commentary writes:
This situates Saraswati in the ascent of the soul and how She at once becomes the Light as well as the Veil for the seeker based on his or her spiritual maturity.
Whether She reveals Herself as the One 'to raise the spirit to its forgotten heights/And wake the soul by touches of the heavens' or one finds through Her presence only 'the the mind of God’s great ignorant world' is decided by the spiritual maturity of the seeker.
The 350th Name in Sri Lalita Sahasranama is Vagvadini. As She always abides in the form of speech on the tongue of all her devotees, She is known in the world as Vagvadini. and as She is the origin of all words, She is known as the Vagvadini.
Savitri still moves forward towards a higher integration as we shall in succeeding episodes.
