The untold story of Matri Mandir

The architectural dimensions of Auroville’s Matri Mandir, which touch upon profound truths about the mystifying cosmic order will be elucidated at an exhibition, ‘The Future Realisation’, at the Indira Gandhi National Centre of Arts, in the city.

Presented by Aeon Centre of cosmology, the event will showcase 100 exhibits to highlight the importance of symbolism in the Mother’s (Mother of Puducherry) plan for Matri Mandir and the significance of numbers and precise and precise measurements that she mandated for the sacred structure.

The exhibition would answer why she wanted these particular dimensions and what they mean. Significantly, this aspect of the Mother’s philosophy and thought has never been revealed before.

The Matri Mandir (Temple of the Mother) is a creation of spiritual significance for practitioners of integral yoga. It is situated at the centre of Auroville, which is an experimental township in Villuppuram District, Tamil Nadu.

This township was the brainchild of  ‘The Mother’ of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The exhibition is focused on sacred geometry. Since the exhibits may appear too abstract for some, they would be placed side by side with images from the Puranic Age that summarise the same principles.

The viewers would be offered an integral package – number, geometry, architecture – all grounded in Indian mythology. Such an integral approach to the sacred has not been attempted before.

Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet, the director of Aeon Centre of Cosmology says, “The exhibition brings together all the sacred sciences – number power, geometry, architecture, cosmology, geo-cosmology – captured in many myths but never conveyed as the science that they rightfully are. It updates the ancient knowledge and brings it alive for the 21st Century.”

Norelli-Bachelet, who has conducted research for decades on the Mother’s original plans for Matri Mandir contends that the Matri Mandir was not built according to the specifications of the Mother's original blueprints.

“Everything in this exhibition comes from a vision the Mother had in 1970. The Matri Mandir was her attempt to translate what she saw in the occult plane into the measures of our physical world. She was the greatest geometrician of the sacred and gave very precise measurements for the structure.

Unfortunately, the builders did not take much interest in the nuances of the dimensions while constructing the Mandir. Not all details in the original plan were adhered to and not all measurements were precisely replicated. The final outcome is only a shadow of the real thing, not its exact
manifestation.”
The second volume of Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet’s autobiographical book, The Tenth Day of Victory, would be launched on January 4 at the exhibition which is on from 1-5 January, at Indira Gandhi National Centre of Arts.
R Radhika