Sarvahuta Yajna of the Purusha Sukta and Aswapati’s yoga-tapasya in carrying the world’s desire to the supreme Goddess are two marvellous events pertaining to the cosmic manifestation of the manifesting Spirit. But here a question might arise.

Let us put it in the following manner: Is the Sacrifice of the Purusha a divine Will that is constantly streaming into this field of Ignorance and it driving the evolutionary process constantly, at every instance? Or is that Sacrifice something which marks the “Beginning”, a stage of the Involution, with the expectation of a “Return”, it just an entry which has somehow happened, a desirable Miracle with the waving of the Wand by the Wizard, and is not going to be a continuing entry, it taking place repeatedly? Firstly, one thing is clear: the Sacrifice of the Purusha is not happening directly as a result of the divine Will; it was willed by the Gods and the Rishis and the Sadhyas.

Since the cosmic order is willed by the Gods, the Rishis and the Sandhyas and the Purusha is sacrificed in the great sacrifice, how were these Gods, the Rishis and the Sandhyas born from the Purusha? Who made it possible? Their presence is prior to the Sacrifice itself. How did that happen? The question could be understood only by remembering that Purusha Sukta’s Sacrifice is but one episode in the sequence of this multi-meaningful creation.

How were the Gods born? What can one say about that? Nothing. It certainly is beyond the reach of the modern analytical mind, the rational mind. Vishnu Purana and Bhagavat Purana do describe the genealogy, but for our suspecting and wise incisive generation it will look mythology and maybe we could just avoid stepping into that domain. We simply don’t have any perceptive spiritual contact with the reality to which they belonged. There are gods and gods in the Transcendental, and elsewhere, and there are Rishis, and there are the Cycles of Time, the Aeons, the Manvantaras and Manus, and Manas-Putras, and we are not aware of them. But as far as the Purusha Sukta is concerned what is presented in it is only one occurrence: the Sukta is not a thesis or a treatise or a textbook on creation, a professional account the way a present-day academician would like to have. It is describing, rather celebrating, one specific event in the cosmic manifestation. The Sukta is triumph song also.

If we have to raise a question in the same vein then, what about the opening line of Savitri, that most wonderful line with suggestions and shades of revelation? It was the hour before the Gods awake,—how rich it is! But do the Gods awake by themselves or they are woken up by someone else, woken up by beating a drum or by blowing an occult mysterious horn? The temple gong goes out at 4 O’clock in the morning and the Gods awake, at Brahma-Muhurta. And this happens everyday, and with it begins the day for the Gods to do their work

However, one thing is definite: nothing seems to stream down or happen by itself. There has to be a call, yearning, willing, invocation, prayer. Nothing comes out without yoga or tapasya or yajna. It was in response to something from the earth that life entered into matter, that is, Pranamaya Purusha became the leader of Prana and Sharira, Life and Body, prāņa-śarīra-nétā, and later came in a similar way the Manomaya Purusha. Here is a vivid description in Savitri about the entry of Life on the material scene; she heard a call from the young gods helplessly locked within matter, and volunteered to make an adventurous move: (pp. 129-31)

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.

In that desolate grandeur, in that beauty bare,

In the deaf stillness, mid the unheeded sounds,

Heavy was the uncommunicated load

Of Godhead in a world that had no needs;

For none was there to feel or to receive.

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.

A voice was heard on the mute rolling globe,

A murmur moaned in the unlistening Void.

A being seemed to breathe where once was none:

Something pent up in dead insentient depths,

Denied conscious existence, lost to joy,

Turned as if one asleep since dateless time.

Aware of its own buried reality,

Remembering its forgotten self and right,

It yearned to know, to aspire, to enjoy, to live.

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 sweetness 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.

