Every year during the great festival of Navaratri or Dassara, Hindus chant the powerful hymn called Durga Saptasati or Chandi which comprises of seven hundred majestic verses told as an interesting story addressed to the Divine Mother. As one chants these seven hundred verses, one is awestruck at the mighty power of Mahasakthi as she annihilates and violently battles the titans in their forms as Chanda, Munda, Dumralochana, Nishumbha and Mahishasura.
As she battles these mighty asuras one is reminded of the immortal words of Sri Aurobindo on Mahakali:
“Mahakali embodies her power of splendid strength and irresistible passion, her warrior-mood her overwhelming will, her impetuous swiftness and world-shaking force.”
Some years ago I looked up the meaning of some of the verses of Chandi and was struck by its graphic and violent description of this battle and the victory of the Divine Mother, such as these below:
“She seized one by the hair and another by the neck, one she crushed by the weight of her foot, and another of her body.
And she caught with her mouth the weapons and the great arms shot by those asuras and crunched them up with her teeth in her fury.
Some were killed with her sword, some were beaten with her skull topped staff, and other asuras met their death being ground with the edge of her teeth.”
The Mother said that this annual battle and victory of Durga symbolizes “the rhythmic intervention of the Supreme Divine Consciousness that periodically gives a new impetus to the universal progress”. The unfolding of the events in the world coinciding with this annual battle of Durga and the violent turmoil of the financial markets seems very much like the action of Mahakali which has intervened in its “warrior mood and impetuous swiftness” to make us shake off the egoism, ignorance, greed, selfishness and obscurity into which we have sunk. It does feel like Mahakali is literally seizing us by the hair and neck and crushing us with her anger and wrath. Everything around us is reeling in this dance of Mahakali’s overwhelming intensity and “warrior-mood”, which is doing in a day what might have taken centuries.
In the Prayer of August 31, 1914, the Mother writes prophetically that it is from the disorder and terrible destruction that will be seen a “great working, a necessary toil preparing the earth for a new sowing”. We turn to the Mother in this time of disorder and chaos and join the Gods and Sages and chant to the Mother who is “at once the destroyer and the builder”… and in “whom the whole Universe lives with all its life innumerable”.
“O Devi, you who remove the suffering of your suppliants, be gracious. Be propitious, O Mother of the whole world. Be gracious, O Mother of the Universe, Protect the Universe. You are O Devi, the ruler of all that is moving and unmoving.”
REFERENCES
“ The Mother” , Sri Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry
“Devi Mahatmyam “, Sri Ramakrishna Math, Madras.
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