The Mother

4: A Synthesis in the Making

Accustomed only to read outward signs
None saw aught new in her, none divined her state.¹

– Sri Aurobindo

Mirra’s divorce from Henri Morisset took place in March 1909. She went to live alone on the fifth floor of 49 Rue du Levis, a street parallel to the Rue de Tocqueville and not far from her former house. Maybe the following statement of the Mother was applicable to Morisset also: ‘When you saw the artist at work, he lived in a magnificent beauty, but when you saw the gentleman at home, he had only a very limited contact with the artist in himself, and he became generally speaking a very vulgar, very ordinary man.’ ² And she had a character in one of her plays say: ‘I always dreamt of a great love that would be shared, free from all animal activity, something that could physically represent the great love at the origin of the worlds. This dream accounted for my marriage. But the experience was not a happy one. I have loved deeply, with great sincerity and intensity, but my love has not met with the response it hoped for.’ ³

On Her Own

For the time being Mirra was on her own, which does not mean that she led the life of a disillusioned divorcee or an embittered recluse. On the contrary, she took the opportunity to see as much of the world and of her fellow human beings as possible, and where could she have found a more colorful gamut of the human experience than in la ville lumière, the City of Light? For Mirra was of the opinion that there should be no barrier between the spiritual and the ordinary life, everything without exception being the One. It might be less easy to lead the spiritual life in the midst of the ordinary, but the result would prove to be much richer and more complete, more integral.

She met Anatole France and asked him if he knew of the Cosmic Tradition, as he had in his novel La révolte des anges written pages that closely agreed with its teachings. But the famous author had never heard of the Cosmic Tradition. He had reached the same insights guided by his intuition. She went to performances of all three forms of theatre Paris had to offer: sophisticated, for example the Comédie française; the ‘boulevard theatre,’ showing the risqué comedies its bourgeois public craved for; and the Grand Guignol, the folksy melodramatic plays, performed mostly in theatres on the outskirts of the city for an emotional and boisterous audience. In one of her conversations the Mother describes vividly how much the spectators identified with the characters on the stage during a popular cloak-and-dagger play Le Bossu (the hunchback).

Mirra also enjoyed music very much and had several composers among her acquaintances. One of them was Ambroise Thomas, a celebrity at the time because of his twenty operas – foremost Mignon, which is still in the international repertoire, and Hamlet. Thomas would become Director of the Paris Conservatory of music. He was probably the composer who, as the Mother said, was so skilled at the intricate art of orchestrating music – ‘it’s like higher mathematics’ – that other composers had their orchestrations done by him. Thomas had visited India and taken a youthful, good-looking Indian girl with him as the nanny of his children. This girl was clairvoyant and excelled at palmistry, so much so that she was engaged at the Moulin Rouge, where she performed under the guise of – what else? – an Indian ‘maharani.’

We know that Mirra learnt to play the piano and to sing at an early age. When she was fourteen she had a powerful experience when, during a marriage ceremony in a synagogue, exalting music of Camille Saint-Saëns was played and a flashing ray of light pierced her heart. As the Mother she would later say that art is a great means of spiritual progress, and she would often tell her young, bright-eyed audience during her evening talks about the occult levels or worlds where sound and music originate, and about the composers whose music she had loved so much.

César Franck, she would say, had a psychic opening and created his music under the direct influence of his soul – something most music lovers who know his (only) symphony, or his Trois Chorals for organ, will have difficulty disagreeing with. She would call Hector Berlioz, who transmuted every feeling into sound, ‘the very incarnation of music,’ and she put him, despite his shortcomings, among the greatest composers. She said that something like an unhealthy vein ran through the compositions of Frédéric Chopin. And she would talk about Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and about the occult inspiration in many parts of the operas of Richard Wagner, whose fame was around the turn of the century at its peak, in France as well as elsewhere.

And then there was Eugene Ysaÿe, the Belgian violinist, ‘truly the most wonderful violinist of his age. That man had most certainly a reincarnation of Beethoven in him – not perhaps a reincarnation of [Beethoven’s] entire psychic being, but in any case that of his musical capacity. He looked alike, he had the head of Beethoven. I have seen him, I have heard him play … I did not know him, I knew nothing about him. I was at a concert in Paris and there was [Beethoven’s] Concerto in D major [for violin and orchestra] on the programme … I saw him coming on the stage to play and I said: “Isn’t that strange how much this man looks like Beethoven: he is the very likeness of Beethoven!” Then the violin joined in with one stroke of the bow, three, four notes … and everything changed, the whole atmosphere changed. All suddenly became marvellous. Three notes, struck with such power, such grandeur! It was so wonderful that nothing stirred anymore, all remained as if suspended. And he played that from beginning to end in an absolutely unique manner, with an understanding I have not met with in any other performer. And then I saw that the musical genius of Beethoven was in him.’ ⁴

Cranks, Seekers and Sages

It is undeniable that in our human world today an elite manifests itself of which the distinctive mark is a higher Consciousness that wants to participate in a wisdom beyond the rational knowledge.⁵

– M. Schwaller de Lubicz

‘When I was in Paris, I went to many places where there were meetings of all kinds and people who were doing all sorts of research, spiritual (so-called spiritual), occult, and so on.’ ⁶ This was a world in the shadows of public life, as it were, but the object of widespread interest and busily frequented. It was the world of mediums, spiritism, automatic writing, poltergeist phenomena, alchemy, astrology, channelling, white and black magic, Satanism. As Peter Washington writes: ‘Churches were in decline. Atheists and materialists attacked them from without. The abuse of clerical privilege and collusion between Church and State exposed them to the criticism of liberals and radicals … The antiquity, hierarchy and secular power which had for so long been the sources of their authority were now the cause of internal revolt and public disaffection.’ Besides: ‘The study of Asian religion had been proceeding in Europe since the late eighteenth century, when the Royal Asiatic Society was formed in London and Hindu scriptures were translated into French and English. By the 1870s German scholars were producing magnificent editions and translations of the Hindu Vedas and major Buddhist texts.’ ⁷

Mirra was of course very much at home in this kind of activities. It is no exaggeration to say that at the time she was already one of the greatest occultists alive, and, in the Western context at least, one of the most spiritually advanced people. She wanted to find out what was going on in that immense patchwork of occult and pseudo-occult groups and gatherings. She wanted, as always, to learn and – where appropriate – to teach or communicate some of her knowledge. For if a great part of the ‘occult wave’ was bogus and fare for cranks, there were also truly gifted and sincerely seeking people. We have already met the clairvoyant Madame Fraya, and there were others of her kind and with her talent.

