There are the great and splendid embodiments of the Divine Mother, her Powers and her dynamic Personalities carrying out the cosmic work. Her Four Powers of Wisdom-Strength-Harmony-Perfection or Maheshwari-Mahakali-Mahalakshmi-Mahasaraswati are of such a type, already functioning in the vaster scheme of cosmic things. But they don’t pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, they don’t accept the “lamentable limitations”, they don’t climb up the Calvary of deep-rooted frustration, don’t bear the ignominy of human births. Once the Mother told the Goddess Durga the magic of surrender to the Lord—and then only did Durga see, with utter astonishment, its marvel and its power; yet she was unwilling to take birth here, as was Shiva too. This is a much painful affair and it is the greatness of the Avatar that he accepts it. It is an act of his grace also for the evolving soul of the earth. Lakshmi, Saraswati, Gauri, Uma, Amba, Bhavani, Parvati, Kali, and in a way even the Madonnas who are present in the cosmic field, are powers and personalities of the Divine Mother, but essentially typal in character. There are goddesses and goddesses, devis and mātrikās, there are lesser vital embodiments also, embodiments who have drifted far away from her; there are alluring females too, like la belle dame sans merci, and frightful women in a bouge with perilous beauty and charm. But let us take the Mother of Compassion, Karunamayi Mata, whom we meet in Savitri; she suffers no doubt, but not the way does Savitri, the incarnation that Savitri is. Hers is a picture of Grief Divine: (Savitri, p. 503)

A moon-bright face in a sombre cloud of hair,

A Woman sat in a pale lustrous robe.

A rugged and ragged soil was her bare seat,

Beneath her feet a sharp and wounding stone.

A divine pity on the peaks of the world,

A spirit touched by the grief of all that lives,

She looked out far and saw from inner mind

This questionable world of outward things,

Of false appearances and plausible shapes,

This dubious cosmos stretched in the ignorant Void,

The pangs of earth, the toil and speed of the stars

And the difficult birth and dolorous end of life.

Accepting the universe as her body of woe,

The Mother of the seven sorrows bore

The seven stabs that pierced her bleeding heart:

The beauty of sadness lingered on her face,

Her eyes were dim with the ancient stain of tears.

Her heart was riven with the world’s agony

And burdened with the sorrow and struggle in Time,

An anguished music trailed in her rapt voice…

And she herself tells to Savitri: (pp. 503-05)

To share the suffering of the world I came,

I draw my children’s pangs into my breast.

I am the nurse of the dolour beneath the stars;

I am the soul of all who wailing writhe

Under the ruthless harrow of the Gods.

I am woman, nurse and slave and beaten beast;

I tend the hands that gave me cruel blows…

The scream of tortured flesh and tortured hearts

Fall’n back on heart and flesh unheard by Heaven

Has rent with helpless grief and wrath my soul…

Nothing refusing of creation’s load,

I have borne all and know I still must bear…

I have borne the calm indifference of Heaven,

Watched Nature’s cruelty to suffering things

While God passed silent by nor turned to help…

I am the hope that looks towards my God,

My God who never came to me till now;

His voice I hear that ever says ‘I come’:

I know that one day he shall come at last.

”Accepting the universe as her body of woe” she does her silent work. She bears the afflictions and the sorrows of the cosmic travail. But as the incarnate what were the seven stabs she bore? Here is Stabat Mater with emotions, Our Lady at the Cross and not at the Manger, at Calvary and not at Bethlehem; here is Mary at the Cross and not at the Cradle. Her Seven Sorrows are:

The Prophecy of Simeon

The Flight into Egypt

The Loss of Jesus in the Temple

Mary meets Jesus Carrying the Cross

The Crucifixion

Mary Receives the Dead Body of Her Son

The Burial of Her Son and Closing of the Tomb

Great as the sea was her sorrow. Her prayer is: Mother of Sorrows, have compassion on them, and grant us the privilege to be present to them. In the Fifth Dolor, the Crucifixion, Mary stood beneath the Cross and watched her Son suffer and die, her heart was united with his. She cried: Mother of Sorrows, have compassion on them, and grant us the privilege to be present to them. This may be very motherly, and tender and touching, very poignant, even to a good extent deeply psychic; but the sweet and spiritual which is there in Savitri’s Mother of Compassion, the Grief Divine, duhkhī-kaştī dévī, does not come out with that reassuring definiteness. Perhaps this is because this Mother of Sorrows is typal. She does not pass through the portals of the birth that is a death,—which Savitri does. In that sense this incarnation of the Divine Mother, as Savitri, is just not an embodiment; it is an incarnation. Savitri’s is a sacrifice of a different kind. According to the Law of Sacrifice “a divinising, a saving power descends” to carry the earthly evolution towards greater godhood, even making that godhood’s greater manifestation here more and more possible, more and more ampler, more and more definite. Savitri does it by accepting the earthly conditions in their totality. There is the crucial difference between the typal and the incarnate.