The Mother

14: The Mother’s Reincarnations

Since the beginning of the earth, wherever and whenever there was the possibility of manifesting a ray of consciousness, I was there.¹

– The Mother

‘The Divine also comes down into the cycle of rebirths, makes the great holocaust, endures shame and obloquy, torture and crucifixion, the burden of human nature, sex and passion and sorrow and suffering, manifests many births before he reveals the Avatar,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo to Nirodbaran.² The Mother has often talked about her former incarnations, yet always in a confidential way, either to her audience in the Playground or in private conversations.⁹¹ They are certainly part of the life we are trying to describe in this book, as they are part of the Great Life, the constant presence on earth of the Mahashakti in her many material emanations or embodiments. The Mother made it clear that she had grown aware of these incarnations unexpectedly; that she herself was astonished by their multiplicity; that all her experiences of former lives were living memories; and that she studied the subject of rebirth after having had the experiences.³ She also said that one should never speak vaguely of things like this, and condemned the pseudo-romantic suppositions based on nothing but the imagination.

This is not the place for a closer look at the subject of reincarnation, which is here taken for granted. As Sri Aurobindo wrote in the Arya: ‘We may according to our prepossessions accept it as the fruit of ancient psychological experience always renewable and verifiable and therefore true, or dismiss it as a philosophical dogma and ingenious speculation; but in either case the doctrine, even as it is in all appearances well-nigh as old as human thought itself, is likely to endure as long as human beings continue to think.’ ⁴

It may be useful, however, to mention Sri Aurobindo’s revealing answer to the question of a disciple concerning what he and the Mother had been doing in their previous lives: ‘Carrying on the evolution.’ – ‘I find it difficult to understand so concise a statement. Can’t you elaborate?’ asked the disciple. – ‘That would mean writing the whole of human history,’ replied Sri Aurobindo. ‘I can only say that as there are special descents to carry on the evolution to a farther stage, so also something of the Divine is always there to help through each stage itself in one direction or another.’ – Disciple: ‘… How is it that even Sri Krishna, Buddha or Christ could not detect your presence in this world?’ – Sri Aurobindo: ‘Presence where and in whom? If they did not meet, they would not recognize, and even if they met there is no reason why the Mother and I should cast off the veil which hung over these personalities and reveal the Divine behind them. Those lives were not meant for any such purpose … If the Mother were in Rome in the time of Buddha, how could Buddha know as he did not even know the existence of Rome? … An Avatar or Vibhuti⁹² have the knowledge that is necessary for their work, they need not have more … An Avatar does not even manifest all the Divine omniscience and omnipotence; he has not come for any such unnecessary display; all that is behind him but not in front of his consciousness. As for the Vibhuti, the Vibhuti need not even know that he is a power of the Divine. Some Vibhutis like Julius Caesar for instance have been atheists. Buddha himself did not believe in a personal God, only in some impersonal and indescribable Permanent.’ ⁵

In the Earthly Paradise

The Mother, according to her own statements, has had innumerable reincarnations. Sometimes she had several simultaneously, for instance at the time of Christ and during the Renaissance. ‘The Mother’s Vibhutis would usually be feminine personalities most of whom would be dominated by one of the four personalities of the Mother’ ⁶ – i.e. Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati. She has talked about some reincarnations only in passing; she has said, for instance, that she had lived several times in Babylonia – ‘I have extremely precise memories, completely objective’ ⁷ – in Assyria, in Japan, etc. Others she has described in some detail, and from these we choose a few where the references are not subject to doubt or interpretation.

Her very first incarnation in a human form was in the earthly paradise. ‘According to what I remember, there has certainly been a moment in earth’s history when there existed a kind of earthly paradise, in the sense that life at that time was perfectly harmonious and perfectly natural. By this I mean that the manifestation of the mind was in accord – was still in complete accord – with the ascending march of Nature, and totally harmonious, without perversion or distortion. This was the first stage of the mind’s manifestation in material forms.’ ⁸

‘How long did it last [the earthly paradise]? It is difficult to say. But for man it was a life which resembled a kind of culmination of the animal life. My memory is that of a life in which the body was perfectly adapted to its natural environment, the climate to the needs of the body and the body to the needs of the climate. Life was completely spontaneous and natural, just as a more luminous and more conscious animal life would be. There were none of the complications and distortions brought in by the mind later, in the course of its development.

‘I have the memory of that life. I got it, I relived it when I became conscious of the life of the earth as a whole. Yet I cannot say how long it lasted nor what area it covered, that I don’t know. I only remember the condition, the state of material Nature and what the human form and the human consciousness were like then, and this kind of harmony with all the other elements on earth: harmony with the animal life and such a great harmony with the life of the plants. There was a kind of spontaneous knowledge of how to use the things of Nature, of the properties of the plants, the fruits and everything the vegetable kingdom could provide. No aggressiveness, no fear, no contradiction nor friction, and no perversion at all. The mind was pure, simple, luminous, uncomplicated …

‘According to certain impressions – but they are only impressions – it would seem to have been in the vicinity of … I do not know exactly whether it was on this side of Ceylon and India or on the other [Mother points to the Indian Ocean, first to the west of Ceylon and India, then to the east, between Ceylon and Java], but it was certainly a place which no longer exists, which has probably been swallowed up by the sea. I have a very clear vision of that place and a very clear awareness of the life there and its forms, but I cannot give any material details. The truth is that, when I relived those moments, I was not interested in seeing such details. One is in a different state of mind and one has no curiosity for material details, everything is transformed into psychological experiences …

‘During a certain period, by night as well as by day, and in a certain state of trance I went back to a life that I had once been living, with the full consciousness that it was the culmination of the human form on earth, in the first human forms capable of embodying the divine Being. For that was what it was. It was the first time I was able to manifest in an earthly form, in a personal form, in an individual form – not in a common life form but an individual form.⁹³ By this I mean that it was the first time that the Being above and the being below had joined through the mentalization of the material substance. I lived this several times, but always in similar surroundings and always with a similar feeling of such a joyful simplicity, without any complications, without any problems, without all those questions: there was nothing, absolutely nothing of the kind! It was a culmination of the joy of living, nothing else but that, in common love and harmony. The flowers, the minerals, the animals: all lived in harmony.’ ⁹

King Hatshepsut

Do you not know, Asclepius, that Egypt is an image of heaven? Or, so to speak more exactly, that in Egypt all the operations of powers which rule and work in heaven have been transferred down to the earth below?¹⁰

The Mother has said that she had had ‘at least’ three incarnations in Egypt. Her contact with Egypt started when she was very young, at the Guimet Museum in Paris. When she was asked many years later by a child why accidents often happen to people who break into the tombs in Egypt, she answered abruptly: ‘They deserve it!’ Then she added: ‘Let me explain. In the physical form is contained “the spirit of the form,” and this spirit of the form remains for some time, even when outwardly the person is declared dead. As long as the spirit of the form persists, the body does not decompose. In ancient Egypt they had this knowledge. They knew that if they prepared the body in a certain manner, the spirit of the form would not leave it and the body would not disintegrate. In some cases they have succeeded wonderfully well. And if one disturbs the repose of beings who have remained like that for thousands of years, I understand that they are not very pleased, especially when their repose is disturbed out of unhealthy curiosity, justified in the name of science.

