Medhananda

Medhananda, 1908 – 1994, was born as Fritz Winkelstroeter in Germany. He spent his school years in Pforzheim and, besides English and French, learned Latin and Greek at an early age. Despite his early interest in ancient cultures and their symbols and spirituality, he followed the wishes of his father and studied law at Munich, Heidelberg, and Paris, as his father (a wealthy engineer and industrialist) wished. During this time he was privileged to study Chinese under the distinguished scholar Richard Wilhelm, translator of the Chinese I Ching, Tao Te Ching and many other ancient texts.

In 1934, although already launched on a promising legal career, he left Germany with his French wife to escape the rise of Nazism. They went to Tahiti in French Polynesia, settled on its sister island Moorea where they bought 200 hectares of virgin forest, built, a small house, and established themselves as farmers, cultivating vanilla and coffee. Their three children grew up in that paradise. In the radiant silence of that forest, Medhananda started to explore the levels of consciousness accessible to his self-awareness. He also had plenty of opportunity to explore the pre-Christian culture, the age-old gnosis of Polynesia.

During the Second World War he (a German) was interned as a potential enemy alien. After his release in 1946 he came across the writings of the Indian philosopher and sage Sri Aurobindo. Deeply impressed by them he moved to India in 1952 and joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. The Mother (Mirra Alfassa) gave him his new name ‘Medhananda’ and put him in charge of the Sri Aurobindo Library. For many years he taught History of Religions at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, a position he was well-qualified for by his life-long study of the spiritual cultures of different ages and parts of the world. In 1965 he became editor of the quarterly journal Equals One, for which he wrote numerous articles.

In 1978 he founded together with Yvonne Artaud, his collaborator, the Identity Research Institute, a non-profit foundation for psychological research. It was from about 1970 onwards that he started an in-depth exploration of the symbology of the hieroglyphs and pictorial imagery of ancient Egypt, using the psychological approach that his teacher Sri Aurobindo had initiated for the interpretation of the Indian Vedas, the ancient spiritual texts of India (see Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda).