INTRODUCTION TO HER "THE LIGHTNING AND THE SUN" Paul of Tarsus; or, Christianity and Jewry
Savitri Devi, whose birth name was Maximiani Portas, was one of the most compelling figures to emerge from the wreckage of post-War National Socialism. More than any single figure, it was Devi who would carry the torch of occult National Socialism through the grim period following World War II. Through her writings and her personal example, she would inspire a new generation of National Socialists to explore the occult byways of racial mysticism that were once blazed by such 19th century German figures as Guido von List and such Third Reich figures as Heinrich Himmler. Originally a French citizen, Devi was born on 30 September 1905 of Greek and British parents. Educated in France and in Greece, Devi earned masters’ level degrees in philosophy and science in France in the 1920s, and received a Ph.D. in chemistry on the basis of her dissertation, La Simplicité Mathématique in 1931. Mathematics and science however, held less allure to Devi than did contemporary politics, religious speculation, and of greatest import, the Aryan philosophical and religious traditions of ancient India. India in fact would be her home for much of her life. Before embarking on her spiritual quest, however, Devi took an active interest in politics. Even as a young girl, she was much attracted to Germany and to the German philosophical and intellectual traditions. Appalled by the betrayal of Germany at Versailles following the First World War, as well of the treatment of Greek refugees in the same period, Devi determined to learn more of what she instinctively felt were the deeper realities which determined the seemingly chaotic course of world events. It was during this youthful quest for hidden and suppressed knowledge that Devi acquired her life-long aversion to Judaism. Devi’s anti-Semitism was fed by several currents. First, there was the Bible, and in particular, the Old Testament which she felt was rife with examples of Jewish perfidy. This feeling would be considerably reinforced by reports of Zionist actions in Palestine in the 1920s. In 1929—the year of Arab riots and the killing of a number of Jews in Hebron—she visited Palestine and confirmed for herself the truth of these reports. Her studies brought her into contact with the intellectual anti-Semitism that was the common coin of the realm in the French academy, and this too seems to have been a factor. In this, the work of the intellectual anti-Semite Ernst Renan would be an important influence both in confirming her dim view of the Jews as racial and cultural outsiders and in fixing India and the Aryan myth of origins as the central interest of her life. Of considerable importance too was what she perceived to be the malign role of the Jews in the defeat of Germany in the First World War. This latter stream would come to dominate Devi’s view of the Jews as her admiration for Hitler and the Third Reich grew in the 1930s through the Second World War. Here, Devi seems to have been one of the select few who to actually read Alfred Rosenberg’s verbose and turgid 1930 opus The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Even the Führer would confide that, although he displayed this book prominently on his bedside table, he found it unreadable. Devi however, was enchanted. In the 1930s Devi moved to India and undertook what would prove to be a lifelong study of the classic Indian texts—the Vedas and the Upanishads. From these sources, and from their contemporary manifestations in the caste system, Devi felt that she had found the true sources of the once and future greatness of the Aryan race. In 1940, Devi married a pro-Nazi Indian nationalist named A. K. Mukherji. This gave her a British passport and the possibility of deepening her work for the Third Reich. In Calcutta, the Mukherji home became something of a salon for Allied diplomats and military officers, and whatever intelligence which could be gathered quickly found its way to the German consulate. Devi felt her greatest service to the cause, however, would be in her ongoing research and the book which she was writing which would set out a blue print for the new Aryan religion which she believed would be instituted in Germany after the inevitable Nazi victory. In the event of course, Germany was defeated. Devi’s dream of a global Aryan racial paradise would now never be realized, but through considerable adversity, she held fast to her ideals until her death in 1982. She returned to Europe in 1945, settling in England where her book on the religious heritage of Ancient Egypt, A Son of God, was published and well received in British intellectual and occult circles. It was the work that followed however, the Impeachment of Man, which was finished in London and published in 1946 that stands as a classic in the current world of National Socialism. Radical environmentalism, amounting indeed to a religion of nature, has always been strong in National Socialist thought, and with the wartime defeat, has become as much a trademark of the movement as anti-Semitism and racialist thought. The Impeachment of Man remains the strongest statement of the National Socialist nature religion that may be found today. Opening with epigraphs from Alfred Rosenberg (“Thou shalt love God in all things, animals and plants”) and Josef Goebbels who in a diary entry quotes the Führer’s resolve to create a post-war society that would eschew the eating of meat, the book is a passionate treatise on the rights of animals and of plants, as contrasted with man’s egocentric consumption and destruction of the natural world. The argument is couched in religious terms and the proof texts are drawn from the Aryan Golden Age. The book, long out of print, underwent a revival with a new Noontide Press edition which appeared in 1991. In 1946, Devi moved from England to Iceland. There, the ancient Norse pantheon joined the ancient Indian heritage as a source for Aryan religiosity. Here too Devi anticipated by decades Odinism’s popularization of the Norse/Germanic pantheon as a fitting Aryan racial religion in the post-War movement. Two years later, Devi undertook a more open pro-Nazi course of activism, traveling to occupied Germany and distributing propaganda leaflets. This resulted in her incarceration in 1949. While in jail, Devi expanded one of her leaflets into the book which she considered her magnum opus, Gold in the Furnace. Gold in the Furnace is at once an auto-biography and a dreamy meditation on what could have been. In it, she states explicitly that which until 1948 she had never dared to publicly utter: …I love this land, Germany, as the hallowed cradle of National Socialism; the country that staked its all so that the whole of the Aryan race might stand together in its regained ancestral pride; Hitler’s country…. Because for the last twenty years I have loved and admired Hitler and the German people…I was happy—oh so happy!--thus to express my faith in the superman whom the world has misunderstood and hated and rejected. I was not sorry to lose my freedom for the pleasure of bearing witness to his glory, now, in 1948. Devi was released from prison after six months, and then entered her most productive literary period. The autobiographical Defiance appeared in 1950. Devi’s example served as an inspiration to a new generation of National Socialists when a portion of the book was published in the Winter 1968 edition of the National Socialist World. Gold in the Furnace came out in 1952, followed by another memoir, Pilgrimage in 1958 (although some sources place the publication date as early as 1953). Her most important work, The Lightening and the Sun, appeared in 1956 and a condensed version was published in the premier edition (Spring 1966) of William Pierce’s American Nazi Party intellectual journal National Socialist World. The Lightening and the Sun is a remarkable exposition on occult National Socialism which explicitly deifies Hitler as the savior of the Aryan people. The first words of the book read: To the godlike individual of our times; the Man against time; the greatest European of all times; both Sun and Lightening: ADOLF HITLER. The Lightening and the Sun ranges through the ages, suggesting a religious and political history in which the Third Reich is the apex and the natural culmination of Aryan development. The book ends with at once a cry of despair and an affirmation of hope: Kalki will lead them through the flames of the great end, and into the sunshine of the new Golden Age. We like to hope that the memory of the one-before-the-last and most heroic of all our men against time—Adolf Hitler—will survive at least in songs and symbols. We like to hope that the lords of the age, men of his own blood and faith, will render him divine honors, through rites full of meaning and full of potency, in the cool shade of the endless regrown forests, on the beaches, or upon inviolate mountain peaks, facing the rising sun. As if to belie the heroic tones of her National Socialist dream, the 1950s was an empty time for Devi. While she could escape into the world of her literary dreams, and while she traveled intensively in these years, there remained a terrible void in her life. The man against time and his iron heroes were gone—many were dead, others living in hiding, still others captured and brought to the bar of allied justice. It was not until the 1960s that Devi could allow her hopes of a National Socialist revival to live again. Through the jungle telegraph linking European Nazis, Devi soon got wind of a rising young star on the American scene, George Lincoln Rockwell. Rockwell, who founded the American Nazi Party in 1959, began to correspond with Devi in 1960. It was Devi who introduced Rockwell to the man who would quietly become something of a mentor, the unreconstructed German National Socialist Bruno Ludke. Together with Britain’s Colin Jordan, the three became the core of the World Union of National Socialists—an organization which sought with little success to link together the far-flung National Socialist tribes from throughout the world. The high point of the effort was the 1962 meeting at Cottswald in England which resulted in the Cottswald Agreement, the World Union of National Socialists’ founding document which served as a theoretical blueprint for the revival of a global neo-Nazi movement. Cottswald, in which Savitri Devi served as the representative of France, was the first and last time that Devi and Rockwell would have the opportunity to meet. By all reports, Rockwell was mesmerized by Devi. Here was a living link to the original font of National Socialism—Nazi Germany—and here too was a visionary whose religious vision of National Socialist revival immeasurably deepened and enriched Rockwell’s more narrowly political conception of the movement. Moreover, the fact that Devi was the only woman in the upper echelons of National Socialism at that time was no small matter either. In the end, it mattered little. The World Union of National Socialists never rose above the level of squabbling ‘leaders’ more engaged in internecine plotting than in serious thought of revolutionary change and the institution of a neo-Nazi New Order. Worse, but five short years after Cottswald, Rockwell was dead, felled by bullets from the gun of a disgruntled former follower. The World Union of National Socialists soldiered on for decades, but as a mere shell of the organization envisioned by Rockwell, Ludke, Devi and Jordan. Devi’s remaining years were bleak. Much of it was spent back in mother India with her husband, writing, corresponding and marking time. She was an early convert to the field of holocaust denial, and it was under her influence that such well-known holocaust revisionists of the present day as Ernst Zundel were introduced to the field. Indeed, Devi’s chief contributions to the movement to which she had dedicated her life in the 1970s was through her tireless correspondence to true believers throughout the world. Her personal circumstances did not fare so well, however, and at her death in 1982 was reportedly penniless. In the course of her life, Devi’s achievements, if measured on the scale of her dream of the recreation of a National Socialist revival, were meager. At her death, the world of explicit National Socialism was, if anything, more fragmented and powerless than ever before. But her writings, and the powerful dream of a religio-mystical Aryan Golden Age which they so eloquently convey, are having a powerful impact on the movement, and indeed, beyond the narrow confines of the radical right and into the realms of radical ecology and New Age thought. See also: American Nazi Party; Hitler, Adolf; Jordan, Colin; Ludke, Bruno; Odinism; Pierce, William; religion of nature; Rockwell, George Lincoln; World Union of National Socialists. Further reading: Savitri Devi, “The Lightening and the Sun (A New Edition),” National Socialist World 1 (Spring 1966); Savitri Devi, “Gold in the Furnace,” National Socialist World 3 (Spring 1967); Savitri Devi, “Defiance,” National Socialist World 6 (Winter 1968); Savitri Devi, Impeachment of Man (Costa Mesa, CA: Noontide Press, 1991); Nicholas Goodrick-Clark, Hitler’s Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Occult Neo-Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Fritz Nova, Alfred Rosenberg: Nazi Theorist of the Holocaust (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1986); Phillip Rees, Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990); Frederick J. Simonelli, American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).