‘In the Guimet Museum, in Paris, there are two mummies. Of the one nothing much is left, but in the other the spirit of the form has remained very conscious, to such an extent that one can have a contact by means of the consciousness. It goes without saying that it cannot be very pleasant when a bunch of idiots come and stare at you with popping eyes understanding nothing and saying all the time: “Look, he is like this! Look, he is like that!” … It was never ordinary people who were mummified; they were beings who had realized a considerable inner power or who were members of the royal family, persons more or less initiated. There is a mummy which has been the cause of a large number of catastrophes. She was a princess, daughter of a pharaoh, and secretly at the head of a college of initiation at Thebes.’ ¹¹ The warning inscribed over some tombs, ‘Death shall come on swift wings to him that toucheth the tomb of the Pharaoh,’ ¹² seems not to have been a vain threat.

The Mother said that ancient Egypt was extremely occult. Now this begins to be understood more widely. Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, for instance, write in their Keeper of Genesis: ‘From available primary sources, the overall picture that emerges is that the “Followers of Horus” may not have been “kings” in the usual sense of the word but rather immensely powerful and enlightened individuals – high initiates who were carefully selected by an elite academy that established itself at the sacred site of Heliopolis-Giza thousands of years before history began.’ ¹³

‘Standing in front of a portrait of Queen Hatshepsut, the Mother told the following story when she came to the Ashram’s University Centre Library to open an exhibition on ancient Egypt in August 1954. When she was a girl of about eight or ten, she and her brother were taken one day by her teacher [more probably their nanny, Miss Gatliffe] to the famous Museum of the Louvre in Paris. On the ground floor are galleries of Egyptian antiquities. As they were slowly passing through the collections, the Mother was suddenly attracted by a beautiful toilet case inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli, which was exposed in one of the museum cases. An attendant noticed her great interest and explained to her that the toilet case had once belonged to the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut. He also showed her a fine portrait of the Queen as a young girl and smilingly remarked that she had a striking resemblance to that ancient Queen. The toilet case and particularly the comb appeared to be strangely familiar to the Mother.’ ¹⁴ It is reasonable to suggest that the Mother would not have told this anecdote if there was no profound reason for it. Besides, we have already mentioned that the Mother experienced an affinity with Queen Hatshepsut in 1914, during her visit to a museum in Cairo, en route to Pondicherry.

It is most often thought that Hatshepsut (ca. 1504-ca. 1483 bc)⁹⁴ has been the only Egyptian queen to reign as a king. Yet, this happened four or five times, e.g. in the case of Netokris (ca. 2160 bc), Sobeknofru (ca. 2160 bc), Ankhet-kheperu-re (ca. 1347 bc) and Tauseret (ca. 1186 bc). In all these cases, however, the rule of the female pharaoh was rather short, while Hatshepsut, whose name means ‘the Foremost of Women,’ ruled for about twenty-two years and her reign marked one of the highlights of Egyptian civilization. ‘Among the kings of the XVIIIth dynasty,’ writes Jean Yoyotte, ‘Hatshepsut is, together with Akhenaton, the one who evokes the most admiration, amazement and questions.’ ¹⁵ ‘Queen or, as she would prefer to be remembered, King Hatshepsut ruled during the 18th Dynasty Egypt for over twenty years,’ writes Joyce Tyldesley. ‘Her story is that of a remarkable woman. Born the eldest daughter of King Tuthmosis I, married to her half-brother Tuthmosis II, and guardian of her young stepson-nephew Tuthmosis III, Hatshepsut somehow managed to defy tradition and establish herself on the divine throne of the pharaohs. From this time onwards Hatshepsut became the female embodiment of a male role, uniquely depicted both as a conventional woman and as a man, dressed in male clothing, carrying male accessories and even sporting the traditional pharaoh’s false beard. Her reign, a carefully balanced period of internal peace, foreign exploration and monumental building, was in all respects – except one obvious one – a conventional New Kingdom regime; Egypt prospered under her rule.’ ¹⁶

Hatshepsut married her half-brother Thutmosis II when she was about fourteen or fifteen years of age, thus becoming ‘the Great Princess, great in favour and grace, Mistress of All Lands, Royal Daughter and Royal Sister, Great Royal Wife, Mistress of the Two Lands [i.e. Upper and Lower Egypt].’ Her royal husband died young and was succeeded by her nephew, Tuthmosis III, still a child. Hatshepsut became his regent and therefore the highest authority in the realm. But then Hatshepsut sprang a surprise: in the seventh year of the boy’s reign she proclaimed herself Pharaoh, or rather had herself proclaimed thus by an oracle of Amon, the chief god and presiding deity of the huge temples in Luxor and Karnak, the temple in which she was crowned. She became ‘the Female Horus, the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Maatkare, the son of Re, Hatshepsut-Khnemet-Amun! May she live forever!’

The reason for this unconventional and bold step is unknown. It may be supposed, however, that she took the crown of the Two Lands because for some reason or other the succession of the dynasty was in peril, her husband having died prematurely and the new king still being a child. It should be realized that, for the Egyptians, their Pharaoh was literally a god on earth, who upheld Maat, i.e. the Dharma of the land, who made the sun rise and the river Nile come into spate, and who sustained the life of all beings. Joyce Tyldesley makes a telling comparison between Hatshepsut and Queen Elizabeth I of England, ‘a woman who inherited her throne against all odds at a time of dynastic difficulty when the royal family was suffering from a shortage of sons, and who deliberately stressed her relationship with her vigorous and effective father in order to lessen the effect of her own femininity and make her own reign more acceptable to her people.’ ¹⁷

The proof of Hatshepsut’s insight and strength in daring the practically impossible is the success of her reign as King Maatkare. (Re being the Sun, Ka the divine force in all, and Maat the same as Maya or Dharma, the name could be translated as ‘Maat is the vital Force of Re,’ or, in terms more familiar to us, ‘Shakti of the Sun’ – the Sun being the symbol of the divine Unity-Consciousness, the Supramental.) Thanks to her, Egypt, which had been partially ruined by the invasion of the Hyksos only half a century before, became prosperous again. Peace reigned within the country and with all its neighbours. ‘I have given you the pacification within the provinces and every town is quiet,’ she proclaimed. Great building works were undertaken, and so were expeditions to foreign lands. Hatshepsut became ‘the most influential woman ever known’ and her reign ‘the most fruitful period ever in Egypt.’ She ‘stands out as one of the great monarchs of Egypt.’