Here was an invocation from the gods present in the inanimate physical objects; Life heard the call; she made herself bold to step into the material unknown, least minding the hazard; she poured her gifts on them; but that itself brought a dire questioning Presence, dark and terrible, setting to nought all that she was trying to do—appeared Death. But the point is, she would not have come of her own had there not be that call from the young gods in the material world

There is a luminous aspect of this invocation when in identification with the Supreme’s Will is the will of the aspiring individual. When the Mother says to the Lord “What thou willest, what thou willest”, she herself, in a certain sense, is proposing, even willing, something, and leaving the rest to the Lord. She has worked out a certain possibility but whether it is realistic or not, opportune or not, that she is leaving to the Lord.

Equivalence of the four great cosmic powers as Maheshwari-Mahakali-Mahalakshmi-Mahasaraswati with the four soul-qualities or swabhāvas as we have in the ancient revelations such as the Purusha Sukta or the Gita is unmistakable; caturvarņa as it is called is a spiritual order working in the occult domain of Nature or Prakriti. If we go by the account of the Purusha Sukta then these powers were brought down more or less easily by the efficacy of the Sarvahuta Yajna, the Sacrifice of the All; the descent of other powers indispensable for the supramental manifestation fall outside its scope. We may look into it by going through the story recounted by the Mother. It is as follows. She is cautious also to say that it should be taken rather as a succinct story:

When the Supreme decided to exteriorise Himself in order to be able to see Himself, the first thing in Himself which He exteriorised was the Knowledge of the world and the Power to create it. This Knowledge-Consciousness and Force began its work; and in the supreme Will there was a plan, and the first principle of this plan was the expression of both the essential Joy and the essential Freedom, which seemed to be the most interesting feature of this creation. So intermediaries were needed to express this Joy and Freedom in forms. And at first four Beings were emanated to start this universal development which was to be the progressive objectivisation of all that is potentially contained in the Supreme. These Beings were, in the principle of their existence: Consciousness and Light, Life, Bliss and Love, and Truth. You can easily imagine that they had a sense of great power, great strength, of something tremendous, for they were essentially the very principle of these things. Besides, they had full freedom of choice, for this creation was to be Freedom itself.... As soon as they set to work—they had their own conception of how it had to be done—being totally free, they chose to do it independently. Instead of taking the attitude of servant and instrument… they naturally took the attitude of the master, and this mistake—as I may call it—was the first cause, the essential cause of all the disorder in the universe. As soon as there was separation—for that is the essential cause, separation—as soon as there was separation between the Supreme and what had been emanated, Consciousness changed into inconscience, Light into darkness, Love into hatred, Bliss into suffering, Life into death and Truth into falsehood. And they proceeded with their creations independently, in separation and disorder. The result is the world as we see it. It was made progressively, stage by stage, and it would truly take a little too long to tell you all that, but finally, the consummation is Matter—obscure, inconscient, miserable.... The creative Force which had emanated these four Beings, essentially for the creation of the world, witnessed what was happening, and turning to the Supreme she prayed for the remedy and the cure of the evil that had been done. Then she was given the command to precipitate her Consciousness into this inconscience, her Love into this suffering, and her Truth into this falsehood. And a greater consciousness, a more total love, a more perfect truth than what had been emanated at first, plunged, so to say, into the horror of Matter in order to awaken in it consciousness, love and truth, and to begin the movement of Redemption which was to bring the material universe back to its supreme origin. So, there have been what might be called ‘successive involutions’ in Matter, and a history of these involutions. The present result of these involutions is the appearance of the Supermind emerging from the inconscience; but there is nothing to indicate that after this appearance there will be no others... for the Supreme is inexhaustible and will always create new worlds. That is my story.

We may discern the following sequence in this narrative by the Mother: the Supreme’s wish to objectivise himself; the emanation of four beings to start the universal development; their separation from the Origin in the joy and freedom they had; the result due to separation from the divine Origin is the world as presently is; the creative Force which had emanated these four Beings is stunned on seeing what had happened; she turns to the Supreme and prays for the remedy; she is given a command to precipitate her Consciousness into this Inconscience, her Love into this suffering, and her Truth into this falsehood. That is the great sacrifice she has made, the Holocaust of the Divine Mother.

Is this Holocaust the same as the Holocaust of the Purusha Sukta? Not exactly so. The Holocaust described by the Mother is the beginning of the whole creative-manifestive movement; the Sacrifice of the Purusha Sukta is one of the movements of the process.