Savitri Devi: Life and WorkIrmin
Savitri Devi, priestess of esoteric national socialism, was born Maximiani
Portas on September 30, 1905, in Lyons, France, of a Greek father and an English
mother. [Image: Savitri in India, c. 1935.]
The passionate iconoclasm that would mark so much of her life began early: At age eleven, during the First World War, she chalked anti-Entente slogans on the Lyons railway station ("Down with the Allies, Long Live Germany") as a protest against the illegal Allied invasion of neutral Greece. A true polymath, Portas earned degrees in chemistry and philosophy, wrote her doctoral thesis on the philosophy of science, and would eventually master at least seven languages, including Bengali and Hindi. Her earliest political convictions were pan-Hellenic, and in 1928 Portas renounced her French citizenship and became a Greek national. While studying in Athens her political nationalism, along with a fascination with Greco-Roman antiquity and a mistrust of Christianity, evolved into a broader pagan racialism, and a visit to Palestine in 1929 convinced her that Judeo-Christianity, whose outward observances in the Holy Land repelled her, was an alien intrusion into the West, distorting its natural spiritual evolution and imposing upon it a sterile monotheism and a servile philo-Semitism. It was in Palestine, she later said, that she first realized she was a National Socialist. In 1932 she traveled to India, in search of the Aryan paganism that Judeo-Christianity had supplanted. On the subcontinent she sought "gods and rites akin to those of ancient Greece, of ancient Rome, of ancient Britain and ancient Germany, that people of our race carried there, with the cult of the Sun, six thousand years ago." Her exemplar was Julian the Apostate, the fourth-century emperor who briefly restored paganism and the cult of the Sun to the Roman Empire. Portas took up residence in Calcutta and
quickly immersed herself in the Hindu nationalist movements, lineal ancestors of
the modern BJP, that were then waging a two-front political campaign against
Islam and British colonialism. She worked as a traveling lecturer for the Hindu
Mission, a nationalist organization with NS sympathies, and adopted the Hindu
name Savitri Devi, after the Indo-Aryan sun-god (cf. Rig Veda 3.62.10).
Her new racialist Hinduism was a reflection of her NS beliefs: In the swastika,
the Aryan sun-wheel, she saw "the visible link between Hitler and orthodox
Hinduism."
In 1940, largely to avoid deportation for her pro-Axis activities, Savitri married the Brahmin Asit Krishna Mukherji, pan-Aryan editor of the openly NS journal New Mercury. During the war the couple gathered intelligence on behalf of the Axis, and Mukherji put militant Hindu nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose in contact with the Japanese, who would later support his Indian National Army in its abortive campaign against the British. Savitri was overwhelmed by Germany's defeat and post-war dismemberment. She returned to Europe in 1945 determined to propagandize on behalf of her now reviled NS beliefs, staying briefly in London (where she published Son of God, her study of Akhnaton's solar religion), France, Iceland, Scotland (where she began her most influential work, Lightning and the Sun) and Sweden (where she met Sven Hedin, the famous explorer and committed national socialist). In 1948 and 1949, at the height of de-nazification, she conducted a series of clandestine propaganda missions into a prostrate Germany still devastated by mass starvation and the Allied terror bombing, distributing leaflets and posting handbills urging resistance to the often brutal occupation:
Savitri was eventually arrested along with a comrade in February 1949, convicted of promoting national socialist ideas, and sentenced to six years imprisonment, of which she served only seven months, returning to Lyons in the summer of 1949. There she wrote Defiance and completed Gold in the Furnace, both based on her experiences in occupied Germany. [Image: An Aryan racial loyalist salutes the Sun rising behind the rubble of bombed-out Germany; Savitri's own cover art for Defiance.]
Savitri returned to India in 1957, but was back in Europe three years later. The friendships she had made during her imprisonment provided entrée into murky world of post-war national socialism -- she was already on friendly terms with such luminaries as Hans Rudel, Otto Skorzeny, and Leon Degrelle -- and while living in London she became involved with the politics of the British Racial Right, attending, along with George Lincoln Rockwell, the international WUNS conference in the Cotswolds in 1962, site of the famous Cotswold Declaration. In 1971 Savitri returned again to India, where she spent most of the 1970s corresponding with her comrades abroad and influencing a number of young racialists who visited her in Delhi. She died in the United Kingdom in 1982, while preparing for a speaking tour of the United States.
Savitri Devi
Introduction
To the godlike Individual of our times; the Man against time; the greatest European of all times; both Sun and Lightning: ADOLF HITLER.
