SAVITRI DEVI

PAGE II

Woman Against Time:
Remembering Savitri Devi's 100th birthday

Hitlerism and Hindudom

Jewish Intolerance

Feminism and National Socialism

National Socialism and Neo-Paganism

A Son of God: Introduction

Joyous Wisdom

Akhnaton and the World of To-day

Indian Paganism:
The Last Living Expression of Aryan Beauty

The Religion of the Strong

Hitlerian Esotericism and the Tradition

Savitri Devi was a philosopher, a religious thinker, and a tireless activist on behalf of National Socialism, Indo-European paganism, vegetarianism, animal welfare, and deep ecology. She also dabbled in fiction-writing and espionage. In 1958, with the publication of her magnum opus, The Lightning and the Sun, she emerged as one of the most original and influential National Socialist thinkers of the post World War II era. [Image: Savitri Devi in the 1950s.]

Savitri Devi was born Maximine Portaz on 30 September 1905 in Lyons, France at 8:45 a.m. She died shortly after midnight on 22 October 1982 in Sible Hedingham, Essex, England. Of English, Greek, and Italian ancestry, she described her nationality as "Indo-European."

Someone once asked Ramana Maharishi – one of the greatest spiritual personalities of modern India (he died only a few years ago) – what he thought of Adolf Hitler. The answer was short and simple: "He is a 'gnani,'" i.e., a sage; one who "knows," who is, through personal experience, fully conscious of the eternal truths that express the Essence of the Universe; conscious of the hierarchic character of its visible (and invisible) manifestations in time and outside time; conscious of the nature and place of gods, men and other creatures, animate and inanimate, in the light of the One inexpressible Reality behind, within and above them all: the Brahman-Atman of the Hindu scriptures, thousands of years old. This implies, of course, consciousness of the great Laws of manifestations that preside over the birth, life, death, rebirth and liberation from the wheel of birth and rebirth, of all creatures, and therefore of the fundamental inequality of creatures, including people – and races – the inequality of souls as well as of bodies, and – on the social plane – the strivings for an order that would be the exact reflection of this inequality within the universal, divine hierarchy – of this unity within hierarchical diversity. [Image: Hitler in 1919.]

In the mind of such a perfect Brahmin (in the etymological sense of the word: a man who has realized Brahman-Atman within himself and, in consequence, "knows" the truth) the word "gnani" cannot mean anything less than that.

It is a far greater praise than any recognition of our Leader's importance in mere history. It means that his unique place in history is the mere outcome of Something deeper and more difficult to sense (for the common mind): his place among those at the very top of the hierarchy of creatures. As I said before, Ramana Maharishi represents the double aristocracy of Hindudom: both by his caste (he was a Brahmin) and by the fact that he was one of the few who were strictly worthy of belonging to that exalted caste. His judgment is of more import than that of millions of average, albeit "intellectual" people.

I shall now relate an episode of my own life involving a youngster of a very low Hindu caste: the Maheshyas of West Bengal, a caste of tillers of the soil; one of the innumerable subdivisions of the Sudras.

The youngster, named Khudiram, after one of the fighters for Indian independence, was a typical specimen of the masses of Bengal: dark skinned, flat-faced – a blending of Dravidian (the race of most South Indians) and Mongoloid. He must have been about fifteen and was perfectly illiterate. He was my servant.

One day – in glorious 1940 – as he came back from the market where I had sent him to buy fish for the cats, he told me, beaming with joy: "Memsahib" (it is the way one addresses all European women, here in India) "I really wish your Leader will win the war! I want him to, and I pray to all the gods that he does!"
 

Pan Hindu Flag

I was dumbfounded. I had never spoken about Adolf Hitler to Khudiram – a non-Aryan if any! I presumed the lad knew there was a war going on in faraway Europe – everybody knew it – and I was not over-astonished at his taking sides with us: all Indians in those days did the same, including the Communists (on account of the non-aggression pact of August 23, 1939). "The enemies of our enemies are our friends" – and Bengal was a bastion in the struggle against British rule. But I never expected such emphasis in the pro-German feelings of a Bengali village lad.

I asked him: "Why are you so strongly on the Leader's side? Is it just because he is winning?" (The French campaign was then nearly over.)

Khudiram said: "No, I would be on his side even if he were defeated, but I pray all the gods he may win."

"And why? What do you know about the war?"

And the illiterate lad replied, to my further surprise: "I may be an ignorant boy. But I met one in the market much older than I; he must be about twenty – a 'learned' boy, who can even speak a little English, and he told me that your Leader was fighting this war in Europe so that he might do away with the Bible and in its place set up, for all the West – the Bhagavad-Gita!"