In the temple of Karnak, Hatshepsut had two gigantic obelisks erected. The process of their being hewn out of the rock, in the south of the country, of their transportation and erection is shown on the walls of Deir el-Bahri. After something like three and a half millenniums, one of these obelisks is still standing. The top of it was covered with shining electrum, a mixture of gold and silver. Thus were the rays of Re, the Sun, reflected over the country during its daily course from dawn to dusk and its yearly course through the seasons. It must have been a splendid sight.

And then there was the temple at Deir el-Bahri, Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple, called Djeser-Djeseru: ‘Holy of Holies’ – ‘beyond doubt one of the most beautiful buildings in the world,’ and generally recognized as such. ‘It is built at the base of the rugged Theban cliffs [on the west bank of the Nile], and commands the plain in magnificent fashion: its white colonnades rising, terrace above terrace, until it is backed by the golden living rock. The ivory white walls of courts, side chambers and colonnades have polished surfaces which give an alabaster-like effect. They are carved with a fine art, figures and hieroglyphs being filled in with rich yellow colour, the glow of which against the whites gives an effect of warmth and beauty quite indescribable.¹⁸ (J.R. Buttles).

Although the architect of Djeser-Djeseru seems to have been Hapuseneb, the supervisor and creator of the masterwork was Senenmut, the famous assistant of Hatshepsut, acting on her direct inspiration. ‘I was the greatest of the great in the whole land,’ say the hieroglyphs in Senenmut’s tomb. ‘I was guardian of the secrets of the King [i.e. Hatshepsut] in all his places: a privy councillor on the Sovereign’s right hand, secure in favour and given audience alone. I was one upon whose utterances his Lord relied, with whose advice the Mistress of the Two Lands was satisfied, and the heart of the Divine Consort was completely filled.’ ¹⁹ It is interesting to note how Hatshepsut had picked out a whole team of able collaborators to run the kingdom. Senenmut, her assistant, architect Hapuseneb, Chancellor Neshi, leader of the expedition to Punt, the Treasurer Tuthmosis, Useramen the vizier, Amenhotep the chief steward, Inebni, Viceroy of Kush, and others. Again one is reminded of Elizabeth I of England and her court. The Mother would probably have said that this group of outstanding collaborators belonged to ‘the family.’

The reign of the extraordinary Queen Hatshepsut was a period of peace, prosperity and stabilization. It was the basis upon which Thutmosis III, when he finally became Pharaoh in his own right, expanded the kingdom. He became known as ‘the Egyptian Napoleon’ and waged no less than seventeen victorious campaigns. Hatshepsut’s work in reviving the prosperity of the land would render Tiy and Akhenaton’s astounding reformation possible. Who has hacked away her effigies and the cartouches containing her royal name? Nobody can tell with any certainty. To the Egyptians the power of the written or chiselled word or hieroglyph was very real, as was the power of the statues and buildings. An erasure of a name or the mutilation of a statue was a direct attack on the Ka, and thus on the survival of the person represented by the hieroglyphs or the statue. Strange to say, the memory of King Hatshepsut was obliterated for many centuries from Egyptian history and only rediscovered in the nineteenth century.

Queen Tiy

‘About two years ago,’ the Mother said in May 1956, ‘I had a vision in connection with Z.’s son. She had brought him to me – he was not quite one year old – so I had just seen him in the room where I receive people. He gave me the impression of someone very well known to me, but I didn’t know who or what. Then, in the afternoon of the same day [during her midday rest], I had a vision. It was a vision of ancient Egypt, and I was somebody there: I was the High Priestess, or whoever. I didn’t know who, for [during the experience] one doesn’t tell oneself “I am so-and-so.” The identification is complete, there is no objectivation, so I don’t know.

‘I was in an admirable building, immense! so high! but quite bare. There was nothing except a place with magnificent paintings, which I recognized as the paintings of ancient Egypt. I was coming out of my apartments and entering a kind of large hall. There was a sort of gutter all along the walls, for collecting the water. And then I saw the child, half naked, playing in it. I was quite shocked. I said: “What is this! This is disgusting!” (The feelings, ideas and all that were translated into French in my consciousness.) Then the tutor came, I had him called. I gave him a scolding. I heard the sounds. I don’t know what I said, I don’t remember the sounds any more. I heard the sounds I was pronouncing, I knew their meaning, but the translation was into French and the sounds I didn’t remember.

I spoke to [the tutor]. I told him: “How can you let the child play in there?” He answered – and I woke up with his reply – saying … I did not hear the first words, but in my thought it was [translated as]: “Amenhotep likes it.” “Amenhotep” I heard and I remembered. Then I knew the little one had been Amenhotep.

‘So I know that I spoke. I spoke in that language, but I don’t remember it now. I remembered “Amenhotep” because I have kept that in my active consciousness: “Amenhotep.” But the rest, the other sounds did not remain. I have no memory for sounds. And I know I was his mother. Then I knew who I was, for I know that Amenhotep was the son of so-and-so. Besides, I looked it up in history.’ ²⁰

As the Mother confirmed afterwards, that child, her son, was Amenhotep IV (1376-47 bc),⁹⁵ the future Akhenaton, which means that she was Queen Tiy (1397-60 bc). Tiy, though her father occupied a high position in the realm, was not of royal blood and possibly of Nubian descent. She had been chosen in 1389 as his principal consort by Amenhotep III, the Magnificent. ‘The name of her father is Yuya, the name of her mother is Tuya. She is the spouse of a powerful king whose southern border reaches to Karoy and his northern to Naharin.’ ²¹ This is the way the Pharaoh had the high status of his wife proclaimed throughout the Two Lands. Tiy became the mother of Amenhotep IV (1376-47 bc), who afterwards, in one of the most spectacular religious reformations in history, would call himself Akhenaton and found the city of Akhetaton.

‘Tiy had a very powerful influence on her husband Amenhotep III. Her strong personality dominated the mentally weaker king completely. As his queen, she decided about the broad outlines within the structure of his policy and played an important role in the Egyptian religious life. Amenhotep III already felt the power of the sun god Aton, and it is in no way improbable that Tiy took the initiative to stimulate his dormant sympathy for this god.’ ²² The sun god Aton, never represented in human form but as the sun disk, was central to the theology of Heliopolis, perhaps the most ancient in Egypt, although he played only a minor role in the official religion. That Amenhotep and Tiy were profoundly dedicated to Aton is shown by the fact that he was revered in their palace at Malgatta, west of Thebes, and that the boat in which Tiy moved on the huge artificial lake her husband had dug for her was called ‘Aton radiates.’

