The Mother

3: Explorations of the Occult

Occult knowledge without spiritual discipline is a dangerous instrument, for one who uses it as for others, if it falls into impure hands. Spiritual knowledge without occult science lacks precision and certainty in its objective results; it is all-powerful only in the subjective world. The two, when combined in inner or outer action, are irresistible and are fit instruments for the manifestation of the supramental power.¹

– The Mother

It was a friend of Mattéo’s, Louis Thémanlys, who brought Mirra into contact with the Parisian chapter of the Mouvement cosmique and its monthly publication, the Revue cosmique. This contact, which occurred sometime in 1903, would have far-reaching consequences for her.

Occultism

In the West occultism is generally regarded with distrust and disbelief, and associated with black magic, witches on broomsticks and grotesque demons. This attitude towards it is not undeserved. As Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Life Divine: ‘Occultism in the West … never reached its majority, never acquired ripeness and a philosophic or sound systematic foundation. It indulged too freely in the romance of the supernatural or made the mistake of concentrating its major effort on the discovery of formulas and effective modes for using supernatural powers. It deviated into magic, white and black, or into romantic or thaumaturgic paraphernalia of occult mysticism and the exaggeration of what was after all a limited and scanty knowledge. These tendencies and this insecurity of a mental foundation made it difficult to defend and easy to discredit, a target facile and vulnerable. In Egypt and in the East this line of knowledge arrived at a greater and more comprehensive endeavour.’ ²

Sri Aurobindo writes, however, in the same work: ‘To know these [occult] things and to bring their truths and forces into the life of humanity is a necessary part of its evolution. Science itself is in its own way an occultism; for it brings to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organize and place at the service of man her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic – for there is and can be no other magic than the utilization of secret truths of being, secret powers and processes of Nature. It may even be found that a supraphysical knowledge is necessary for the completion of physical knowledge, because the processes of physical Nature have behind them a supraphysical factor, a power and action mental, vital or spiritual which is not tangible to any outer means of knowledge.’ ³

The Mother would approach the subject in the same open-minded scientific spirit. After all, the scientific spirit is not necessarily limited to the materialistic, reductionist variant of science, however dominant it may be at present. The scientific spirit is an attitude of the mind that may and should be taken towards all aspects of existence within the perceptual scope of the human being, be they material or not, for immaterial is not synonymous with unreal or non-existent. The Mother therefore said: ‘[Occultism] is a knowledge which in the modern world is hardly recognized as scientific, but which is scientific in the sense that it has precise procedures and that, if one reproduces the circumstances exactly, one obtains the same results. It is a progressive science which can be practised and in which totally justified progress can be made as logical as in all other sciences acknowledged as such in modern times. But its object is a reality or realities which do not belong to the most material domain. Special capacities and a special development are needed to be conscious in that domain, for it eludes our ordinary senses.’ ⁴ She also said in answer to the question of a young student: ‘[Occultism] is the knowledge of the invisible forces and the power to handle them. It is a science. It is altogether a science. I always compare occultism with chemistry, for it is the same kind of knowledge as that of chemistry regarding material things. It is a knowledge of invisible forces, their various vibrations, their interrelations, the combinations which can be made by bringing them together and the power one can exercise over them. It is absolutely scientific and ought to be learned like a science, which means that one cannot practise occultism as something emotional or vague and imprecise. You must work at it as you would do at chemistry and learn all the rules – or find them yourself if there is nobody to teach you, but then at some risk to yourself. There are combinations [in occultism] as explosive as certain chemical combinations.’ ⁵

Occultism was the order of the day especially in France at the turn of the century. The wave of spiritism⁹¹ that originated in the United States in 1848 also inundated Europe. In reaction to the dry and harsh spirit of materialism and positivism, many became interested in mysticism and the supernatural. The books of the Frenchman Allan Kardec, for instance, were so widely read that in Western Europe spiritism became a kind of secular religion with millions of followers. (There were already twelve million in the U.S.) In 1889, on the occasion of an international spiritist congress, no less than ninety-eight spiritist dailies and periodicals were counted. ‘The medium was replacing the priest.’ There was also a wave of Orientalism, caused in part by the expanding colonization taking place at the time. The translations of the Indian and Chinese classics, the foundation in Paris of the Guimet Museum and the Oriental sections in the Louvre, and the interest in Japanese painting, very influential on post-Impressionist art, were all expressions of the same phenomenon.

In fact, occultism in all its aspects – hermetism, alchemy, astrology, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism – has always been a strong undercurrent in European culture. Even in the century of the Enlightenment, the acme of rationalism in its most strident and critical form, ‘persons without number were ready to believe anything and to follow the most woolly ideas,’ according to Louis Pauwels. And Paul Valéry wrote: ‘Magic, alchemy, divination by the stars, and stimulated dreams coexisted [during the Enlightenment] in more than one brain with the most limpid classic culture and the discipline of the exact sciences. Never have scepticism and credulity been more closely associated than at that time.’ ⁶ Never? One wonders whether the present is any different – and whether this does not result from the fact that the human being is much more complex than science and materialism contend.

Pathways for the Dead

So many people come to her in the night for the passage to the other side whom she has not known in the body.⁷

– Sri Aurobindo

Even before Mirra discovered the teaching of the Cosmic Movement, she had ‘certain experiences at night, certain types of nightly activities, caring for people who had just left their body.’ Although still lacking the theoretical knowledge, she knew exactly what had to be done, and did it. When she began reading the Revue cosmique, she understood many things she had not known before and, true to character, began to apply that new knowledge and to work it out systematically.

‘Every night, at the same hour, my work consisted in constructing between the purely terrestrial atmosphere and the psychic atmosphere a sort of path of protection across the vital, so that people wouldn’t have to pass through it. For those who are conscious but don’t have the knowledge it’s a very difficult passage, it’s infernal. I was preparing this path – it must have been around 1903 or 1904, I don’t exactly remember – and working at it for months and months.’ ⁸ Afterwards, she would be told by Madame Théon, with whom we shall soon get acquainted: ‘It is part of the work you have come on Earth to do. All those with even a slightly awakened psychic being and who can see your Light will go to it at the moment of dying, wherever they may die, and you will help them to pass through.’ And the Mother said later that this was a ‘constant work’ she had been doing and continued to do.

