{"id":2458,"date":"2013-07-13T01:41:45","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2458"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:41:45","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:41:45","slug":"13-canto-eight-the-world-of-falsehood-the-mother-of-evil-and-the-sons-of-darkness-vol-33-34-savitri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/33-34-savitri\/13-canto-eight-the-world-of-falsehood-the-mother-of-evil-and-the-sons-of-darkness-vol-33-34-savitri","title":{"rendered":"-13_Canto Eight – The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n\n\n
 <\/td>\n\n<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\tCanto Eight <\/font><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\tThe World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil<\/font><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

\n
\nand the Sons of Darkness<\/font><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tT<\/font>HEN<\/b> could he see the hidden heart of Night:<\/p>\n

The labour of its stark unconsciousness<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tRevealed the endless terrible Inane.<\/p>\n

A spiritless blank Infinity was there;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA Nature that denied the eternal Truth<\/p>\n

In the vain braggart freedom of its thought<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHoped to abolish God and reign alone.<\/p>\n

There was no sovereign Guest, no witness Light;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tUnhelped it would create its own bleak world.<\/p>\n

Its large blind eyes looked out on demon acts,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIts deaf ears heard the untruth its dumb lips spoke;<\/p>\n

Its huge misguided fancy took vast shapes,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIts mindless sentience quivered with fierce conceits;<\/p>\n

Engendering a brute principle of life<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tEvil and pain begot a monstrous soul.<\/p>\n

The Anarchs of the formless depths arose,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tGreat Titan beings and demoniac powers,<\/p>\n

World-egos racked with lust and thought and will,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tVast minds and lives without a spirit within:<\/p>\n

Impatient architects of error’s house,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tLeaders of the cosmic ignorance and unrest<\/p>\n

And sponsors of sorrow and mortality<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tEmbodied the dark Ideas of the Abyss.<\/p>\n

A shadow substance into emptiness came,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tDim forms were born in the unthinking Void<\/p>\n

And eddies met and made an adverse Space<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn whose black folds Being imagined Hell.<\/p>\n

His eyes piercing the triple-plated gloom<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIdentified their sight with its blind stare:<\/p>\n

Accustomed to the unnatural dark, they saw<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 <\/font>220<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

Unreality made real and conscious Night.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA violent, fierce and formidable world,<\/p>\n

An ancient womb of huge calamitous dreams,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tCoiled like a larva in the obscurity<\/p>\n

That keeps it from the spear-points of Heaven’s stars.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt was the gate of a false Infinite,<\/p>\n

An eternity of disastrous absolutes,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAn immense negation of spiritual things.<\/p>\n

All once self-luminous in the spirit’s sphere<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTurned now into their own dark contraries:<\/p>\n

Being collapsed into a pointless void<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThat yet was a zero parent of the worlds;<\/p>\n

Inconscience swallowing up the cosmic Mind<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tProduced a universe from its lethal sleep;<\/p>\n

Bliss into black coma fallen, insensible,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tCoiled back to itself and God’s eternal joy<\/p>\n

Through a false poignant figure of grief and pain<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tStill dolorously nailed upon a cross<\/p>\n

Fixed in the soil of a dumb insentient world<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhere birth was a pang and death an agony,<\/p>\n

Lest all too soon should change again to bliss.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThought sat, a priestess of Perversity,<\/p>\n

On her black tripod of the triune Snake<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tReading by opposite signs the eternal script,<\/p>\n

A sorceress reversing life’s God-frame.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn darkling aisles with evil eyes for lamps<\/p>\n

And fatal voices chanting from the apse,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn strange infernal dim basilicas<\/p>\n

Intoning the magic of the unholy Word,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe ominous profound Initiate<\/p>\n

Performed the ritual of her Mysteries.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThere suffering was Nature’s daily food<\/p>\n

Alluring to the anguished heart and flesh,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd torture was the formula of delight,<\/p>\n

Pain mimicked the celestial ecstasy.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThere Good, a faithless gardener of God,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n