Most historians agree that Tiy had an equally strong influence on her son Amenhotep IV. As Berbers and Beumer write: ‘Through his mother Tiy, in this supported by his father Amenhotep III, he must have been initiated in the philosophies around Aton and indoctrinated with the idea that for the religious salvation of Egypt a god like Aton was the only outcome.’ ²³ This influence must have been very strong indeed, for after his father had died Amenhotep IV changed his name into Akhenaton, translated variously as ‘he who is faithful to Aton,’ ‘One useful to Aton,’ ‘he who serves Aton’ and ‘reflection of Aton.’ And not only did he change his name, he founded a totally new city, Akhetaton, ‘Horizon of Aton,’ on the right bank of the Nile, halfway between Thebes and Memphis. The name of the city may be understood as the projection of the Sun World into the material world of the earth.

This splendid city, entirely dedicated to the new creed, was built in an incredibly short time and must have been a costly enterprise. Akhenaton lived there with his wife, the famous Nefertiti (‘the Beautiful has come’) and their six daughters. There he worshipped the sun disk, represented by the ankh, the sign of life, and little hands blessing all existence. And there he received also his mother Tiy, who had remained in her palace at Malgatta, but who would breathe her last, in 1347, in that fantastic city which had probably arisen under her impulse.

Akhenaton’s revolutionary undertaking – he has been called ‘the heretic king’ and ‘the most controversial of all kings of Egypt’ – went completely against the established and extremely powerful religion of the time, and is considered the first attempt at monotheism. The faceless Aton was declared the only God and the worship of all other gods, of the whole Egyptian panthéon, was abolished. The significance of this act can only be understood if one realizes that the priestly caste was second in power to the Pharaoh – who was a living god, the incarnated Horus on earth – and often vied with him for supremacy. The temple of Amon in Thebes had become one of the richest in Egypt, and the power of the Amon priests was still on the increase. ‘By the middle of the New Kingdom, the religious foundations controlled an estimated one-third of the cultivated land and employed approximately twenty per cent of the population … Within a very short time the Amon temple at Thebes was second only to the throne itself as a centre of economic and political influence in Egypt.’ ²⁴ Their wrath at Akhenaton’s reformist acts must have been unforgiving.

And unforgiving it was. There seem to have been signs of the decline of Akhetaton even towards the end of Akhenaton’s brief life. (Life was generally brief in those times.) After his death in 1347 bc, and while Nefertiti was still living in her palace at Akhetaton, the brand-new city gradually emptied of its population. When Nefertiti died in 1344 bc, her son Tutankhaton could or would no longer resist the conservative powers; he changed his name into Tutankhamon and, together with his wife, went back to Thebes. In 1333 bc general Horemheb became Pharaoh. This was the end of the XVIIIth Dynasty – and of the City of the Sun, which he razed to the ground with the fury only religious fanaticism can inspire. It disappeared under the desert sands, and for many centuries there was nothing to be seen but a hill at a place called Tell el-Amarna.

Modern historians have little or no understanding of what happened at the time of Tiy, Akhenaton and Nefertiti. The reason is that they project their world ‘realistic’ view and even their religious prejudices on times and events that were utterly different from the ones in which they themselves live. As the Mother said, the life, culture and religion of ancient Egypt were determined by an exceptional presence of the occult. What is occult is by definition unknown. It is worthwhile pointing out that many of the prominent Greeks – Solon, Pythagoras, Herodotus, Plato – found the sources of their knowledge in Egypt (which means that European culture has its roots deeper than Greece, in the Kingdom of the Two Lands).⁹⁶ All of these Greeks were instructed by representatives of the Egyptian priesthood, but as the latter were bound by their vows, the knowledge they shared was but a part of what they actually knew. Only recently has there been an effort among Western scholars to approach ancient Egypt with less arrogance and with more patience and openness when seeking the still hidden sources of that civilization.

The impulse, the force Tiy, Akhenaton and Nefertiti (who also was totally dedicated to the Aton) were drawing from, must have been very powerful indeed to allow for a revolution as the one brought about. Looking back on it from the viewpoint of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, one may assume the following. Tiy was a ‘Vibhuti’ of the Universal Mother, a fact which endowed her with the awareness of her eternal soul within, and thus of the Divine. She had probably become an initiate of the mysteries of Heliopolis, keeper of the secrets of the Sun. Here it is worth mentioning that Sri Aurobindo said that the Sun is the symbol of the Supramental, which is the Divine upholding all creation. (This upholding and blessing is graphically represented in Akhenaton’s iconography of the Sun disk.) Having become a high occult initiate, Tiy may have had the vision or inspiration – or a series of visions or inspirations – of the supramental Truth. The word ‘supramental Truth’ is nothing but a verbal abstraction for a divine Reality which surpasses everything an ordinary human being can feel, imagine and experience. It is the One Reality present in all that exists and of which the gods are the cosmic powers.

Tiy may have had some kind of realization of the Supramental and transmitted it to her husband, son and daughter-in-law. Nothing short of such a realization could have been powerful enough to enable these few individuals, however elevated their position, to undertake the steps just mentioned against the stubborn, conservative, centuries-old established powers and customs. Graham Philips writes: ‘Indeed, [the Aton] is unlike any Egyptian god: an all powerful, heavenly father who demands that his children live in “truth.” Precisely what this reference to truth implies is hard to say. One can only assume that Akhenaton’s followers were encouraged to behave candidly and live an honest life. The word Maat, “Truth,” appears again and again at Amarna, and the phrase “living in truth” seems almost to have been a motto of the new religion.’ ²⁵ It is also a key concept in the yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

‘In reply to a question (concerning Akhenaton) I had put her,’ recalls Tanmaya, a French teacher at the Ashram school, ‘Mother let it clearly be understood that she had been Queen Tiy, the mother of Akhenaton … She specified that Akhenaton’s revolution was intended to reveal to the people of that time the unity of the Divine and his manifestation. This attempt, the Mother added, was premature, for the human mind was not yet ready for it. It had, however, to be undertaken in order to assure the continuity of its existence in the mental plane.’ ²⁶

Joan the Maid

The Mother has referred several times to facts and situations from the life of Jeanne d’Arc (1412/13-1431 ad) which came back to her on many occasions and ‘with a terrific precision.’ ²⁷ It is no exaggeration to say that the life of this young French girl was a pure miracle. (That some miracles take time for their completion doesn’t prevent them from being miracles.) ‘She is the wonder of the ages,’ wrote Mark Twain.²⁸ The facts, which in this case can be verified in historical detail, are there for us to read and ponder.