The human being consists of several sheaths or ‘bodies,’ mental, vital and material, and behind them the soul, supporting the whole.⁹² At the time of death, the incarnated soul lays down the material body and enters the vital worlds, through which it passes into the mental worlds, and finally into the psychic⁹³ world, where it rests ‘in a kind of beatific contemplation’ between two incarnations and assimilates its experiences from the former life. The beings of the vital worlds, more specifically the lower vital worlds, are the vicious entities we call demons or hostile forces. As these worlds are the first the departing soul has to traverse, it must in almost all cases confront those beings unprepared, unarmed with the necessary knowledge. It is to these terrifying experiences that the various myths of ‘hell’ go back.

The Mother explained: ‘Generally, one calls the “domain of death” a certain region of the most material vital into which one is projected at the moment one leaves the body.’ This lower vital region, this material vital world, is obscure and full of small, vampire-like beings who feed on everything they can swallow, including the vital substance of the deceased person who, because of the sudden and often shocking death experience, has been projected into it. In the physical these beings are powerless, but when one has passed completely outside the physical – and the main characteristic of death is that it cuts all links with the material world – one is at their mercy. ‘If at that moment people who love the departed person concentrate their thought and love on him, he finds a refuge therein and this protects him fully against those entities.’ One who does not have such protection is ‘like a prey delivered to those forces, and that indeed is an experience that is difficult to bear.’ ⁹ It is ‘infernal.’

And the Mother went on: ‘Now there are what one might call bridges, protected passages which have been built in the vital world in order to pass through all those dangers. There are “atmospheres” which receive people leaving their body, giving them shelter, giving them protection.’ ¹⁰ These ‘protected passages’ are the ones she built for months on end somewhere at the beginning of the century. We now know from people who have actually died, but who for some reason have come back from death to go on living, that these bridges are there. Such people are the ones who have had a ‘near-death experience.’

Many books have already been published on the subject, pioneered by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and Raymond Moody. Let’s take the one written by Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light. A frequent scenario of the near-death experiences examined in this work is as follows: at the moment of death the experiencers have no fear at all. On the contrary, everything feels like a pleasant experience and even a great happiness. Many see themselves outside their (material) body. In a flash their past actions are reviewed tactfully and with a sense of humour, and then they enter a tunnel and are attracted by a warm, loving light; in that light, they discern a Being of light, waiting to take them onwards. All this is accompanied with a ‘mystical’ feeling of intense realness, unity and ineffability of the experience. ‘Sometimes the passage to the light that people describe is not really a tunnel, though it usually has tunnel-like features – and nearly always the welcoming light is seen shining more brightly at the end’ ¹¹ – at the end of the ‘protected passages.’

Louis Thémanlys (1874-1943) was the head of the Paris centre of the Cosmic Movement when Mirra Alfassa made his acquaintance. He and his wife Claire had come into contact with the Movement through a copy of the Revue cosmique picked up at the Librairie Chacornac, an occult bookshop which at the time of writing still exists on the Quai St Michel, across from the Notre-Dame. Three times a week Thémanlys gave talks on the Cosmic Tradition, and was also responsible for the publication of the Revue cosmique. Mirra soon became very active in the movement, participating in a discussion group named Idéa and helping edit the Revue.⁹⁴ It did not take long before Thémanlys, for whose character and zest for work she had but faint praise, passed on the total responsibility for the monthly to her.

The articles to be published came from Tlemcen, where they were written in English by Max Théon and his wife Alma, the leaders and inspirers of the Cosmic Movement. Those articles were, however, translated into French by Teresa, their companion and secretary of many years. Teresa, who was English (her real name was Augusta Rolfe), was ‘convinced she knew French as well as a Frenchman,’ so much so that, according to the Mother, she did not even find it necessary to use a dictionary. Mirra had the ‘literally impossible’ task of rewriting Teresa’s bungled prose in readable French. For five years Mirra would look after the layout, proofreading and printing of the Revue cosmique, its administration and distribution, and other matters connected with it.

In the meantime her inner experiences continued. In ‘a series of visions’ she saw Sri Aurobindo ‘exactly as he was physically, but more glorious. I mean the same man as I was to see the first time I met him: almost thin, with that golden-bronze hue, that clear-cut profile, the unruly beard, the long hair, dressed in dhoti with one end thrown over his shoulder, arms bare, a part of the body also bare, and bare-footed.’ ¹² The Mother, when recounting this, would emphasize the fact that at the time she knew nothing about India, absolutely nothing at all – which was as much as her European contemporaries knew. And in those visions she did something amazing to herself: she prostrated herself in the way Hindus do before the apparition, whom she held to be Shri Krishna. ‘I did that, and at the time my external being wondered: “What is all this?”’ She realized, however, that her symbolic visions were at the same time spiritual facts, decisive spiritual experiences ‘of meeting and of a united perception of the Work to be accomplished.’

Then, in the autumn of 1905, she met Max Théon.

The Reclusive Masters

The righteous will shine like stars, but those who have guided others towards the truth will shine like suns, forever.¹³

– Max Théon

Max Théon was a mysterious figure and he chose to remain so. The Mother, however well she had known him, was not sure about his provenance. He never told her who he really was, where he was born, how old he was, or anything else. According to her supposition he was a Polish or Russian Jew who had received initiation in India, knew Sanskrit, was knowledgeable about the Rig Veda, and had worked together with H.P. Blavatsky in Egypt.

The marriage certificate of Max Théon and Alma, dated 21 March 1885 and reproduced in Sujata Nahar’s third volume of the Mother’s life, tells us that his name was Louis Maximillian Bimstein, son of Rabbi Judes Lion Bimstein and thirty years of age at the time, which means that he was born in 1855 – but other documents give different dates of birth. The marriage certificate also says that Louis Bimstein was a ‘doctor of medicine,’ which was not true and may cast doubt on the other data too. The confusion about his country of origin – Poland, Russia or the Ukraine – is partly understandable because of the political instability in the region of Eastern Europe from which he is supposed to have come. At the time Poland was the defenceless common prey of Prussia, Russia and Austria, and borders changed easily and on many occasions. It was also a time of frequent pogroms which destabilized the Jewish communities, to one of which Louis Bimstein must have belonged.

