Mother's Chronicles - Book Three

4

The Human Fathers

It was around the turn of the century that the Théons decided to found the Cosmic Movement.

The Cosmic Review — intended for the "study and re-establishment of the original Tradition" —was to become the Movement's mouthpiece. Its first editor was Charles Barlet¹; and Theon, under the name of Aia Aziz, was its Director.

Theon declared that his wife was the moving spirit behind this idea. Thus, it was thanks to Madame Theon that all the science of the occult that Theon had accumulated could be put into practice.

1. F. Charles Barlet was the nom de plume of Albert Faucheux (1838-1921). Among many of his activities, Barlet was also the Director of the magazine L'Étoile d'Orient ('The Eastern Star'). Prof. Charles Barlet, Bachelor of Law, was President of the Eastern Esoteric Centre of France, member of several scientific societies and the author of a number of books on astrology, occultism, etc. He was a member, often a founding one, of numerous occult or esoteric groups and societies, both French and international.

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"He said he had received initiation in India," Mother disclosed to Satprem. "He knew a little Sanskrit, and was thoroughly versed in the Rig-Veda. Well then, in some way, he developed a tradition which he called the 'Cosmic Tradition.' He claimed to have received it —I don't know how —from a tradition anterior to that of the Cabala and the Vedas."

Mother herself was deeply interested in the Vedas and made a thorough study of Sri Aurobindo's The Secret of the Veda and the many Vedic hymns he had translated.

One day, from my laboratory, I saw Mother going towards Pavitra's office to give Satprem one of the regular interviews. Often, on her way to him, she would stop to give me a smile or a pat. Not that day. She seemed intent on some thought, her eyes fixed on the flowers she held in her hand. Satprem had barely closed the passage door behind her when she began, "I have brought you a whole discourse!"

Handing him a flower, she said : "First, the goal of the Vedas —Immortality. That was their goal —the Truth that led to Immortality. Immortality was their ambition. Only I don't think it was physical immortality.

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But that's not certain, because they do speak of the 'forefathers' and this refers to the initiatory tradition preceding the Vedas and preceding the Cabala; and there they speak of immortality on earth, the earth transformed —Sri Aurobindo's idea."

This is what Sri Aurobindo wrote: "I had already seen that the central idea of the Vedic Rishis was the transition of the human soul from a state of death to a state of immortality by the exchange of the Falsehood for the Truth, of divided and limited being for integrality and infinity.... Man rises beyond the two firmaments, rodasi, Heaven and Earth, mind and body, to the infinity of the Truth, and so to the divine Bliss. This is the 'great passage' discovered by the Ancestors, the ancient Rishis."

Mother mulled over this question. "The text of the Vedas makes it plain, for example, that the 'forefathers' they remembered were men who had realized immortality upon earth." She added in an aside, "Who knows, they may still be alive! They had the same concept of things as Sri Aurobindo."

When Sri Aurobindo studied the Vedas in the original Sanskrit, he found that many of his own

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experiences tallied with those described in them. "My first contact with Vedic thought," he wrote in the Arya, "came indirectly while pursuing certain lines of self-development in the way of Indian Yoga, which, without my knowing it, were spontaneously converging towards the ancient and now unfrequented paths followed by our forefathers." As he began to unravel the knot of the Vedic imagery, he found "positive references to the human Fathers who first discovered the Light and possessed the Thought and the Word and travelled to the secret worlds of the luminous Bliss." Further studies of the more important passages, in which this great discovery of the human forefathers is hymned, made him find there "the summary of that great hope which the Vedic mystics held ever before their eyes; that journey, that victory is the ancient, primal achievement set as a type of the luminous Ancestors for the mortality that was to come after them. It was the conquest of the powers of the circumscribing Night, Vritras, Sambaras and Valas, the Titans, Giants, Pythons, subconscient Powers who hold the light and the force in themselves, in their cities of darkness and illusion, but can neither use it

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aright nor will give it up to man, the mental being. Their ignorance, evil and limitation have not merely to be cut away from us, but broken up and into and made to yield up the secret of light and good and infinity. Out of this death that immortality has to be conquered. Pent up behind this ignorance is a secret knowledge and a great light of truth; prisoned by this evil is an infinite content of good; in this limiting death is the seed of a boundless immortality. Vala, for example, is Vala of the radiances, his body is made of the light, his hole or cave is a city full of treasures; that body has to be broken up, that city rent open, those treasures seized. This is the work set for humanity and the Ancestors have done it for the race that the way may be known and the goal reached by the same means and through the same companionship with the gods of Light. At the beginning of all human traditions there is this ancient memory. It is Indra and the serpent Vritra, it is Apollo and the Python, it is Thor and the Giants, Sigurd and Fafner, it is the mutually opposing gods of the Celtic mythology; but only in the Veda do we find the key to this imagery which conceals the hope or the

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wisdom of a prehistoric humanity."¹

Mother continued. "The other tradition, which Theon said was the origin of Cabala — he said both the Cabala and the Vedas originated from it —also held the same concept of divine life and a divine world as Sri Aurobindo: that the summit of evolution would be the divinization of everything objectified, along with an unbroken progression from that moment on. As things are now, we go forward and backward, again forward and backward. But then the backward movement won't be necessary — there will be a continuous ascent. This conception was held in that ancient tradition." She added as an afterthought, "Sri Aurobindo hadn't yet written anything when I met Theon, who told me very clearly about it. Theon had written all kinds of things —not philosophy, it was all stories, fantastic stories! Yet this same knowledge was behind them. And when asked about the source of this knowledge, he would say that it antedated both the Cabala and the Vedas —he was well-versed in the Rig-Veda."

1. The Secret of the Veda.

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