Mortality bears ill the eternal’s touch…

It trembles at its naked power of Truth

And the might and sweetness of its absolute Voice.

Inflicting on the heights the abysm’s law,

It sullies with its mire heaven’s messengers:

Its thorns of fallen nature are the defence

It meets the son of God with death and pain.

A glory of lightnings traversing the earth-scene,

Their sun-thoughs fading, darkened by ignorant minds,

Their work betrayed, their good to evil turned,

The cross their payment for the crown they gave…

The image of cross appears in several places in Savitri. But Savitri’s cross is also the sign of her complete surrender to the Supreme, she going by the Will of the Lord whatever be the difficulty. The divine descent meets the barring line, the incarnation the yoke of misery, the being of knowledge the affliction of ignorance, love hatred. Unless this is experienced, there cannot be any solution to it. The Divine has to come down and carry on his shoulder the heavy wooden cross, must pant for breath. The way to heaven is through the way of suffering. He himself must bear the Cross.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “All true Truth of love and of the works of love the psychic being accepts in their place: but its flame mounts always upward and it is eager to push the ascent from lesser to higher degrees of Truth, since it knows that only by the ascent to a highest Truth and the descent of that highest Truth can Love be delivered from the cross and placed upon the throne; for the cross is the sign of the Divine Descent barred and marred by the transversal line of a cosmic deformation which turns it into a stake of suffering and misfortune. Only by the ascent to the original Truth can the deformation be healed and all the works of love, as too all the works of knowledge and of life, be restored to a divine significance and become part of an integral spiritual existence.” (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 157)

One may acquire a kind of divine equality, samatā, in all circumstances of life, including even the extreme of deathful anguish; but there must yet come a degree of perfection surpassing everything. The key for this perfection could be in accepting in all gladness the circumstances as they are as a god-given opportunity, in remaining untouched by them. But the truer way is the way of surrender, surrender to both the divine Will and the divine Wisdom which are actually one. That is the perfect way to bear the weight of the cross, recognising in it the way of the divine Love.

That is the way Savitri follows, the way of perfect surrender to the Supreme. She carries the cross of suffering and pain, not just submitting but surrendering herself to the Will and Wisdom of the Divine.

The cross their payment: Cross means progress for those who suffer for it, and not who fight for it. But here is the Mother about the Cross: (Collected Works of the Mother, Vol. 4)

Even higher beings have their cross to bear. It is a question of a difference of consciousness. In some it is the external states of consciousness which are most developed; others, on the contrary, have taken care to develop the higher states of consciousness. So, to say ‘each one bears his cross’ is true of the external consciousness (of material happenings, happenings which touch the vital being, the emotional being and the mental being); for such people there will always be a considerable number of catastrophes, all the more because catastrophes seem to be proportionate to the capacity of the individual, they seem to be dealt out according to his capacity to bear things. It may just be that those who have greater capacities have an over-plus of suffering and misfortune.

But there are people who are above all misfortune and yet misfortunes exist for them. Why? Because the inner consciousness in them is stronger, more developed than the other consciousness (I do not speak here of ‘transformed’ beings, for in them one can conceive of a state of things in which even the physical being is above suffering; we are speaking of men as they are at present). If your consciousness is seated in a place where these external things do not exist, then it may be said that you do not bear your cross because you are above it. Yet there are exceptions, there are human beings who are above afflictions, yet carry their cross.

There is a state of human consciousness (it is not yet superhuman, it is truly human) in which the two things may coexist. One may have sufferings and not feel them, be as if they did not exist. That is, a misfortune, a ‘cross’ touches only the outer consciousness, the physical, the mental, the vital, but the psychic —in truth, the psychic is above all suffering. Let us take a very simple example: an illness. A physical disorder brings suffering, at times much suffering, but there are people who are in such a state of consciousness that their physical sufferings do not exist, they are not real for them. It is the same thing with separation; if you love someone and are separated from that person, you suffer—this is one of the most common of sufferings, it is the ties which are broken—well, in a certain state of consciousness the real link between two beings cannot be broken, for it does not belong to the domain where things break. Therefore one is above what may happen.

Throughout human history it has been thus. Those who have come with special abilities, a special grace, and have tried to make men come out of their ordinary rut, have been more or less persecuted, martyred, burnt alive, put on the cross. ... The situation now is apparently a little better because now slightly more plausible reasons than those of old are needed to burn men—the habit of doing so is no longer there—but the feelings are not very different. The human race, generally, has a sort of rancour against what surpasses it; it feels humiliated, and men do not like to be humiliated.

Don’t you know that there are three principles: the transcendent, the universal and the individual or personal? No?—the transcendent which is above creation, at the origin of creation; the universal which is the creation, and the individual which is self-explanatory. There is a transcendent Divine, a universal Divine and an individual Divine. That is, one may put oneself in contact with the divine Consciousness within oneself, in the universe and, beyond all forms, in the transcendent. So these three aspects are also the three aspects of the divine Mother: transcendent, universal and individual.... Do you know the flower I have called Transformation? You know it has four petals. Well, these four petals are arranged like a cross: one at the top which represents the transcendent; two on each side, the universal; and one at the bottom, the individual. The petal at the top is divided into two. Exactly, the transcendent is one and two (or dual) at the same time. This flower is almost perfect in its form. This was the original meaning of the cross also, but that was not as perfect as the flower, for it was one, two, and three. It was not so good —the flower is perfect.