The idea of progress — indefinite betterment — is anything but modern. It is probably as old as man's oldest successful attempt to improve his material surroundings and to increase, through technical skill, his capacity of attack and defense. Technical skill, for many centuries at least, has been too precious to be despised. Nay, when displayed to an extraordinary degree, it has more than since been hailed as something almost divine. But apart from the incredible feats of a handful of individuals, the ancients as a whole distinguished themselves in many material achievements. They could boast of the irrigation system in Sumeria; of the construction of pyramids revealing, both in Egypt and, centuries later, in Central America, an amazing knowledge of astronomical data; of the bathrooms and drains in the palace of Knossos; of the invention of the war chariot after that of the bow and arrow, and of the sand clock after that of the sundial — enough to make them dizzy with conceit and overconfident in the destiny of their respective civilizations. Yet, although they fully recognized the value of their own work in the practical field and surely very soon conceived the possibility — and perhaps acquired the certitude — of indefinite technical progress, they never believed in progress as a whole, in progress on all lines, as most of our contemporaries seem to. Whether Hindus or Greeks, Egyptians or Japanese, Chinese, Sumerians, or ancient Americans — or even Romans, the most "modern" among people of antiquity — they all placed the Golden Age, the Age of Truth, the rule of Kronos or of Ra or of any other gods on earth — the glorious beginning of the slow, downward unfurling of history, whatever name it be given — far behind them in the past. And they believed that the return of a similar age, foretold in their respective sacred texts and oral traditions, depends not upon man's conscious effort but upon iron laws, inherent in the very nature of visible and tangible manifestation, and all-pervading; upon cosmic laws. They believed that man's conscious effort is but an expression of those laws at work, leading the world, willingly or unwillingly, wherever its destiny lies; in one word, that the history of man, as the history of the rest of the living, is but a detail in cosmic history without beginning or end; a periodical outcome of the inner necessity that binds all phenomena in time. And just as the ancients could accept that vision of the world's evolution while still taking full advantage of all technical progress within their reach, so can — and so do — to this day, in the very midst of the over-proud industrial cultures, a few stray individuals able to think for themselves. They contemplate the history of mankind in a similar perspective. While living apparently as "modern" men and women — using electric fans and electric irons, telephones and trains and airplanes, when they can afford it — they nourish in their hearts a deep contempt for the childish conceit and bloated hopes of our age and for the various recipes for "saving mankind" which zealous philosophers and politicians thrust into circulation. They know that nothing can "save mankind," for mankind is reaching the end of its present cycle. The wave that carried it for so many millennia is about to break, with all the fury of acquired speed, and to merge once more into the depth of the unchanging ocean of undifferentiated existence. It will rise again, some day, with abrupt majesty, for such is the law of waves. But in the meantime nothing can be done to stop it. The unfortunate — the fools — are those men who, for some reason best known to themselves — probably on account of their exaggerated estimation of what is to be lost in the process — would like to stop it. The privileged ones — the wise — are those few who, being fully aware of the increasing worthlessness of present-day mankind and of its much-applauded "progress," know how little there is to be lost in the coming crash and look forward to it with joyous expectation as to the necessary condition of a new beginning — a new Golden Age, sunlit crest of the next long-drawn, downward wave upon the surface of the endless ocean of life. To those privileged ones — among whom we count ourselves — the high-resounding "isms" to which their contemporaries ask them to give their allegiance are all equally futile: bound to be betrayed, defeated, and finally rejected by men at large, if containing anything really noble; bound to enjoy, for the time being, some sort of noisy success, if sufficiently vulgar, pretentious, and soul-killing to appeal to the growing number of mechanically conditioned slaves that crawl about our planet, posing as free men; all destined to prove, ultimately, of no avail. The time-honored religions, rapidly growing out of fashion as present-day "isms" become more and more popular, are no less futile — if not more: frameworks of organized superstition void of all true feeling of the divine, or — among more sophisticated people — mere conventional aspects of social life, or systems of ethics (and of very elementary ethics, at that) seasoned with a sprinkling of outdated rites and symbols of which hardly anybody bothers to seek the original meaning; devices in the hands of clever men in power to lull the simpletons into permanent obedience; convenient names, round which it might be easy to rally converging national aspirations or political tendencies; or just the last resort of weaklings and cranks: that is, practically, all they are — all they have been reduced to in the course of a few centuries — the lot of them. They are dead, in fact — as dead as the old cults that flourished before them, with the difference that those cults have long ceased exhaling the stench of death, while they (the so-called "living" ones) are still at the stage at which death is inseparable from corruption. None — neither Christianity nor Islam nor even Buddhism — can be expected now to "save" anything of that world they once partly conquered; none have any normal place in "modern" life, which is essentially devoid of all awareness of the eternal. The exponents of the belief in "progress" put forth many arguments to prove — to themselves and to others — that our times, with all their undeniable drawbacks, are, on the whole, better than any epoch of the past, and even that they show definite signs of improvement. It is not possible to analyze all their arguments in detail. But one can easily detect the fallacies hidden in the most widespread and, apparently, the most "convincing" of them. All the advocates of "progress" lay enormous stress upon such things as literacy, individual "freedom," equal opportunities for all men, religious toleration, and "humaneness," progress in this last line covering all such tendencies as find their expression in the modern preoccupation for child welfare, prison reforms, better conditions of labor, state aid to the sick and destitute, and, if not greater kindness, at least less cruelty to animals. The dazzling results obtained, of recent years, in the application of scientific discoveries to industrial and other practical pursuits, are, of course, the most popular of all instances expected to show how marvelous our times are. But that point we shall not discuss, as we have already made it clear that we by no means deny or minimize the importance of technical progress. What we do deny is the existence of any progress at all in the value of man as such, whether individually or collectively, and our reflections on universal literacy and other highly praised signs of improvement in which our contemporaries take pride, all spring from that one point of view. We believe that man's value — as every creature's value, ultimately — lies not in the mere intellect but in the spirit; in the capacity to reflect that which, for lack of a more precise word, we choose to call the divine, i.e., that which is true and beautiful beyond all manifestation; that which remains timeless (and therefore unchangeable) within all changes. We believe it with the difference that, in our eyes — contrarily to what the Christians maintain — the capacity to reflect the divine is closely linked with man's race and physical health; in other words, that the spirit is anything but independent from the body. And we fail to see that the different improvements that we witness today in education or in the social field, in government or even in technical matters, have either made individual men and women more valuable in that sense, or created any new, lasting type of civilization in which man's possibilities of all-round perfection, thus conceived, are being promoted. Progress? — It is true that today at least in all highly organized (typically "modern") countries, nearly everybody can read and write. But what of that? To be able to read and write is an advantage — and a considerable one. But it is not a virtue. It is a tool and a weapon; a means to an end; a very useful thing, no doubt; but not an end in itself. The ultimate value of literacy depends upon the end to which it is used. And to what end is it generally used today? It is used for convenience or for entertainment, by those who read; for some advertisement or some objectionable propaganda — for money making or power grabbing — by those who write; sometimes, of course, by both, for acquiring or spreading disinterested knowledge of the few things worth knowing, for finding expression of or giving expression to the few deep feelings that can lift a man to the awareness of things eternal, but not more often so than in the days in which one man out of ten thousand could understand the symbolism of the written word. Generally, today the man or woman whom compulsory education has made "literate" uses writing to communicate personal matters to absent friends and relatives, to fill forms — one of the international occupations of modern, civilized humanity — or to commit to memory little, useful, but otherwise trifling things, such as someone's address or telephone number, or the date of some appointment with the hairdresser or the dentist, or the list of clean clothes due from the laundry. He or she reads "to pass time" because, outside the hours of dreary work, mere thinking is no longer intense and interesting enough to serve that purpose. We know that there are also people whose whole lives have been directed to some beautiful destiny by a book, a poem — a mere sentence — read in distant childhood, like Schliemann, who lavishly spent on archaeological excavations the wealth patiently and purposely gathered in forty years of dreary toil, all for the sake of the impression left upon him, as a boy, by the immortal story of Troy. But such people always lived, even before compulsory education came into fashion. And the stories heard and remembered were no less inspiring than stories now read. The real advantage of general literacy, if any, is to be sought elsewhere. It lies not in the better quality either of the exceptional men and women or of the literate millions, but rather in the fact that the latter are rapidly becoming intellectually more lazy and therefore more credulous than ever — and not less so; more easily deceived, more liable to be led like sheep without even the shadow of a protest, provided the nonsense one wishes them to swallow be presented to them in printed form and made to appear "scientific." The higher the general level of literacy, the easier it is for a government in control of the daily press, of the wireless, and of the publishing business — these almost irresistible, modern means of action upon the mind to keep the masses and the "intelligentsia" under its thumb, without their even suspecting it. Among widely illiterate but more actively thinking people, openly governed in the old, autocratic manner, a prophet, direct mouthpiece of the gods, or of genuine, collective aspirations, could always hope to rise between secular authority and the people. The priests themselves could never be quite sure of keeping the people in obedience forever. The people could choose to listen to the prophet if they liked. And they did, sometimes. Today, wherever universal literacy is prevalent, inspired exponents of timeless truth — prophets or even selfless advocates of timely, practical changes, have fewer and fewer chances to appear. Sincere thought, really free thought, ready, in the name of superhuman authority or of humble common sense, to question the basis of what is officially taught and generally accepted, is less and less likely to thrive. It is, we repeat, by far easier to enslave a literate people than an illiterate one, strange as this may seem at first sight. And the enslavement is more likely to be lasting. The real advantage of universal literacy is to tighten the grip of the governing power upon the foolish and conceited millions. That is probably why it is dinned into our heads, from babyhood onward, that "literacy" is such a boon. Capacity to think for one's self is, however, the real boon. And that always was and always will be the privilege of a minority, once recognized as a natural elite and respected. Today, compulsory mass education and increasingly standardized literature for the consumption of "conditioned" brains — outstanding signs of "progress" — tend to reduce that minority to the smallest possible proportion; ultimately, to suppress it altogether. Is that what mankind wants? If so, mankind is losing its raison d'être, and the sooner the end of this so-called "civilization," the better. What we have said of literacy can roughly be repeated about those two other main glories of modern democracy: "individual freedom" and equality of opportunities for