Jeannette was the daughter of simple people (laboureurs, which means farmers) at Domrémy, a small town on the French border with Lorraine, at a confused and critical time for the kingdom of France. What we now know as France was then divided into many parts, belonging mainly to three powers: the King of France, the King of England and the Duke of Burgundy. It is amazing that at that time nearly nothing was left of France – even Paris was in the hands of the English – and that the English conquests threatened to deal France a deathblow. France might have been erased from the map had it not been for that simple girl Jeannette, now known as Joan of Arc, or Joan the Maid.

‘A twelve year old child, a very young girl, taking the voice of her heart for the voice of heaven, conceives the strange, improbable, even absurd idea of doing what human beings are not able to do any longer: save her country,’ writes the French historian Jules Michelet.²⁹ ‘She mulls this idea over for six years without taking anybody into her confidence; she even says nothing about it to her mother or to her confessor. Without any support from a priest or from her parents, she walks all that time alone with God in the solitude of her great endeavour. She waits till she is eighteen to execute it, irresistibly. She rides through France, ravaged and depopulated, its roads infested with brigands. She imposes herself at the court of Charles VII. She plunges into the war. In soldiers’ camps, which she has never even seen before, and in combat, nothing astonishes her. She throws herself, intrepid, against the swords of the enemy. Wounded on several occasions but never discouraged she gives confidence to the old soldiers, makes everybody fight as one man together with her, and nobody dares to be afraid of anything any longer.’

However romantic this text may appear, it tells nothing but the truth. Jeannette started hearing her voices when she was twelve or thirteen and was frightened by them. This daughter of a nobody was sent on a divine mission to crown the dauphin as King of France at Reims and save her country! At the same time, her father had dreams in which he saw Jeannette among soldiers; suspecting that she would become a soldiers’ girl, he beat her severely when she finally dared to tell him about her intentions. Still she persisted and managed after several attempts to convince Robert de Baudricourt, Lord of Vaucouleurs, of her sincerity and the possible truth of her mission. At seventeen she rode, with an escort of six armed, rough and tough companions for eleven days through the hardships of winter and the dangers of a country at war (and hardly less dangerous when at peace). The simple people of Vaucouleurs had paid for her horse and for her man’s clothes, the only outfit convenient to ride on horseback.

At the Château of Chinon she met the Dauphin, whom she convinced of her purpose and who was a transformed man after talking to her in private. He ennobled her and saw to it that she was equipped with white armour, a white horse, her own standard, and, like other army commanders, a private military escort called maison militaire. Off she rode, Joan of Arc, seventeen years of age, at the head of an army of more than ten thousand men. And this was at a time when Catholic theologians still doubted not only whether women had a soul but whether they were human beings, and when it was considered blasphemous for women to wear men’s clothes.

Joan with her army went to liberate Orléans, which was completely surrounded by English troops and about to surrender. On 29 April 1429, after only nine days, ‘with a rapidity that stupefied all of Europe,’ she chased away the English and freed Orléans. Régine Pernoud writes: ‘Later, during her trial, Joan will declare: “I was the first to put up the ladder against the fortification at the end of the bridge of Orléans.” And it suffices to define her strategy by recalling that she was always to be found at the most exposed spot, covering the retreat at the Augustins to turn it into an attack, or giving the example of how to climb the walls by being the first to put up a ladder and climb it when taking the Tourelles.’ ³⁰ Joan was wounded by an arrow above the left breast, but ‘after having herself bandaged, she climbed on her horse again.’

The liberation of Orléans was followed by a string of victories, the one at Patay being no less important than the one at Orléans. On 29 June, Charles started to march towards Reims. Unexpectedly, but in accordance with the prediction made by Joan’s voices, the towns on his way changed their allegiance from the English to him. He was solemnly anointed and crowned King of France on 17 July. ‘The liturgy carries such a weight that he thereby becomes, to all, the real king.’ ³¹⁹⁷ Gradually large parts of the Kingdom of France will return to him and in 1437 he will even enter Paris again.

By then Joan was dead – she had been cruelly burned at the stake as a heretic in Rouen, on 30 May 1431. Her astounding appearance on the scene of history had lasted no longer than two years. All the time she had faithfully followed the guidance of her voices, which she said were those of St Catherine (of Alexandria), St Margaret (of Antioch) and St Michel, the archangel, leader of the celestial armies.⁹⁸ The voices had told her that her mission would last no longer than one year, and so it happened. After the triumphal coronation at Reims, the difficulties started. A weak and wavering man, Charles VII, influenced by jealous advisers, surreptitiously withdrew his support from Joan. Her military campaigns – in which she was assisted by her faithful captains Dunois, La Hire, Xaintrailles, Gilles de Ray (for a time) and others – were no longer successful, and on 23 May 1430 she was captured before Compiègne.

The verdict of Joan’s trial was predetermined because the English wanted the whole of Europe to know that they had only been beaten by the supernatural powers of a witch. It is a sorry fact that Bishop Cauchon, and the Inquisitor at his side, were fanatically supported by the University of Paris in condemning Joan, and that the learned judges tried to trick the young girl with broadsides of complicated theological questions. But she stuck to the inspiration of her voices, time and again silencing her interrogators by the candid directness of her answers. There she stood, sent by God to do the impossible – ‘je suis venue de par Dieu’ (I have come from God) – never giving in to their threats or enticements. Finally the learned reverend men had to use some canonical machinations to condemn her as a heretic and deliver the nineteen-year-old heroic virgin into the hands of the executioner.

‘Anyone may believe what he chooses to believe,’ says the French historian Guy Breton about Joan the Maid. ‘All what I can say is that [she is] the most marvellous and the most extraordinary being of our history, a personality who is without equal in whatever country, in whatever time.’ ³² ‘She was the wonder of the Ages,’ writes Mark Twain. ‘And when we consider her origin, her early circumstances, her sex, and that she did all the things upon which her renown rests while she was still a young girl, we recognize that while our race continues she will be also the Riddle of the Ages … Out of a cattle-pasturing peasant village, lost in the remoteness of an unvisited wilderness and atrophied with ages of stupefaction and ignorance, we cannot see a Joan of Arc issue equipped to the last detail for her amazing career and hope to be able to explain the riddle of it, labour at it as we may … Joan of Arc stands alone, and must continue to stand alone, by reason of the unfellowed fact that in the things wherein she was great she was so without shade or suggestion of help from preparatory teaching, practice, environment, or experience.’ ³³