Watered with virtue the world’s upas-tree<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd, careful of the outward word and act,<\/p>\n

Engrafted his hypocrite blooms on native ill.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAll high things served their nether opposite:<\/p>\n

The forms of Gods sustained a demon cult;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHeaven’s face became a mask and snare of Hell.<\/p>\n

There in the heart of vain phenomenon,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn an enormous action’s writhen core<\/p>\n

He saw a Shape illimitable and vague<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSitting on Death who swallows all things born.<\/p>\n

A chill fixed face with dire and motionless eyes,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHer dreadful trident in her shadowy hand<\/p>\n

Outstretched, she pierced all creatures with one fate.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhen nothing was save Matter without soul<\/p>\n

And a spiritless hollow was the heart of Time,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThen Life first touched the insensible Abyss;<\/p>\n

Awaking the stark Void to hope and grief<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHer pallid beam smote the unfathomed Night<\/p>\n

In which God hid himself from his own view.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn all things she sought their slumbering mystic truth,<\/p>\n

The unspoken Word that inspires unconscious forms;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tShe groped in his deeps for an invisible Law,<\/p>\n

Fumbled in the dim subconscient for his mind<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd strove to find a way for spirit to be.<\/p>\n

But from the Night another answer came.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA seed was in that nether matrix cast,<\/p>\n

A dumb unprobed husk of perverted truth,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA cell of an insentient infinite.<\/p>\n

A monstrous birth prepared its cosmic form<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn Nature’s titan embryo, Ignorance.<\/p>\n

Then in a fatal and stupendous hour<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSomething that sprang from the stark Inconscient’s sleep<\/p>\n

Unwillingly begotten by the mute Void,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tLifted its ominous head against the stars;<\/p>\n

Overshadowing earth with its huge body of Doom<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n

It chilled the heavens with the menace of a face.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA nameless Power, a shadowy Will arose<\/p>\n

Immense and alien to our universe.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn the inconceivable Purpose none can gauge<\/p>\n

A vast Non-Being robed itself with shape,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe boundless Nescience of the unconscious depths<\/p>\n

Covered eternity with nothingness.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA seeking Mind replaced the seeing Soul:<\/p>\n

Life grew into a huge and hungry death,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Spirit’s bliss was changed to cosmic pain.<\/p>\n

Assuring God’s self-cowled neutrality<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA mighty opposition conquered Space.<\/p>\n

A sovereign ruling falsehood, death and grief,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt pressed its fierce hegemony on the earth;<\/p>\n

Disharmonising the original style<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOf the architecture of her fate’s design,<\/p>\n

It falsified the primal cosmic Will<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd bound to struggle and dread vicissitudes<\/p>\n

The long slow process of the patient Power.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tImplanting error in the stuff of things<\/p>\n

It made an Ignorance of the all-wise Law;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt baffled the sure touch of life’s hid sense,<\/p>\n

Kept dumb the intuitive guide in Matter’s sleep,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tDeformed the insect’s instinct and the brute’s,<\/p>\n

Disfigured man’s thought-born humanity.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA shadow fell across the simple Ray:<\/p>\n

Obscured was the Truth-light in the cavern heart<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThat burns unwitnessed in the altar crypt<\/p>\n

Behind the still velamen’s secrecy<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tCompanioning the Godhead of the shrine.<\/p>\n

Thus was the dire antagonist Energy born<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWho mimes the eternal Mother’s mighty shape<\/p>\n

And mocks her luminous infinity<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWith a grey distorted silhouette in the Night.<\/p>\n

Arresting the passion of the climbing soul,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tShe forced on life a slow and faltering pace;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n

Her hand’s deflecting and retarding weight<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIs laid on the mystic evolution’s curve:<\/p>\n

The tortuous line of her deceiving mind<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Gods see not and man is impotent;<\/p>\n

Oppressing the God-spark within the soul<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tShe forces back to the beast the human fall.<\/p>\n

Yet in her formidable instinctive mind<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tShe feels the One grow in the heart of Time<\/p>\n