Mirra also wanted, if and where appropriate, to put matters straight and warn people. ‘There was a time when I wanted to prove to people that what they were evoking was nothing but themselves. I then had some fun simply by a concentration of the will giving bangs to the furniture, making tables walk, and all such things.’ ⁸ She especially made it clear that most of the occult phenomena were caused by little vital beings, the ‘elementals,’ of which we have already heard as denizens of the lower vital world and who find their amusement in making fools of the by-and-large ignorant and defenceless human beings.

‘Those who indulge in this kind of practice [e.g. table-turning or automatic writing], which derives from an unhealthy curiosity, get what they deserve. You should know that the atmosphere we live in is full of a great number of small vital entities which are born of unsatisfied desires, of vital movements of a very low type, and also of the decomposition of larger beings of the vital world. Indeed, it is swarming with them. It is no doubt thanks to a special protection that most people do not see what is going on in this vital atmosphere, for it is not exactly pleasant. But if out of presumption they want to come into contact with [that atmosphere] and set about trying automatic writing or table-turning, or anything else of that kind, out of an unhealthy curiosity, well, what happens is that one or several of those small entities have fun at their expense. They gather all the necessary information from the subconscious mind [of the humans] and then provide them with that information as convincing proof that they are the person who has been summoned! I could write a book with instances I have known of this kind of stories.’ ⁹

The group of people who had met regularly in the studio of Rue Lemercier now continued to meet, on Wednesday nights, in Mirra’s small fifth floor apartment in Rue du Levis. ‘They came to have me demonstrate or to tell them about certain things.’ The Mother would later tell about the fate of one of the participants, a young man who was a student and a poet, but who was also leading a rather murky sexual life. Although other members of the group had met him a couple of days before, he did not show up on the evening of the meeting. ‘We waited quite a long time. Then the meeting was over and when I opened the door to let the people out, there sat there a big dark-grey cat which rushed like mad into the room and jumped upon me, mewing desperately. I looked into its eyes and said to myself: “But these are his eyes,” meaning the person who had not shown up, “surely something has happened to him.” The next day we learned that he had been murdered the night before; he had been found lying strangled on his bed … The eyes of the cat had completely changed, they had become human eyes.’ ¹⁰

Mister Mind

Mirra had first met him in Montmorency, at the house of Henri Morisset’s sisters, who were looking after her son André: Paul Antoine Richard, born in 1874 in the south of France, intelligent, good-looking, and very interested in occultism. Richard too must have discovered the Revue cosmique, for he had already been on a visit to Tlemcen from 7 January to 17 February 1907. One may suppose that he had wanted to know more than Max Théon and Alma were able to tell him in those few weeks, that the Théons had a clear perception of his personality and capacities, and that they therefore had told him about Mirra Morisset, as she was still called. Mirra and Richard met shortly afterwards, some say during a game of tennis, which Mirra liked to play so much.

Richard had been impressed by Max Théon. He wrote after his visit to Tlemcen: ‘I have passed forty days with the most wonderful man in the world. I feel as if I have climbed a high mountain, from which I have been able to descry the magnificent horizons that I always have dreamed of. It is certain that there always have been men who have come from on high to manifest the divine power and goodness. This confirms what I have long felt … Great things are taking shape.’ ¹¹

After serving four years in the army, Richard had studied philosophy and theology, and been a pasteur [French Protestant minister] from 1898 to 1905, first in Montauban and afterwards in Lille, near the Belgian border. In Lille he had founded or joined a number of philanthropic organizations. His humanitarian interests drew him increasingly towards socialism. The twentieth century, he wrote in a letter, would be one of unprecedented enlightenment, in which ‘science and faith would eventually meet.’ In 1905 Richard resigned his ministry and dedicated himself fully to humanitarian work. He joined the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, a pro-Dreyfus group. In the same year he took up the study of law, failed to kick-start a political career, and supported himself as a writer for a Paris daily. He also became a Freemason. Freemasonry was extremely powerful at the time and the main force in the struggle of rationalism and liberalism against the Catholic Church and the anti-Dreyfusards. ‘The Masonic loges recruited on a grand scale and formed, in the still well-kept secret of their initiatory rites, the cadres of the Third Republic.’ ¹²

Mirra and Richard grew much closer after her divorce from Morisset in March 1908. She studied law along with Richard – we are reminded of her studying mathematics together with her brother – so extensively that she ‘could have passed the examination.’ Richard obtained his law degree from the Académie de Lille in July 1908.¹³ Shortly afterwards he became a barrister at the Paris Court of Appeals. He was still eager to enter politics, and in February 1910 joined the Ligue de Défense et de Propagande Républicaine Radicale et Radicale-Socialiste, a party much smaller than its resounding name might suggest, combining ‘a leftist ideology with a conservative financial programme (and a strong Masonic influence).’ ¹⁴

It was supposedly this party that sent Paul Richard to Pondicherry, a French comptoir in the deep south of the Indian subcontinent, a little more than 150 kilometres south of Madras, on the Coromandel Coast. A comptoir was an anchoring place where the French did colonial business and provided for their ships for the voyage ahead to East Asia or back towards the motherland. They had several such comptoirs on the Indian coasts. Pondicherry, the most important one, was a rather backward, out-of-the-way place at the time Richard arrived there. As K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar describes it, it was ‘a dead city … like a backwater of the sea, a stagnant pool by the shore … akin to a cemetery … infested by ghosts and goblins.’ ¹⁵ But it was French territory and consequently entitled to a representative in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris. It is not clear whether it was Richard’s mission to assist a certain Paul Bluysen in the latter’s electoral campaign for the Hindu Party or whether he intended to campaign for himself.