every person. The first is a lie — and a more and more sinister one as the shackles of compulsory education are being more and more hopelessly fastened round people's whole being. The second is an absurdity. One of the strangest inconsistencies of the average citizen of the modern, industrialized world is the way in which he criticizes all institutions of older and better civilizations, such as the caste system of the Hindus or the all-absorbing family cult of the Far East, on the ground that these tend to check the "liberty of the individual." He does not realize how exacting — nay, how annihilating — is the command of the collective authority which he obeys (half of the time, unknowingly) compared with that of traditional collective authority, in apparently less "free" societies. The caste-ridden or family-ridden people of India or of the Far East might not be allowed to do all that they like, in many relatively trifling and in a few really all-important matters of daily life. But they are left to believe what they like, or rather what they can; to feel according to their own nature and to express themselves freely about a great number of essential matters: they are allowed to conduct their higher life in the manner they judge the wisest for them, after duties to family, caste, and king have been fulfilled. The individual living under the iron and steel rule of modern "progress" can eat whatever he fancies (to a great extent) and marry whom he pleases — unfortunately! — and go wherever he likes (in theory at least). But he is made to accept, in all extra-individual matters — matters which, to us, really count — the beliefs, the attitude to life, the scale of values, and, to a great extent, the political views that tend to strengthen the mighty socioeconomic system of exploitation to which he belongs (to which he is forced to belong, in order to be able to live) and in which he is a mere cog. And, what is more, he is made to believe that it is a privilege of his to be a cog in such an organism; that the unimportant matters in which he feels he is his own master are, in fact, the most important ones — the only really important ones. He is taught not to value that freedom of judgement about ultimate truth, aesthetical, ethical, or metaphysical, of which he is subtly deprived. More still: he is told — in the democratic countries at any rate — that he is free in all respects, that he is "an individual, answerable to none but to his own conscience" ... after years of clever conditioning have molded his "conscience" and his whole being so thoroughly according to pattern, that he is no longer capable of reacting differently. Well can such a man speak of "pressure upon the individual" in any society, ancient or modern! As for "equality of opportunities," there can be no such thing anyhow, really speaking. By producing men and women different both in degree and in quality of intelligence, sensitiveness, and willpower, different in character and temperament, Nature herself gives them the most unequal opportunities of fulfilling their aspirations, whatever these might be. An overemotional and rather weak person can, for instance, neither conceive the same ideal of happiness nor have equal chances of reaching it in life, as one who is born with a more balanced nature and a stronger will. That is obvious. And add to that the characteristics that differentiate one race of men from another, and the absurdity of the very notion of "human equality" becomes even more striking. What our contemporaries mean when they speak of "equality of opportunities" is the fact that, in modern society — so they say — any man or woman stands, more and more, as many chances as his or her neighbor of holding the position and doing the job for which he or she is naturally fitted. But that too is only partly true. For, more and more, the world of today — the world dominated by grand-scale industry and mass production — can offer only jobs in which the best of the worker's self plays little or no part if he or she be anything more than a merely clever and materially efficient person. The hereditary craftsman, who could find the best expression for what is conveniently called his "soul" in his daily weaving, carpet making, enamel work, etc ..., even the tiller of the soil, in personal contact with, Mother Earth and the sun and the seasons, is becoming more and more a figure of the past. There are fewer and fewer opportunities, also, for the sincere seeker of truth — speaker or writer — who refuses to become the expounder of broadly accepted ideas, products of mass conditioning, for which he or she does not stand; for the seeker of beauty who refuses to bend his or her art to the demands of popular taste which he or she knows to be bad taste. Such people have to waste much of their time doing inefficiently — and grudgingly — some job for which they are not fitted, in order to live, before they can devote the rest of it to what the Hindus would call their sadhana and the work for which their deeper nature has appointed them; their life's dedication. The idea of modern division of labor, condensed in the oft-quoted phrase "the right man in the right place," boils down, in practice, to the fact that any man — any one of the dull, indiscriminate millions — can be conditioned to occupy any place while the best of human beings, the only ones who still justify the existence of the more and more degenerate species, are allowed no place at all. Progress .... There remain the "religious toleration" of our times and their "humaneness" compared with the "barbarity" of the past. Two jokes, to say the least! Recalling some of the most spectacular horrors of history — the burning of heretics and witches at the stake, the wholesale massacre of "heathens," and other no less repulsive manifestations of Christian civilization in Europe and elsewhere — modern man is filled with pride in the "progress" accomplished, in one line at least, since the end of the dark ages of religious fanaticism. However bad they be, our contemporaries have, at any rate, grown out of the habit of torturing people for such "trifles" as their conception of the Holy Trinity or their ideas about predestination and purgatory. Such is modern man's feeling — because theological questions have lost all importance in his life. But in the days when Christian churches persecuted one another and encouraged the conversion of heathen nations by means of blood and fire, both the persecutors and the persecuted, both the Christians and those who wished to remain faithful to non-Christian creeds, looked upon such questions as vital in one way or another. And the real reason for which nobody is put to torture, today, for the sake of his or her religious beliefs, is not that torture as such has become distasteful to everybody, in "advanced," twentieth-century civilization, not that individuals and states have become tolerant, but just that, among those who have the power of inflicting pain, hardly anybody takes any vivid, vital interest in religion, let alone in theology. The so-called "religious toleration" practiced by modern states and individuals springs from anything but an intelligent understanding and love of all religions as manifold, symbolical expressions of the same, few, essential, eternal truths. It is, rather, the outcome of a grossly ignorant contempt for all religions; of indifference to those very truths which their various founders endeavored to reassert, again and again. It is no toleration at all. To judge how far our contemporaries have or have not the right to boast of their spirit of toleration, it is best to watch their behavior toward those whom they decidedly look upon as the enemies of their gods: the men who happen to be holding views contrary to theirs concerning not some theological quibble, in which they are not interested, but some political or sociopolitical ideology which they regard as "a threat to civilization." Nobody can deny that in all such circumstances, and specially in war time, they all perform — to the extent they have the power — or condone to the extent they have not, themselves, the opportunity of performing — actions in every respect as ugly as those ordered, performed, or tolerated in the past, in the name of different religions (if indeed the latter be ugly). The only difference is, perhaps, that modern, cold-blooded atrocities only become known when the hidden powers in control of the means of herd-conditioning — the press, the wireless, and the cinema — decide, for ends anything but humanitarian, that they should be, i.e., when they happen to be the enemy's atrocities, not one's own — nor those of one's "gallant allies" — and when their story is, therefore, considered to be good propaganda, on account of the current of indignation it is expected to create and of the new incentive it is expected to give the war effort. Moreover, after a war, fought or supposed to have been fought for an ideology — the modern equivalent of the bitter religious conflicts of old — the horrors rightly or wrongly said to have been perpetrated by the vanquished are the only ones to be broadcasted all over the world, while the victors try as hard as they can to make believe that their high command at least never shuts its eyes to any similar horrors. But in sixteenth-century Europe, and before; and among the warriors of Islam conducting jihad against men of other faiths, each side was well aware of the atrocious means used, not only by its opponents for their "foul ends," but by its own people and its own leaders in order to "uproot heresy" or to "fight popery" or to "preach the name of Allah to infidels." Modern man is more of a moral coward. He wants the advantages of violent intolerance — which is only natural — but he shuns the responsibility of it. Progress, that also. The so-called humaneness of our contemporaries (compared with their forefathers) is just lack of nerve or lack of strong feelings — increasing cowardice, or increasing apathy. Modern man is squeamish about atrocities — even about ordinary, unimaginative brutality — only when it happens that the aims for which atrocious or merely brutal actions are performed are either hateful or indifferent to him. In all other circumstances, he shuts his eyes to any horrors — especially when he knows that the victims can never retaliate (as is the case with all atrocities committed by man upon animals, for whatever purpose) and he demands, at the most, not to be reminded of them too often and too noisily. He reacts as though he classified atrocities under two headlines: the unavoidable and the avoidable. The unavoidable are those that serve or are supposed to serve modern man's purpose — generally: "the good of humanity" or the "triumph of democracy." They are tolerated, even justified. The avoidable are those which are occasionally committed, or said to be committed, by people whose purpose is alien to his. They alone are condemned, and their real or supposed authors — or inspirers — branded by public opinion as "criminals against humanity." Surely modern man does not "uphold" slavery; he denounces it vehemently. But he practices it nevertheless — and on a wider scale than ever, and far more thoroughly than the ancients ever could — whether in the capitalistic West or in the tropics, or (from what one hears outside its impenetrable walls) even in the one state supposed to be, today, the "workers' paradise." There are differences, of course. In antiquity, even the slave had hours of leisure and merriment that were all his own; he had the games of dice in the shade of the columns of his master's portico, his coarse jokes, his free chatter, his free life outside his daily routine. The modern slave has not the privilege of loitering, completely carefree, for half an hour. His so-called leisure itself is filled with almost compulsory entertainment, as exacting and often as dreary as his work, or — in "lands of freedom — poisoned by economic worries. but he is not openly bought and sold. He is just taken. And taken, not by a man in some way at least superior to himself, but by a huge, impersonal system without either a body to kick or a soul to damn or a head to answer for its mischief. But more cowardly and more hypocritical, perhaps, than anything else, is "progressive," modern man's behavior toward living nature, and in particular toward the animal kingdom. Primitive man — and, often, also man whose picturesque civilization is anything but "modern" — is bad enough, it is true, as far as his treatment of animals is concerned. One only has to travel in the least industrialized countries of southern Europe, or in the Near and Middle East, to acquire a very definite certitude on that point. And not all modern leaders have been equally successful in putting an end to age-old cruelties to dumb beasts, whether in the East or in the West. Gandhi could not, in the name of that universal kindness which he repeatedly preached as the main tenet of his faith, prevent Hindu milkmen from deliberately starving their male calves to death, in order to sell a few extra pints of cow's milk. Mussolini could not detect and prosecute all those Italians who, even under his government, persisted in the detestable habit of plucking chickens alive on the ground that "the feathers come off more easily." There is no getting away from the fact that kindness to animals on a national scale does not ultimately depend upon the teachings of any superimposed religion or philosophy. It is one of the distinctive characteristics of the truly superior races. And no religious, philosophical, or political alchemy can turn base metal into gold. This does not mean to say that a good teaching