And sees the Immortal shine through the human mould.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAlarmed for her rule and full of fear and rage<\/p>\n

She prowls around each light that gleams through the dark<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tCasting its ray from the spirit’s lonely tent,<\/p>\n

Hoping to enter with fierce stealthy tread<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd in the cradle slay the divine Child.<\/p>\n

Incalculable are her strength and ruse;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHer touch is a fascination and a death;<\/p>\n

She kills her victim with his own delight;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tEven Good she makes a hook to drag to Hell.<\/p>\n

For her the world runs to its agony.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOften the pilgrim on the Eternal’s road<\/p>\n

Ill-lit from clouds by the pale moon of Mind,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOr in devious byways wandering alone,<\/p>\n

Or lost in deserts where no path is seen,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFalls overpowered by her lion leap,<\/p>\n

A conquered captive under her dreadful paws.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIntoxicated by a burning breath<\/p>\n

And amorous grown of a destroying mouth,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOnce a companion of the sacred Fire,<\/p>\n

The mortal perishes to God and Light,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAn Adversary governs heart and brain,<\/p>\n

A Nature hostile to the Mother-Force.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe self of life yields up its instruments<\/p>\n

To Titan and demoniac agencies<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThat aggrandise earth-nature and disframe:<\/p>\n

A cowled fifth-columnist is now thought’s guide;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHis subtle defeatist murmur slays the faith<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n

And, lodged in the breast or whispering from outside,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA lying inspiration fell and dark<\/p>\n

A new order substitutes for the divine.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA silence falls upon the spirit’s heights,<\/p>\n

From the veiled sanctuary the God retires,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tEmpty and cold is the chamber of the Bride;<\/p>\n

The golden Nimbus now is seen no more,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNo longer burns the white spiritual ray<\/p>\n

And hushed for ever is the secret Voice.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThen by the Angel of the Vigil Tower<\/p>\n

A name is struck from the recording book;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA flame that sang in Heaven sinks quenched and mute;<\/p>\n

In ruin ends the epic of a soul.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis is the tragedy of the inner death<\/p>\n

When forfeited is the divine element<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd only a mind and body live to die.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFor terrible agencies the Spirit allows<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd there are subtle and enormous Powers<\/p>\n

That shield themselves with the covering Ignorance.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOffspring of the gulfs, agents of the shadowy Force,<\/p>\n

Haters of light, intolerant of peace,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAping to the thought the shining Friend and Guide,<\/p>\n

Opposing in the heart the eternal Will,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThey veil the occult uplifting Harmonist.<\/p>\n

His wisdom’s oracles are made our bonds;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe doors of God they have locked with keys of creed<\/p>\n

And shut out by the Law his tireless Grace.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAlong all Nature’s lines they have set their posts<\/p>\n

And intercept the caravans of Light;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWherever the Gods act, they intervene.<\/p>\n

A yoke is laid upon the world’s dim heart;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tMasked are its beats from the supernal Bliss,<\/p>\n

And the closed peripheries of brilliant Mind<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBlock the fine entries of celestial Fire.<\/p>\n

Always the dark Adventurers seem to win;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n

Nature they fill with evil’s institutes,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTurn into defeats the victories of Truth,<\/p>\n

Proclaim as falsehoods the eternal laws,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd load the dice of Doom with wizard lies;<\/p>\n

The world’s shrines they have occupied, usurped its thrones.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn scorn of the dwindling chances of the Gods<\/p>\n

They claim creation as their conquered fief<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd crown themselves the iron Lords of Time.<\/p>\n

Adepts of the illusion and the mask,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe artificers of Nature’s fall and pain<\/p>\n

Have built their altars of triumphant Night<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn the clay temple of terrestrial life.<\/p>\n

In the vacant precincts of the sacred Fire,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn front of the reredos in the mystic rite<\/p>\n

Facing the dim velamen none can pierce,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIntones his solemn hymn the mitred priest<\/p>\n