In the section Recollections and Diary Notes of Champaklal Speaks, there is a note dated 6 February 1940. It says: ‘Mother was arranging flowers. It was an understanding that in order to save time I could show to her paintings, etc., at that hour when she arranged flowers. Champaklal: “Can I show the plate now?” Mother smiled and said: “Yes, yes.” After seeing the painting Mother said: “This is the best.” Champaklal: “Is that so?” Mother: “I think so. We shall see. Sri Aurobindo was the artist.” Champaklal: “Leonardo da Vinci?” Mother smiled sweetly and said: “Yes.” Then I pointed to the picture [of Mona Lisa] and said: “Mother, it seems this is yours?” Mother: “Yes.”’ ³⁴ In his Reminiscences, Udar narrates that he wanted a Sanskrit name for his wife Mona and that the Mother said she would ask Sri Aurobindo. ‘The next day the Mother told me that Sri Aurobindo wanted Mona to keep her name as it reminded him of Mona Lisa. Then the Mother added: “You know, Udar, I was Mona Lisa, and Sri Aurobindo, as Leonardo da Vinci, painted me in that famous picture.”’ ³⁵ About Leonardo, Sri Aurobindo himself wrote: ‘What Leonardo da Vinci held in himself was all the new age of Europe on its many sides. But there was no question of Avatarhood or consciousness of a descent or pressure of spiritual forces. Mysticism was no part of what he had to manifest.’ ³⁶ According to Kenneth J. Atchity: ‘His multifaceted, wide-ranging mind, coupled with brilliant genius and ready wit, gave Leonardo da Vinci the title Renaissance man as soon as the word Renaissance came into use.’ ³⁷

Leonardo’s painting of Mona Lisa is ‘perhaps the most famous image of a human face in the history of Western Art.’ ³⁸ At the time when her famous portrait was painted she seems to have been a young woman of twenty, whose name was Lisa di Anton Maria di Noldo Gherardini, and she was the third wife of Francesco di Bartolomeo di Zanobi del Giocondo. ‘It is often said the Mona Lisa is mysterious,’ writes Roger D. Masters, ‘but much more is known about the subject of the portrait than is usually realized. Lisa Gherardini married Francesco del Giocondo in 1495. He had first married Camilla Rucellai in 1491, but she had died after giving birth to a son; his second wife, Tommasa Villani, likewise died within a year after they were married in 1493. In April of 1503, Francesco del Giocondo had two reasons to commission a painting of his third wife, Lisa:⁹⁹ she had just given birth to his third child, a son (her second, an infant daughter, had died in 1499), and he had just bought a house. Such events were often the occasion for a familial portrait.

‘La Gioconda probably dates from this time because Raphael copied and imitated it between 1504 and 1506, and the dates are consistent with Leonardo’s other activities in Florence. Although no one knows exactly why Leonardo received the commission, Vasari claims he worked on La Gioconda for about four years. For some reason the portrait was never delivered to the merchant who ordered it.’ ³⁹ It is also said that Leonardo kept it always with him wherever he went, till he died. When one knows about the Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s eternal relationship, their meeting during the Renaissance as Mona Lisa and Leonardo da Vinci would be an explanation for the time and artistry Leonardo lavished on the portrait, for the personal value he attached to it, and for the smile which keeps so many people spellbound up to the present day.

The Mother has said more than once that during the Italian and French Renaissance, just as during the time of Christ, she was on earth in four different bodies.⁴⁰ Two of these incarnations, Joan of Arc and Mona Lisa, we have met. The third incarnation was Queen Elizabeth I of England. The fourth one was Margaret of Valois (1553-1615), Queen of France and Navarre. In the second chapter of this book, while depicting the Mother’s life as an artist, we have seen how she was thunderstruck by a portrait of Margaret of Valois at the beautiful Château in Blois, on the Loire. She was so overpowered by the feeling that she herself had been the subject of that portrait that she voiced her amazement in a way which made other people stop and stare.

The painting, now in the National Library in Paris, was by François Clouet, a typical French Renaissance painter closely related to the humanistic circles. Those were the troubled times of the Reformation, when Catholics and Protestants, the people of the New Faith, were fighting each other mercilessly throughout western Europe, and when the front lines of this war of religion ran through families and marriages. Margaret was, like her painter and the other members of her circle, through and through a Renaissance person, highly intelligent and cultured, intent on equilibrium and harmony, and trying to understand where others did not want to, trying to heal where others sought to harm. In 1572 she married Henry IV of France precisely in order to seal a peace between the religious parties – but five days later thousands of Protestants were treacherously massacred on St Bartholomew’s Day. When she retired to the Château of Usson, Margaret held court for various men of erudition and letters. Her Mémoires, poems and letters are still much appreciated.

The Virgin Queen

The Mother said several times, for instance on 12 September 1964 and on 15 July 1967 in the private conversations which make up the Agenda, that she had been Queen Elizabeth I of England (1533-1603). In a conversation from 1964 she confirms an anecdote about Elizabeth she had told thirteen years before. ‘There is a true story about Queen Elizabeth. She had come to the last days of her life and was extremely ill. But there was trouble in the country about questions of taxation, and various people (merchants, I believe) had formed a delegation to present a petition to her. She lay very ill in her room, so ill that she was hardly able to stand. But she got up and dressed in order to receive them. The person who was taking care of her cried out: “But it is impossible, you will die of this!” The queen answered quietly: “Dying one does afterwards” … This is an example from a whole series of experiences one can have in the life of a king, and it is this which justifies the choice of the psychic being when it takes up this kind of life.’ ⁴¹ By then Elizabeth had reigned for forty-five years, something nobody would have dared to predict when she was born.

She was the daughter of Henry VIII of England and his second wife Anne Boleyn. Everybody knows that this Henry had many wives, but the reason for his six marriages is usually less well known: Henry did not get a son from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, which meant that the house of the Tudors would lose the crown and that the kingdom might be ruled by a foreign king. Catherine gave him a daughter, Mary. Anne Boleyn, whom he married after repudiating Catherine, bore him Elizabeth. Only from his third wife, Jane Seymour, did he get a son, Edward. By then the whole situation of the king, his kingdom and his religion had radically changed. For at the time of his first marriage Henry and all of his realm were Catholic, and a Catholic cannot divorce without the sanction of the Pope. When the Pope, mainly for political reasons, was unwilling to sanction his divorce from Catherine, Henry seceded from the Catholic Church and became head of the Anglican Church (as the British monarch still is today). England was now a Protestant nation.

When Anne Boleyn bore him Elizabeth, but no son, he repudiated her too by having his marriage to her declared illegal by the Parliament. Thus Elizabeth became illegitimate and lost her rights to the throne. Her mother was beheaded for treason and adultery before Elizabeth was three years old. Still her father continued showing interest in her and later even nominated her third in succession to the throne, after Edward and Mary. Deeply marked by these traumatic events, the very intelligent Elizabeth was put through an arduous schooling which made her into a highly cultured Renaissance person. As her tutor, Roger Ascham would declare: ‘Her mind has no womanly weakness, her perseverance is equal to that of a man, and her memory long keeps what it quickly picks up. She talks French and Italian as well as she does English, and has often talked to me readily and well in Latin, moderately in Greek. [She had notions of Spanish and German too.] When she writes Greek and Latin, nothing is more beautiful than her handwriting. She delights as much in music as she is skilful in it. In adornment she is elegant rather than showy.’ ⁴²

After Henry VIII died in 1547, young Edward VI acceded to the throne, but his health was poor and he died in 1553. Now Mary, Catherine’s daughter, became Queen and married Philips II of Spain. Both monarchs were fanatically Catholic and did their utmost to destroy the new Protestant Church in England, including people as well as books, so that the Queen was soon known as ‘Bloody Mary.’ Mary, who remained childless, knew that the whole of Protestant England rallied behind Elizabeth, for no true-blue Englishman wanted England to become a dependency of hated Spain. Mary had Elizabeth imprisoned in the frightful Tower of London and it looked as if her head, just like her mother’s, might fall, but her strength of character and her steadfastness under interrogation saved her.

