Mirra Alfassa

Mirra Alfassa Biography

Mirra Alfassa, fondly called ‘The Mother’ was the spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo. Originally belonged to Paris, her birth name is Blanche Rachel Mirra Alfassa. She reached Pondicherry on 29 March 1914 to accept the spiritual world. Sri Aurobindo considered her an incarnation of the Mother Divine, and called her ‘The Mother’, the name by which she later came to know by. Her 30 years of spiritual experience in India was compiled together as a single book - The Agenda in 13 volumes.

She was born in Paris in 1878 to Jewish parents, migrated to France before her birth. She had an elder brother. Till the age of 8, she lived in Paris. Since the age of 5, she experienced spirituality and a feeling that she did not belong in this world. At age 12 she practised occultism and claimed to be travelling out of her body. She also claims that for one year since 13 years old, she was going out of her body and rising straight above the city, every night. She moved to Italy with her mother in 1893. She acquired the nickname "the Sphinx" at the age of 16. She married Henri Francois Morisset in 1897 and had one son.

When she became nineteen, she felt the Divine Presence, without the help of books or teachers and very soon discovered Vivekananda's Raja Yoga. Once she met an Indian at Paris, who advised her to read Bhagavat Geeta. Though she got a French version of Geeta with poor translation, she managed to learn the essence of Geeta. She separated from her husband in 1908 founded a group - "l'Idee Nouvelle", aside her brother Matteo Mathieu Maurice Alfassa, a noted French official. In 1911 Mirra married Paul Antoine Richard, and reached India along with him at Pondicherry.

The couple met Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry and with the first meeting itself her mind became quiet, and began to gather momentum and later left was silence and the yogic consciousness. Alfassa and Richard stayed at Pondicherry until February 1915 and later spent four years in Tokyo to return back in 1920. The couple got separated and she later associated with disciples of Sri Aurobindo in evening talks and group meditations. After the Ashram was founded in 1926 with a group of 24 disciples, Sri Aurobindo decided to withdraw from public view and gave instructions to Mirra Alfassa, giving her new name - the Divine Mother.

From 1962 she started giving public darshans to devotees four times a year and she has been a prominent spiritual figure in the 1960s and 1970s. After Sri Aurobindo death in 1950, she established the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Delhi Branch in 1956 and founded Auroville in 1968. She passed away in 1973 and her body was kept in the newly constructed Samadhi structure, near her spiritual guru Aurobindo.

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Updated: January 18, 2016