He left Eastern Europe around 1870. It is quite possible that he spent some time with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-91) in Egypt, as the Mother remembered him telling her, to found an occult society. Blavatsky travelled from Egypt via Great Britain to America in 1873, and possibly Bimstein was in London in the same year. ‘London [at that time] was the haven of people claiming to be priests of Isis, students of the Kabbalah, friends of the Sphinx, and disciples of the dancing dervishes.’ ¹⁴ In London Bimstein became a member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, routinely referring to itself as the ‘H.B. of L.’ Bimstein became ‘the group’s chief instructor in practical occultism,’ and had in the meantime adopted the modest pseudonym of Max Théon, meaning ‘Greatest God.’

It was to Max Théon that aspirants for the H.B. of L. were directed to write in an advertisement of 1884.¹⁵ But things went awry for the Brotherhood when, in 1886, it turned out that one of its founders had been convicted of advertising fraud; he secretively left for the United States. Max Théon, not wanting to be smeared by the affair, had already left for France a month earlier. It should be mentioned that the H.B. of L. had for some time been considered a serious rival of the fledgling Theosophical Society, which had been founded by H.E. Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Olcott in America in 1875. The Theosophical Society permitted itself to speak denigratingly of the H.B. of L. only after the latter had collapsed in such an inglorious way.

When he moved to France, Théon was accompanied by his wife of one year, Mary Christine Woodroffe Ware, called by some Alma, i.e. ‘Soul.’ Like her husband, Madame Théon already had a public career as an occultist behind her. As ‘Una’ she had founded the Universal Philosophic Society, whose purpose was ‘to create or form a Temple of Truth in which Science as the High Priest shall offer humanity the threefold gifts of Happiness, Holiness and Freedom.’ She had also published a book, Sayings of the Sibyl Alta Una. ‘Shortly after her marriage Una stopped addressing conferences and started appearing with Théon at séances. He, during this period, advertised himself in the occult press as “Eastern psychic healer.”’ ¹⁶

If all this may seem a bit nebulous, the occult abilities of Max Théon and Alma should not be underestimated. The more the Mother would later know of the occult heritage of India, the more she would appreciate what Théon actually knew. And for his wife she had nothing but the highest praise: ‘She had unheard of faculties, that woman, unheard of!’

Max and Alma stayed in France for a year and a half, and then moved on to Algeria, where they built a villa on the outskirts of Tlemcen, a town at the foot of the Atlas mountains. There they spent a decade developing their teachings. In comparison with the lives of other prominent occultists of the time, this long period of withdrawal is exceptional and may be taken as an indication of the seriousness with which they worked on their mission. In the meantime they made the acquaintance of Charles Barlet (1838-1921). Today Barlet’s name may not ring a bell, but he should be regarded as the brain behind the French occult revival. ‘He knew and was known to everyone that counted.’ Not only was he a founder-member of the Paris branch of the Theosophical Society and ‘the father of the astrological movement in France,’ he was also one of the six known members – there were six unknown too – of ‘the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix’ founded by Stanislas de Guaita in 1888. Barlet became the chief of the order in 1897 when de Guaita died of an overdose of drugs, but soon resigned in favour of the still well-known Papus.¹⁷

Barlet was impressed by the Cosmic Tradition developed by Théon, who based it on his own knowledge of the ancient wisdom and also on the occult material with which Alma provided him. The Mother has spoken more than once of that Tradition, anterior to the Vedic Rishis and the Chaldeans, and from which both originated. ‘When asked about the source of his knowledge, [Théon] would say that it antedated the Kabbalah and the Vedas,’ she said. And she added: ‘I have memories – these are always lived experiences for me – very clear memories, very precise, of a time which was assuredly much prior to the Vedic times and to the Kabbalistic knowledge of the Chaldean traditions. So, personally I am convinced that there was in fact a Tradition prior to those two traditions, and which contained a knowledge very close to an integral knowledge. When I came here and told Sri Aurobindo certain things I knew from an occult standpoint, he always answered me that they were in conformity with the Vedic tradition.’ ¹⁸

It seems it was at Barlet’s insistence that the Théons agreed to found their Cosmic Movement and, in 1901, to start the Revue cosmique, with Charles Barlet as editor and Aia Aziz as director.

Aia Aziz was the second pseudonym Louis Bimstein had assumed; it means ‘the Beloved.’ (To the people of Tlemcen he was known as Bushaor, ‘Long Hair.’) However, there rose a difference of opinion between Aia Aziz and Barlet because the former took a stance which leaned more and more towards the Kabbalah. As Aia was not a man to revise or soften his opinion, Barlet quit and Aia Aziz remained the sole leader both of the Movement and its publication. A little later Mirra Alfassa became intensely involved with both, as we have seen, and in 1905 she met Bimstein-Théon-Aziz in Paris, where, accompanied by Alma, he had come on a visit.

‘When I met him, I saw that he was a being of great power. He bore a certain likeness to Sri Aurobindo [whom Mirra as yet had only met in her visions] … Théon was not a tall man, he was of medium height, and lean, slim, with quite a similar profile. But I saw, or rather felt, that Théon was not he whom I had seen in my visions, because when I met him he didn’t have that vibration. Yet it was he who first taught me things, and I went and worked at Tlemcen two years in succession.’ ¹⁹

Théon and Alma possessed the faculties to perceive with whom they were dealing, and they invited Mirra, already an experienced occultist in her own right, to their mountain-encircled abode in Tlemcen, a place apparently outside the rule of the laws as known to science.

Tlemcen – The First Visit (1906)

When you yourselves are inwardly developed, are capable of having a direct and inner contact with these [occult] things, then you know what they are; but no material proof can give you the knowledge if within you do not have the being capable of having this knowledge.²⁰

– The Mother

It was Mirra’s first long journey alone. She travelled by train to Marseilles, embarked on the boat to Oran, had to wait there a day or so, and then again took the train to Tlemcen. She arrived there on 14 July 1906. It had taken six-and-a-half hours to cover the 166 kilometers of the last stage of the journey. But all had gone well, and Max Théon was waiting for her at the station to take her in a car to Zarif, the suburb about a kilometer away where his villa was built into the side of a hill.

