Théon was actually incarnation of the God of Death

Re: 10: Across the Silence of the Ultimate Calm by RY Deshpande on Wed 02 May 2007 02:26 AM PDT Profile Permanent Link The Yogin’s stifling Assignation with the Night

The fallen Life’s predicament cannot but set Aswapati on the quest to find a solution to it. He descends into the Night and witnesses there her pitiful plight. She in that gloom, with her perilous charm and beauty, lies cursed under the Gorgon spell. But Aswapati’s stepping into the Night is an act of grace, of supreme Grace. Wherever the Avatar moves, there, at every place, he leaves his presence behind. It is this presence that becomes the support and ground, ādhāra-sthāna, for the incarnate Force’s work. It is the guarantor of the Truth that shall prevail. There is a Greek proverb: “Great is Truth and it shall prevail.” But it prevails step by step with each appearance of the Avatar. It does not seek to prevail of its own. In fact, the harsh reality is that it cannot prevail in the Abyss of the Night unless the Avatar enters into it.

For the Truth to prevail, the Avatar has to come down and do the yoga-tapasya in the Inconscient fields. Its inevitability, of the Avatar’s coming, is an occult necessity and an occult fact, something of supreme significance, which the linear Newtonian-Darwinian evolution cannot grasp. The force of Matter is intrinsically inadequate to bring out of itself the higher expressions of the Truth. Aswapati’s descent into the Night is charged with all these connotations. Such indeed is the significance of the Book of the Traveller of the Worlds in Savitri, in which Aswapati the Avatar is putting his foot in every nook and corner of this vast cosmic manifestation. It is that universal Presence, calm and luminous and powerful, which gives to Savitri’s task the needed meaning and success.

When the Avatar puts his foot on the soil of the Night, it indeed marks the beginning of the Everlasting Day. In Sri Aurobindo’s yoga-tapasya it means, the first decisive step towards integral transformation. In its sequel great things will happen,—including the upsurge of terrible forces. That this business with the jeopardous Night should have coincided with the Second World War, when the Regiments of Darkness had heavily precipitated upon earth, does not therefore come as a surprise. The fate of the evolutionary creation was hanging in the balance. But Aswapati came out victorious. Savitri informs us about that aspect of the occult history. Here the aspect of Savitri as a symbol has certainly gone far ahead of the traditional aspect of it being a legend.

It was in this Night that the secret Mantra of Life was kept in a sealed box. During the days, about a hundred years ago, when the Mother was doing occultism under Théon, once she discovered this Mantra, with her name written on the seal. Théon got interested in it and wanted the Mother to break the seal for him. She refused. We can possibly understand Théon’s interest in it, if we know that he was actually incarnation of the God of Death. He as Death ought to be interested in having a full hold on Life. Life in the possession of Death makes sense even to us. Later the Mother gave this Mantra of Life to Sri Aurobindo. How marvellous!

What did Sri Aurobindo do with the Mantra? Who can say anything about it? It will be presumptuous to speak anything about it. Yet in our rash foolishness we can hazard a conjecture. He removed the hold Death had on Life and gave it back to the Mother, to her whose task it was to make the divinity of Life manifest here. It is that Shakti Aswapati was seeking in his cosmic and transcendental sojourns. He must meet her and he must persuade her to take the mortal birth because, thus alone, could the Mantra of Life work its dynamism in this creation. RYD