cannot help to bring the best out of every race, as well as out of every individual man or woman. But modern, industrial civilization, to the extent it is man-centered — not controlled by any inspiration of a superhuman, cosmic order — and tends to stress quantity instead of quality, production and wealth instead of character and inherent worth, is anything but congenial to the development of consistent, universal kindness, even among the better people. This is the age in which falsehood is termed truth and truth persecuted as falsehood or mocked as insanity; in which the exponents of truth, the divinely inspired leaders, the real friends of their race and of all the living — the godlike men — are defeated, and their followers humbled and their memory slandered, while the masters of lies are hailed as saviors; the age in which every man and woman is in the wrong place, and the world dominated by inferior individuals, bastardized races, and vicious doctrines, all part and parcel of an order of inherent ugliness far worse than complete anarchy; the age which the Hindus have characterized from time immemorial as Kali Yuga — the Dark Age, the Era of Gloom. This is the age in which our triumphant democrats and our hopeful communists boast of "slow but steady progress through science and education." Thanks very much for such "progress"! There are no cruelties in ancient history — no Assyrian horrors, no Carthagenian horrors, no old Chinese horrors — which the inventiveness of our contemporaries of East and West, aided by a perfected technique, has not outdone. But cruelty — the violence of cowards — is merely one expression of violence among many, though admittedly the most repulsive one. Aided and encouraged by more and more staggering scientific achievements, which can be put to use for any purpose, man has, throughout history, become more and more violent — and not less and less so, as people fed on pacifist propaganda are often inclined to think! And, which is more, it could not have been otherwise; and it cannot be otherwise at any period of the future, until the violent and complete destruction of that which we call today "civilization" opens for the world a new Age of Truth; a new Golden Age. Until then, violence, under one form or another, is unavoidable. It is the very law of life in a fallen world. The choice given us is not between violence and nonviolence, but between open, unashamed violence, in broad daylight, and sneaking, subtle violence — blackmail; between open violence and inconspicuous, slow, yet implacable persecution, both economic and cultural: the systematic suppression of all possibilities for the vanquished, without it showing; the merciless conditioning of children, all the more horrible that it is more impersonal, more indirect, more outwardly gentle; the clever diffusion of soul-killing lies (and half lies); violence under the cover of nonviolence. The choice is also between selfless ruthlessness put to the service of the very cause of truth; violence without cruelty, applied in view of bringing about upon this earth an order based on everlasting principles, that transcend man; violence in view of creating, or maintaining, a human state in harmony with life's highest purpose, and violence applied to selfish ends. The more disinterested be its aims and the more selfless its application, the more frank and straightforward violence is. While, on the other hand, the more sordid be the motives for which it is in reality used, the more it is itself, hidden, even denied; the more the men who resort to it boast of being admirers of nonviolence, thus bluffing others and sometimes also themselves, acting as deceivers and being deceived — caught in the network of their own lies. As time goes on and as decay sets in, the keynote of human history is not less and less violence; it is less and less honesty about violence. But violence is not a bad thing in itself. True, it set in as a necessity only after the world had become, to a great extent, "bad," i.e., unfaithful to its timeless archetype; no longer in keeping with the creative dream of the universal Mind, that it had once expressed. Yet, violence cannot be judged apart from its purpose. And the purpose is good or bad; worth its while, or not. It is worth its while when those who pursue it do so, not merely unselfishly — with no primordial desire of personal glory or happiness — but also in keeping with an ideology expressing timeless, impersonal, more-than-human truth; an ideology rooted in the clear understanding of the unchanging laws of life, and destined to appeal to all those who, in a fallen world, still retain within their hearts an invincible yearning for the perfect order as it really was and will again be. Any purpose which is intelligently, objectively consistent with the war aims of the undying forces of light in their age-old struggle against the forces of darkness, i.e., of disintegration — that struggle illustrated in all the mythologies of the world — any such purpose, I say, justifies any amount of selfless violence. Moreover, as the era of gloom in which we are living proceeds, darker and darker and fiercer and fiercer year after year, it becomes more and more impossible to avoid using violence in the service of truth. No man — no demigod can bring about, today, even a relative amount of real order and justice in any area of the globe, without the help of force, specially if he has but a few years at his disposal. And, unfortunately, the further this world advances into the present age of technical wonders and human abasement, the more the great men of inspiration are submitted to the factor of time, as soon as they attempt to apply their lofty, intuitive knowledge of eternal truth to the solution of practical problems. They just have to act, not only thoroughly, but also quickly, if they do not want to see the forces of disintegration nip their priceless work in the bud. And whether they like it or not, thoroughly and quickly means, almost unavoidably, with unhesitating violence. One can say, with more and more certainty as the dark age goes on, that the godlike men of action are defeated, at least for the time being, not for having been too ruthless (and thus for having roused against themselves and their ideas and their collaborators the indignation of the "decent people"), but for not having been ruthless enough — for not having killed off their fleeing enemies, to the last man, in the brief hour of triumph, for not having silenced both the squeamish millions of hypocrites and their masters, the clever producers of atrocity tales, by more substantial violences, more complete exterminations. From all this it is quite clear that to condemn violence indiscriminately is to condemn the very struggle of the forces of life and light against the forces of disintegration — struggle, all the more heroic and all the more desperate, also, as the world rushes on toward its doom. It is to condemn that struggle which, at every one of its age-long, varying phases, and even through temporary disaster, has been securing for the world, beyond its deserved doom, the glorious new beginning, which the few alone deserve. Within the bondage of time, specially within this kali yuga, one cannot be consistently nonviolent without contributing, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, to the success of the forces of disintegration; of what we call the death forces. As for that violence which is used to forward the war aims of the death forces, it is, and has always been, twofold: directed on one hand against life itself — first, against the whole of innocent, living Nature, then, against the vital interests of higher mankind, in the name of "the common man" — and, on the other, against those particular men who, more and more conscious of the tragic realities of a darkening age, put up a stand in favor of the recognition of life's eternal values and of the restoration of order upon its true, eternal basis. In the attempt to bring about the triumph of the worthless and the slow but steady disintegration of culture, in fact, less and less violence is needed. The world evolves naturally toward disintegration, with accelerated speed. It might have been, once, necessary to push it on along the slippery path. It has no longer been so, for centuries. It rolls on to its own doom, without help. In that direction, therefore, the champions of disintegration enjoy an easy task. They only have to follow and flatter the vicious tendencies of the increasingly despicable majority of men, to become the world's darlings. But in their war against the few, but more aware and practical exponents of the higher values — the upholders of the natural hierarchy of races; the worshippers of light, of strength, of youth — they are (and are bound to be) more and more violent, more and more relentlessly cruel. Their hatred grows as history unfolds, as though they knew — as though they felt, with the sharpness of physical perception — that every one of their victories, however spectacular it be, brings them nearer the final, redeeming crash in which they are bound to perish, and out of which their now persecuted superiors are bound to emerge as the leaders of the new age. Their hatred grows, and their ferocity too, as the redeeming crash draws nigh, and, along with it, the dawn of the universal new order, as unavoidable as the coming of spring. They are in a hurry — not, as the heroic elite, out of generous impatience; not out of any longing to see the age of truth re-established before its time, but out of feverish lust; out of the will to snatch from the world, for themselves, all the material advantages and all the satisfactions of vanity they possibly can, before it is too late. And as time goes on, their hurry amounts to frenzy. The one obstacle that stands in their way and still defies them — that will always defy them, till the end — is precisely that proud elite that disaster cannot discourage, that torture cannot break, that money cannot buy. Whether consciously or unconsciously, whether they be, themselves, thoroughly wicked, or just blind, through congenital stupidity, the workers of disintegration wage war upon the men of gold and steel, with unabated, hellish fury. But theirs is not the frank, unashamed violence of the inspired idealists striving to bring forth, speedily, a lofty sociopolitical order too good for the unworthy world of their times. It is a sneaking, creeping, cowardly sort of violence, all the more effective that it is, outwardly, more emphatically denied, both by the scoundrels who apply it or condone it, and by the well-meaning fools who actually believe that it does not exist. It is prompted by such feelings as one cannot possibly exhibit, even in a degenerate world, without running the risk of defeating one's own purpose: by bare hatred, rooted in envy — the hatred of worthless weaklings for the strong, for no other reason than that they are strong; the hatred of ugly souls (incarnated, more often than not, in no less ugly bodies) for the naturally beautiful ones; for the noble, the magnanimous, the selfless, the real aristocracy of the world; the hatred of the unhappy, and, even more so, of the bored -- of those who have only their pockets to live for, and nothing at all to die for -- for those who live, and are ready to die, for eternal values. Such is, more and more, the widespread violence of our times, less and less recognized, in its subtle disguise, even by the people who actually suffer through it. The ancients knew better than our contemporaries who were their friends and who were their enemies. And this is natural. In a world rushing to its doom, there is bound to be increasing ignorance — ignorance precisely of those things one should know the best, in order to survive. The ancients suffered, and knew whom to curse. Modern men and women, as a rule, do not know; do not really care to know; are too lazy, too exhausted, too near the end of their world to take the trouble to inquire seriously. And clever rascals, themselves the authors of all the mischief, incite them to throw the blame of it upon the only people whose unfailing wisdom and selfless love could have saved them, had they but wanted to be saved; upon that hated elite that stands against the current of time, with the vision of the glorious new beginning beyond the doom of the present-day world, clear and bright before its eyes. Thousands of well-meaning and foolish people, who take for granted whatever they are given to read and inquire no further, have no idea of the horrors perpetrated by their compatriots in other people's countries as colonists or as members of occupying armies, no idea of what goes on in their own country, behind prison bars, in torture chambers for political investigation, and in concentration camps. Indeed, in England and in other democratic nations, many are under the impression that their government never tolerated such things as concentration camps and torture chambers for human beings. Only "the enemy" had them — so they believe. Years ago, they would have thought nothing of admitting that "everybody has them"; must have them; that one cannot run a war without those unpleasant but extremely woeful accessories. But now hypocrisy concerning violence has reached its pitch. Never has there been, in the world, so much cruelty, allied to such a general attempt to hide it, to deny it, to forget it, and, if possible, make others forget it. Never have people been so willing to forget it, in externally "decent" and kindly surroundings — houses and streets in which no torture of man or beast can be seen or heard — provided, of course, it is not "the enemy's" cruelty.