‘Tlemcen! It’s the sound of a gong vibrating over the mountains. It’s a smile at the edge of the desert,’ ²¹ wrote a lyrical Claire Thémanlys after her visit to ‘the Great Initiates.’ The town is located in a valley partly enclosed in the lower hills of the bare, rocky Atlas range. Although it is located in a desert climate directly influenced by the nearby Sahara, the valley is fertile and green, fed by an everflowing river.

Mirra and Théon alighted in order to walk up towards the red-painted house, for Théon wanted his youthful guest to be impressed by the splendid view – and by himself. Suddenly he stopped and turned towards her. ‘You are now at my mercy,’ he said point-blank. ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ To which Mirra smiled and answered quietly: ‘I am never afraid: I have the Divine here, in my heart.’ Théon paled.⁹⁵

These simple words of hers reveal an important event in Mirra’s inner development: shortly before travelling to Tlemcen, she had realized her soul. We remember that she had been a convinced atheist to the extent of being incensed by the word ‘God,’ which evoked to her ‘a monster’ who would be ‘the one and only’ and who had created, to his satisfaction, this absurd world of endless suffering. But then she met the Indian who gave her the Bhagavad Gita to read and who for the first time provided her with the key to ‘the interior God.’ And afterwards she discovered Théon’s teaching in the Revue cosmique explaining the presence of the Divine in the heart. As always, she tried out what she read with the full power of her enormous concentration. ‘The experience was stunning. I am very grateful to him [i.e. Théon] for it … By following his instructions and seeking within my being, behind the solar plexus, I found it. I found it, I had an experience, an absolutely convincing experience.’ ²² Théon had underestimated his invitee. The reason may have been that, although he knew theoretically of the inner Divine and even had expounded Its presence in the heart, he did not have the psychic realization. The idea of surrender to the Divine was alien to him. Later we will see why.

When Théon and Mirra arrived at the red-painted house, Alma was waiting for them. ‘She was almost always in trance and she had trained her body so well that even when she was in trance, that is, when one or more parts of her being were exteriorized, the body had a life of its own and she could walk about and even attend to some small material occupations … In her trances she could talk freely [something Mirra would learn too] and she used to narrate what she saw.’ ²³ Her narrations were noted down by Teresa (who had been Alma’s friend since their years at a girls’ boarding school in England) and formed the bulk of the texts in the Revue cosmique. Théon usually dressed in a long red, purple or white robe, tied up with a cord around the waist, while Alma wore a dalmatic and covered her shoulders with a red shawl on cool days or during the evenings. She was small in stature, rather plump, and had lost an eye in an occult battle.

‘Her powers were quite exceptional,’ related the Mother. ‘She had received an extremely complete and rigorous training and she could exteriorize herself, that is, bring out of her material body a subtle body, in full consciousness, and do that twelve times in succession. This means that she could pass consciously from one state of being to another, live there as consciously as in her physical body, and then again put this subtler body into trance, exteriorize herself from it – and so on, twelve times successively, to the extreme limit of the world of forms.’ ²⁴ Soon Mirra too would learn and master this with ease.

The villa of the Théons, built more or less in the style of an Arab manor, was a house of wonders; there the atmosphere, impregnated with their occult powers, seemed to belong to another universe in which the extraordinary was the daily fare.

Later the Mother would often tell about the astonishing happenings she had witnessed at Tlemcen. When Alma wanted her slippers, she fixed her gaze on them and they obediently came shuffling towards her. When she wanted to announce that dinner was ready, she stared a moment at the gong (a present from Louis Thémanlys) and it sounded all by itself loud and clear. When she felt exhausted, she absorbed the life-force of a grapefruit. When she wanted, as a kind gesture, to put a small bunch of flowers on Mirra’s pillow in her locked room, she dematerialized them, sent them through the door or the wall, and rematerialized them on the bed.

Théon was no less powerful a magus. The people of the neighborhood came to him to settle their quarrels and to be cured of their illnesses. When the trees and plants in the park and the roses in the ‘marvellous’ rose-garden needed watering, he made it rain only there and nowhere else. And one day, during a thunderstorm, he took Mirra up to the roof of the villa. Mirra asked him whether this was prudent under the circumstances, but he reassured her. And there she observed how, after mumbling some formulas, he deflected a bolt of lightning off its course. ‘He was terrible,’ she would later say, and also: ‘He was very knowledgeable.’

Even Little Boy, the dog ‘who adored me,’ participated in the ambience. One day with his wet nose he woke Mirra up from her nap for their daily walk, though she found him still asleep when she went down: he had exteriorized from his sleeping body to go and call her.

It may be remembered that Mirra, because of her harsh realistic and positivist education – for which she remained ever thankful – was not a person to imagine things; on the contrary, she would always look for the most concrete, plausible and rational explanation. But concreteness does not seem to be limited to the tridimensional universe of our sense perceptions. ‘You see, when people are in this occult consciousness everything is possible. It creates an atmosphere where everything, but everything is possible.’ In this context ‘atmosphere’ might nowadays be translated by ‘field.’

Mirra herself had become so skilled in matters occult that she, as reported by Sri Aurobindo, ‘when being in Algiers appeared to a circle of friends sitting in Paris and took up a pencil and wrote a few words on paper.’ ²⁵ Let us recount two of the unusual happenings at Tlemcen in some detail. One day an Arab from town came to visit the Théons and started asking annoying questions about ‘magic.’ (In town all sorts of rumors were rife concerning Max Théon, whom the Muslim townspeople often saw dressed in a manner only becoming of prophets.) Alma, getting tired of the tactless visitor, whispered to Mirra: ‘We are going to have some fun, just watch.’ They were sitting around a fairly big and heavy table on the veranda,⁹⁶ but nobody was touching it. As the visitor went on asking his prying questions, the table started moving and then actually jumped on him ‘with a heroic élan!’ Alma had not touched it; she had only looked at it. ‘First the table began waddling a bit, then it moved forward, and all of a sudden, in one single jump, it threw itself on the man, who left in a hurry never to come back.’ ²⁶

The second anecdote, in the Mother’s own words, goes as follows. ‘Tlemcen is very near the Sahara and has a desert climate, except in the valley where a river flows which never dries up and makes the whole place very fertile. The mountains, however, were absolutely arid. Only on the lands occupied by the farmers did something grow. Now, Monsieur Théon’s park – a large estate – was, as I said, a marvellous place, everything grew there, everything one could imagine, and to a magnificent size.