Yet it seems that Richard was much more interested in finding a spiritual master, a yogi, than in his political pursuits. Behind all his humanitarianism, socialism, idealism and enthusiasm for human progress was hidden an urge for power for which we will soon be able to account. He, too, had certainly heard or read about all those Western occultists, H.P. Blavatsky being the foremost, who had been initiated and received power from some eastern guru, and the people who met with Richard on his arrival in Pondicherry report that one of his very first questions was where he could find a yogi.

‘Since he was interested in occultism and spirituality, he took advantage of the occasion [the election] to come here [to Pondicherry] and to search,’ the Mother said in a recorded conversation. ‘He was searching for a “Master,” a yogi. He arrived. The first thing he said, rather than occupying himself with politics, was: “I am looking for a yogi.” Somebody told him: “You are really in luck, the yogi has just arrived.”’ ¹⁶

The yogi in question was Aurobindo Ghose, at that moment the most famous revolutionary in India, who had turned his political revolution into a spiritual one. He had had to flee British territory because the colonial authorities were about to deport him, and found refuge in the French enclave of Pondicherry. He had arrived from Calcutta by boat and under an assumed name on 4 April 1910, which means that Richard must have arrived shortly afterwards. Mister Ghose, though, was ‘less than anxious’ to meet unknown people. After his arrival in Pondicherry he remained in seclusion for more than three months, not leaving the house in which he had been given shelter nor allowing the young men staying with him to do so either. ‘The British Government in India could never accept that Sri Aurobindo had come away to French territory to carry on his yoga. Religion and spirituality, these to them were a mere subterfuge … Here was the brain-centre of the Indian independence movement.’ ¹⁷ Still Aurobindo Ghose agreed to see the French visitor. Although Ghose knew French perfectly well, he was not in the habit of speaking it, and a Pondicherrian revolutionary had to act as interpreter, for Richard had little English. This interpreter later wrote in his memoirs that the meeting went well and that Aurobindo Ghose became more and more interested in his visitor. Paul Richard, from his side, came away with a high opinion of the Indian master, but he was much more laudatory about his knowledge than about his spiritual realization, for which Richard did not possess the necessary discernment.

And the elections? Richard had grossly underestimated the difficulties that would face him in a God-forsaken place like Pondicherry, about which he knew practically nothing. ‘On certain occasions, during the campaigns for political elections, complete anarchy seemed to reign in Pondicherry, while rioting and murder continued for days on end and blood flowed freely. People would not dare stir out of their houses, especially after dark.’ ¹⁸ During the time of the elections, and at most other times, Pondicherry was terrorized by gangs in the pay of the political candidates. Richard, an unknown Frenchman and a lamb among wolves, stood no chance.

The date of his departure from Pondicherry is not known, but he was surely home before December. All he could show to back up his enthusiastic reports about his meetings with Aurobindo Ghose was a rather dim photograph in which Mirra, surprisingly, saw nothing but the politician Ghose had been at the time it was taken. ‘I had the impression that it was a very interesting man, that’s all.’

Alexandra David-Néel

In the meantime Mirra came to be on friendly terms with an extraordinary woman, Alexandra David-Néel. She may have met her for the first time when Madame David-Néel was giving a talk on Buddhism at the Guimet Museum, a place that crops up time and again in the lives of the Westerners who played a part in the discovery of the East. ‘The Paris of the fin de siècle discovers Asia in the footsteps of the Goncourt Brothers who were the very first to give the starting signal for the run on Japanese prints, Buddhas in jade, silk fans embroidered with melancholic sunsets seen through branches of blossoming plum trees … And in Paris, Asia had its temple: the Guimet Museum.’ ¹⁹ This museum was familiar to Mirra. She had visited it many times, and, even when still a little girl, had had an unexpected contact with one of the mummies there and with certain artefacts used by Egyptian royalty.

Mirra had already been practising Buddhism in the minister’s box at the opera. This time, while listening to Madame David-Néel, who was a convinced and practising Buddhist, she saw the Buddha present near the speaker, ‘not above the head but a little to the side.’ When the talk was over and Mirra told Madame David-Néel about her vision, she received the indignant repartee that such a thing was impossible because the Buddha had gone to Nirvana. All the same, both ladies came to respect each other’s qualities and soon were friends.

Alexandra David-Néel was born near Paris in 1868. Her father, Louis David, was a friend of Victor Hugo and he too, just like the great writer, had been banished for his anti-government stance. As a consequence Alexandra grew up in Brussels, educated by a bigoted mother and in sanctimonious nuns’ schools. In revolt against such stifling surroundings, she became an anti-conformist and an ascetic, an inborn trait that made it impossible to punish her in any way. She also seemed driven by an urge to depart for faraway places and went on several escapades, but each time she had to return home for lack of money.

In 1888, when old enough to go her own way, we find her in the London which Max Théon and Alma had recently left. There Alexandra became a member of the rapidly expanding Theosophical Society, the movement that opened up the eastern religion to the West. A year later she studied Sanskrit in Paris with professors from the Collège de France. She also improved her knowledge of English, took music and singing lessons, and inevitably discovered the Guimet Museum, where she often prostrated herself in front of the Buddha statues, so that the place became really a kind of a temple to her. She read extensively in the religious literature of the East, deepened her knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita, the Rig Veda, the Dhammapada and other essential texts, and discovered her vocation as an orientalist and a Buddhist. Her biographer, Jean Chalon, points out: ‘For Alexandra Buddhism was not a religion but a philosophy.’

In 1892 she travelled to Ceylon and visited Colombo, then Madurai, Benares and Darjeeling on the subcontinent. As a member of the Theosophical Society she had no trouble finding friends and shelter. And she always saw to it that her handbag was stuffed with letters of recommendation from well-known or highly-placed people.

Then Alexandra’s life took an astonishing turn, for we next find her at the Hanoi Opera, in what was then still called Indochina, where in 1895 she became the première chanteuse under the pseudonym Alexandra Myrial! In 1897 she sang in Paris, but without the success she had hoped for, two years later at the Athens Opera, and, at the turn of the century, at the Tunis Opera. Of this last Opera she became the manager and married a railway engineer, Philippe Néel, of British origin. But Alexandra was also an ardent feminist and would never allow the shackles of marriage to press too deeply into her flesh, although we owe to that relationship many interesting letters addressed to her dear, generous ‘Mouchy,’ as she called her husband.