READ THE ENTIRE BOOK "THE LIGHTNING AND THE SUN" ON OUR WEB SITE
Paul
of Tarsus; or, Christianity and Jewry
SAVITRI DEVI was born Maximiani Portas on September 30, 1905, in Lyons, France, of a Greek father and an English mother. A true polymath, Portas earned degrees in chemistry and philosophy, wrote her doctoral thesis on the philosophy of science, and would eventually master at least seven languages, including Bengali and Hindi. Her earliest political convictions were pan-Hellenic. While studying in Athens her political nationalism, along with a fascination with Greco-Roman antiquity and a mistrust of Christianity, evolved into a broader pagan racialism, and a visit to Palestine in 1929 convinced her that Judeo-Christianity, whose outward observances in the Holy Land repelled her, was an alien intrusion into the West, distorting its natural spiritual evolution and imposing upon it a sterile monotheism and a servile philo-Semitism. It was in Palestine, she later said, that she first realized she was a National Socialist. In 1932 she traveled to India, in search of the Aryan paganism that Judeo-Christianity had supplanted. On the subcontinent she sought “gods and rites akin to those of ancient Greece, of ancient Rome, of ancient Britain and ancient Germany, that people of our race carried there, with the cult of the Sun, six thousand years ago.” Her exemplar was Julian the Apostate, the fourth-century emperor who briefly restored paganism and the cult of the Sun to the Roman Empire. Portas took up residence in Calcutta and quickly immersed herself in the Hindu nationalist movements, lineal ancestors of the modern BJP, that were then waging a two-front political campaign against Islam and British colonialism. She worked as a traveling lecturer for the Hindu Mission, a nationalist organization with NS sympathies, and adopted the Hindu name Savitri Devi, after the Indo-Aryan sun-god (cf. Rig Veda 3.62.10). Her new racialist Hinduism was a reflection of her NS beliefs: In the swastika, the Aryan sun-wheel, she saw “the visible link between Hitler and orthodox Hinduism.” She said, in her Pilgrimage: “... Greece, India, Germany: these are the three visible landmarks in the history of my life. Just as other women love several men in turn, so have I loved the essence of several cultures, the soul of at least three nations. But in all three and above all three, it is the essential perfection of Aryandom which I have sought and worshipped all my life. I have sought God — the Absolute — in the living beauty and the manly virtues of my own god-like Race, as other women seek Him in their lovers’ eyes, and give everything for the joy of adoring Him in them, not in heaven, but here on earth.” In 1940, largely to avoid deportation for her pro-Axis activities, Devi married the Brahmin Asit Krishna Mukherji, pan-Aryan editor of the openly NS journal New Mercury. During the war the couple gathered intelligence on behalf of the Axis, and Mukherji put militant Hindu nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose in contact with the Japanese, who would later support his Indian National Army in its abortive campaign against the British. Devi was overwhelmed by Germany’s defeat and post-war dismemberment. She returned to Europe in 1945 determined to propagandize on behalf of her now reviled NS beliefs, staying briefly in London (where she published Son of God, her study of Akhnaton’s solar religion), France, Iceland, Scotland (where she began her most influential work, The Lightning and the Sun) and Sweden (where she met Sven Hedin, the famous explorer and committed National Socialist). Devi was eventually arrested along with a comrade in February 1949, convicted of promoting National Socialist ideas, and sentenced to six years imprisonment, of which she served only seven months, returning to Lyons in the summer of 1949. There she wrote Defiance and completed Gold in the Furnace, both based on her experiences in occupied Germany. In 1953 Devi returned illegally to Germany on a self-styled pilgrimage, lasting four years, to the holy sites of National Socialism and Germanic paganism. She lived for two years at Emsdetten in Westphalia at the home of an NS sympathizer, where she wrote Pilgrimage, and completed The Lightning and the Sun. Devi returned to India in 1957, but was back in Europe three years later. The friendships she had made during her imprisonment provided entrée into murky world of post-war National Socialism — she was already on friendly terms with such luminaries as Hans Rudel, Otto Skorzeny, and Leon Degrelle — and while living in London she became involved with the politics of the British racial right, attending, along with George Lincoln Rockwell, the World Union of National Socialists conference in the Cotswolds in 1962, site of the famous Cotswolds Declaration. In 1971 Devi returned again to India, where she spent most of the 1970s, corresponding with her comrades abroad and influencing a number of young racialists who visited her in Delhi. She died in the United Kingdom in 1982, while preparing for a speaking tour of the United States. -- Irmin Vinson This article was originally published in National Vanguard magazine number 118. You may see a sample of the latest issue by clicking on the 'magazine' button at the top of this page. More works by Savitri Devi are available here. ( http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=158 ) National Vanguard • Box 5145 • Charlottesville • VA 22905 • USA NationalVanguard.org
The Death of Adolf HitlerSavitri Devi
Others have described -- or
tried to describe -- far better than I (who was not on the spot) ever could, the
last days of the Third German Reich: the irresistible advance of the two frantic
invading armies (and of their respective auxiliaries) into the heart of the
land, in which years of unheard-of bombardment had left nothing but ruins; the
terror of the last and fiercest air raids that disorganized everything, while
streams and streams of refugees kept pouring westward (realizing that they had,
in spite of all, less to fear from the Americans -- enemies of National
Socialism with no faith to put in its place -- than from the Russians, who were
fighting in full awareness of their allegiance to the contrary faith); the
horror of the last desperate battles, intended to immobilize for a while an
enemy that one now knew to be the winner; and the moral breakdown -- the
frightening, blank hopelessness, the bitter feeling of having been mocked and
cheated -- of millions in whose hearts faith in National Socialism had been
inseparable from the certitude of Germany's invincibility: the moral ruins, even
more tragic and more lasting than the material ones.