‘[Madame Théon] told me – they had been living there for many years – that about five or six years before, I think, they had felt that the barrenness of the mountains might one day cause the river to dry up and that it would be better to plant trees. So the administrator of Tlemcen⁹⁷ ordered trees to be planted on all the surrounding hills. He ordered that pine trees should be planted, for in Algeria the sea pine grows very well.

‘For some reason or other – forgetfulness or fancy, nobody knows – instead of pine trees they ordered fir trees! Fir trees belong to northern countries, not at all in desert lands. And very conscientiously all those fir trees were planted … Four or five years later [and thanks to Madame Théon’s occult intervention] those fir trees had not only survived, they had become magnificent. When I went to Tlemcen, the mountains all around were absolutely green, full of splendid trees!

‘… Then, [Madame Théon] told me, three years after the fir trees had been planted, suddenly one day or rather one night in December, after she had just gone to bed and put out the light, she was awakened by a tiny little noise. She was very sensitive to noise. She opened her eyes and saw something like a moonbeam – there was no moon that night – lighting up a corner of her room. And she noticed that a little gnome was there, like the ones they tell about in the Scandinavian fairy-tales. He was a little fellow with a big head, a pointed cap, pointed dark green shoes, a long white beard, and covered with snow all over. She looked at him – she had her eyes open – and said: “What are you doing here?” She was a little worried, for it was warm in her room and the snow was melting and making a small puddle on the parquet floor.

‘He gave her his sweetest smile and said: “But we were called by the fir trees! Fir trees call the snow, they are trees of the snow countries. I am the Lord of the Snow, so I came to announce you that we are coming. We have been called, we are coming” … He went away. The moonlight went with him. She lit a lamp – there was no electricity – and saw a little pool of water in the place where he had stood. So it was no dream, there really had been a little being whose snow had melted in her room. And the next morning, when the sun rose, it shone upon mountains covered with snow. It was the first time, snow had never been seen before in that country. Since then every winter – not for long, just for a little while – all the mountains have been covered with snow.’ ²⁷

Claire and Louis Thémanlys visited the Théons a few months later, from April till June 1907. In her narration of that visit, called Un Séjour chez les Grands Initiés (A Stay with the Great Initiates) and published by the Publications cosmiques, Claire narrates how Aia presided over the meals, seated at the head of the table, with Alma, whom he served with deference, and no doubt also Teresa to his right, and the Thémanlyses to his left. She calls Teresa ‘the old secretary, that paragon of discrete dedication.’ She describes how Aia, ‘cheerful, witty and brilliant … walked with brisk steps in the shadowy lanes of the park,’ all the while rolling cigarettes with nimble fingers and expounding ‘Bereschith [the opening verses of Genesis], of which every word, every letter is a teaching of life.’ And she tells how Alma, her red shawl tightened around her shoulders, was constantly writing down her experiences and visions.

She also confirms almost all the wondrous happenings mentioned above: the table that moved, this time on Claire’s request, the gong sounding without anybody touching it – and also the tablecloth folding itself, a small bell floating tinkling through the dining room from end to end, a shower of flowers raining down in the same dining room, and so on. And she specifies: ‘Those phenomena took place at noon, in broad daylight, as well as at night in the light of a lamp, outside on the terraces as well as in the closed dining room.’ ²⁸ According to her, the Théons had correspondents in all European countries, Alma often telling Théon in advance the contents of letters just posted to him.

Henri Morisset joined his wife at Tlemcen on 17 August 1906 – and had a violent quarrel with Théon about the color of the latter’s habit, whether it was violet or purple. (Théon: ‘When I say it is purple, it is purple!’) The Morissets left Tlemcen on 14 October.

What was the Cosmic Tradition the Théons propounded and to which the Mother would keep referring afterwards? It seems it derived from three sources, out of which Théon distilled an occult philosophical system. The first source was the very old Tradition at the origin of the Vedic and the Chaldean wisdom; this has already been mentioned, together with Mirra’s confirmation of it from her own experience. Speaking about this Tradition Alma said: ‘All truth, all beauty come from the old, simple and profound philosophy that is the source from where the vulgarized religions have drawn their primitive waters, now alas so often vitiated and corrupted.’

The second source was the rich, continuous flow of Alma’s direct experience, uttered in trance and noted down by Teresa, or recorded by Alma herself when seen in visions or dreams. The third source, though seldom mentioned, was no doubt the Jewish tradition of the Kabbalah; this becomes clear from the testimony of Claire Thémanlys and from an essay by Peter Heehs. As Heehs puts it: ‘The two historic traditions thought by contemporary occultists to be the oldest and most remarkable, the “Aryan” and the “Chaldean,” were said by the Théons to be early “deformations” of the original tradition. They nevertheless conceded that they had “borrowed above all from the oral Chaldean tradition” … This I believe was an indirect way of saying that they borrowed chiefly from the Hebraic tradition, in particular the Kabbalah.’ ²⁹

Summarizing, one may say that at the core of their thinking was the idea of evolution – not only evolution of or on this Earth, but of former universes. According to the Cosmic Tradition, there have been six universes preceding the existing one, each representing a quality of the One Being for whom there is no name. The present universe is the seventh and the last. It is based on the qualities of equilibrium and unending progress. As the Mother would explain: ‘There is an old tradition which says that the world was created seven times, that is to say that the first six times it returned into the Creator … It is said that we are now the seventh creation, and that this is the last one. This is the one which will remain, it is the creation of the equilibrium … This is the last, which means that the world will not fall back again into a pralaya⁹⁸ and that there will be a perpetual progress.’