The very intelligent Alexandra, now Madame David-Néel, was also active as a journalist and gave talks about all new and progressive topics: socialism, feminism, eastern religions in general and Buddhism in particular. And this was how Mirra met her. For a while they saw each other almost every day, sat together for ‘philosophical meditations,’ and went for walks in the Bois de Boulogne, where some of the first aeroplanes, grasshopper-like, rose with sputtering engines a few feet into the air and landed – in most cases – less elegantly than the way the ladies and gentlemen sat down on the grass to admire them.

There are frequent short notes in Alexandra’s diary concerning her friendship with Mirra, of the kind ‘dinner with the Richards’ or, on 1 January 1911: ‘Started the year in a session of philosophical meditation at the Richards.’ Although a ‘philosophical’ Buddhist and therefore logically an atheist, Alexandra was also interested in occultism. Putting some of her reading and travelling experiences together, she had by mental formation tried to create a ‘mahatma’ – mahatmas⁹¹ were ‘in’ at the time – and succeeded in doing so. But then her mahatma never left her alone and became such a botheration to Alexandra that she tried to get rid of him by all possible means, though in vain. Finally, she had to confide in Mirra, the occult expert, and received the necessary advice to reabsorb into herself the mental formation which the troublesome mahatma was.

‘Madame David-Néel was an intense woman and capable of profound meditation,’ said the Mother. And she gave an example. On her journey to the north of the Indian subcontinent, while her bearers were setting up camp, Alexandra went for a walk and became absorbed in meditation. Later on, returning to her surface consciousness, she found that she had strayed a long way from the camp and began to walk back – until she stood in front of a river. As the camp was definitely on the other side of it, she could only conclude, to her astonishment, that she must have crossed it while in concentration and unaware of her surroundings. She must have walked on water.

Another anecdote the Mother heard from Alexandra was of how one day she was sitting in meditation in front of a tree. When she opened her eyes she thought at first, probably because of the sunlight sifting through the trees, that she saw a heap of dry leaves. Then she thought that a zebra (!) was standing in front of her. But when her eyes adapted to the light she saw, at a short distance, a tiger of a respectable size fixing his interested gaze on her. As a true Buddhist, she distanced herself from everything life represented and withdrew within, ready for any eventuality. When after some time nothing happened, she opened her eyes again and saw that the tiger was gone. (Jean Chalon, showing an uncommonly penetrating insight into tiger psychology, writes: ‘Vexed for having been taken for a heap of dead leaves and for a zebra, traumatized by the profound immobility of the woman he thought would be a tasty prey, the tiger fled to hide his shame deep in the jungle.’)

Madame David-Néel would write in her book L’Inde où j’ai vécu (the India where I have lived): ‘I have the best possible memories of the evenings spent with her [Mirra] in the small house she inhabited in the Rue du Val-de-Grâce in Paris, and of the walks together in the Bois de Boulogne. Neither she nor I myself could at that time have imagined the place she occupies today.’ And she would characterize Mirra as ‘a woman of distinction, an intellectual of a mystic tendency, of Levantine origin and French education.’ And Jean Chalon comments: ‘It stirs the imagination, that tête-a-tête of the future Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the future amazon of the Himalayas on the first day of 1911.’ ²⁰

For Madame David-Néel had still a long way to go. In that very same year she left on a journey from which she would only return in 1925. In November she met Aurobindo Ghose in Pondicherry. On 10 or 11 January she met with the tiger which fled so shamefully into the jungle of Kapilavasthu, Nepal. In 1914 she engaged a young Sikkimese lama, renamed him Albert’ and kept him with her for the rest of his life. Tibet was a forbidden territory and closely watched. Frustrated in her effort to reach Lhasa – for the time being, that is – she turned her back on it and travelled via Rangoon to Japan, which she hated intensely.

Then she journeyed on via Korea to China, was caught there in the civil war, and spent the first several months in the lama monastery of Kum-Bum, then three years in the deserts of Szechwan. At last she entered Lhasa, in January 1924. She thought nobody had noticed that a foreign national had entered the forbidden territory and its holy capital, for she spoke the language like a Tibetan and had disguised herself well. Nonetheless she had given herself away, for a spy found it suspect that she took a bath, and not only once but every day. Luckily, the official to whom he reported this bizarre fact paid no attention to it, maybe because he found it too incredible to be true.

After an absence of fourteen years she met ‘Mouchy’ again; he had faithfully sent her the money which had enabled her to make that fantastic journey. Madame David-Néel became a celebrity. She had a house built in Digne, in the south of France, and went to live there with Albert. The house was called ‘Samten Dzong,’ meaning ‘Fortress of Meditation’ in Tibetan. But she still dreamed of journeying beyond the horizon, and again went to China, where she had to remain from 1937 till 1944, trapped by the Second World War. She wrote several books, all of which are still being reprinted and read to the present day. Madame David-Néel died in her Fortress of Meditation in 1969, a full century old.

She had continued to correspond sporadically with her former friend Mirra Richard, she addressing the Mother as Chère amie de jadis, (dear friend of yesteryear) the Mother replying with Chère amie de toujours (dear friend of always).

Yes, Mirra was now Mirra Richard. She had married Paul Richard on 5 May 1911, and went to live in his house (which still exists at 9 Rue du Val-de-Grâce, in the Valley of Grace). The apparent reason for the marriage was that, after divorcing his Dutch wife, Richard wanted the custody of the three children, ‘but to do so he had to have his legal situation in order, so he asked me to marry him. I said yes. I have always been totally indifferent to those things.’

The second reason for the marriage was much more important. ‘When I met him, I knew who he was and I decided I would convert him. That is the thing. The whole story revolves about that.’ ²¹ She had immediately recognized Richard as an emanation of the third Asura we have met in the former chapter: the Asura of Falsehood who had originally been the Angel of Truth, and who now called (and calls) himself ‘Lord of the Nations.’ His conversion was an immense task undertook, and the story of the relationship would be ‘far more exciting than any novel imaginable.’ When she took up the challenge, she was sufficiently conscious and experienced to know what was in store for her.