World War II's victors hoist the hammer-and-sickle flag over the Reichstag in Berlin. On the afternoon of April 30, 1945, as Soviet troops stormed the Reichstag, Hitler committed suicide in his nearby bunker headquarters. Others have described or tried to describe the horror of the last days of Berlin under the relentless fire of the Russian guns -- Berlin which, seen from above, "looked like the crater of an immense volcano." [These are the words of the well-known German airwoman, Hanna Reitsch, who saw it -- Devi's note.] In the midst of the capital ablaze, stood the broad and yet untouched gardens of the Chancellery of the Reich. There, surrounded by a few of his faithful ones in his bunker, underground, Adolf Hitler, the man against time, lived the apparent end of all his life's work and of all his dreams, and the beginning of his people's long martyrdom. More or less accurate reports have reached the outer world about his last known gestures and words. But nobody has described in all its more-than-human grandeur the last, real, inner phase -- the tragic failure, and yet (considered from a standpoint exceeding by far that of the politician) the culmination -- of his dedicated life. In August Kubizek's biography of him as a young man, there is a passage too significant for me not to quote it nearly in extenso. It is the description of a walk to the Freienberg (a hill over-looking Linz) in the middle of the night, just after the future Fuehrer and his friend had attended together, at the opera, a performance of Richard Wagner's Rienzi. "We were alone," writes Kubizek. "The town had sunk below us into the fog. As though he were moved by an invisible force, Adolf Hitler climbed to the top of the Freienberg. I now realized that we no longer stood in solitude and darkness, for above us shone the stars." "Adolf stood before me. He took both my hands in his and held them tight -- a gesture that he had never yet made. I could feel from the pressure of his hands how moved he was. His eyes sparkled feverishly. The words did not pour from his lips with their usual easiness, but burst forth harsh and passionate. I noticed by his voice even more than by the way in which he held my hands how the episode he had lived (the performance of Rienzi) had shattered him to the depths. "Gradually, he began to speak more freely. The words came with more speed. Never before and also never since have I heard Adolf Hitler speak like he did then, as we stood alone under the stars as though we had been the only two creatures on earth. "It is impossible for me to repeat the words my friend uttered in that hour. "Something quite remarkable, which I had not noticed before, even when he spoke to me with vehemence, struck me at that moment: it was as though another self spoke through him; another self, from the presence of which he was as moved as I was. In no way could one have said of him (as it sometimes happens, in the case of brilliant speakers) that he was intoxicated with his own words. On the contrary! I had the feeling that he experienced with amazement, I would say, that he was himself possessed by that which burst out of him with elemental power. I do not allow myself a comment on that observation. But it was a state of ecstasy, a state of complete trance, in which, without mentioning it or the instance involved in it, he projected his experience of the Rienzi performance into a glorious vision upon another plane, congenial to himself. More so: the impression he had received from that performance was merely the external Impulse that had prompted him to speak. Like a flood breaks through a dam which has burst, so rushed the words from his mouth. In sublime, irresistible images, he unfolded before me his own future and that of our people. "Till then I had been convinced that my friend wanted to become an artist, a painter, or an architect. In that hour there was no question of such a thing. He was concerned with something higher, which I could not yet understand ... He now spoke of a mission that he was one day to receive from our people, in order to guide them out of slavery, to the heights of freedom ... Many years were to pass before I could realize what that starry hour, separated from all earthly things, had meant to my friend." Calmer now, amid the thunder of explosions and the noise of crumbling buildings -- the flames and ruins of the Second World War -- than then, at the top of the Freienberg, under the stars; freed from the temporary wild despair that had seized him at the news of the Russian advance west of the Oder River, Adolf Hitler beheld the future. And that future -- his own and that of National Socialism and that of Germany, which had now become, forever, the fortress of the new faith -- was nothing less than eternity; the eternity of truth, more unshakable (and more soothing) in its majesty even than that of the Milky Way. The Russians could come, and their "gallant Allies" from the West could meet them and rejoice with them upon the ashes of the Third Reich (as Winston Churchill and his daughter Sarah, who were actually to be seen a few days later giggling with Russian officers before the skeleton of the Reichstag); Berlin could be wiped out -- or bolshevized -- and Germany, cut in two or in four, could, for years and years, suffer such an ordeal as no nation in history had yet suffered. In spite of all, National Socialism, the modern expression of cosmic truth, would endure and conquer. National Socialism would rise again because it is true to cosmic reality and because that which is true does not pass. Germany's via dolorosa was indeed the way to coming glory. It had to be taken, if the privileged nation was to fulfill her mission absolutely, i.e., if she was to be the nation that died for the sake of the highest human race, which she embodied, and that would rise again to take the lead of those surviving Aryans who are -- at last! -- to understand her message of life and to carry it with them into the splendor of the dawning Golden Age. Oh, now -- now under the ceaseless fire and thunder of the Russian artillery; now, on the brink of disaster -- how the man against time clearly understood this! Above him and above the smoke of the Russian cannons and of the burning city, above the noise of explosions, millions and millions of miles away, the stars -- those same stars that had shed their light over the adolescent's first prophetic ecstasy forty years before -- sparkled in all their glory, in the limitless void. And the man against time, who could not see them, knew that his National Socialist wisdom, founded upon the very laws of life; his wisdom that this doomed world had cursed and rejected, was and would remain, in spite of all, as unassailable and everlasting as their everlasting dance.
The Last Man Against TimeSavitri Devi
 Not
only had Adolf Hitler done all he possibly could to avoid war, but he did
everything he possibly could to stop it. Again and again -- first in October,
1939, immediately after the victorious end of the Polish campaign; then on the
22nd of June, 1940, immediately after the truce with defeated France -- he held
out his hand to England; not the hand of a supplicant, still less that of a man
afraid, but that of a farsighted and generous victor whose whole life was
centered around a creative idea, whose program was a constructive program, and
who had no quarrel with the misled blood brothers of his own people, who saw in
them, despite their hatred of his name, his future friends and collaborators.
The fact that all Adolf Hitler's efforts to avoid war -- or to end it speedily and victoriously, at least honorably -- remained fruitless, proves by no means his inefficiency as a statesman or as a strategist. It only proves that the forces of disintegration -- the coalesced forces of our dark age, embodied in all-powerful, international Jewry -- were, in spite of his insight, in spite of his genius, too strong for him; that it needed a still harder man against time than he in order to break them; in other words, that he is not the last man against time. He knew it himself, from the early
days of the struggle. And nothing shows more clearly how aware he was of his own
place and significance in history than the words he addressed Hans Grimm in
1928, in the course of a conversation that lasted an hour and a quarter: "I know
that some man capable of giving our problems a final solution must appear. And
that is why I have set myself to do the preparatory work (die Vorarbeit);
only the most urgent preparatory work, for I know that I am myself not the
one. And I know also what is missing in me (to be the one). But the
other one still remains aloof, and nobody comes forward, and there is no more
time to be lost."
 The last incarnation of He Who Comes Back -- the last man against time -- has many names. Every great faith, every great culture, every true (living or obsolete) form of a tradition as old as the fall of man has given him one. Through the eyes of the visionary of Patmos, the Christians behold in him Christ, present for the second time: no longer a meek preacher of love and forgiveness, but the irresistible leader of the celestial white horsemen destined to put an end to this sinful world and to establish a new heaven and a new earth. The Mohammedan world is awaiting him under the features of the Mahdi, whom Allah shall send "at the end of times," to crush all evil through the power of his sword -- "after the Jews will once more have become the masters of Jerusalem" and "after the Devil will have taught men to set even the air they breathe on fire." And the millions of Hindustan have called him from time immemorial and still call him Kalki, the last incarnation of the world-sustaining power: Vishnu; the one who will, in the interest of life, put an end to this age of gloom and open a new succession of ages. I have called him here by his Hindu name, not in order to show off an erudition which I am far from possessing, but simply because I happen to know of no other tradition in which the three types of manifested existence -- above time, against time, and in time -- which I tried in these pages to evoke and to define, have so obviously their counterpart as in the Hindu trinitarian conception of divinity.
The well-known Hindu Trinity -- Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, so masterfully evoked in Indian art -- is anything but the blending of three inseparable gods into one; anything but the triple aspect of one transcendent and personal god. It symbolizes something by far more fundamental, namely, existence in its entirety: manifested and unmanifested; conceivable, visible and tangible, and beyond conception. For existence -- being -- is the one thing divine. And there is no divinity outside it; and nothing outside divinity. [Image: Bust of Trimurti ("having three forms") in the caves at Elephanta.] Now Brahma is existence in und fuer sich -- in and for itself; being unmanifested, and thereby outside and above time; being, beyond the conception of the time-bound mind, and thereby unknowable. It is significant that Brahma has no temples in India -- or elsewhere. One cannot render a cult to that which no time-bound consciousness can conceive. One can, at the most, through the right attitude (and also through the right ascetic practices) merge one's self into it; transcend individual consciousness; live above time -- in the absolute present which admits no "before" and no "after," and which is eternity. Vishnu -- the world sustainer -- is the tendency of every being to remain the same and to create (and procreate) in its own likeness; the universal life force as opposed to change and thereby to disaggregation and death; the power that binds this time-bound universe to its timeless essence -- every manifested being to the idea of that being, in the sense Plato was one day to give the word idea. All men against time (all centers of action against time, in the cosmic sense of the word) are embodiments of Vishnu. They are all -- more or less -- saviors of the world: forces of life, directed against the downward current of irresistible change that is the very current of time; forces of life tending to bring the world back to original, timeless perfection. Shiva -- the destroyer -- is the tendency of every being to change, to die to its present and to all its past aspects. He is Mahakala -- time itself; time that drags the universe to its unavoidable doom and -- beyond that -- to no less irresistible regeneration; to the spring of a new Golden Age and again, slowly and steadily, to degeneracy and death, in an endless succession.