Invoking their dreadful presence in his breast:<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAttributing to them the awful Name<\/p>\n

He chants the syllables of the magic text<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd summons the unseen communion’s act,<\/p>\n

While twixt the incense and the muttered prayer<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAll the fierce bale with which the world is racked<\/p>\n

Is mixed in the foaming chalice of man’s heart<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd poured to them like sacramental wine.<\/p>\n

Assuming names divine they guide and rule.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOpponents of the Highest they have come<\/p>\n

Out of their world of soulless thought and power<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTo serve by enmity the cosmic scheme.<\/p>\n

Night is their refuge and strategic base.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAgainst the sword of Flame, the luminous Eye,<\/p>\n

Bastioned they live in massive forts of gloom,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tCalm and secure in sunless privacy:<\/p>\n

No wandering ray of Heaven can enter there.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tArmoured, protected by their lethal masks,<\/p>\n

As in a studio of creative Death<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe giant sons of Darkness sit and plan<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n

The drama of the earth, their tragic stage.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAll who would raise the fallen world must come<\/p>\n

Under the dangerous arches of their power;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFor even the radiant children of the gods<\/p>\n

To darken their privilege is and dreadful right.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNone can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis too the traveller of the worlds must dare.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA warrior in the dateless duel’s strife,<\/p>\n

He entered into dumb despairing Night<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tChallenging the darkness with his luminous soul.<\/p>\n

Alarming with his steps the threshold gloom<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHe came into a fierce and dolorous realm<\/p>\n

Peopled by souls who never had tasted bliss;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIgnorant like men born blind who know not light,<\/p>\n

They could equate worst ill with highest good,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tVirtue was to their eyes a face of sin<\/p>\n

And evil and misery were their natural state.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA dire administration’s penal code<\/p>\n

Making of grief and pain the common law,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tDecreeing universal joylessness<\/p>\n

Had changed life into a stoic sacrament<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd torture into a daily festival.<\/p>\n

An act was passed to chastise happiness;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tLaughter and pleasure were banned as deadly sins:<\/p>\n

A questionless mind was ranked as wise content,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA dull heart’s silent apathy as peace:<\/p>\n

Sleep was not there, torpor was the sole rest,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tDeath came but neither respite gave nor end;<\/p>\n

Always the soul lived on and suffered more.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tEver he deeper probed that kingdom of pain;<\/p>\n

Around him grew the terror of a world<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOf agony followed by worse agony,<\/p>\n

And in the terror a great wicked joy<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tGlad of one’s own and others’ calamity.<\/p>\n

There thought and life were a long punishment,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n

The breath a burden and all hope a scourge,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe body a field of torment, a massed unease;<\/p>\n

Repose was a waiting between pang and pang.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis was the law of things none dreamed to change:<\/p>\n

A hard sombre heart, a harsh unsmiling mind<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tRejected happiness like a cloying sweet;<\/p>\n

Tranquillity was a tedium and ennui:<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOnly by suffering life grew colourful;<\/p>\n

It needed the spice of pain, the salt of tears.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIf one could cease to be, all would be well;<\/p>\n

Else only fierce sensations gave some zest:<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA fury of jealousy burning the gnawed heart,<\/p>\n

The sting of murderous spite and hate and lust,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe whisper that lures to the pit and treachery’s stroke<\/p>\n

Threw vivid spots on the dull aching hours.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTo watch the drama of infelicity,<\/p>\n

The writhing of creatures under the harrow of doom<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd sorrow’s tragic gaze into the night<\/p>\n

And horror and the hammering heart of fear<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWere the ingredients in Time’s heavy cup<\/p>\n

That pleased and helped to enjoy its bitter taste.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOf such fierce stuff was made up life’s long hell:<\/p>\n

These were the threads of the dark spider’s-web<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn which the soul was caught, quivering and rapt;<\/p>\n

This was religion, this was Nature’s rule.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn a fell chapel of iniquity<\/p>\n

To worship a black pitiless image of Power<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tKneeling one must cross hard-hearted stony courts,<\/p>\n

