The life incarnate and the life divine: Spiritual evolution,androgyny and the grace of the goddess in the teachings of Mirra Alfassa,the Mother of Integral Yoga

Abstract

Mirra Alfassa (1878–1973), better known as The Mother, was Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual partner and co-founder of Integral Yoga, a global movement based in South India and currently numbering multiple centres around the world. Affectionately addressed by her devotees at the Ashram as Douce Mère (Sweet Mother), Alfassa is understood to be an incarnation of the Universal Mother, or Shakti, who has ‘taken birth’ on earth in order to facilitate the spiritual – and physical – evolution of humanity to its next stage of development. At the same time, Alfassa deemed celibacy as necessary for advanced spiritual practice, and had renounced biological or ‘physical’ motherhood (and sexual intimacy) even before her collaboration with Aurobindo. Alfassa’s complex attitudes towards gender and normative gender roles, this article argues, inform her teachings and self-positioning as The Mother. Specifically, the intersection of sex, gender and physical materiality is an important current in Alfassa’s thought, including her instructions to future residents of Auroville (a utopian intentional community), her reflections on the Matrimandir, as well as her teachings on the future supramental humanity, whose ‘luminous’ divinized bodies would be genderless or androgynous. Here, the author examines the tensions between the gendered creative and spiritual powers attributed to The Mother, such as her role as Aurobindo’s Shakti and as a grace-bestowing living goddess, and Alfassa’s often ambivalent discourse around gender, embodiment and motherhood. These tensions, it is argued, are not only key to her articulation of Integral Yoga, but also raise broader, conceptual questions about persistent cultural and religious associations between gender and materiality.

Introduction

Sometime between 1916 and 1920, a Frenchwoman of Egyptian-Turkish Jewish descent was invited to speak to a group of women in Japan. The precise occaion for her talk is unknown, however, given it was a time when spiritual seekers, political activists, artists, and others pursuing heterodox social or philosophical ends often intersected in shared circles, we can surmise that her audience was likely diverse, including Theosophists and Pan-Asianists, local intellectuals and curious expats, among others. The topic of dicsussion concerned the subject of motherhood and its significance as a spiritual endeavour, a sacred duty not to be taken lightly. Even as the speaker praised what she saw as a traditional Japanese dedication to children and child-rearing, the thrust of her argument was decidedly unorthodox. ‘Maternity’, she argued, could only become ‘the principal role of woman’ if it was properly defined, and she gave a definition of it that was indeed striking:

To bring children into the world as rabbits do their young – instinctively, ignorantly, machine-like, that certainly cannot be called maternity! True maternity begins with the conscious creation of a being, with the willed shaping of a soul coming to develop and utilize a new body. . . . The work really commences when, by the power of thought and will, we conceive and create a character capable of manifesting the ideal. (‘To the Women of Japan’, CWM 2: 157) ¹

The speaker was Mirra Alfassa (1878–1973), the future Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and the ideal she was talking about was nothing short of divinized, spiritually evolved humanity. Later, this would become the central goal of Integral Yoga – a spiritual philosophy and metaphysic developed by Alfassa and Sri Aurobindo (born Aurobindo Ghose, 1872–1950), grounded in their yogic experimentation and spiritual collaboration. ²

Integral Yoga, which is based on a synthetic weaving of Vedantic principles, tantric elements and western occultism, is notable for its emphasis on spiritual evolution, its complex septenary cosmology, and its distinctive terminology for the various layers of increasingly subtle and more universal levels of consciousness. ³ Despite her significance to the movement, Alfassa’s role in contributing to its development, philosophy, and practice remains under-examined, particularly as compared to the volume of literature on Aurobindo. This article responds to this gap by examining one aspect of her thought and focusing on the concept of the Mother, spiritual motherhood, and gender broadly conceived – ideas that deeply inform Alfassa’s teachings and self-positioning as the Mother. The reason for drawing attention to these themes is twofold. First, Alfassa’s discussion of these topics reflects the crucial yet equivocal place of matter in Integral Yoga ontology, wherein the material, physical universe and body are at once seens as the necessary ground of spiritual transformation as well as its most formidable obstacles. Indeed, Alfassa’s utopian vision of a supramental, androgynous humanity at once relies on and exists in tension with the overtly gendered framework of the spiritual and creative powers attributed to the Mother. Tracing her navigation of this terrain contributes greatly to our understanding of Integral Yoga philosophy and metaphysics, but, still more broadly, also raises pertinent questions about persistent cultural and religious associations between gender and materiality – a discussion I take up in the concluding section.

Second, Alfassa’s discourse at the intersection of sex, gender and physical materiality forms a rich current of thought running the length of her spiritual and intellectual trajectory, from her early involvement in French esoteric groups to her later spiritual collaboration with Aurobindo. As such, attending to its particulars allows one to better contextualize the development of Integral Yoga genealogically. Notably, at the time of Alfassa’s talks with a women’s group in Japan, the future Mother was still simply Mirra or, as she was known then, Madame Richard, having just recently remarried. ⁴ All the same, her critical stance on conventional ‘maternity’ presaged something fundamental about her becoming the Mother – in essence, a personified, universalized version of the very principles she spoke of, ‘the power of thought and will’ put to work in ‘manifesting the ideal’. These ideas are remarkably consistent, from Alfassa’s earliest surviving work into her mature teachings. In what follows, I trace some of the most salient points in Alfassa’s discourse on maternity/motherhood, materiality, consciousness and transformation, and consider the ways they inform her position as the Mother, as well as Integral Yoga philosophy more broadly.