Let us see the line “Earth saw my struggle, heaven my victory” (Savitri, p. 638) in the context of the present discussion pertaining to the opening canto of the poem.

This is what Savitri tells to Yama, the God of Death from whom she is claiming back the soul of her deceased husband, Satyavan. Yama had all along remained unconvinced by Savitri’s powerful arguments and was not ready to release the soul he was carrying with him. And one of the arguments Savitri puts forward is, about her struggle and her victory. Her argument is preceded by a statement that, it is in her unceasing fire that the great stars burn, the fire whose faggots are life and death.

The point is, Savitri cannot win the victory in life if she lacks death, unless she has experience of death she cannot experience life. She has to conquer death in order to conquer life. That is true, indeed. The stars in the night get their supernatural fuel from both life and death. That is the mystery of the stars as against the mystery of the suns whose fuel comes from no other source than the transcendental Fire, the divine Agni who knows no night. He gives immortality to form.

But at the moment Savitri is stuck, even as Yama remains unyielding, Yama the iron Law of Inconscience. The debate between Yama and Savitri, we must recognize and understand, is not just a set of wordy arguments, not just a profound metaphysical dialogue, a verbal engagement, a conjuration of one-upmanship, not even sharp and cutting logomachy. With each utterance of theirs, vast occult forces are released into the deep occult universe, forces clashing one against the other in the cosmic functioning. But Savitri has no other choice but to win. She must conquer death to conquer life. With the power of her total surrender she must carry the cross on her shoulder. The plight in which she finds herself at present is tellingly described in these lines of the opening canto. She has lifted the burden of man on her shoulders and for than man is ungrateful. Even this eventuality she must meet.

Savitri has to accept the gift of mortality before she can accept the gift of immortality. What is the gift of mortality? It is sorrow, pain, suffering, humiliation, infliction of hatred and jealousy: the cross. Unless she bears the cross how can she know what human suffering is? But her way of bearing the cross is to fight in the Will and Wisdom of the Lord for whom she is willing to go to whatever extent it might be necessary.

Here is a gruesome account of crucifixion Jesus faced, taken from Internet:

Crucifixion typically began with a scourging or flogging of the victim’s back. The Romans used a whip called a flagrum, which consisted of small pieces of bone and metal attached to a number of leather strands. The number of blows given to Jesus is not recorded; however, the number of blows in Jewish law was 39 (one less than the 40 called for in the Torah, to prevent a counting error). During the scourging, the skin was ripped from the back, exposing a bloody mass of tissue and bone. Extreme blood loss occurred, often causing death, or at least unconsciousness. In addition to the flogging, Jesus faced severe beating and torment by the Roman soldiers, including the plucking of His beard and the piercing of His scalp with a crown of thorns.

After the flogging, the victim was often forced to carry his own crossbar, or patibulum, to the execution site. The patibulum could easily weigh 100 pounds. In the case of Jesus, the record shows that He may have carried His patibulum the distance of over two football fields. In a weak and tormented state, it’s no wonder the record establishes that Jesus needed a great deal of assistance. Once the victim arrived at the execution site, the patibulum was put on the ground and the victim was forced to lie upon it. Spikes about 7 inches long and 3/8 of an inch in diameter were driven into the wrists. The spikes would hit the area of the median nerve, causing shocks of pain up the arms to the shoulders and neck. Already standing at the crucifixion site would be the 7-foot-tall post, called a stipes. In the center of the stipes was a crude seat to “support” for the victim. The patibulum was then lifted on to the stipes, and the victim’s body was awkwardly turned on the seat so that the feet could be nailed to the stipes. At this point, there was tremendous strain put on the wrists, arms and shoulders, resulting in a dislocation of the shoulder and elbow joints. The position of the nailed body held the victim’s rib cage in a fixed position, which made it extremely difficult to exhale, and impossible to take a full breath. Having suffered from the scourging, the beatings and the walk with the patibulum, Jesus was described as extremely weak and dehydrated. He was probably losing significant amounts of blood. As time passed, the loss of blood and lack of oxygen would cause severe cramps, spasmodic contractions and probably

nconsciousness.

Ultimately, the mechanism of death in crucifixion was suffocation. To breathe, the victim was forced to push up on his feet to allow for inflation of the lungs. As the body weakened and pain in the feet and legs became unbearable, the victim was forced to trade breathing for pain and exhaustion. Eventually, the victim would succumb in this way, becoming utterly exhausted or lapsing into unconsciousness so that he could no longer lift his body off the stipes and inflate his lungs. Due to the shallow breathing, the victim’s lungs would begin to collapse in areas, probably causing hypoxia. Due to the loss of blood from the scourging, the victim probably formed a respiratory acidosis, resulting in an increased strain on the heart, which beats faster to compensate. Fluid would also build up in the lungs. Under the stress of hypoxia and acidosis, the heart would eventually fail. There are several different theories on the actual cause of death for Jesus. One theory is that there was a filling of the pericardium with fluid, which put a fatal strain on the ability of His heart to pump blood. Another theory states that Jesus died of cardiac rupture. Another theory is that Jesus' death was “multifactorial and related primarily to hypovolemic shock, exhaustion asphyxia and perhaps acute heart failure.” Regardless of the actual medical cause of final death, the historical record is very clear—Jesus suffered numerous hours of horrible and sustained torture on the cross of Calvary.