We can read this progress in the gradations or stages of evolution as known at present, although the material manifestations of the evolution should be seen as the result of the underlying workings of the Spirit. In the evolution, the human being plays a crucial role. ‘If only humanity understood its role as “evolutor” of the planet,’ said Théon.³⁰ For, the human being is that decisive step in evolution at which life becomes conscious of itself. As it is clear that the present human being is too imperfect to be the summit of creation; other, higher gradations of beings must be expected to appear on the Earth. This is where the teaching of the Théons touches the view of Sri Aurobindo. Even matter as it is now will evolve, which means that the material body will evolve and gradually or in a quantum leap give birth to the appearance of beings with a ‘supramental’ body, the corps glorieux (body of light) of which the Théons spoke.

What made Théon’s Cosmic Tradition important was that it represented a theory that could be put into practice. When still in the H. B. of L., Max Théon had been ‘the group’s chief instructor of practical occultism … The H. B. of L. was an “order of practical occultism.” Its use of mystical techniques to open the way to inner experience was something of a novelty at the time. Most esoteric groups, including the Theosophical Society, were content to disseminate secret doctrines … The popularity of the practical approach of the H. B. of L. encouraged the Theosophical Society to open its own “esoteric section” in 1888.’ ³¹

It was exceptional for well-known occultists, as the Théons had already been in Britain, to withdraw for ten years in order to deepen or recast their knowledge and their powers. (They were also fortunate to have sufficient financial means at their disposal.) It was most probably Alma who was responsible for the long retreat in Tlemcen, as she seems to have been the mainstay of everything the Cosmic Tradition represented. How much Théon depended on her would become evident when she unexpectedly passed away.

We now have an inkling of the occult powers of the Théons, and Mirra’s realization of the inner Divine is proof of the spiritual effectiveness of their teaching. The contribution of the Théons to the spiritual riches of the world will remain alive thanks to their close connection with Mirra Morisset, who for a while was their student and collaborator.

The Morissets were still living in the Rue Lemercier. Their house, though, was no longer solely an artist’s home; it had also become a centre of occult and spiritual meetings, for instance, for the group Idéa on Wednesday evenings. It was there, in January 1907, that they were visited – during one of their meetings – by a Russian revolutionary. This was not long after the first attempt to overthrow the repressive regime in Russia had been bloodily quashed. Mirra wrote of this encounter in a piece called Un chef (A Leader).³²

‘We were assembled, a few friends and I myself, in a small group for philosophical studies, when the presence was announced of a mysterious visitor who asked to be introduced to us. We went to meet him, and in the reception room we saw a man in a suit that was clean but worn to the thread … I asked him: “What do you want, monsieur?” – “I have come from Kiev to meet you … In Kiev there is a group of students who are very much interested in the major philosophical ideas. We happened to read your books,⁹⁹ and we were glad to find at last a synthetic teaching which does not restrict itself to theory but urges one on to action … My occupation is revolution.”’ And Mirra wrote: ‘Those words rang like a knell in the luxury of our bourgeois apartment.’

What could this man – held by some to have been Maxim Gorky’s son³³ – expect from the Cosmic Movement? He explained how they had tried to topple the Czarist regime through violence and terror, but even in the middle of this he had felt that something better was possible by means of an inner development. ‘We are not strong enough to wage the struggle by force … We should develop our intelligence more to understand the profound laws of nature, and to better learn how to act with order, how to coordinate our efforts … I have succeeded in making my friends understand all that.’ And, he said, he had come to ask the help of the Cosmic Movement to adapt its ideas to the situation in Russia, and also to write a brochure ‘which would spread among the Russian people those beautiful ideas of solidarity, harmony, liberty and justice.’

Mirra’s advice was the following: ‘You have to yield for some time, to draw back into the shadows, to prepare yourself in silence … No longer put your weapons in the hands of the enemy, be yourselves, irreproachable when standing up to him, show him the example of a courageous patience, of rectitude and justice. Then your victory will be near-at-hand, for you will have justice on your side, integral justice, not only as to the goal but also as to means.’ – ‘I am glad, madame, to see that a woman shows concern about these kind of problems. Women can do so much to hasten the coming of better days.’ On taking leave, he said that even in Paris he and the woman who helped him get around – he had serious trouble with his eyesight – did not feel safe, because the police suspected them of being dangerous anarchists. He was never seen again.

Tlemcen – The Second Visit (1907)

Mirra arrived for her second stay with the Théons on 18 July 1907. There is a huge difference between Mirra’s relationship to the Tlemcen masters and that of somebody like Claire Thémanlys. Claire was a neophyte, still curious to have Alma show her powers and as yet hardly receptive to the influence of the occult force the masters were trying out on her. Mirra, on the contrary, was already an experienced occultist before her first visit to Tlemcen and had already had her first major spiritual realization. True, Théon and Alma taught her a lot, and she would remain thankful for this even long after they were gone; but she also ‘worked together’ with them, especially during her second stay.

Of that work we know little. The Mother has told that it was quite perilous, for she exteriorized all the sheaths of her being from her material body, which remained behind in a cataleptic state under the surveillance of Théon. Surveillance on such occasions is an absolute necessity, for the only tie then remaining with the material body is the ‘silver cord,’ the existence of which is common knowledge in occultism. If that link snaps or is cut off, the person loses contact with the material world; in other words, he or she dies.

Mirra also learned to exteriorize twelve times in succession up to the upper limit of the manifestation, just like Alma, and she had learned how to talk during her trance, an ability mastered only by the most advanced occultists. ‘My body was in a cataleptic state and I was in a conscious trance, but it was a special kind of catalepsy, in that my body could speak. I could speak, although very slowly. Théon had taught me how to do it.’ ³⁴ And the Mother added: ‘However, this state is not without danger, the proof being that during my work, for some reason or other – obviously due to some negligence on Théon’s part, who was there to watch over me – the cord was cut … The link was cut malevolently.’

What happened? In some world visited by Mirra during her exteriorization under the direction of Théon, she found the ‘Mantra of Life.’ This is the formula by which one can give life and also take it, create life and also destroy it. ‘This mantra was shut away, sealed, with my name on it in Sanskrit. I didn’t know Sanskrit at that time, but he did.’ Still, Mirra was aware that it was Sanskrit, told Théon so and started to describe the characters to him. Théon, for some reason, ‘got very interested.’ He told Mirra to break the seal and tell him what was hidden there. Then ‘something in me knew at once,’ and she refused to tell him.