This should be kept in mind when trying to understand what their relationship actually meant and how it unfolded. The Mother would clearly state that she was Richard’s guru. Everything he came to know about occultism and spirituality he had from her, and the books he wrote were based on her inspiration. She would accompany him to Pondicherry and to Japan, each time paying for the passage from the money she had left. Outwardly she would be the cultured, intelligent, refined Madame Mirra Richard, while inwardly she would be battling for Richard’s soul, having to swallow the venom of his antagonism and weather the fury of his Asuric revolt. The Mother sometimes described their relationship as ‘infernal’ and ‘diabolical.’ She was not given to exaggeration and she had, indeed, dared to challenge a demon, one of the most demonic kind – although he too, just like Max Théon, could be extremely gentle and affable, and hardly anybody would have guessed his real nature.

Mirra’s son André, who at the time was in his teens, later remembered: ‘My father and mother divorced, and mother married Paul Richard. They went to live at Rue du Val-de-Grâce and I used to go and have lunch with them every Sunday. After lunch, especially when the weather was bad, we went to [Mirra’s painting] studio. Paul Richard lay down on a couch, lit his pipe, and they started working, that is, my mother wrote down what he dictated. I could not help but notice that she was rectifying most of Paul’s dictation. That small house at the back of a garden, or more precisely of a fairly large courtyard with a few trees, stretching in front of a big apartment house, was strikingly cosy and very comfortable.’ ²²

In those pre-war years Paul Richard wrote two books, L’Éther vivant (the living ether) and Les Dieux (the Gods). ‘The books he wrote – especially the first one, The Living Ether – were in fact based on my knowledge. He put my knowledge into French, and beautiful French at that. I would tell him my experiences and he would write them down. Later he wrote The Gods. This was incomplete, one-sided.’ The Mother would also say that Richard had ‘a rather remarkable metaphysical brain.’

Looking back, she discerned several distinct periods in her life. There had, for instance, been the period of vital experience and development, including her first marriage, her life as an artist among the artists, and the explorations of the occult realms. With Richard she had entered a period of mental development in the most comprehensive way: ‘a study of all the philosophies, all the conceptual juggling in the minutest details, delving into systems, getting a grasp on them.’ It was the experience and development of the mental capacities ‘taken to the uppermost limit where you can play with all ideas, when the mind’s development has made you understand that all ideas are true and that there is a synthesis to be made, and that beyond that synthesis lies something luminous and true.’ ²³ These were ten years of intellectual studies, of working out a synthesis that would lead her to Sri Aurobindo.

On 31 December 1911, New Year’s Eve, when opening the door of her studio and looking at the night sky, she saw a shooting star. It is a popular belief that if one formulates a wish during the instant the shooting star is visible, the wish will come true. The Mother would give the rationale behind the popular belief: the fact that one is able to utter the wish so spontaneously and unexpectedly proves that it must represent a deep longing just below the surface of the subconscient. ‘If you are able to articulate your spiritual aspiration at that very moment, it means … that it dominates your consciousness. And, necessarily, what dominates your consciousness can be realized very quickly.’ ²⁴ And she uttered her wish: ‘The union with the Divine for my body.’ On the path Mirra was discovering, and in contrast to all other paths, the material body played a very important role. The goal of this path was not the quickest possible escape from our material incarnation into some heaven, liberation or nirvana, but a realization of a divine life, of the corps glorieux upon Earth. Mirra’s body had become extremely refined and sensitive because, on the one hand, she was living in her soul and every yogic siddhi (permanent realization) exerts an influence on the material body, and on the other hand because of her occult mastery of the various sheaths of the adhara. A yogic discipline for the material body, in other words for the Earth, is possible only when the yogi masters each part of that material body as well as of the other constituents of his person, and brings it under the direct influence of his soul, which is the Divine in him. This was precisely the wish that Mirra formulated on the threshold of the new year.

Around the same time Mirra succeeded in awakening the kundalini. The kundalini is the force sustaining the life of a human being, the power normally coiled up and asleep at the base of the spine. When it awakes, it rises up like the intertwined serpents in the caduceus⁹² through the chakras or energy centres of the body and awakens them. (This happens in the subtle, vital body.) When fully unfolded, the kundalini touches the ‘thousand petalled lotus’ on top of the head, with the effect of a sudden resplendent sun.

This extremely important step in Mirra’s yoga is mentioned by her only once, and that in passing, but it was luckily recorded during a conversation with a disciple.²⁵ It is, however, explicitly confirmed by Sri Aurobindo in his epic Savitri, which is the spiritual biography of the Mother and of himself.²⁶ In that conversation the Mother said that the awakening of the kundalini took place before she went to India. She had read books by Vivekananda on the subject and had, as always, tried out what she read. Strange to say, when the force of the kundalini arose in her, it climbed all the way up to a place above the head, which is where ‘the consciousness installed itself’ and where it remained ever afterwards. Sri Aurobindo would later tell her that he had had the same experience – and that normally one dies of it. To which the Mother added with a smile that both of them had survived.

When working at achieving the union with the Divine for the body, Mirra had employed her usual one-pointed concentration. It is a fact that she worked at her sadhana every moment of her life and in an ever more intense way, just like Sri Aurobindo did. It was with the same one-pointed concentration that she had resolved to attain union with her psychic being. By the end of the year she obtained the realization for which she had been aspiring.

Rue du Val-de-Grâce is near the Jardin du Luxembourg, where Mirra often went for a walk amidst the trees and the greenery, escaping for a while the constant din of the metropolis. But to enter the Jardin du Luxembourg from her house, Mirra had to cross the busy Boulevard Saint-Michel, a street on the Left Bank which has been well-known and even notorious since the Middle Ages. One day she was so inwardly absorbed that she forgot to look about her when stepping down from the pavement into the traffic: only at the last moment did she avoid being hit and run over by a tram, the driver swearing at her – or, as she said with her usual sense of humour, ‘paying me his compliments.’