Mary died in 1558, and what had seemed so unlikely, if not impossible in all those years when her life hung by a thread, happened. Elizabeth acceded to the throne ‘amid bells, bonfires, patriotic demonstrations and other signs of public jubilation.’ ‘If ever any person had either the gift or the style to win the hearts of people, it was this Queen,’ wrote an enthusiastic observer, ‘and if ever she did express the same it was at present, in coupling mildness with majesty as she did, and in stately stooping to the meanest sort.’ ⁴³

But Elizabeth was a woman, and her sex was ‘an almost desperate impediment.’ Women in sixteenth-century England – and in other countries too – had no vote, few legal rights, and an extremely limited chance of ever getting an education, much less a job. Government was a masculine business; the court was constructed for a King. On the other hand, if Elizabeth married a foreign nobleman of royal descent, England would be ruled by a foreigner. The brief intermezzo of Philip II of Spain at the helm of England had not been encouraging. There were many suitors for Elizabeth’s hand and kingdom, but she knew how to stall, to play the one against the other, to keep them at bay while alluring them. ‘While stalwart Elizabethan women were battling it out on the front lines of the household, Queen Elizabeth was proving that a woman was more than capable of mastering a kingdom – and showing herself to be an almighty exception to the rules that governed women’s lives.’ ⁴⁴ As she once declared in front of her troops: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.’

England had enormous problems. Internally it was all but bankrupt and for the past three years the harvests had been poor; its navy was run down and it had no standing army; it was torn between its Anglican Protestants, Catholics and Puritans; its nobles and courtiers were divided accordingly. Externally, every neighbouring power – France (manipulating Mary, Queen of Scots) and Spain foremost among them – was ready to pounce on the helpless country governed by an apparently helpless Queen, and the Pope did his utmost to remove that heretic woman from the throne. ‘Since that guilty woman of England rules over two such noble kingdoms of Christendom [England and Scotland] and is the cause of so much injury to the Christian faith and loss of so many million souls, there is no doubt that whosoever sends her out of the world [i.e. murders her] with the pious intention of doing God service, not only does not sin but gains merit,’ said the Papal Secretary.⁴⁵ Elizabeth was excommunicated in 1570 and ever afterwards her life remained endangered by assassins commissioned by Rome.

Elizabeth was not daunted – or if she was, she did not show it. Her first asset was her firm resolve. She truly believed that divine intervention had elevated her to the throne, that it was God who wanted her to rule England. Her second asset was the team of talented and dedicated advisers she chose and assembled around her, especially in her Privy Council: William Cecil, Nicholas Bacon, Francis Walsingham, Nicholas Trockmorton, Robert Dudley. Together with them, but always making the final decisions herself, she set about solving the problems and building England into the power it would remain for two and a half centuries. She brought religious peace to the kingdom by reining in the fanatics and ordering a minimum of external religious conformity while refusing to interfere with any individual’s conscience.[^100] She made England financially healthy again by an economic policy of severe parsimony. She built up its army and especially its fleet, which would in future dominate the world’s oceans, and which was able, in 1588, to trounce Spain’s ‘Invincible Armada,’ also pirating the wealth which that country was shipping home from its South American colonies.

Elizabeth’s reign became England’s Golden Age. It was the age of the playwrights Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; of the poets John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Georges Chapman; of the musicians Thomas Tallis and William Byrd; of the seafarers and explorers Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Martin Frobisher, John Davies and John Hawkins; of the philosopher Francis Bacon; of John Dee, the occultist and court astrologer; of the scientists William Gilbert, Thomas Harriot and Walter Warner. These are but a few of the many that became legendary. Elizabeth knew them all, and all of them paid homage to their Sovereign.

Not only did they pay homage, they made the Virgin Queen the object of a cult. In Elizabeth her worshipping subjects saw Diana, the virgin goddess of the moon, Gloriana, the fairy queen, and above all Astraea. ‘Astraea, one of the most constant of all the names used for the Queen from her accession onwards, is the just virgin of Virgil’s “IVth Eclogue,” whose return to earth inaugurates the golden age, bringing not only peace but eternal springtime.’ ⁴⁶ ‘Elizabeth’s name came to connote the peak of national greatness … It is difficult to convey a proper appreciation of this amazing Queen, so keenly intelligent, so effervescing, so intimate, so imperious and regal. She intoxicated Court and country, and keyed her realm to the intensity of her own spirit. No one but a woman could have done it, and no woman without her superlative gifts could have attempted it without disaster. In part instinctive, it was also conscious and deliberate. “Her mind,” wrote her witty godson, Sir John Harrington, “was oftime like the gentle air that cometh from the westerly point in a summer’s morn; ’twas sweet and refreshing to all around. Her speech did win all affections, and her subjects did try to show all love to her commands; for she would say that her state did require her to command what she knew her people would willingly do from their own love to her.”’ ⁴⁷

Having briefly revived our memories of a few of the Mother’s reincarnations, it may be an interesting exercise to point out some common characteristics which could provide us with a broader insight into the extraordinary being the Mother was, she who contained all those personalities into herself. As her mission was different each time, all of these characteristics can, of course, not be prominent or even discernible in every life.

A first outstanding characteristic is that in most cases she seems to have been born to accomplish the humanly impossible. Actually, it is always the task of the Vibhuti to accomplish the humanly impossible; the humanly possible is for ordinary humans to do. Still, the accomplishments of some of the Mother’s Vibhutis have been so much out of the ordinary that they go on living in the memory of humankind. (It is striking that the Mother, each time choosing the place on earth most suitable to execute her task, was not always highly born. Mona Lisa must have been, to the eyes of her contemporaries, a Renaissance woman like any other; Joan of Arc was a farmer’s daughter from a village hardly anybody would have heard of had she not been born there. The Mother may have had many ‘hidden’ births like that, in order to raise the inner, psychological level of mankind.)

A second characteristic is the all-embracing scope of the personalities she took on. As Hatshepsut, Elizabeth I and Catherine II of Russia she incorporated some of the focal periods of civilization. For what one does not hold in oneself, one cannot carry onwards.