While it is the Consciousness-Force or Prakriti who creates the worlds and upholds the world-movements, for that to happen it is the Being of Truth, the Sat Purusha, who has to provide the needed support or ādhāra. The Sat Purusha has to do the sacrifice; it is the Purusha-Yajna that enables the appearance of these worlds, these countless worlds each characteristic of a particular plane with its appropriate expression. In that sense the creation of different worlds by Purusha or Prakriti is an inseparable act.

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri celebrates the Yajna of New Creation. It begins at the beginning of things. It opens with action in the Transcendental and the entire concern is for the Evolutionary Soul of the Earth. It has by now emerged out of the darkness of Inconscience and stepped into the half-light of knowledge, of mental awareness. But it is an awareness bordering at best on the spiritual and obviously this partial attainment cannot be the culmination of its growth. Beyond the worlds of ignorance, there are the worlds of luminous possibilities and they must become a part of the earth’s life. This can happen only when a radical change takes place in its character and quality. The imperative is that the hesitant path turn into a path of progress in Superconscience. There is however a formidable and frightening existential impediment standing across it and unless that is removed nothing divinely worthwhile can be achieved. The difficult problem of transition from Ignorance into the richly growing domains of Knowledge assumes an altogether new proportion as compared with the growth that until so far was taking place in the cosmic Ignorance.

It is a problem connected with response and receptivity of the physical Nature, with its stiffly formed Inconscient will difficult to change. Locked in that will is the inflexible Law of Death which sprang up when Life entered into Matter. It is indispensable that the law of growing immortality replaces this regime of mortal existence. Right now the grave impediment is in the nature of the mind of the physical. If we go to the root of the cause, we see that this mind was built by the powers of Darkness as an aspect of necessity, and has remained all along subject to them; the necessity was to give to whatever form had appeared out of the Void a power to withstand the tendency of it being swallowed by that Void itself. It has now become the mind of Night standing as an obstacle across the path of the cherished event. If the mind of the physical receiving the supramental is the mind of Light, then we can say that the mind of the physical receiving the Inconscient is the mind of Night. This physical mind, the mind of the obstinate physical, because it has already taken a form seems to be more tenacious, more ominous and threatening also than a certain kind of plasticity that is otherwise there in the infinite Nothingness. Not the spirit of Night, the Purusha of the Inconscience, but the grimly formed mind of Night with its refusal to change is what is to be recognized as the real occult difficulty. This also means that it is inherently a difficulty of Nature, a material and not a spiritual difficulty. This mind of Night must open to the wonderful powers of Truth and Consciousness and Bliss and become the mind of Light. The way is long towards it but it must be taken. That is the immediate purport of the yogic Savitri. In it is set the problem and in it is given the solution also.

But the mind of Night cannot transform into mind of Night by itself. It is obdurate and enduring and bears the stamp of Inconscience, of sticking ot what it is. The change in the evolutionary course cannot happen of its own, although it does possess all the possibilities of the Spirit in it. Therefore there has to be a direct operative involvement of the Supreme in it, an involvement that should be twofold. Which means that, the Supreme should incarnate himself as a full-bodied Avatar and do Yoga-Tapasya in the physical. The Vedic Rishis spoke of the body as an unbaked earthen vessel or atapta tanu in which so far no tapas has been done. In their marvellous pursuit they had arrived at this stage but got stuck because it is the descent of the Supermind that alone can bring about the miracle. The key for the descent of the Supermind in the physical was not available to them and therefore the issue remained unresolved. Now the supramental Avatar comes here as Aswapati and does tapasya in the physical, makes ready the desired tapta tanu. By his Yoga-Tapasya is prepared, in the field of ignorant and stumbling Nature, the ground for his Executive’s world-action. She shall then as Savitri take the mortal birth in the Will of the Supreme and do Shakti Yoga. With this double Yoga accomplished, in its Siddhi shall the Soul of the Earth step into the regions of Knowledge. A new and authentic felicity shall thus be established.