She Who is Speaking to You …
Let me be Thy herald among men …²⁷

– The Mother

Most of the documents about the life of Mirra during those years are collected in a volume entitled Paroles d’autrefois (Words of Long Ago). Compared to the volumes of the Mother’s talks and conversations of a much later date, Words of Long Ago may give the impression of a haphazard collection of texts, but to see them like that and to pay them but scant attention would be a serious error. There is hardly a topic touched upon in the eight volumes of her Entretiens, called in English Questions and Answers, that is not already present in a mature form in Words of Long Ago. Underestimation of these texts has resulted in many misunderstandings of the Mother’s contribution to Sri Aurobindo’s vision and Yoga.

Words of Long Ago contains the ‘early’ texts. However, Mirra’s occult and spiritual development shows us that ‘early’ in this case is not a synonym for ‘rudimentary.’ In the first years of her marriage to Paul Richard, Mirra was already very advanced on the spiritual path; she had already gone much farther than most human beings can ever hope to go. Some people were aware of this and went to listen to what she had to say. And she explained the place of the human being in the universal scheme of things, the aim that might make life worthwhile and the means to reach that aim, the value of everyday events and encounters, the invisible forces behind their material expressions. She analyzed the waking state with its longings and thoughts, as well as sleep and dreams. And where the audience was sufficiently receptive, she talked about the soul, about spirituality and the Divine.

The first decades of the twentieth century were also a time when women fought for their rightful place in society, when the suffragettes did not shrink from extreme action. (One of them threw herself in front of the King’s horse during the Derby, and was killed.) Mirra, like Alexandra David-Néel, was a convinced and active feminist. One could even call Mirra the ‘essential’ feminist, for reasons we shall discover soon. She talked, obviously, about the inanity of ‘the perpetual oppositions between men and women’ and stressed the inner fact of the union of ‘those two complementary halves of humanity’ that should now find its expression in the outer forms of society and in its laws. But she also said: ‘If women want to take the place they claim in the government of the nations, they must still make much more progress in the mastery of the self, the broadening of their ideas and points of view, in intellectual suppleness, and in the oblivion of their sentimental preferences, in order to become worthy of the management of public affairs.’ ²⁸

And in one of her talks to L’Union de la Pensée Féminine, she said the following: ‘It has always seemed to me that, apart from a very few exceptions, the mental role of women is not to speculate on the metaphysical causes of the phenomena which are perceptible to us, but to draw practical conclusions from those phenomena … It would be wrong for women to want to think in the same way as men, they would be in danger of losing their own qualities – profound intuition and practical deduction – without acquiring those of their masculine counterparts – logical reasoning and the capacity of analysis and synthesis.’ ²⁹ A few years later Mirra would say to the women of Japan: ‘The true domain of women is spiritual.’ ³⁰ And many years later the Mother would say that it is only women who can establish the connection between the old world and the new one in the making, and that only women know how to use the Power deriving from service to Truth.³¹

Mirra also met many travellers on the circuit of what would now be called ‘New Age’ communication and propaganda. After Swami Vivekananda, sent on a mission by Ramakrishna Paramhansa, had in 1893 so impressively opened the doors of the West for Eastern religions and spirituality, many visitors from the East followed in his footsteps. Conditions in the West, briefly sketched in this and former chapters, were such that most of those masters and pseudo-masters found an audience; some became very successful. However, at the beginning it was not always easy for them. For some time they felt like total strangers in the unfamiliar Western surroundings, and had great difficulty in adapting to the food and the enigmatic customs of their hosts.

In November 1912 Mirra met one of them: the Sufi mystic and musician Inayat Khan (1882-1927). He had travelled with his ‘Royal Musicians of Hindustan’ from India to Great Britain at the beginning of that year and crossed over to France in September. Although ‘the French capital in 1912 was awash with Orientalism or what was taken for it,’ ³² Indian music was still an absolute novelty to the audiences of the Royal Musicians. Few Westerners had ever seen the instruments they were playing: sitar, esraj, veena and other strange stringed contraptions. On one occasion it even happened that the Royal Musicians were warmly applauded after tuning their instruments because the audience thought that they had finished their first raga! Inayat Khan and his brothers were often in dire straits financially, so much so that at one time they even had to accompany Mata Hari. ‘The foremost fake, Mata Hari was at the height of her glory as a so-called Indian dancer; she was not an Indian and she could not dance.’ She pleaded with the Khan brothers not to expose her and they did not.⁹³

In 1953, the Mother would say about Inayat Khan, who may have given Mirra her initiation into Indian music: ‘I heard a Sufi mystic, an Indian who was also a great musician, say that for the Sufis there was a state higher than that of adoration and surrender to the Divine, higher than that of devotion, that this was not the last stage. The last stage of the progress is when there is no longer any distinction, when you no longer have that kind of adoration or surrender or consecration. It is a very simple state in which one makes no distinction between the Divine and oneself. They know this. It is even written in their books.’ ³³ She had not forgotten anything.

And there was Abdul Baha, about whom the Mother said: ‘I knew Abdul Baha very well, the successor of Baha Ullah, founder of the Baha’i religion. Abdul Baha was his son and lived in prison till he was forty, I believe … After [Baha Ullah’s] death, his son, the sole heir, became determined to preach his father’s religious ideas, and for this purpose he travelled to many countries in the world. He had an excellent nature. He was as simple as his aspiration was great. I liked him very much.’ ³⁴

Baha Ullah (1817-92) was a follower of the Bab, who had declared himself a manifestation of the Divine, and whom the Persian Government had executed in 1850. After the Bab’s death, Baha Ullah took over the leadership of the community and declared himself ‘Him Whom God Shall Make Manifest.’ The followers of the Baha’i religion believe him to have been the most recent in a series of past and future divine manifestations including Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus Christ and Muhammad. Baha Ullah spent most of his life in prison and was often subjected to torture, first in Persia, afterwards in Baghdad and Acre, where he died in 1892. Abdul Baha (1844-1921), his eldest son, succeeded him. Today, there are about three million Baha’is in the world. The Baha’i religion has once again been severely persecuted in Iran before and after the foundation of the Islamic Republic there in 1979.

The bases of the Baha’i religion are racial and religious harmony and a universal faith consisting of the essence of the great religions. Baha’ism stands for equality of the sexes, an international auxiliary language, universal education and a universal representative government. It has no professional priests, initiation or ritual. Abdul Baha was an intelligent, tolerant and sincere person – ‘his sincerity and his aspiration for the Divine were simple and very spontaneous’ – so one can easily understand why Mirra liked him.

