(The disciple asks for permission to poison some cats who have been disturbing him every night. Mother replies.)

I once had a cat with almost a child's consciousness, and someone poisoned it. And when he came back poisoned, dying, I cursed all people who poison cats. And that's serious, so you mustn't do it. It was a real curse - I was with Sri Aurobindo, so it was serious - so don't do it.

But there is a way....

You know, I made a pact with cats, with the King of the Cats - it goes back very, very far. And it's extraordinary (it happened in Tlemcen, entirely on the occult plane), extraordinary! For certain reasons, the King of the Cats gave me a power over these creatures - and it's true. Only I have to see them.

We shall try.

(silence)

What do these animals represent in the terrestrial manifestation? They're so strange....
Cats are vital forces, incarnations of vital forces. The King of the Cats - that is, the spirit of the species - is a being of the vital world.

For instance, cats can very easily incarnate the vital force of a dead person. I have had two absolutely astounding experiences of this.

The first was with a boy who was a Sanskritist and had wanted to come to India with us. He was the son of a French ambassador - an old, noble family. But he learned that his lungs were bad, and so he joined the Army; he enlisted as an officer, just at the start of the 1914 war. And he had the courage of those who no longer cling to life; when he received the order to advance on the enemy trenches (it was incredibly stupid, simply sending people to be slaughtered!), he didn't hesitate. He went. And he was hit between the two lines. For a long time, it was a no man's land; only after some days, when the other trench had been taken, could they go and collect the dead. All this came out in the newspapers AFTERWARDS. But on the day he was killed, of course, no one was aware of it.

I had a nice photo of him with a Sanskrit dedication, placed on top of a kind of wardrobe in my bedroom. I open the door and ... the photo falls. (There was no draft or anything.) It fell and the glass broke into smithereens. Immediately I said, 'Oh! Something has happened to ... Fontenay.' (That was his name: Charles de Fontenay.) After that I came back down from my room, and then I hear a miaowing at the door (the door opened onto a large garden courtyard [[Rue du Val-de-Grace (in Paris). ]] ). I open the door: a cat bursts in and jumps on me, like that (Mother thumps her breast). I speak to him: 'What is it, what's the matter?' He drops to the ground and looks at me - Fontenay's eyes! Absolutely! No one else's. And he just stayed put, he didn't want to go. I said to myself, 'Fontenay is dead.'

The other story dates farther back. I was living in another house (we had the whole fifth floor), and once a week I used to hold meetings there with people interested in occultism - they came to have me demonstrate or tell them about occult practices. There was a Swedish artist, a French lady and ... a young French boy, a student and a poet. His parents were decent country people who bled themselves white to pay for his life in Paris. This boy was very intelligent and a true artist, but he was depraved. (We knew about it, but it was his private life and none of our business.) One evening, when four or five of us were to meet, this boy didn't turn up, although he had said he would. We had our meeting anyway and didn't think much about it - we thought he must have been busy elsewhere. Around midnight, when the people were leaving, I open the door. A big black cat was sitting in the doorway and, in a single bound, it jumps on me, just like that, all curled up in a ball. So I calm it down, I look at it - 'Ah, the eyes!' They were this boy's eyes. (I no longer recall his name.) Right away (at the time we were all involved in occultism), we knew something had happened; he had been unable to come and the cat had incarnated his vital force.

The next day, all the newspapers were full of a vile murder: a pimp had murdered this boy - it was disgusting! Something utterly vile. And it had happened at the very moment he should have come - the concierge had seen him going into the house with this pimp. What happened? Was it just for money or for something else - vice? Or what?

But both times, the incarnation was so (how to put it?) powerful that the eyes changed; the eyes of the cat changed completely into the eyes of the dead person. Unmistakable. Both came to me and both times there was the same movement, the same kind of feline howl - you know how they sound.

But I have had some cats.... I had a cat who was the reincarnation of the mind of a Russian woman. I had a vision of it one day, it was so strange - this woman had been murdered at the time of the Russian Revolution, along with her two little children. And her mind entered a cat here. (How? I don't know.) But this cat, mon petit.... I got her when she was very young. She would come and lie down, stretched out like a human being, with her head on my arm! (I used to sleep on a Japanese tatami on the floor.) And she would stay there, so well-behaved, didn't stir all night long! I was really amazed. Then she had kittens, and wanted to give birth to them lying stretched out, not at all like a cat. It was very difficult to make her understand that it couldn't be done that way! And one night after she had had her kittens, I saw her ... I saw a young woman in furs, with a fur bonnet - you could just see a tiny human face; she had two little ones and she came to me and placed them at my feet. Her whole story was there in her consciousness: how she and the two children had been murdered. And then I realized she was the cat!

The cat wouldn't leave her kittens for a moment! Not for anything. She wouldn't eat, wouldn't go outside to relieve herself, nothing: she stayed put. So I told her, 'Bring me your kittens.' (If you know how to handle them, cats understand very well when they're spoken to.) 'Bring me your little ones.' She looked at me, went and brought one of her kittens, and placed it between my feet. Then she went to fetch the other one and placed it between my feet (not beside, between my feet). 'Now you can go out,' I told her. And out she went.

page 158-161 - Mother's Agenda, volume 2, 7th April - 1961


You know (shall I be frank?), it's purely a vital dissatisfaction. And I know that, because it has been (how can I put it?) my great difficulty with you. It was a hundred, a thousand times more violent formerly; now it's beginning to calm down. It's a vital that's very intense in its desires (which may not be ordinary desires at all), but with a sort of almost aggressive intensity, and ... essentially dissatisfied. It was very, very strong before, years ago; now it has quieted down. But every time the vital comes into play (and one is obliged to let the vital play because of the physical health; one can't "calm" it down totally because that would make the physical body suffer), it's like that.... It gives me, if you like, the impression of a cat's vital! Cats have a wonderful vital (laughing), far, far more clever and intense than human beings have, but the cat claws, you know, and the feeling is: "I'm not happy, that's that. I'm not happy"! (Mother laughs)


page 344 , Mother's Agenda , volume 6 , 31st Dec - 1965