Born in Paris in a secular Jewish family, Mirra was an artist by training and a spiritual seeker by disposition. She spent her late twenties to mid thirties exploring a variety of esoteric traditions, from occultism to theosophically filtered Buddhism and Vedanta, including joining a little-known French esoteric group, the Mouvement Cosmique – she later imported some of its teachings into Integral Yoga. ⁵ Alfassa had first met Aurobindo in 1914, having travelled to Pondicherry with her second husband, Paul Richard – a barrister and aspiring spiritualist. Richard had encountered Aurobindo some years prior, having gone to Pondicherry as a stand-in for a local election, and the two had maintained a lively correspondence (Heehs, 2008). In 1914, Richard was returning for yet another election; he ended up losing spectacularly, but the trip proved fateful for him and Alfassa, though probably not in the way Richard himself had hoped for. As Alfassa wrote in her journal soon after meeting Aurobindo, she had instantly recognized him as the mysterious teacher who had so often appeared in her dreams and visions (CWM 1: 113); the two began an association that would turn into a lifelong spiritual collaboration.

As for Aurobindo, a Bengali-born, Oxford-educated polyglot and polymath, at the time of his meeting with Alfassa he was primarily known as a political figure – an outspoken defender of Indian independence and a charismatic young leader within Congress’s extremist faction. On his return to India, he variously taught at Baroda College, read copiously and wrote constantly – on subjects ranging from philosophy to criticism, plays, poetry and translations (Heehs, 2008: 11–97, passim). That said, it was his political essays that eventually caught the attention of both Indian activists and British officials. Following a failed assassination plot the British sought to implicate him in (he was later acquitted of all charges), Aurobindo quit British India in 1910 for Pondicherry, then still a French territory. Despite this somewhat unconventional trajectory, by the time he and Alfassa met, his reputation as a yogi was on the rise. Though he began his experiments some years before the arrest, by 1914 yoga had become central to his work – in part owing to spiritual experiences in his year of incarceration while awaiting trial and in part as a conscious political act. Aurobindo often stressed that his spiritual practice, or sadhana, was, in fact, a truer form of revolutionary action. ⁶ I stress these aspects of Aurobindo’s – and to some extent Alfassa’s – formation precisely because the idea of spiritual development as an art of the self, equally shaping one’s inner and outer being, is central to the philosophy of Integral Yoga and to Alfassa’s own complex self-positioning.

Today, Alfassa is best known simply as the Mother. Affectionately addressed by devotees during her lifetime as Douce Mère, she was understood to be the personal, embodied aspect of the Universal Mother, or Shakti, the creative principle of the Divine. As Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator, Alfassa was not only the co-founder of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, which was officially established in 1926, but also its public de facto leader. In the same year that marked the beginning of the Ashram, Aurobindo had retreated into seclusion in order to focus on his sadhana – not for his personal liberation, but for the transformation of the world as such – and he left Mirra in charge of directing the spiritual practice of their followers, as well as managing the daily affairs of the Ashram. It was then that Aurobindo officially designated Alfassa as the Mother, telling devotees: ‘Mirra is my Shakti . . . [she] has taken charge of the new creation’ (Heehs, 2008: 345). In effect, Alfassa had become the Mother, a title that signalled her status not only as Aurobindo’s Shakti, but also as his equal; in later Integral Yoga discourse, they are at times said to be so closely attuned as to be like a single consciousness in two bodies.

Maternity, materiality and the supramental

Let us return now to the talk Alfassa had delivered before a women’s group in Japan, where she spoke at length of maternity as spiritual work. Even in this early text the central themes that will characterize mature Integral Yoga thought are clearly articulated – including the principles of spiritual evolution and Integral Yoga’s complex, multivalent metaphysical structure – and, as such, it is worth examining in more detail. In her lecture, Alfassa characterized the world as full of chaos and strife (a fair assessment, considering the then recent events of the First World War, the Russo-Japanese conflict and Japan’s imperial expansion); consequently, she argued, the present civilization, based on ‘the power of mind’, was in the process of disintegration, giving way to ‘a new reign . . . of the Spirit’ (CWM 2: 159). Indeed, the goal of active world transformation and ushering in the descent of the supramental is central to Aurobindo and Alfassa’s mature spiritual work; at that time, however, Alfassa made her appeal to women specifically, stressing that it was their duty to be a ‘spiritual former and educator’. (CWM 2: 160)

‘Superman’ will undoubtedly be ‘born of woman’, Alfassa claimed, but simply being aware of this was not enough; women must not merely strive to bring forth a ‘being in whom our highest personal ideal is manifested’, but aspire to realize the future ‘type’ of humanity, which will exceed all current ‘human measures and features’ (CWM 2: 157–168). ⁷ In other words, women are called to intuit these future forms through spiritual aspiration – by which Alfassa meant not an imaginative exercise in creating a fantasy or an ‘ideal man’, but a quest for spiritual realization that will facilitate the revelatory quantum leap, as it were. This is a point worth stressing, perhaps, as Alfassa’s notion of fostering an ideal humanity departs meaningfully from the narrow and racist eugenic theories of her time. As she puts it, ‘the obscure bonds of heredity and atavism . . . are nothing else than subconscious preferences for our own trend of character’, while truly spiritual maternity is a much nobler task:

we can, by concentration and will, call into being a type constructed according to the highest ideal we are able to conceive. With this effort, maternity becomes truly precious and sacred; indeed with this, we enter the glorious work of the Spirit, and womanhood rises above animality and its ordinary instincts, towards real humanity and its powers.

In this effort, in this attempt, then, lies our true duty. And if this duty was always of the greatest importance, it certainly has taken a capital one in the present turn of the earth’s evolution. (CWM 2: 158)

Although this talk predates Alfassa becoming the Mother by nearly a decade, it remains representative of her thinking. In fact, she deemed this piece important enough to have it republished several times, signalling perhaps that her comments on motherhood as essentially a spiritual task were further informed by her own role as the Mother, and remained an important message for her followers even as Integral Yoga practice came to emphasize the cultivation of personal spiritual evolution. Similarly, the ideal humanity Alfassa spoke of, brought about by psycho-spiritual and physical transformation, would become the driving ethos of Alfassa and Aurobindo’s work and a core principle of Integral Yoga. Far from being simply an improved version of humans as they are now, this ‘future type’ – the Superman or the supramental race, as it would be dubbed in mature Integral Yoga literature – would constitute a wholly new species. ⁸ Following her vision of the ‘supramental ship’ in February 1958, Alfassa noted that: ‘Between the beings of the supramental world and men, there exists approximately the same gap as between men and animals’ (Mother’s Agenda, 1: 137). ⁹ Commenting on it again a little later, she remarked that she now ‘understood the Christian symbolism’ of original sin and redemption, its true meaning indicating a psycho-physical transformation that would ‘reverse’ the error of the Fall:

that part of humanity, of the human consciousness, capable of uniting with the Supermind and of liberating itself, will be completely transformed. This humanity is moving towards a future reality not yet expressed in its outer form. Whereas the part of humanity nearer to the simplicity of the animal or of Nature will be reabsorbed by Nature and entirely reassimilated. (Agenda 1: 149)

This spiritualized, transformed humanity will possess an outer form fitting its evolved consciousness: first, it will be androgynous and, second, its very material physicality will differ dramatically from the flesh-and-blood embodiment of current humanity. Alfassa taught that the bodies of the supramental race will be made of a new substance that is luminous and plastic, and can be shaped as needed through conscious will. Moreover, while ‘supramentalized’ bodies will retain distinction as individuals, the need for biological, sexual distinction will disappear precisely because it will no longer be needed for ‘animal procreation’. ¹⁰ For now, according to Alfassa’s teachings, this future humanity exists only on the supramental plane; in time, however, as the supramental consciousness is brought down to ‘work’ on the material plane, it will become manifest in material reality. This transformative work is not only the result of individual spiritual development, although that too is part of it; more significantly, it is the direct objective of Aurobindo and the Mother’s spiritual work.

The Supermind, as envisioned by Aurobindo, belongs to the divine hemisphere of existence (that which is eternal, true, constant and ultimately real), yet it also acts directly on the material hemisphere of being – the domain of Nature, comprising matter, life and the mind. Accordingly, Aurobindo understood the perennial human aspiration towards eternal truth, consciousness, and immortality as really nothing more than the striving of Nature to evolve beyond the mind. This is enabled by the Supermind, the ‘creative action of the All-existent’: ‘proceeding from the essential oneness to the resultant multiplicity, it comprehends all things in itself as itself the One in its manifold aspects and it apprehends separately all things in itself as objects of its will and knowledge’ (CWSA 21: 276–277). ¹¹ Though I will not delve deeply into the septenary metaphysics of Integral Yoga here, for space considerations, it is important to note that the Supermind, as a type of acting consciousness, is the middle, pivotal node of Integral Yoga ontology, or what Aurobindo calls the ‘sevenfold chord of being’, and functions almost as a form of translation between the divine and the natural realms (CWSA 21: 276–304, passim). In their sadhana, Aurobindo and Alfassa sought to ‘bring down’ and ‘establish’ the Supermind, thereby accelerating (or enabling) humanity’s evolution to the next stage of being and consciousness. Moreover, as we shall see, this was a task that the Mother was deeply instrumental to, doctrinally speaking, and which Alfassa carried on after Aurobindo’s passing in sometimes novel ways.

It is this connection between spiritual motherhood and the vision of a transformed, spiritualized humanity that I would like to probe further here, in order to tease apart the thick tangle of significations that emerge in Alfassa’s thought around mothering and what it meant to be the Mother. Her attitudes towards embodiment, gender, and sexuality are complex and, at times, ambivalent. The question of material embodiment is particularly germane here, since, on the one hand, according to Integral Yoga tradition, the Mother has ‘taken birth’ in a body precisely in order to facilitate the spiritual and physical evolution of humanity to its next stage. On the other hand, it is physical materiality itself that is deemed to be in need of the greatest transformation, as can be gleaned from her discourse on matter and the supramental. In Alfassa’s terminology, especially the mature thought of her later years, the world of physical matter becomes increasingly associated with ‘falsehood’, and the more subtle layers of reality with ‘truth’. ¹² Compare the following two passages, for example:

When one looks at the world of men from the supramental consciousness, the dominant characteristic is a feeling of oddity, of artificiality – a world that is absurd because it is artificial. This world is false because its material appearance does not at all express the profound truth of things [. . .] in the supramental world, the will acts directly upon the substance, and the substance is obedient to this will. (Agenda 1: 145)

And

Not one of the values of ordinary physical life is based upon truth. Just as we have to buy cloth, sew it together, then put it on our backs in order to dress ourselves, likewise we have to take things from outside and then put them inside our bodies in order to feed ourselves. For everything, our life is artificial.