‘One day, when I went to see him, he was to give a lecture to his disciples. But he was ill and could not get up. Perhaps the meeting would have to be postponed. When I went to him, he said: “You go in my place and give today’s talk.” I was astonished, unprepared as I was, to hear such a request. I said to him: “I am not a member of your sect, I know nothing about it. How then could I talk to them?” But he insisted, saying: “It does not matter. Say anything that comes to your mind, it will be quite all right. Go and give the talk. Concentrate for a while in the sitting room and then speak.” He persuaded me to do it.’ ³⁵

In Words of Long Ago there is an ‘introduction to a talk’ given on 10 March 1912. Did Mirra scribble down some ideas before starting her talk to the Parisian Baha’is? Has somebody else noted down what she said? ‘All the prophets, all the instructors who have come to bring the divine word to men, have, on one point at least, given an identical teaching. All of them have taught us that the greatest truths are sterile unless they are transformed through us into useful actions. All have proclaimed the necessity of living their revelation in our daily life. All have declared that they show us the path but that we must tread it in ourselves. No being, however great, can do our work in our stead. Baha Ullah was no exception to this rule … Abdul Baha is not content to give us his teaching, he is living it, and therein lies all his power of persuasion. Indeed, who has seen Abdul Baha and not felt in his presence that perfect goodness, that sweet serenity, that peace emanating from his being? …’ ³⁶

On 9 June 1913 Mirra Richard spoke again, no doubt also to the followers of Abdul Baha: ‘Last Monday, Abdul Baha took leave of us. In a very few days he will have left Paris, and I know many hearts which will feel a great void and feel sad … To think of someone is to be near that person, and wherever two beings may happen to be, even when physically separated by thousands of kilometres, if they think of each other they are together in a very real way … Thus separation no longer exists, it is an illusory appearance. And in France, in America, in Persia or China, we are always near the one we love and think of … Every morning when getting up, before you begin your day, with love and admiration and gratefulness salute the great family of the saviours of mankind who – always the same beings – have come, are coming and will keep coming until the end of time as the guides and instructors, as the humble and brilliant servants of their brothers, in order to help them scale the steep slope of perfection.’ ³⁷

Commenting in 1953 on some texts of hers included in Words of Long Ago, the Mother said: ‘There was a small group of about twelve people who met once a week. A subject was given and an answer was to be prepared for the following week. Each one brought along his little homework. Generally I too prepared a short paper and, at the end, read it out.’ ³⁸

One of those texts ought to be quoted in extenso. ‘The general aim to be attained is the advent of a progressive universal harmony. The means for attaining this aim, in regard to the Earth, is the realization of human unity through the awakening in all and the manifestation by all of the inner Divinity, which is One. In other words: to create unity by founding the Kingdom of God which is within us all.

‘The following is therefore the most useful work to be done: 1. For each individually, to be conscious in himself of the Divine Presence and to identify himself with it. 2. To individualize the states of being that till now were never conscious in man and thus to put the Earth in connection with one or more of the fountains of universal force that are still sealed to it. 3. To speak again to the world the eternal word under a new form adapted to its present mentality. It will be the synthesis of all human knowledge. 4. Collectively, to establish an ideal society in a propitious spot for the flowering of the new race, the race of the Sons of God.’ ³⁹ The Mother would say about this statement in her commentary of 1953: ‘It was the whole programme of what Sri Aurobindo has done and the method of doing the work on Earth, and I foresaw this in 1912. I met Sri Aurobindo for the first time in 1914, two years later, and I had already made the whole programme.’ ⁴⁰

The following words of Mirra are also from 1912: ‘That which is speaking to you now is a faithful servant of the Divine. From all time, since the beginning of the Earth, as a faithful servant of the Divine it has spoken in the name of its Master. And as long as the Earth and humanity exist, it will be present in a body to preach the divine word. So, wherever I am asked to speak, I do it to the best of my ability, as a servant of the Divine. But to speak in the name of a particular doctrine or of a man, however great he may be, that I cannot do: the Eternal Transcendent forbids it.’ ⁴¹

On 2 November 1912 Mirra wrote the first entry in her spiritual diary, ‘written during years of intensive yogic discipline,’ and afterwards called Prayers and Meditations. ‘Although my whole being is in theory consecrated to Thee, O Sublime Master, who art the life, the light and the love in all things, I still find it hard to carry out this consecration in detail. It has taken me several weeks to learn that the reason for this written meditation, its justification, lies in the very fact of addressing it daily to Thee. In this way I shall put into material shape each day a little of the conversation I have so often with Thee; I shall make my confession to Thee as well as it may be; not because I think I can tell Thee anything, but our artificial and exterior way of seeing and understanding is, if it may be so said, foreign to Thee, opposed to Thy nature. Still by turning towards Thee, by immersing myself in Thy light at the moment when I consider these things, little by little I shall see them more like what they really are – until the day when, having made myself one in identity with Thee, I shall no more have anything to say to Thee, for then I shall be Thou. This is the goal that I would reach; towards this victory all my efforts will tend more and more. I aspire for the day when I can no longer say “I,” for I shall be Thou.’ ⁴² This diary has not only a great spiritual significance, it is also an abundant source of data concerning Mirra’s life. We shall not leave it untapped.

A Passage to Pondicherry

Grant that I may accomplish my mission, that I may help in Thy integral manifestation.⁴³

– The Mother

Paul Richard travelled to Pondicherry once more to participate in the elections for the Chamber of Deputies, but there is no doubt that this time he wanted to get himself elected. The idea behind it, besides launching a political career, was perhaps to be close to Aurobindo Ghose, and if he did not receive from him what he was looking for, to have India and its yogis within reach. This time Mirra accompanied him.