In other words, Vishnu and Shiva, the world sustainer and the world destroyer, the force against time and time itself -- Mahakala -- are one and the same. And they are Brahma, timeless existence, the essence of all that is. They are Brahma manifested in time (and automatically also against time) and yet timeless. Hindu art has symbolized this metaphysical truth in the figure of Hari-Hara (Vishnu and Shiva in one body) and in the famous Trimurti: three-faced Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva. In the manifested universe as we experience it at our scale, no living being embodies that triple and complete idea of existence -- the everlasting, universal law of constant change away from, and of untiring aspiration toward and ceaseless effort back to, original perfection and the ineffable inner peace of timelessness, inseparable from it -- better than the everlasting and ever-returning man against time; He Who Comes Back, age after age "to destroy evildoers and to establish upon earth the reign of righteousness." The man in time has hardly any of the Vishnu or, as I have called them, sun qualities. The man above time has hardly any of the lightning qualities of Shiva, the destroyer. The man against time -- who lives in eternity while acting in time, according to the Aryan doctrine of detached violence -- has Vishnu's faithfulness to the original pattern of creation, Shiva's holy fury of destruction (in view of further creation), and Brahma's fathomless serenity which is, I repeat, the serenity of all three: timeless peace beyond the roar of all wars in time. Yet no hero against time has ever expressed that triple aspect of immanent divinity with absolute adequacy, and none will, save the last one. That last, great individual -- an absolutely harmonious blending of the sharpest of all opposites; equally sun and lightning -- is the one whom the faithful of all religions and the bearers of practically all cultures await; the one of whom Adolf Hitler (knowingly or unknowingly) said, in 1928: "I am not he; but while nobody comes forward to prepare the way for him, I do so"; the one whom I have called by his Hindu name, Kalki, on account of the cosmic truth that this name evokes. Contrarily to Adolf Hitler, he will spare not a single one of the enemies of the divine cause: not a single one of its outspoken opponents but also not a single one of the lukewarm, of the opportunists, of the ideologically heretical, of the racially bastardized, of the unhealthy, of the hesitating, of the all-too-human; not a single one of those who, in body or character or mind, bear the stamp of the fallen ages.
They are the bridge to supermanhood, of which Nietzsche has spoken; the last battalion, in which Adolf Hitler has put his confidence. Kalki will lead them, through the flames of the great end, into the sunshine of the new Golden Age. We like to hope that the memory of the one-before-the-last and most heroic of all our men against time -- Adolf Hitler -- will survive, at least in songs and symbols. We like to hope that the lords of the age, men of his own blood and faith, will render him divine honors, through rites full of meaning and full of potency, in the cool shade of the endless regrown forests, on the beaches, or upon inviolate mountain peaks, facing the rising sun. Excerpted from Devi's Lightning and the Sun, 3rd abridged edition (Wellington, NZ: Renaissance Press, 1994), 74, 82-83. First published in Calcutta in 1958. The title above is editorial.
Rocks of the SunSavitri DeviThe Externsteine, 23rd of October 1953, in the evening. We rolled through and past Horn, without stopping, turned to our right as we reached the outskirts of the town and then, after another five hundred yards, to our left, and followed a beautiful asphalted road bordered with trees and meadows beyond which more trees -- that same, unending Teutoburg Forest in autumn garb, that I was never tired of admiring -- could be seen. I looked right and left, and ahead, and did not speak. I was watching the approach of evening upon the fiery red and yellow and brown of the leaves ready to fall, and thinking of the captive eagles and of enslaved Germany, and longing for the Day of Revenge -- "der Tag der Rache" -- as steadily as I had been, as a matter of fact, for the last eight and half years. Then, suddenly barring the road, a row
of vertical rocks about a hundred feet high -- but looking much higher,
specially from a short distance -- appeared, evenly grey against the bright
background of the sunset sky. I recognised them at once for having seen pictures
of them, and exclaimed in a low voice, with ravishment: "Die Externsteine!"
We stepped out of the car. I stood, automatically, apart from the other travellers, as though I were aware of the fact that we belonged to two different worlds; that they, even though they were Germans, were, here, but tourists, while I, even though a foreigner, was already a pilgrim. I looked up to the irregular stone shapes that stood between me and the further forest, into which the motorable road leads. The familiar outlines fascinated me. Not that I was, for the first time in my life, visiting a place stamped with the prestige of immemorial Sun-worship: it was anything but the first time! I had seen Delphi and Delos, and the ruins of Upper and Lower Egypt: Karnak and the Pyramids. And I had, in India, visited the celebrated "Black Pagoda" built in the shape of a Sun-chariot resting upon twelve enormous wheels, each of which corresponds to a sign of the Zodiac, and presenting in sculpture the most splendid illustration of Life at all its stages -- in all its fullness -- from the wildest erotic scenes that adorn most of the surface of the lower walls, to the serene stillness of lonely medication --: the meditation of the Sun-god Himself, whose seated statue dominates the whole structure. And I had visited the extraordinary temple of Sringeri, every one of the twelve columns of which is struck in turn by the first Sun-rays, on the day the Sun enters a new constellation.
But I had never yet (save once, in Sweden) found myself upon a spot sanctified by the Worship of our Parent Star -- the old worship of Light and Life -- in a Germanic country. And these Rocks, I knew, had been the centre of Germanic solar rites in time without beginning. I felt like a person who has walked a long way and a long time -- who has come from a very, very distant country -- with a definite purpose, and who, at last, reaches the goal. I had now attained, if not the end (for there is no end), at least the culminating point of my pilgrimage through Germany and through life. And I was happy. I had reached the Source where I could replenish my spiritual forces for the eternal Struggle in its modern form: the Struggle of the Powers of Light against the Powers of Gloom, experienced by me as that of the National Socialist values against those both of Christianity and of Marxism -- of the oldest and of the latest Jewish doctrine for Aryan consumption, which I had fought and would continue fighting untiringly.< |
"Men and women of Germany! In the midst of untold hardships and suffering, hold
fast to your glorious National Socialist faith and resist! Defy our persecutors
... Nothing can destroy that which is built on truth. We are the pure gold put
to test in the furnace. Let the furnace blaze and roar. Nothing can destroy us.
One day we shall rebel and triumph again. Hope and wait. Heil Hitler!"
In 1953 Savitri returned illegally to Germany on a self-styled pilgrimage,
lasting four years, to the holy sites of National Socialism and Germanic
paganism, visiting Braunau am In, Linz (where she met Hitler's tutor),
Berchtesgarden, the Berghof, the Feldherrnhalle, and Nuremberg. She lived for
two years at Emsdetten in Westphalia at the home of an NS sympathizer, where she
wrote Pilgrimage, completed Lightning and the Sun, and added to
the stations of her pilgrimage the Hermannsdenkmal and the Externsteine, the
former a monument honoring Hermann's defeat of the Romans in A.D. 9, the latter
a reputed pagan solar temple, where she experienced a mystical revelation of
eventual Aryan victory. [Image: Atop the tallest spire of the Externsteine, the
remains (perhaps) of a pagan shrine.] 
the birth of the Child. One of the many apocryphal gospels (1) — rejected by the
Church — attributes the paternity of Jesus to a Roman soldier, distinguished for
his bravery and accordingly nicknamed “the Panther.” This gospel is cited by
Heckel in one of his studies on early Christianity. Yet accepting such evidence
would not entirely resolve the very significant question of Christ’s origins,
because we are not told who his mother Mary was. One of the canonical gospels
tells us that she was the daughter of Joachim and Anne, although Anne had passed
the age of maternity; in other words, she too must have been born miraculously,
or could perhaps have been simply a child adopted by Anne and Joachim in their
old age, which hardly clarifies matters. (2) 
A few words will make this point clear. 
The
truly great men in time -- men such as Genghis Khan -- reflect something
of his terrible majesty. The greatest men against time also -- inasmuch
as they all must possess (more or less) the qualities of character that are
specially those of the men in time; the qualities in which is rooted the
efficiency of organized violence. For Shiva is not only the destroyer; he is the
creator -- the good one; the positive one -- also to the extent all further
creation is conditioned by change and ultimately by the destruction of that
which was there before. He is -- as essence of destructive change, as time --
turned toward the future. And, on the other hand, Lord Shiva himself -- time
personified -- is also (strange as this may seem to the purely analytical mind)
above time. He is the great Yogi, whose face remains as serene as the
blue sky while his feet beat the furious rhythm of the Tandava dance, amid the
flames and smoke of a crumbling world. 
His
companions at arms will be the last National Socialists; the men of iron who
will have victoriously stood the test of persecution and, what is more, the test
of complete isolation in the midst of a dreary, indifferent world in which they
have no place; who are facing that world and defying it through every gesture,
every hint -- every silence -- of theirs and, more and more (in the case of the
younger ones) without even the personal memory of Adolf Hitler's great days to
sustain them. They are the ones who will, one day, make good for all that which
men against time have suffered in the course of history, like they
themselves, for the sake of eternal truth: the avenging comrades whom the five
thousand of Verden called in vain within their hearts at the moment of death,
upon the bank of the Aller River, red with blood; those whom the millions of
1945 -- the dying, the tortured, and the desperate survivors -- called in vain;
those whom all the vanquished fighters against time called in vain, in
every phase of the great cosmic struggle without beginning, against the forces
of disintegration, co-eternal with the forces of life. 