A third characteristic is the unbending strength shown in every incarnation – Hatshepsut acting as a king; Tiy initiating the utopia of Akhetaton; seventeen years old Joan without any military experience commanding a victorious army; Elizabeth effectuating in an English Renaissance context something comparable to what Hatshepsut did in XVIIIth Dynasty Egypt; Catherine taking Russia into the modern age practically single-handed.

A fourth characteristic is the multiple abilities shown in every incarnation, even in the simply educated Joan of Arc. It is through its incarnations that the psychic being grows into the fullness of its divinity. A mature psychic being, having been through hundreds if not thousands of human incarnations, is often recognizable because of its numerous capabilities, acquired in the course of its incarnations. It is only this completeness that can lead to the cosmic consciousness, which is a necessary state to realize the Supramental. And who has gone through more lives than the Mother – she who said she has never left the earth since its beginning?

In our four characteristics, the reader will doubtlessly have observed some of the characteristics of Maheshwari (majesty, greatness), Mahakali (strength, daring), Mahalakshmi (beauty, harmony) and Mahasaraswati (learning, industry), functioning within the given, limited circumstances of our Earth at particular moments of its evolution and history, and in each reincarnation present in the required proportion to bring this evolution a step further, ‘to manifest a ray of consciousness.’

These brief life-sketches are only a few examples of the Mother’s reincarnations. She has said, for instance, that a petrified body of hers still existed somewhere in the Himalayas.⁴⁸ We know about the vision she had of Sakyamuni, the Buddha, noted down in her diary on 20 December 1916, and in which he said: ‘I know thee and love thee as thou didst know and love me once. I have appeared clearly before thy sight so that thou mayst in no way doubt my word.’ Who was it who thus loved and knew the Buddha? Yasodhara, his wife? And there is the story, told in one of the first chapters of this book, about the daughter of a Venetian doge who was murdered on the orders of her father because of her love for the son of the doge whose position her father was usurping. The Mother knew the names and the dates of the persons involved, for she had looked them up in the history books, but she never told them.

And, yes, she had been ‘that Catherine,’ by whom she meant the Great Catherine II, of Russia (1729-96).⁴⁹ The characteristics of the other lives we know about are distinctly present in this incarnation too. There was the difficult start in life before Catherine became Empress, comprising ‘18 years of deception and humiliation’ during her marriage with the neurotic Peter III. There was her exceptional intelligence and her interest in the English and French philosophers of the Enlightenment, especially Voltaire and Diderot. There was her strength and daring: ‘For her, a foreign-born petty princess, with only a handful of friends, to lead a rising against her own husband, Peter the Great’s grandson – even in Russia no such daring coup had ever before been heard of … It was a dramatic sight, later depicted by painters: the slim figure of Catherine, for eighteen years subdued and victimized, at last in command perfectly assured on horseback, attractive in her Guards uniform, at the head of company after company of soldiers, their boots thudding on the road in unison.’ ⁵⁰ (Who, reading this, does not think of Joan of Arc?) The author of these words, Vincent Cronin, who calls Catherine ‘Russia’s one person Renaissance,’ also writes: ‘Catherine set out the need for complete religious toleration, for freedom of the press within limits, above all for just human laws … She was moving towards a typically eighteenth-century belief in progress, in particular progress for Russia, and she saw herself as being helped by Providence to forward the wellbeing of the Russian people … She was as successful a woman ruler as Elizabeth of England has been in a very different kind of country.’ ⁵¹

And the Mother said: ‘I remember acutely a resolve I made in my last life as an empress [Catherine II]. I said: “Never again! Enough is enough, I want no more of it! [Next time] I want to be a commoner, in an ordinary family, free at last to do as I want.”⁵² We, now, have an idea how it looked like, that ordinary family, host to an exceptional child. We have seen that child grow into the Mother, the female part of the Two-in-One together with Sri Aurobindo, on earth once more to accomplish the humanly impossible: to transform the human species into a divine species. And we have seen how the mature reincarnated souls came to them from the four corners of India and from abroad in order to participate in the Great Work in total dedication and surrender. As the Mother repeatedly said, most of them belonged to ‘the family,’ in this and in many previous lives; they had been together with her, or with Sri Aurobindo, or with both, in India, Babylonia, Egypt, Europe, Japan, and who knows how many places more, some now covered by sand or water – but they did not remember. She did, though, and to some she told about when and where they had been together. But then she stopped telling them, for few are the humans who can bear the memory of their past.[^101]

The process of reincarnation should not be too much schematized in our mind. The Mother, like Sri Aurobindo, has said so often that everything is possible, and that it is typical of the human mind always to simplify and standardize. At the base of every human incarnation is the psychic being[^102], but this does not mean that the psychic being has to be involved in its entirety all the time. The Mother sometimes called her incarnations ‘emanations,’ i.e. embodiments of a part, an aspect of her Being. She even said that all her reincarnations up to the present one had been partial embodiments of her Divinity, more had not been necessary.

This time, however, it was the full Being that had incarnated, she said, it was the Mahashakti, the Great Mother in her fullness.⁵³ Which may give us an idea of the importance and difficulty of the Work that was to be undertaken, as will become clearer in the following chapters.

[^100]: ‘Elizabeth made the Protestant faith England’s official national religion and instituted the Book of Common Prayer. She also passed a law that required every subject to go to church on Sunday. At the same time she declared that she had no interest in sifting the consciences of her people. In other words, as long as everyone looked and acted like Protestants, and as long as unauthorized forms of worship weren’t perceived to threaten national security, she didn’t care what was done in the privacy of the subjects’ homes. Such tolerance was exceptional at the time.’ (John Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland, Shakespeare alive! p. 23)

[^101]: There is some evidence that Sri Aurobindo was, besides Leonardo da Vinci, also Pericles, Caesar Augustus and Louis XIV. He may have been King Solomon, for, after all, the basic form of his symbol is that of Solomon. A disciple of whom some incarnations are common knowledge was Nolini Kanta Gupta, a great yogi. He himself has said that he was Yuyutsu in the war on which the Mahabharata is based; Virgil, the Roman poet and friend of Caesar Augustus; Pierre de Ronsard, the French poet of the Pleiade and friend of Francois Clouet; Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s councillor and spy-master; André Le Nôtre, who designed the gardens of the palace of Louis XIV at Versailles; and André de Chenier, the poet of the French Revolution, who died on the guillotine.

[^102]: The difference between an incarnation of an ordinary human being and an incarnation of the Mother or Sri Aurobindo is that, in the first case, the divine soul has accepted to dive into the ignorance, completely forgetting its divinity and starting its ‘adventure of consciousness and joy’ from scratch, as it were; while in the second case the soul remains always in full possession of its Divinity and incarnates every time as a psychic being that represents the highest possibility at which evolution has arrived.