A true, sincere, spontaneous life, as in the supramental world, is a springing forth of things through the fact of conscious will, a power over substance that shapes this substance according to what we decide it should be. (Agenda 1: 142) ¹³

On the one hand, this is perfectly consonant with Aurobindo’s treatment, in the sense that the highest reality, or Brahman, is that which is the truly real – ‘the triune principle of transcendent and infinite Existence, Consciousness and Bliss which is the nature of divine being’, or Sat-chit-ananda (CWSA 21: 276). That said, Aurobindo had equally emphasized the monistic, advaitic thrust of his philosophy (a-dvaita is Sanskrit for ‘non-dual’), in which the dualities of the universe are part of its multiplicity (the play, or līlā, of the One as the Many), as well as a temporary condition of human perception, to be resolved through progressive spiritual development (CWSA 21: 29–37, passim). Alfassa’s discourse of falsehood and truth differs in its emphases, perhaps because her starting point as the Mother is different as well, rooted as it is in the highly gendered language of her creative and spiritual powers as Shakti – a creative feminine force. This generates an inherent tension between the nature of the Mother as a transforming, salvific force and the ultimate goal of that transformation – particularly as Alfassa-as-the Mother also serves as an exemplar to her followers. At the same time, it is through this tension that Alfassa succeeds, perhaps, to destabilize the notion of spiritual motherhood in new and unique ways, and it is this discussion I turn to next.

The Mother: individual, universal and transcendent

Let us first examine more closely some of the elements that make up Alfassa’s spiritual motherhood. In her capacity as the Mother, the scale of Alfassa’s own ‘spiritual shaping’ of her children devotees (and, by extension, of all humanity) is indeed global and universal. According to Integral Yoga, the Mother ‘performs the sadhana’ for the world in order to enable the personal evolution (or else salvation) of humankind – a dynamic not unlike the incarnation of Christ, in some ways, though of course the Indic model of the avatāra is the primary context here, commonly referenced in Integral Yoga. The conception of the Mother as a source of spiritual transformation and grace was first formally laid out in Aurobindo’s work, The Mother, comprising a series of essays partly co-authored with Alfassa and circulated among the small Ashram community shortly after Aurobindo’s retirement into seclusion. ¹⁴ These texts, as well as his correspondence with devotees from these years – not all of whom easily accepted his withdrawal and Alfassa’s leadership – remain the main formal doctrinal articulations of the Mother within Integral Yoga (leaving out, for the time being, what Alfassa herself had to say on the subject). Later, Aurobindo also refined some of the themes in philosophical and allegorical form as well, especially in his final work, the epic poem Savitri. ¹⁵

Aurobindo’s thought on this subject is crucial to understanding what ‘the Mother’ means in Integral Yoga practice and metaphysics, but here I will address it only very briefly. In his essays and letters, Aurobindo defines the Mother in terms of the Indic concept of śakti. In the South Asian context, this is a capacious, multivalent term, as it signifies simultaneously (1) the abstract yet feminine-gendered universal creative force or power, (2) the specific creative force of male gods or saints, (3) the personifications of this force as various goddess figures and (4) the Goddess (Devī/Mahādevī). The latter, depending on the specific sectarian context, may designate the feminine duality and creative force of God (that is, the deity associated with Brahman or absolute reality), as in the Shaiva or Vaishnava traditions; similarly, it may also denote the creative, multiplex, conscious nature of the Real in goddess-centric Shakta traditions (equivalent to Brahman without a male-deity counterpart). Notably, when Aurobindo told his followers that Mirra was ‘his Shakti’, he meant it in all of these ways, to some extent. He identified three main aspects of the Mother: the Individual (that is, embodied as Alfassa), the Universal, and the Transcendent:

Transcendent, the original supreme Shakti, she stands above the worlds and links the creation to the ever unmanifest mystery of the Supreme. Universal, the cosmic Mahashakti, she creates all these beings and contains and enters, supports and conducts all these million processes and forces. Individual, she embodies the power of these two vaster ways of her existence, makes them living and near to us and mediates between the human personality and the divine Nature. (CWSA 32: 14)

Most importantly, perhaps, this clearly identified Alfassa as his spiritual partner and equal (not merely a devotee), and highlighted the salvific, grace-granting nature of the Mother. Moreover, these three aspects are not separate entities but interrelated ways of ‘being the Mother’, who is no less than ‘the Divine Consciousness that dominates all existence’ (CWSA 32: 14). In particular, she has a central role to play in the process of supramentalizing the earth-consciousness, and to this end she manifests in different ways on different planes of reality. It is interesting that Aurobindo compares her with the Vedantic idea of Nature as Prakriti (the active, manifest, creative force or reality, and the feminine counterpart of Brahman as the inert, unmanifest, passive and male Absolute), but he stresses that Prakriti is only the Mother’s ‘most outward executive aspect’. Indeed,

Nothing can be here or elsewhere but what she decides and the Supreme sanctions; nothing can take shape except what she moved by the Supreme perceives and forms after casting it into seed in her creating Ananda. . . . The Mother as the Mahashakti of this triple world of the Ignorance stands in an intermediate plane between the supramental Light, the Truth life, the Truth creation which has to be brought down here and this mounting and descending hierarchy of planes of consciousness that like a double ladder lapse into the nescience of Matter and climb back again through the flowering of life and soul and mind into the infinity of the Spirit. . . .