This made Théon violently angry and his anger cut the cord. Mirra was dead. Théon, because Mirra had been able to warn him in the nick of time, became frightened and used all his occult knowledge and powers to pull her back into her material body. But the Mother said that the friction of re-entering her material body was an extremely painful experience. ‘I returned as a result of the power and the will, because … simply because I still had something to do on the Earth … He made me drink half a glass of cognac. He always made me take some every day after the session, because I remained working in trance for more than an hour, which generally is a forbidden practice.’ ³⁵

Mirra had brought her music scores with her on this visit, for there was a piano at the house of the Théons, normally played by Teresa. Do toads have a sense of music? The fat and warty one, which came and sat on the threshold of the open door while Mirra was playing Mozart and Beethoven, must have felt something, for it remained listening as if transfixed; and when Mirra stopped playing, it thanked her for the recital with a couple of deep-throated croaks, then hopped away into the night.

When after a stay of two months Mirra left for France, Max Théon, who was going on a tour of Europe, accompanied her. While they were crossing the Mediterranean, a violent storm arose. Everybody on the ship grew nervous and scared, except Théon and Mirra. He looked at her and said: ‘Go and stop it.’ She entered her cabin, lay down and went out of her body – to find that huge beings, invisible to humans, were dancing wildly on the water and making the ship bob up and down like a cork. She pleaded with those beings ‘for half an hour’ to refrain and save the lives of the humans on the ship. Finally they consented and the troubled sea calmed down. ‘I then went back into my body and came out of the cabin. When I went on deck I found all the people gathered there happily engaged in jovial talk.’ ³⁶ There is no evidence that after that journey Mirra ever saw Max Théon and Alma again.

One has the impression that Alma withdrew from life of her own will. After she and her husband had spent the summer of 1908 in France with Louis and Claire Thémanlys, she wanted, at the beginning of September, to visit the British Channel Islands. (She had been born on the Isle of Wight.) Before the departure of the ferry-boat from the harbour of Côteret, there was time for a stroll along a rather dangerous path between rocks protruding over the sea. Eyewitnesses say that she slipped, probably in trance as usual, and fell into the cold waters. She did not want to postpone her outing but became ill during the crossing. On her arrival in the port of Gorey, on the island of Jersey, she was taken to a hotel, where she died that very day, 10 September.’ ³⁷

His wife’s death was a heavy blow for Théon and he never got over it. He stopped the publication of the Revue cosmique in December of the same year, 1908. Afterwards he lived sequestered in Tlemcen, so much so that the Mother, like most others who had known him, thought that he had died in 1913. In that year Théon, who was a reckless car driver, did meet with a serious accident, having to walk on crutches for a long time afterwards. He died many years later, in 1927, with the faithful Teresa at his side. She would survive him for less than a year. The red-painted house of wonders in Tlemcen was empty.

Sri Aurobindo would reportedly say: ‘Théon knew that he was not meant to succeed but had only come to prepare the way to a certain extent for others to come and perfect it. But later the disciples around him made him believe himself to be the man destined to bring down the Supermind into the physical plane, and naturally the whole thing came to a smash. His wife saw that the Supermind was not to be attained by them and that the venture had failed for the time being, and so she gave up her body. It was she who had been supporting Théon with her knowledge and powers; without her he was nothing, and naturally after her death the entire project suffered shipwreck.’ ³⁸

More than sixty years later the Mother would look back in amazement: ‘Théon and Sri Aurobindo did not know each other. They never met, they did not know of each other’s existence, till, without having at all proceeded along the same lines, they reached the same conclusion. In totally different countries, without ever having met, and at the same moment they knew the same thing. And I have known the one as well as the other.’ ³⁹

The Four Asuras

There is an important part of the Cosmic Tradition that has not yet been touched upon: the explanation of how a world like ours is the result of God’s workings – and can only be such a result, as there is nothing else but God, or That, or the Divine, or the Supreme. The Mother talked about a ‘very old Tradition’ several times, always emphasizing that the story, as narrated by her, sounded like a children’s tale, but that its symbolism was profound and referred to the actual facts.

Once it so happened that ‘God’ decided to exteriorize himself ‘in order to know himself in detail.’ To that end he first manifested his Consciousness, which is the Universal or Divine Mother, and ordered her to make a universe. The Universal Mother emanated four beings, representing the four essential powers of God (and therefore of herself): Truth, Consciousness (that is Light), Life, and Ananda (which means Bliss).[^100] Those four beings ‘were indeed altogether very high beings, of the highest Reality.’

But God had also expressed the wish that his manifestation should be based on freedom. ‘He wanted all that went forth from him to be absolutely independent and free so that it might unite with him in freedom, not through compulsion.’ Because of their freedom, those high and essentially godlike beings each deemed themselves to be the very Godhead himself, which of course is an absurdity, for the Divine is One. This meant that, in a manner of speaking, they distanced themselves from their origin, thereby turning into its opposites. Truth became Falsehood; Consciousness-Light became the black Inconscient; Life became Death; Bliss became Suffering. (One finds in this story the elements of many great traditions all over the world, although most remember only part of it. The Bible, for instance, mentions only the Being of Light.)

The manifestation had taken a turn for the worse. The Universal Mother, upon seeing this, was greatly disturbed and turned to God, asking him to come to her aid. God said to her: ‘Start again, but this time try to do it in such a way that the beings are less independent.’ And it was thus that the Great Mother created the gods. ‘But as the first four had come before them, at every step the gods ran into them, and so it was that the world changed into a battlefield’ between gods and demons, Good and Evil, as all the great traditions tell. Time and again the gods have to do battle with the first four Asuras and with their emanations – for the Asuras had the power to multiply into ‘cascades’ of millions of lesser beings who resembled them and assisted them in their work.

If the world had to continue like this, it would never turn godlike, it would never become its divine Origin again. But when she emanated the gods, the Great Creatrix poured her divine Love into the dark Inconscient. It is this Love that is the driving force of the development of the world, of its evolution on the way back, or up, to its divinization. And as all forces are beings and all beings forces, this Love is a divine Being ever present at the core of the manifestation, which some call ‘creation.’ It is this Being who incarnates in what in India are called the Avatars, the series of direct divine interventions in the unfolding of the evolution.