On 3 March 1914 she took leave of her material surroundings. ‘As the day of departure draws near, I enter into a kind of self-communion; I turn with a fond solemnity towards all those thousand little nothings around us which have silently, for so many years, played their role of faithful friends; I thank them gratefully for all the charm they were able to give to the outer side of our life … Then I turn towards the future and my gaze becomes more solemn still. What it holds in store for us I do not know nor do I care to know.’ This sounds far from enthusiastic and gives the impression that she was taking leave for a long time, perhaps for ever. The next day she writes: ‘It is likely to be the last time for a long while that I am writing at this table, in this calm room all charged with Thy presence.’ ⁴⁴

On 6 March the Richards were in Geneva, for reasons unknown. From there they took the train to Marseilles, where on 7 March they boarded a Japanese ship, the Kaga Maru. Marseilles was the biggest French harbour in the Mediterranean and had become prosperous because of the opening of the Suez Canal, which shortened the voyage from Western Europe to India by several weeks. On that day Mirra made a note in her diary: ‘Violence was answered by calm, brutality by the strength of sweetness; and where an irreparable disaster would have occurred, Thy power was glorified.’ ⁴⁵ What had happened? One cannot even guess.

After two days at sea she wrote how the ship seemed to her ‘a marvellous abode of peace, a temple sailing in Thy honour over the waves of the subconscient passivity which we have to conquer and awaken to the consciousness of Thy divine Presence.’ She thought of ‘all those who were watching over the ship to safeguard and protect our course … [and] of all the inhabitants of this vast sea, both visible and invisible’ ⁴⁶ – as she thought, moving between two worlds, of the dear ones they had left far behind and those they were going to join. There is no indication that Mirra had any inkling of who or what was awaiting her at the end of the voyage.

The thoughts she had noted down a few months before the departure may still have been with her when the Kaga Maru sailed through the Suez Canal, where the desert on both sides made it seem that they glided through sand: ‘In my outer being, my surface consciousness, I no longer have the least feeling of being in my own home and the owner of anything here: I am a stranger in a strange land … I am a visitor here as elsewhere, as everywhere, Thy servant and Thy messenger upon Earth, a stranger among men, and yet the very soul of their life, the love of their heart.’ Sometime later she would write: ‘Many times in the day and in the night it seems to me that I am, or rather that my consciousness is, concentrated entirely in my heart which is no longer an organ, not even a feeling, but the divine Love, impersonal, eternal; and being this Love I feel myself living at the centre of each thing upon the entire Earth, and at the same time I seem to stretch out immensely long, infinitely long arms and envelop with a boundless tenderness all beings …’ ⁴⁷

Pournaprema writes: ‘The Japanese ship on which she travelled called at Cairo, in Egypt.⁹⁴ She [Mirra] went ashore in Cairo and visited the museum. In one of the showcases of the museum there were the toiletries of a great Egyptian queen [Hatshepsut]. There was a comb, hairpins, flacons for perfume and small vessels for beauty unguents. When seeing those objects, Mother exclaimed: “How badly arranged all this is! It was not at all like this that I arranged my things.” In the car that took her back to the harbour after having left the museum, realizing the experience she had just had, she knew that she had been that great Egyptian queen.’ ⁴⁸

Aboard the ship, somewhere in the Red Sea, Mirra had an encounter with a clergyman. There were two clergymen among the passengers, an Anglican and a Presbyterian, on their way to convert the Chinese, and they had been on the verge of quarrelling about who would lead the Sunday service. Afterwards the clergyman who had got the upper hand (the Mother did not remember which one) came to see her because she had not attended, but ere long it was the clergyman who received the sermon from her. ‘Listen, even before your religion was born – not even two thousand years ago – the Chinese had a very high philosophy and knew a path leading them to the Divine, and when they think of Westerners, they think of them as barbarians. And you are going there to convert those who know more about it than you? What are you going to teach them? To be insincere, to perform hollow ceremonies instead of following a profound philosophy and a detachment from life which lead them to a more spiritual consciousness? I don’t think it is a very good thing you are going to do.’ ⁴⁹ The clergyman was not convinced.

After a voyage of three weeks, the Richards left the Kaga Maru at Colombo on 27 March. They remained in Colombo that day to visit a Buddhist monk who probably had been recommended to them by Alexandra David-Néel. Then they crossed the straits at Talaimannar, disembarked at Dhanushkodi, boarded the Boat Mail train on 28 March, changed trains at Villupuram, and arrived in the morning of 29 March at Pondicherry, where they took a room at the Hotel de L’Europe in the Rue Suffren.

Their coming was, of course, not unexpected. Even the house where Sri Aurobindo was staying with his young Bengali freedom-fighters had been cleaned up a bit. When K. Amrita, a follower of Sri Aurobindo from Pondicherry, visited the house shortly before the arrival of the Richards, he was told that ‘two persons from the topmost cultural circle of France were coming to Sri Aurobindo for practising yoga.’ Four electric lights had been put up (before there were only candles), the weeds in the courtyard had been pulled out, the house was now being swept daily and acquired an ‘almost gay appearance’ because of these much-needed changes.⁵⁰

The meeting between Aurobindo Ghose and Mirra took place on Sunday 29 March, at 3:30 in the afternoon, at 41 Rue François Martin. ‘Something in me wanted to meet Sri Aurobindo all alone the first time. Richard went to him in the morning and I had an appointment in the afternoon. He was living in the old Guest House. I climbed the staircase and he was standing there, waiting for me at the top of the stairs: exactly my vision! Dressed the same way, in the same position, in profile, his head held high. He turned his head towards me and I saw in his eyes that it was He.’ ⁵¹ At last Mirra met the ‘Krishna’ before whom she had to her amazement so often prostrated herself in her visions years ago, and whom she had known that she would meet one day in the body.

The next day she wrote in her diary: ‘It matters little that there are thousands of beings plunged in the densest ignorance. He whom we saw yesterday is on Earth; his presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into light, and Thy reign shall indeed be established upon Earth.’ ⁵²

‘Une étape nouvelle est commencée,’ we read on 1 April, ‘a new phase has begun,’ and then again she wrote about ‘the new period that is opening up ahead of us.’ The convergent roads had joined – but only temporarily.

She wrote on 14 June: ‘It is a veritable work of creation we have to do: to create activities, new modes of being for that Force, unknown to the Earth till today, to manifest in its plenitude. To this labour of a new birth I have consecrated myself, O Lord, for it is what Thou wantest of me. But since Thou hast appointed me for this work, Thou must give me the means, that is, the knowledge necessary for its realization.’