A pavement like a floor of evil fate.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tEach stone was a keen edge of ruthless force<\/p>\n

And glued with the chilled blood from tortured breasts;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe dry gnarled trees stood up like dying men<\/p>\n

Stiffened into a pose of agony,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd from each window peered an ominous priest<\/p>\n

Chanting Te Deums for slaughter’s crowning grace,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tUprooted cities, blasted human homes,<\/p>\n

Burned writhen bodies, the bombshell’s massacre.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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\n

\n

\n\t\t\t“Our enemies are fallen, are fallen,” they sang,<\/p>\n

“All who once stayed our will are smitten and dead;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHow great we are, how merciful art Thou.”<\/p>\n

Thus thought they to reach God’s impassive throne<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd Him command whom all their acts opposed,<\/p>\n

Magnifying their deeds to touch his skies,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd make him an accomplice of their crimes.<\/p>\n

There no relenting pity could have place,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut ruthless strength and iron moods had sway,<\/p>\n

A dateless sovereignty of terror and gloom:<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis took the figure of a darkened God<\/p>\n

Revered by the racked wretchedness he had made,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWho held in thrall a miserable world,<\/p>\n

And helpless hearts nailed to unceasing woe<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAdored the feet that trampled them into mire.<\/p>\n

It was a world of sorrow and of hate,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSorrow with hatred for its lonely joy,<\/p>\n

Hatred with others’ sorrow as its feast;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA bitter rictus curled the suffering mouth;<\/p>\n

A tragic cruelty saw its ominous chance.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHate was the black archangel of that realm;<\/p>\n

It glowed, a sombre jewel in the heart<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBurning the soul with its malignant rays,<\/p>\n

And wallowed in its fell abysm of might.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThese passions even objects seemed to exude, —<\/p>\n

For mind overflowed into the inanimate<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThat answered with the wickedness it received, —<\/p>\n

Against their users used malignant powers,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHurt without hands and strangely, suddenly slew,<\/p>\n

Appointed as instruments of an unseen doom.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOr they made themselves a fateful prison wall<\/p>\n

Where men condemned wake through the creeping hours<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tCounted by the tollings of an ominous bell.<\/p>\n

An evil environment worsened evil souls:<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAll things were conscious there and all perverse.<\/p>\n

In this infernal realm he dared to press<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tEven into its deepest pit and darkest core,<\/p>\n

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\n

Perturbed its tenebrous base, dared to contest<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIts ancient privileged right and absolute force:<\/p>\n

In Night he plunged to know her dreadful heart,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn Hell he sought the root and cause of Hell.<\/p>\n

Its anguished gulfs opened in his own breast;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHe listened to clamours of its crowded pain,<\/p>\n

The heart-beats of its fatal loneliness.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAbove was a chill deaf eternity.<\/p>\n

In vague tremendous passages of Doom<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHe heard the goblin Voice that guides to slay,<\/p>\n

And faced the enchantments of the demon Sign,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd traversed the ambush of the opponent Snake.<\/p>\n

In menacing tracts, in tortured solitudes<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tCompanionless he roamed through desolate ways<\/p>\n

Where the red Wolf waits by the fordless stream<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd Death’s black eagles scream to the precipice,<\/p>\n

And met the hounds of bale who hunt men’s hearts<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBaying across the veldts of Destiny,<\/p>\n

In footless battlefields of the Abyss<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFought shadowy combats in mute eyeless depths,<\/p>\n

Assaults of Hell endured and Titan strokes<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd bore the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal.<\/p>\n

A prisoner of a hooded magic Force,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tCaptured and trailed in Falsehood’s lethal net<\/p>\n

And often strangled in the noose of grief,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOr cast in the grim morass of swallowing doubt,<\/p>\n

Or shut into pits of error and despair,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHe drank her poison draughts till none was left.<\/p>\n

In a world where neither hope nor joy could come<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe ordeal he suffered of evil’s absolute reign,<\/p>\n

