The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

Agni, the Divine Will-Force 391
own flame and cry and light had seized with a burning ecstasy
on the imagination of his poets.
Amid this crowd of poetical images there are some of a
symbolic character which describe the many births of the divine
Flame. They are recounted with an extraordinary variety. Sometimes
he is the child of Heaven, the Father — Mind or Soul
— and of Earth the Mother — Body or material Nature; sometimes
he is the flame born from these two tinders; sometimes
Heaven and Earth are called his two mothers, when the figure
is more explicitly symbolic of the pure mental and psychical
and the physical consciousness. He is also hymned as the child
of the seven Mothers — for his complete birth is a result of the
manifestation of seven principles which constitute our conscious
existence — three spiritual of the infinite, three temporal of the
finite, and one intermediate — and which are, respectively, the
foundation of the seven worlds. Like other gods, he is said to
be born of the Truth; the Truth is at once his birthplace and
his home. Sometimes it is said that the Seven Beloved brought
him into birth for the Lord; and here the symbol seems to carry
back his source to that other principle of pure Bliss which is the
original cause of creation. He has one form of the solar light and
flame, another heavenly in the mind, a third which dwells in the
rivers. Night and Dawn are delivered of him, the Knowledge and
the Ignorance suckle alternately the divine Child in their successive
occupation of our heavens. And yet again it is Matarishwan,
Master of Life, who has planted him for the gods secret in the
growths of earth, secret in her creatures, man, animal and plant,
secret in the mighty Waters. These Waters are the seven rivers of
the luminous world that descend from heaven when Indra, the
God-Mind, has slain the enveloping Python; they descend full of
the light and the heavenly abundance, instinct with the clarity
and the sweetness, the sweet milk and the butter and the honey.
Agni’s birth here from these fostering Cows, these Mothers of
Plenty, is the greatest of his terrestrial births; fostered by them as
the swift Mares of Life he grows at once to his divine greatness,
fills all the planes with his vast and shining limbs and forms their
kingdoms in the soul of man into the image of a divine Truth.