The Mother not only governs all from above but she descends into this lesser triple universe. . . . But personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may turn it to godlike Life, into this world-pain and its obstinate sorrow and suffering that she may end it in the transforming ecstasy of her sublime Ananda. (CWSA 32: 14–17)

Recalling that elsewhere Aurobindo defines his philosophical position as monistic, one might say that in his characterization of the Mother he walks a rather fine line between dualism and non-dualism, landing, perhaps, on a Shakta-inflected Vedanta. This metaphysic also supports Integral Yoga’s scheme of the involution of spirit into matter and its eventual evolution out of matter as part of the cosmic unfolding of the Divine, presenting it specifically as the journey, or else the function, of the Divine Mother. Notably, it is in connection with the Mother that the dualities of the universe are so starkly highlighted, perhaps given that it is her role to resolve them. In this sense, her multiform existence is intended to be paradoxical, like the indeterminate polarity of a quantum particle before it is fixed through measurement. For a living woman who is the leader of a growing community of disciples, however, maintaining the paradox necessarily involved daily acts of relational and discursive negotiation. If nothing else, the large volume of correspondence between Aurobindo and his disciples concerning the Mother, her power and the appropriate ways for devotees to ‘call’ on her force or approach her in their meditations, for example, especially in the early years of the Ashram, demonstrates not only the centrality of the Mother to Integral Yoga practice but also that there was considerable ambiguity on this topic among Ashramites.

Given all this, it is all the more interesting that Alfassa herself remained somewhat ambivalent about the term ‘Mother’, though she dutifully accepted the role, juxtaposing it with that of a guru and concluding: ‘I am not eager to be the Guru of anyone. It is more spontaneously natural for me to feel the Mother of all and to carry them forward silently through the power of love’ (CWM 13: 82). ¹⁶ Alfassa’s strategy for both resolving and maintaining the tension between the various aspects of the Mother is, in many ways, discursive (Kuchuk, 2021). In part thanks to Aurobindo’s definition of the Mother as simultaneously personal and universal, and in part owing to her own manner of discursive mechanics, whenever Alfassa utilizes an ‘I’ statement, there is a subtle slippage of identity – is she speaking as the Mother or the incarnate woman? Indeed, in later years, Alfassa had gradually created more and more distance between ‘the Mother’ and ‘the body’ occupied by her consciousness or, more precisely, by the ‘principle of the Mother’ (see, for example, CWM 13: 252) – a somewhat paradoxical stance, considering her equally strong emphasis on direct, embodied experience as a source of universal, revelatory knowledge.

Notably, Alfassa’s elevation of spiritual mothering stands in sharp contrast to her attitudes to the physical, bodied aspects of childbirth and child-rearing. Case in point, the Japanese women who attended her talk long before she was known as the Mother might have been surprised to learn that she had left her own son, André, in the care of his father’s family after divorcing her first husband, and had adamantly refused to bear any more children. As Heehs (2008: 254) writes, Alfassa had warned Richard that, although she agreed to marry him, she had no intention of bearing him any children, stating that ‘the animal mode of reproduction was only a transitional one and that until new ways of creating life became biologically possible her own motherhood would have to remain spiritual’. One might, of course, read such anecdotes through a psychological or interpersonal lens, however, as the excerpts above demonstrate, the association of conventional motherhood with ‘animality’ is a frequent enough refrain in Alfassa’s thought. This sentiment is echoed almost verbatim in Alfassa’s mature Integral Yoga teachings, particularly in her discussion of the supramental race and the ‘humanity of the future’, as well as her advice to prospective inhabitants of Auroville, whose task, ostensibly, was to arrive experimentally at ‘forms of life’ to support such a future – a discussion I return to presently.