In the Revue cosmique Mirra published a vision she had – an occult experience – in which she met that Being in a deep cave at the bottom of the ocean of existence. It radiated all the positive forces which cooperate in the development of the world and which are concretely and personally present in its history as Avatars (incarnations of the essential Divine) or as Vibhutis (incarnations of divine powers). That Being was apparently asleep, she wrote, but when she approached it, it opened its eyes.

Why is it worth knowing all this? Because the Asuras never incarnate as such, only in partial representations or emanations. And because Mirra became closely associated with the direct emanations of all four original Asuras. Her encounters with three of them are well documented.

Asuric beings, like the gods, exist in non-evolutionary worlds and are therefore immortal. To change, to evolve to a higher status – to a divine one for example – they have to take on an earthly body, and most of them refuse to do this. The reason is that in an earthly body they are subject to the forces of the earthly evolution, while in their own worlds they are intangible and sovereignly immortal. The Cosmic Tradition, as we have seen, taught that the earthly evolution is leading to a divinized being in a corps glorieux – as Sri Aurobindo in a faraway part of the globe was also discovering. It was therefore Mirra’s endeavour to convert the Asuras and to make them take up a material form, for without their conversion, or their disappearance by reintegration into their Origin, a new species on Earth could not be achieved because of their insuperable resistance to it. By their conversion or disappearance, the fatal change of the four essential aspects of the Godhead into their contraries – the Fall at the beginning of our universe aeons ago – would be reversed, and the manifestation could continue in its Godward evolution.

Mirra met the Asura of Light (actually the Asura of the dark Inconscient) on her occult explorations under Théon’s guidance during her first stay at Tlemcen. In the Semitic traditions this Asura of Light is called Lucifer or Satan. He agreed to her request to collaborate and consented to be ‘clothed in a body,’ but only a subtle, vital one. ‘You could feel him the way you feel a draught.’ He refused to be born of human parents, which is the only way to get a material body. Théon wanted to keep the converted Asura in his power, for the master occultist felt perfectly at home in the vital also. Mirra, well knowing who Théon really was, pretended she had not understood him and let the converted Asura freely choose the way in which he wanted to collaborate. ‘He said that he was going to set in motion the Chinese revolution … “Mark my words, [he said,] it will happen in exactly five years” … I noted it down. And exactly five years later it happened.’ The last Chinese emperor, a child, was overthrown in 1911 by the revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925). ‘That,’ the Asura said, ‘will be the beginning, the first terrestrial movement heralding … the new world upon Earth.’

But then, who was Théon? The Mother has said repeatedly that he was an emanation of the Asura of Death. This explains his great powers, his fearlessness, and his combative character. It also explains why he was so interested in the mantra of life (and death), and why his anger was potent enough to cut Mirra’s lifecord.

And with this goes a story. When Mirra was fifteen, she went with her mother to Italy, where Elvire, Mathilde’s sister, was living with her family. Mirra, who spoke Italian well at that time, and her mother visited the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, the Palace of the Doges, situated next to the San Marco basilica on the world-famous Piazza San Marco. Visitors on a tour through the palace pass through the cells where formerly the prisoners were locked up. Those cells are beside a narrow canal crossed by the Bridge of Sighs, from where prisoners taken to their execution had a last look over the lagoon, symbol of mighty seafaring Venice.

The walls in the prison cells are covered with graffiti, scribbled by the prisoners. Strangely, Mirra felt attracted to a graffito there and knew that it was from her own hand. And she ‘saw’ how she had been there with a prisoner, how some people suddenly had burst into the cell, caught hold of her, tied her up and thrown her through a window into the canal. The experience was so vivid and overwhelming that she had to leave the palace and breathe some fresh air outside.

As she was always looking for explanations of her experiences, she discovered what had happened. ‘I researched in museums, looked up archives, found out my name, other people’s names.’ ⁴⁰ A doge had usurped the throne of his predecessor and thrown the latter’s son into prison. But unknown to the usurper his daughter was in love with the son of his rival, the imprisoned young man whom she secretly went to visit. Her father, having discovered her secret visits, fell into a fit of rage and ordered his daughter to be drowned. His order was executed without delay. By now the reader will have understood who the hot-tempered doge and his daughter were at the beginning of the twentieth century. It seems, besides, that one of the Venetian doges, portrayed by Titian, bears a close resemblance to Max Théon, of whom Mirra drew a remarkable portrait in 1906.⁴¹ In that former Venetian life, and (briefly) in this one too, Mirra had been killed by the Asura of Death.

Did she succeed in converting Théon? The following words of the Mother are probably applicable to him: ‘There is one [Asura] who has almost made an attempt at conversion, but he has not been able to do it. When it had to be done, he felt it as quite unpleasant. So he put it off till another time.’ One should remember that Asuras are beings of immense power, with an ego on a similar scale. If it is already so difficult for a human being to surrender its ego to the Divine, the difficulty for beings of that order, who since the beginning of the manifestation have been the lords of the universe, to surrender their self-will must be enormous. And this, of course, is why their conversion is crucial for the destiny of the world.

Mirra’s encounter with a third emanation – an emanation of the Asura of Falsehood, who calls himself ‘Lord of the Nations’ – will take up part of the following chapter.

Mirra Morisset’s connection with the Cosmic Movement had lasted five years, for her a period of enormous progress and change. Her life as an artist and her marriage gradually came to an end. A page of her life was being turned, and on the following page nothing but questions were as yet to be read. Mirra knew that she was being carried, just as in her early youth, and that the call to her mission would have to be answered one day. But now she knew also who she actually was, for Alma had told her.

[^100]: The supreme attributes of the Divine are Sat (Existence or Truth), Chit (Consciousness that is Light) and Ananda (Bliss). A Sanskrit ‘name’ of the Divine is therefore Sat-Chit-Ananda, spelled in the English transliteration as Sachchidananda. However, an essential aspect of Chit is Tapas (Power that is Life), for everything the Divine is conscious of at the same time exists in one of the many modes of his Power.