Yet kept intact his spirit’s radiant truth.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIncapable of motion or of force,<\/p>\n

In Matter’s blank denial gaoled and blind,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPinned to the black inertia of our base<\/p>\n

He treasured between his hands his flickering soul.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHis being ventured into mindless Void,<\/p>\n

Intolerant gulfs that knew not thought nor sense;<\/p>\n

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\n

Thought ceased, sense failed, his soul still saw and knew.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn atomic parcellings of the Infinite<\/p>\n

Near to the dumb beginnings of lost Self,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHe felt the curious small futility<\/p>\n

Of the creation of material things.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOr, stifled in the Inconscient’s hollow dusk,<\/p>\n

He sounded the mystery dark and bottomless<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOf the enormous and unmeaning deeps<\/p>\n

Whence struggling life in a dead universe rose.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThere in the stark identity lost by mind<\/p>\n

He felt the sealed sense of the insensible world<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd a mute wisdom in the unknowing Night.<\/p>\n

Into the abysmal secrecy he came<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhere darkness peers from her mattress, grey and nude,<\/p>\n

And stood on the last locked subconscient’s floor<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhere Being slept unconscious of its thoughts<\/p>\n

And built the world not knowing what it built.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThere waiting its hour the future lay unknown,<\/p>\n

There is the record of the vanished stars.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThere in the slumber of the cosmic Will<\/p>\n

He saw the secret key of Nature’s change.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA light was with him, an invisible hand<\/p>\n

Was laid upon the error and the pain<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTill it became a quivering ecstasy,<\/p>\n

The shock of sweetness of an arm’s embrace.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHe saw in Night the Eternal’s shadowy veil,<\/p>\n

Knew death for a cellar of the house of life,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn destruction felt creation’s hasty pace,<\/p>\n

Knew loss as the price of a celestial gain<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd hell as a short cut to heaven’s gates.<\/p>\n

Then in Illusion’s occult factory<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd in the Inconscient’s magic printing-house<\/p>\n

Torn were the formats of the primal Night<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.<\/p>\n

Alive, breathing a deep spiritual breath,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNature expunged her stiff mechanical code<\/p>\n

And the articles of the bound soul’s contract,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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\n

Falsehood gave back to Truth her tortured shape.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnnulled were the tables of the law of Pain,<\/p>\n

And in their place grew luminous characters.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe skilful Penman’s unseen finger wrote<\/p>\n

His swift intuitive calligraphy;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tEarth’s forms were made his divine documents,<\/p>\n

The wisdom embodied mind could not reveal,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tInconscience chased from the world’s voiceless breast;<\/p>\n

Transfigured were the fixed schemes of reasoning Thought.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tArousing consciousness in things inert,<\/p>\n

He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe diamond script of the Imperishable,<\/p>\n

Inscribed on the dim heart of fallen things<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA paean-song of the free Infinite<\/p>\n

And the Name, foundation of eternity,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd traced on the awake exultant cells<\/p>\n

In the ideographs of the Ineffable<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe lyric of the love that waits through Time<\/p>\n

And the mystic volume of the Book of Bliss<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd the message of the superconscient Fire.<\/p>\n

Then life beat pure in the corporeal frame;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe infernal Gleam died and could slay no more.<\/p>\n

Hell split across its huge abrupt facade<\/p>\n

As if a magic building were undone,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNight opened and vanished like a gulf of dream.<\/p>\n

Into being’s gap scooped out as empty Space<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn which she had filled the place of absent God,<\/p>\n

There poured a wide intimate and blissful Dawn;<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHealed were all things that Time’s torn heart had made<\/p>\n

And sorrow could live no more in Nature’s breast:<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tDivision ceased to be, for God was there.<\/p>\n

The soul lit the conscious body with its ray,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tMatter and spirit mingled and were one.<\/p>\n

END OF<\/font> CANTO<\/font> EIGHT<\/font><\/p>\n

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<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Canto Eight   The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness   THEN could he see the hidden heart…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-33-34-savitri","wpcat-50-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}