Admittedly, compared to Aurobindo’s writings, Alfassa’s theorizing of her role as the Mother is not so systematic; one reason, perhaps, is that sustaining the creative tension between the different aspects of the Mother required continuous negotiation. For example, in her teachings, she deploys her memoirs and episodes of her pre-Ashram life as teaching parables and, at the same time, distances her self from the ‘material existence of this body’, declaring enigmatically at one point that ‘of all veils the body is the best’ (CWM 13: 45, 46). This may seem ironic, given that it is the individual aspect of the Mother that is understood in Integral Yoga to be the most transformative, as Aurobindo often stressed in his replies to disciples’ questions (CWSA 32: 17–18, 31–34, passim). The Mother, then, having ‘stooped to descend here into the Darkness’, as Aurobindo had so vividly put it, is both a force of transformation and a model yogic practitioner; her personal experiences are thus universalized and made an object of study, devotion and aspiration. For example, excerpts from Alfassa’s spiritual journal (later published as Prayers and Meditations) were first circulated within the Ashram in the early years of her emergence as the Mother as a kind of reintroduction of her to the community. ¹⁷ Addressed to the Divine in the second person – variously identified as Lord, God, Sublime Master (Maître Sublime, Seigneur Suprême, Divin Maître, etc.) and sometimes the Divine Mother (Mère Universelle, Divine Mère) – these prayers are understood in Integral Yoga as a dialogue in which one aspect of the Mother is addressing another aspect, a not uncommon trope in mystical literature. Though I cannot go into much detail here regarding this fascinating text, it is, as I have argued elsewhere, only one of many discursive pluralizing moves employed by Alfassa in an effort to both embody and transcend the confines of the Mother (Kuchuk, 2021: 262–308, passim).

The Matrimandir and the ‘principle of the Mother’

In a way, Alfassa’s life as the Mother is bookended by her discursive negotiations of her identity. If Prayers and Meditations exemplifies an internal, devotional dialogue between the individual and universal aspects of the Mother, later in life, Alfassa’s instructions and conceptual articulation of the Matrimandir attempt to hold in creative tension the personal and the transcendent, at once emphasizing and downplaying the Mother’s embodiment. This discourse is part of her broader discussion of Auroville, and must be anchored in this context, even if briefly, as it draws on all the different tensions and innovations inherent in Alfassa’s articulation of spiritual motherhood.

Auroville was conceived by Alfassa as ‘a city of the future’ – a cosmopolitan, utopian community – and even in its current form remains her final major project and enduring legacy. Founded in 1968 near Pondicherry as an experiment in intentional communal living, Auroville was to pioneer the new forms of life needed to seed supramental humanity (CWM 13: 256, passim). Unsurprisingly perhaps, spatially as well as ideologically, Auroville is centred on the Matrimandir (literally, the ‘Temple of the Mother’). The centrality of the Matrimandir mirrors and reinforces the importance of the Mother’s force and grace in shaping the lives of practitioners of Integral Yoga. As Aurobindo stressed, this yoga was not one of asceticism or renunciation, but a wholistic, lived practice, fully congruent with life in the world, as evidenced by the very term ‘integral’ and both his and Alfassa’s intended programmes of world transformation – spiritual, as well as social, cultural, and political. Aurobindo and Alfassa maintained that any activity, if approached with the right attitude and in the right state of mind (or, rather, consciousness), can be spiritual practice – that is, yoga. ¹⁸ Or, perhaps almost any activity.

In her conversations with aspiring Aurovilians on what cultivating the right attitude for the project might look like, Alfassa was at first reluctant to mandate concrete rules – after all, Auroville was not planned as an extension of the Ashram, where an expectation of celibacy was one of the few hard guidelines for membership. That said, she made it plain that sexuality and sexual reproduction were not altogether compatible with the future mode of life, as guided by supramental consciousness, along with other ‘external’ and ‘mental’ constructions, such as marriage, family life, money, or religion (see, for example, CWM 13: 188–189). Alfassa repeatedly delineates love and physical sex as distinct and, indeed, as opposed to one another. As told to one group of early residents:

Sexual activities bind man to the animal and they will be completely transformed in the future. Those who want to work for the future and prepare themselves to live it, would do well not to be hypnotised by this subject which animalises the consciousness. Above all, do not associate it with love in your thought, for they really have nothing to do with each other. (CWM 13: 240–241)

Though separated by about half a century, these remarks made to early Aurovilians are strikingly similar to the words spoken to an audience of Japanese women in the late 1910s and to Paul Richard, Alfassa’s second husband. Given the role of the Mother in Integral Yoga, moreover, we can read her instructions to Aurovilians as precisely the sort of conscious, wilful shaping of an ideal character – an ideal humanity, even – that, as we saw, she understood to be the core task of ‘maternity’. Repeatedly, Alfassa refers to Auroville as the ‘cradle of the Superman’, ‘meant to hasten the advent of the supramental Reality upon earth’ (CWM 13: 191, 215). Even her reluctance to mandate laws for the township (on one occasion, she mused that its ideal form of governance would be a ‘divine anarchy’) reflects her vision of an evolved, spiritualized humanity, which would be unified and harmonious not because it was being compelled from without, but through sincere, spontaneous identification with the Divine (CWM 13: 219). To put it in Alfassa’s own words, formulated in her statement to UNESCO in 1972: ‘Each one must know if he wants to associate with an old world ready for death, or to work for a new and better world preparing to be born’ (CWM 13: 215).

References to death and rebirth – and, ultimately, immortality – are not simply metaphorical, but point to the very real, radical transformation premised by the practice and teachings of Integral Yoga. Indeed, I should like to stress that it is not so much that Integral Yoga philosophy views the natural world, or even the human body, as inherently problematic in a moral sense. Rather, it is that physical matter is furthest, metaphysically speaking, from the pure, cosmic consciousness of the Divine, and thus the last and slowest to respond to its transforming force. This is a quality of gross matter that is usually described in Indic traditions as tamas – signifying inertness, density, darkness or obscurity. It is not evil per se, but it is, to use Alfassa’s term, ‘inconscient’. That said, it is the journey of divine consciousness into material form (involution) and its eventual re-emergence (evolution) that will bring about the ultimate transformation of reality. This transformation (or spiritualization) of matter is crucial for establishing the ‘divine life’ on earth. In her later years, Alfassa embarked on a spiritual undertaking she dubbed the ‘yoga of the cells’ – a process of awakening the consciousness of matter, intended to transform all materiality as we know it, beginning with the cells of her own body.

