If the divine Shakti has sacrificed her royalty of transcendental delight and existence and awareness and accepted smallness in this mortal creation then a question does arise. The question is: is this Sacrifice, this Holocaust of the creative Force the same as the Sacrifice or Holocaust of the divine Purusha of the Vedic Purusha Sukta in which the Purusha was sacrificed in the ancient day? There are similarities between the two. In the Purusha Sukta the Gods and the Rishis and the Sadhyas invoked the Primordial Being or Purusha and offered him in the sacrifice, he agreeing to become the oblation, sacrificial the offering, āhuti; in the other, the creative Force approached the Supreme and in his Will, at his great command precipitated her Consciousness and Love and Truth into the world that had come out of the Inconscience and Suffering and Falsehood. This is an involution that has happened, only because someone willed it, and also paid a price for it to happen. The Holocaust of the divine Shakti is a result of that willing. The story of separation of the four beings from their supreme Origin is a former event, describing the involution prior to the holocaustic involution. Such is the story connected with the objectivisation of the Supreme.

In answer to a question on 24 March 1951 the Mother said the following. The question was if there were beings before the descent of the divine Love. (Q & A, CWM, Vol. 4)

There were no terrestrial beings. The terrestrial world, the earth came into existence after the descent into the Inconscient, not before.

The gradual formation of the different stages of being, from the Supreme to the most material region, is subsequent to the Inconscient. When, precisely, the Consciousness “began” its creation (don’t take what I say quite literally as though it were a little history of another country, for it is not that, I am trying to make you understand, that’s all), the first manifestation of the creative Consciousness was just an emanation of consciousness—of conscious light—and when this emanation separated itself from its origin, the Inconscient was born, through opposition (how to put it?) yes, really through opposition. Consequently, the birth of the Inconscient is prior to the formation of the world, and it was only when the perception came that the whole universe was going to be created uselessly that there was a call and Divine Love plunged into the Inconscient to change it into consciousness. Therefore, it can be said that the formation of the material worlds as we know them is the result of the descent of the supreme Consciousness into the Inconscient. It cannot be said that there was something prior to that, things as we know them in the material world (I apologise for the ambiguity of my words, but you understand one cannot express these things in our usual words).

The formation of the earth as we know it, this infinitesimal point in the immense universe, was made precisely in order to concentrate the effort of transformation upon one point; it is like a symbolic point created in the universe to make it possible, while working directly upon one point, to radiate it over the entire universe.

If we want to make the problem a little more comprehensible, it is enough to limit ourselves to the creation and the history of the earth, for it is a good symbol of universal history.

From the astronomical point of view the earth is nothing, it is a very small accident. From the spiritual point of view, it is a symbolic willed formation. And as I have already said, it is only upon earth that this Presence is found, this direct contact with the supreme Origin, this presence of the divine Consciousness hidden in all things.

Such is the significance of the earth, what Sri Aurobindo calls a “significant centre”, of Bhumi of the Purusha Sukta, bhūmī, one who expands, grows in the possibilities of the spirit, the Lord of Manifestation himself being described as bhūmā. He the Virat comes in the cosmic operation with his fourfold power of the divine Chatruvarņa.

There is in Savitri a reference to the Originery involution at a couple of places, the first or the initiating involution concerned with the process of objectivisation, the Sacrifice of the Primal Purusha, of the Impersonal-Personal, the Unmanifest, Avyakta. Thus: (pp. 140-41)

In the enigma of the darkened Vasts,

In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite

When all was plunged in the negating Void,

Non-Being’s night could never have been saved

If Being had not plunged into the dark

Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.

Invoking in world-time the timeless truth,

Bliss changed to sorrow, knowledge made ignorant,

God’s force turned into a child’s helplessness

Can bring down heaven by their sacrifice.

A contradiction founds the base of life:

The eternal, the divine Reality

Has faced itself with its own contraries;

Being became the Void and Conscious-Force

Nescience and walk of a blind Energy

And Ecstasy took the figure of world-pain.

The Purusha of Bliss-and-Knowledge-and-Force is bearing himself the cross of Sorrow-and-Ignorance-and-Helplessness, the triple mystic becoming its opposite, the Cross of this Creation. He volunteered to enter into that working contradiction, a rewarding contradiction of his own reality. This he has done precisely because it is in that, and in no other way, could God become greater by the fall. (p. 141)

In a mysterious dispensation’s law

A Wisdom that prepares its far-off ends

Planned so to start her slow aeonic game.

And again: (p. 67)

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone

Has called out of the Silence his mute Force

Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush

Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep

The ineffable puissance of his solitude.

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone

Has entered with his silence into space:

He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;

He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone.

This is the Grand Sacrifice, the Sacrifice by which a creation could be initiated, the utter Originery Sacrifice. Indeed, such is the mechanism by which the non-manifest Supreme could enter into the order of manifestation, a remarkable device by which One could be Many, bahusyām prajāyéyéti, as the Upanishad would say. But in Savitri there is no direct mention of the sacrifice pertaining to the cosmic administration or implementation, such as the creation of the Fourfold Order, the bringing down of the Four Powers of the Divine Mother, the second, the operative involution in the cosmic context. There is, though, connected with it, the description of the fourfold Being (p. 680) wearing the mystery of a nameless Name, in the universe it writing its tremendous sense in the inexhaustible meaning of a word. First he becomes Virat.

However, apart from such many portentous involutionary sacrifices there are also, and of necessity, several evolutionary sacrifices of great significance,—and Savitri is rich in them. These pertain to the incarnations, and the coming of the Avatars and the Vibhutis. Savitri herself “is represented in the poem as an incarnation of the Divine Mother. This incarnation is supposed to have taken place in far past times when the whole thing had to be opened out, so as to hew the ways of Immortality,”— this is what Sri Aurobindo wrote in one of his letters in 1936. And about Satyavan? He is the “soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance.” Sri Aurobindo also says that the characters in the story of Savitri are not mere personified qualities, but are “incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.” These living incarnations are of a different kind than those of the Four Powers of the Divine Mother or of the four beings who went far away from the Source, the involutionary emanations.

But what is incarnation, what is Avatarhood? Let us go to the Mother’s answer. She says, Avatar is “the Supreme manifested on earth in a body.” And what is the work the Avatar comes to do? “To go up and down and join the top to the bottom, the whole secret of realisation.” This suggests that the Avatarhood of Satyavan, fallen in the grip of death, belongs to another category. About him the Mother says: “Satyavan—Well, he is the Avatar. He is the incarnation of the Supreme.” (Questions and Answers, 1953, CWM, Vol. 5) His is a kind of foundational incarnation, a supportive incarnation set in the realm of Death. It makes the work of the Consciousness-Force in the Death’s realm possible. To do that, she incarnates personally on earth. That is Savitri’s incarnation.  She awoke when “Man lifted up the burden of his fate.” The Savitri-legend reveals us that she took the burden of the evolutionay soul of the earth upon herself. She is really the one who is bearing its cross. Without Satyavan, Savitri exists not; without Savitri, Satyavan cannot be rescued. In the process, Savitri is the one who goes through “the portals of the birth that is a death.” This also means, the Savitri-incarnation is different from the appearance of the Four Powers of the Consciousness-Force in the cosmic operation. While these Powers are typal, Savitri belongs to the evolutionary, one connected with the universal, the other with the earth.