The life incarnate and the life divine: Spiritual evolution, androgyny and the grace of the goddess in the teachings of Mirra Alfassa, the Mother of Integral Yoga

Abstract

Mirra Alfassa (1878–1973), better known as The Mother, was Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual partner and co-founder of Integral Yoga, a global movement based in South India and currently numbering multiple centres around the world. Affectionately addressed by her devotees at the Ashram as Douce Mère (Sweet Mother), Alfassa is understood to be an incarnation of the Universal Mother, or Shakti, who has ‘taken birth’ on earth in order to facilitate the spiritual – and physical – evolution of humanity to its next stage of development. At the same time, Alfassa deemed celibacy as necessary for advanced spiritual practice, and had renounced biological or ‘physical’ motherhood (and sexual intimacy) even before her collaboration with Aurobindo. Alfassa’s complex attitudes towards gender and normative gender roles, this article argues, inform her teachings and self-positioning as The Mother. Specifically, the intersection of sex, gender and physical materiality is an important current in Alfassa’s thought, including her instructions to future residents of Auroville (a utopian intentional community), her reflections on the Matrimandir, as well as her teachings on the future supramental humanity, whose ‘luminous’ divinized bodies would be genderless or androgynous. Here, the author examines the tensions between the gendered creative and spiritual powers attributed to The Mother, such as her role as Aurobindo’s Shakti and as a grace-bestowing living goddess, and Alfassa’s often ambivalent discourse around gender, embodiment and motherhood. These tensions, it is argued, are not only key to her articulation of Integral Yoga, but also raise broader, conceptual questions about persistent cultural and religious associations between gender and materiality.