The ‘new sadhana’, as Alfassa sometimes refers to the ‘yoga of the cells’, is extensively documented in the Mother’s Agenda, and is essentially a targeted programme of transformation at the level of material Nature – an effort to awaken the cellular consciousness, which will do no less than ‘enable the conquest of death’ (CWM 13: 268). This effort, which Alfassa took to be her primary task in her final years, was the next step in the supramentalizing of the earth-consciousness, much as Aurobindo’s sadhana had created an opening for the supramental force to begin acting in the world of matter. Increasingly, Alfassa saw her own body as the laboratory, or experimentation site, through which the supramental consciousness would begin to act directly on material Nature. Moreover, it is this sadhana that undergirds Alfassa’s project of Auroville, as well as her vision of the Matrimandir – in effect, they are micro- and macro-scaled versions of one another. Congruent with Alfassa’s vision of the supramental plane, both the city and the temple at its core were envisioned by her as already ‘existing’ on the ‘ideal plane’, and simply needing to be made manifest in the realm of matter. ¹⁹ Thus, in more than one sense, the temple was intended as an extension and an embodiment of the Mother and her force, both central to Integral Yoga practice.

In more practical terms, in addition to serving as the organizing principle for the ‘city of the future’, the Matrimandir was a solution, of sorts, to the problem of leaving the movement without a leader. By the time construction on the Matrimandir began in 1971, Alfassa was 93 years old; it was completed only in 2005, 32 years after her passing. All the same, in her final years, she spoke often of the Matrimandir, stressing that the task of constructing it (that is, literally contributing one’s labour to it) was of paramount importance specifically for those who wished to reside in Auroville. Likewise, despite its name, Alfassa was adamant that it should not be a place of worship, but of concentration. As she confided to Satprem, her final and closest disciple, even the term ‘Matrimandir’ was one of convenience rather than principle. On the ideal plane where she had first seen the temple realized, she knew it as ‘The Pavilion of Love’. In practice, however, she had no intention of using this terminology:

I dislike this word [love], for man has turned it into something grotesque; I am speaking of the principle of Divine Love. But that has changed: it will be ‘The Pavilion of the Mother’ – but not this (Mother points to herself) – the Mother, the true Mother, the principle of the Mother. I say ‘Mother’ because Sri Aurobindo used that word, otherwise I would have put something else, I would have put ‘creative principle’ or ‘principle of realisation’ or – I do not know. (CWM 13: 252) ²⁰

The ‘principle of the Mother’, here and elsewhere in Alfassa’s discourse on the Matrimandir, appears to become increasingly uncoupled from any specific embodiment (including her own) and, consequently, from its sexed or gendered characteristics. Further, while it is consistent with Alfassa’s vision of spiritualized humanity as androgynous, genderless and possessing a light-woven, malleable corporeality unlike any physical matter currently known, it remains in tension both with the articulation of the Mother as Shakti and with the significance of the Mother’s physical body as a laboratory of transformation. In other words, regardless of how much distance Alfassa tries to create between the different aspects of her self (both as the Mother and, I imagine, as the individual woman, Mirra), the reason she is able to negotiate her authority as a spiritual leader is precisely because these aspects continue to hang together. Curiously, in the process of leveraging different aspects of being the Mother against one other, Alfassa hits on some key significations of motherhood, materiality and gender as sociocultural and religious constructions. In concluding my discussion, I turn next to some productive questions that Alfassa’s case study raises in thinking through the broader concept of spiritual motherhood.

Troubling the category

As we have seen, Alfassa rejects a direct or simplistic association between the spiritual and psychological aspects of ‘mothering’ and the physical, biological processes of birthing and rearing children. In dissociating ‘motherhood’ or ‘maternity’ from its biological, bodied referents, she emphasizes instead the creative, generative aspects as a function of spiritual aspiration or conscious will, rather than of one’s specific incarnation. And yet, the body (that is, the specific embodiment) of the Mother is of paramount importance in Integral Yoga, as a site of special grace and of the initiation of planet-wide radical transformation. For various reasons, Alfassa cannot – and does not – give up on the gendered language of the Mother. Instead, she continually renegotiates the category; tracing her discursive moves in and out and around it is helpful, I suggest, for identifying and further interrogating key ideas at the intersection of motherhood and religion.