Savitri begins with the announcement of the death of Satyavan. This looks very dramatic, giving an impression that the poet is plunging without delay into the midst of the great cosmic action. In Narad’s revelation in the Book of Fate also we have the assertion that Satyavan’s death is a decreed death and that he must die. There is no ambiguity or indefiniteness in his pronouncement; in fact he is very categorical about it. Which means that, in that decision, are present the Transcendent’s both will and action, samkalpa and krīyā. In it Satyavan shall die to the past and abandon the paths of the old stumbling Nature. For this to happen on earth, the incarnate with the help of the Gods must climb up the new peaks of ascent. But the Gods are still asleep and unless they awake this night’s darkness cannot end; but it cannot end when the Doom stands there as her guard.

The Gods are the powers of the Divine promoting in cosmic action slow growth of the earth’s soul and therefore they must fulfillingly participate in it. If Reality in the truth of Movement has set into motion this enterprise, then it must as well grow in it. An aspect of that transcendental Reality as manifesting Ŗtam in the dynamics of Becoming has also to emerge in the great rhythms of Time. Behind this creation is that Transcendent’s samkalpa, the Will to be. This Will is the Cosmic Yajna upholding the vast Cosmic Action. But this Yajna cannot be performed when the divine forces are still asleep. Therefore the first task of the divine Being, Sat Purusha, is to kindle this fire of sacrifice in the primordial darkness; for, it is he who performs it for the sempiternal good of this creation. That hour, Brahma-Muhurta, to initiate the Sacrifice has now arrived and the offering or Ahuti of the Inconscient past in the Yajna can be made. The boons of this Yajna shall be the plenitudes of immortality. That is how Yajna in its root sense becomes the dynamic creativity with the dawn, the sun, the wind, the year, the sky, the directions, the earth, the stars, animals and birds and men and the great gods participating in it.

Under the old Nature’s sway Satyavan, the Divine incarnate as the Soul of the Earth, remained all along helpless and bound. He could not step into the eternal day, into the splendours of Superconscience. At times something did stir on the remote border of dream and awareness, swapna and suşupti, but too feeble was the movement. Many wide-shining dawns of the Veda had since then come and returned without fulfilling the promise they had brought with them. The inflexible Night with all her antagonism yet prevailed and the effort had to begin once again. The Daughter of the Sun, the transforming Might rising from golden flames of the Supreme’s cosmic Yajna must effectively deal with it. She must take the mortal birth, but even in that mortal birth she must possess the conqueror’s power that knows no defeat. Now the moment has arrived and the Goddess incarnates herself as Savitri. Divine Savitri accepts the mortal’s lot that has been always full of pain and suffering; she accepts the challenge of Satyavan’s death, the challenge posed to her by Yama the embodied Nothingness. The heroic undertaking is that this incorrigible and severe Yama’s incumbency be terminated. Presently the Soul of the Earth, the divine Soul is in his possession and Savitri must claim it from him. This can happen only in the utter inevitability of the death of Satyavan, her consort in the heavenly creation on earth. After one year of their association in the cycles of Time he must die to it. The result shall be the transformation of the immortal God of Death into the supreme Benefactor of this mortal creation, this mŗtyuloka to which we belong.

When this is done a new Yajna shall be kindled. This shall be the Yajna of New Creation. In it not the early Purusha and Prakriti but Satyavan and Savitri shall tend the leaping golden flames. These shall bear the expression of the True. The luminous Gods and Goddesses shall attend the ceremony and receive a share of the offerings in the Yajna. In it then shall be born the Sun-God, Savitŗ. Savitri who in the Transcendental is the daughter of Savitŗ, of the Sun-God, shall as a result prove on Earth the mother of that Sun-God himself. The daughter thus becomes, somewhat paradoxically in the manner of the Puranas, the mother of her father. When this happens there is the beginning of the new creation. In it is the Endowment, the Boon of the Yajna. That is the glory of the great Savitri-Yajna, and we should be thankful to Aswapati for performing it. The Fruit of this Yajna is the New Creation.