30: Scribbled Notes — The Greater Being as the Master of Fate
Savitri has made known that she has chosen Satyavan in the Shalwa Woods for her lover and husband. But the heavenly Sage Narad speaks clearly, that, exactly one year after the marriage the strong and noble and well-learned youth is going to die, bound to die, a death none has power to prevent. But firm-willed Savitri remains fixed in her resolve. Narad sets himself to justify the ways of the Divine for the small human. There is a necessity of this death and it is only Savitri who can confront it. In the course of his validation Narad tells that a “vast disguise conceals the Eternal’s bliss.” At once Aswapati the Yogi asks the Sage:
Is then the spirit ruled by an outward world? ||112.1||
O seer, is there no remedy within? ||112.2||
But what is fate if not the spirit’s will
After long time fulfilled by cosmic Force? ||112.3||
I deemed a mighty Power had come with her;
Is not that Power the high compeer of Fate? ||112.4||
The Sage is ready with an answer, as if he had come fully prepared to respond:
A Magician’s formulas have made Matter’s laws
And while they last, all things by them are bound:
But the Spirit’s consent is needed for each act
And freedom walks in the same pace with Law. ||112.16||
All here can change if the Magician choose. ||112.17||
If human will could be made one with God’s,
If human thought could echo the thoughts of God,
Man might be all-knowing and omnipotent;
But now he walks in Nature’s doubtful ray. ||112.18||
Yet can the mind of man receive God’s light,
The force of man can be driven by God’s force,
Then is he a miracle doing miracles. ||112.19||
For only so can he be Nature’s King. ||112.20||
It is decreed and Satyavan must die;
The hour is fixed, chosen the fatal stroke. ||112.21||
What else shall be is written in her soul. ||112.22||
But till the hour reveals the fateful script
The writing waits illegible and mute. ||112.23||
Fate is Truth working out in Ignorance. ||112.24||
O King, thy fate is a transaction done
At every hour between Nature and thy soul
With God for its foreseeing arbiter. ||112.25||
Fate is a balance drawn in Destiny’s book. ||112.26||
Man can accept his fate, he can refuse. ||112.27||
Even if the One maintains the unseen decree
He writes thy refusal in thy credit page:
For doom is not a close, a mystic seal. ||112.28||
The beauty and the wisdom of this creation is, “Man can accept his fate, he can refuse”. Savitri accepts it and Narad endorses the decision, in fact, he had come to make it firm.
Man can accept his fate, because he has the psychic being which will really take him on the path of truth and love and beauty and joy. But the Indian Gods and the typal beings are not concerned with the working of the Fate, working for themselves. They are safe in their dharma and the modes of operation, that which must be
Fate followed her foreseen immutable road. ||114.1||
Man’s hopes and longings build the journeying wheels
That bear the body of his destiny
And lead his blind will towards an unknown goal. ||114.2||
His fate within him shapes his acts and rules;
Its face and form already are born in him,
Its parentage is in his secret soul;
Here Matter seems to mould the body’s life
And the soul follows where its nature drives:
Nature and Fate compel his free-will’s choice. ||114.3||
But greater spirits this balance can reverse
And make the soul the artist of its fate. ||114.4||
This is the mystic truth our ignorance hides:
Doom is a passage for our inborn force,
Our ordeal is the hidden spirit’s choice,
Ananke is our being’s own decree. ||114.5||
All was fulfilled the heart of Savitri
Flower-sweet and adamant, passionate and calm,
Had chosen and on her strength’s unbending road
Forced to its issue the long cosmic curve. ||114.6||
In sharp contrast to the soul driving its nature and no other agent or ruler, there are the Ananke’s engines that organise Chance, there is Power in Nature’s nether state, and the result is, incoherences of Fate making a doom of Time’s slipshod caprice.
Against all higher Truth their stuff rebels;
Only to Titan force their will lies prone. ||45.23||
Ananke (Ἀνάγκη) is the Greek goddess Necessity with inescapable force of fate that governs all creation, inescapable power over both gods and mortals. Consort of the Titan Chronos, the personification of Time, she is the most powerful ruler of circumstances, her decisions binding even for deities like Zeus. As Adrastea she is associated with natural law and inevitability, or as Heimarmene with causal fate.
But here Savitri is meeting Ananke who is “our being’s own decree”. What seems to be Fate that is controlled by the greater Being himself, it is not that which comes to it from elsewhere. Savitri, that greater Being, is going to meet the cosmic workings with multiple operating possibilities in the firm strength of her own original spirit, the Transcendental Consciousness-Force itself, that which cannot be challenged or defied by any other power or powers.
But the inspired beauty is in the powerful double entendre of the line coming at the very beginning of Book Seven, The Book of Yoga. Savitri, in spite of Narad’s declaration, knowing the Fate too well, firm in her resolve, is going to get married with Satyavan and stay with him in the Forest Hermitage. She had made it known determinedly that
Fate’s law may change, but not my spirit’s will. ||106.165||
In fact
Above the cherished head of Satyavan
She saw not now Fate’s dark and lethal orb;
A golden circle round a mystic sun
Disclosed to her new-born predicting sight
The cyclic rondure of a sovereign life. ||128.10||
That is the inerasable mark of the greater Being that she is.
But in the line “Fate followed her foreseen immutable road” who is “her”, Savitri or Fate? That is the finest art of Sri Aurobindo’s poetic creation. We will leave it at that.
9 May 2026
The featured image is a painting by Priti Ghosh.
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