The most intriguing possibility offered in Alfassa’s discourse, in my view, is not even the troubling of gender essentialism per se, but her insistence that the very matter of which physical bodies (however sexed) are composed, along with the rest of the natural world, is in need – and in process – of transformation. In claiming this, she is perhaps doing something radical – potentially unsettling the deeply ingrained association between matter and mater that theorists such as Judith Butler (2011) and Luce Irigaray (1985) place at the centre of their critique of normative gender discourse. This is not to say that Alfassa was consciously a feminist or that her teachings can be taken as such wholesale; if anything, as we have seen, her position is rather ambivalent. All the same, her thinking about the body, matter, consciousness and the self offers a rich case study. Taking the body as a space of signification, especially the signification of gendered materiality, it is possible that we can read Alfassa’s discourse of supramental androgyny or her own spiritual motherhood as attempts to pluralize this space, upsetting ingrained binaries and, at the same time, maintaining the role of the body as the ground of experience. While the obverse may seem equally plausible, taking Alfassa’s insistence on celibacy and claims that sexual activity ‘animalises the consciousness’ as attempts to neutralize or erase the sexed body, such a reading, ironically, might require one to reaffirm a narrowly essentialist view. Rather, I argue that Alfassa attempts to carve out a ‘third space’, discursively as well as in her role as the Mother – a principle or a consciousness in continuous movement, as it were, for which ‘of all veils the body is the best’.

Alfassa, then, for all her rejection of physical sexuality, disrupts the familiar continuum of significations female–woman–mother. She does so, in part, precisely through both occupying the archetype and resisting it; the locus of identity, or the subject-self, is destabilized and decentralized, and ultimately figured less as a space and more as a process – specifically, a process of translation, of (re)reading and (re)uttering (Kuchuk, 2021). Paradoxically, perhaps, she is able to do so precisely because her departure points are, in fact, gendered, feminine archetypes: as we have seen in Aurobindo’s articulation of the Mother, he draws on the South Asian tradition of śakti, which is in itself a multivalent and complex term. This tantric undercurrent in an otherwise largely Vedantic tradition is not coincidental, given the emphasis Aurobindo and Alfassa place on total world- and self-transformation, of which realization and liberation are only the first steps (see, for example, Heehs, 2008; Mukhopadhyay, 2019; Stoeber, 2009). Śakti, as a concept, is both gendered and deeply malleable, particularly when taken in the nominally neutral senses of power or energy. Even so, in the Indic context, the gods have (a) śakti, while goddesses are śakti; put another way, śakti is always personified as a goddess. In becoming the Mother, Alfassa inherited this diversity of significations, but what seems original about her inhabiting of the archetype is precisely her emphasis on its plurality, and her resistance of any easy association of divine personality with human embodiment. The ‘principle of the Mother’, as she put it, is thus both gendered and transcendent – a tension she maintains, or tries to maintain, by continually (re)constructing her own subjectivity as multiple and multivocal.

Of course, in many ways Alfassa’s self-construction as the Mother draws on traditional South Asian conventions of female saints and patterns of female devotionalism, in which spiritualized maternal or erotic love for the divine other is complimented with physical celibacy or abstinence in the saint’s or devotee’s human relationships. ²¹ In this sense, her emphasis on celibacy as a prerequisite for spiritual evolution as well as her references to her physical self as removed from her real identity (the ‘material existence of this body’) have a clear cultural and traditional grounding. That said, Alfassa also departs from these patterns in various ways. The Mother herself has never been taken in Integral Yoga as primarily either a worshipper or a devotee (with the exception of the text of Prayers and Meditations, which is understood to be an instance of a special sadhana, not a normative characterization of her practice). On multiple occasions, Aurobindo emphasizes her equal status to himself within the movement – and perhaps more than equal, given that his articulation of the Mother has no ‘male’ parallel. While Alfassa’s role as the Mother was initiated by Aurobindo declaring her to be his Shakti, it is the Mother (and particularly her individual incarnation) who is deemed essential for the spiritual success of Integral Yoga practitioners; transformation, both global and individual, requires the ‘force of the Mother’. ²²

I hope I have shown here that Alfassa’s spiritual motherhood raises more questions than it answers, precisely because her discursive (re)negotiation of her (gendered) role leads to a kind of multiplex universalism, which, from the standpoint of Integral Yoga philosophy, is precisely the point. Integral Yoga postulates a world view in which humanity is working towards increased integration – an integration of matter and spirit, self and other – and yet one that does not collapse all subjectivities into one. This inevitably presents a paradox, highlighted by the fact that the way into this integration is essentially through a gendered lens. Alfassa’s spiritual motherhood is also not easily squared with its biological referents of physical motherhood and childbirth. Rather, late in life, she confided in her disciple Satprem: ‘I have never felt physically very maternal. There are millions and millions who do that, so do it again? – No, truly that’s not what one is born for’ (Agenda 6: 164). ²³ Ironically, even here there is an implicit re-engagement of the idea of motherhood, opaquely gesturing at the relationship with her own mother even as she is raising the question ‘What, precisely, is one born for?’ – clearly, not for the repetition of patterns set before, but for the forging of new forms of subjectivity and being.

This exchange encapsulates surprisingly well the core significations of motherhood, be it spiritual or biological, in Alfassa’s usage: relationality and creative will. Perhaps it is fitting that the discourses examined here bookend Alfassa’s life as the Mother, first emerging at the beginning of her intensive spiritual exchange with Aurobindo, when she was transitioning from spiritual seeker to preceptor in her own right, and again at the end, as she was preparing what would remain her most tangible legacy – the experimental community of Auroville, centred on the Matrimandir. Indeed, while pinning down the locus of ‘the Mother’ is increasingly difficult in Alfassa’s later years, its enduring signification is a relationship of creative, ongoing ‘shaping’ of souls ‘coming to occupy a body’ – a relationship at once divine and deeply human.