I wondered what Adolf Hitler's reaction would have been, had he known the interpretation given to his war aims in the Calcutta fish market. (I did not yet know of the high consideration he had for the most ancient Aryan philosophical poem. I was to hear of it in England, from a man who knew him well – after the war.) But I thought of a passage in the first chant of the Bhagavad Gita, in its nineteenth century French translation by Eugene Burnouf: "Out of the corruption of women proceeds the confusion of castes (i.e., of races, for the castes originally corresponded to racial differences); out of the confusion of castes proceeds the loss of memory (i.e., one forgets who were one's ancestors), out of the loss of memory proceeds the loss of understanding, and out of this all evil!"

I thought to myself in a flash: "True, this is the oldest known expression of the spirit of Mein Kampf." And I told the boy: "Your elder friend is right. Our Leader is fighting for the Aryan West to go back to the eternal Aryan values that are exalted in the Bhagavad Gita. Now I give you a day's holiday, and a rupee to treat your friends. Go and tell them all – tell everyone you meet – what your market big boy said. He is right!"

Khudiram was delighted and joyously made for the door. But I stopped him for a while to put another question to him.

"You pray for our Leader's victory – our victory," said I. 'Now, do you know that if we win the war and my Leader's influence reaches the ends of the earth, you, within our New Order, shall remain forever what you are: a Maheshya – a Sudra. You are no Aryan. The New Order shall grant you no privileges: these will be, just as throughout the centuries, for the fair-complexioned Brahmans or Kshatriyas, who, in India, will remain at the top of Hindu society. Do you still love our Leader, knowing this?"

The lad of the tropics, the mouthpiece of the illiterate Hindu masses, exclaimed unhesitatingly: "Of course I do, and all the more, now I know it!" For this means that your Leader's spirit is one with the Shatras [i.e., of the Hindu sacred writ] – that he knows the truth, and wants the world to abide in truth, as did the great ones who handed over the Shatras to their disciples. This is of no more importance whether I, a mere individual, get promotion or not in this world. The one and only thing that matters is the truth of the gods which is (now I know it!) your Leader's truth also.

"If I was born a mere Maheshya, it is sure that I have sinned in many of my past lives. But this time I obey the Shatras – i.e., do not defile myself by eating forbidden things, do not mess about with girls of other castes, and so forth – then next time, when I am born again, I shall be born in a better family. And after several thousands of years – time does not count – who knows? I might be born as the son of a Brahmin, or perhaps in your Europe, as one of the young men who fight for your Leader's ideals. Who knows?" [Image: Iron Age swastika (sun wheel) from Gotland, Sweden.]

Could one imagine, in Christian Europe, a lad of non-Aryan or doubtful descent saying: "This is my punishment for my past misdeeds, of before this present life. Now if I behave as I should, who knows? I might slowly, slowly, make my way upwards and after a thousand years or more be born a German." No, one cannot, precisely because such thoughts are totally foreign to the Christian spirit and the belief that all souls are equally precious in the eyes of a personal man-loving god. This could have been possible if we had, in Europe, remained faithful to our old heathen values. And there old values are the very same "hyperborean" ones as are to this day upheld in Hindu India, where the idea of segregated castes – the oldest form of "apartheid" on earth – and the belief that the Aryan is the one who should rule the world, are widespread and undiscussed ideas.

Well did Rudolf von Sebottendorf, founder of the famous Thule Gesellschaft that prepared the way for the triumph of National Socialism, well did he, I say, owe a lot to his visits to India, and his contacts with Hindus conscious of their hyperborean traditions?

It is said in Hindu writ that "the year is the day of the gods." The solar year, six months daylight and six months night, and the Arctic years, two or three full months light in the summer and two or three months night in the winter, are "days" of the Nordic ancestors of our fair-complexioned Indian Brahmins. The gods – the "shining ones" whose "days" were years of half sunshine and half darkness – were just perfect types of Aryan humanity: the hyperboreans of far-away Thule, the ones whom the twentieth century great Indian scholar, Tilak, mentions in his book The Arctic Home in the Vedas.

And it is noteworthy that tradition among Aryans other than those of India, places the seat of godhead in the same polar region: the Greek sun god Apollo is called "the Hyperborean." Only the Hindus – including the non-Aryan masses of India insofar as they have not been corrupted by ideas drummed into their heads by degenerate Aryans (no longer Aryans of spirit) of today – have kept the traditions. Thanks to its forced Christianization from the fourth to the fifteenth century A.D., Europe has forgotten it. The glory of Adolf Hitler – and a few of his forerunners such as Friedrich Lange (founder of the Deutsches Bund, 1894) or Hans Krebs – is to have felt it intuitively, with the aid of the gods, and made it the philosophical basis of their social and political natures.

The holy Swastika that Adolf Hitler chose as the Symbol of his Movement is the visible link between him and orthodox Hinduism. One sees it everywhere in India: on temple gates, on pennants fluttering from the top of temples, on the walls in front of which marriage rites are celebrated (as all Hindu rites, before a burning fire), and on public signs and on ordinary advertisements, and on jewels, "for luck."

There was a time when the Symbol was to be found everywhere also in Aryan countries – or countries under Aryan influence: on Greek pottery, and more so on Trojan pottery (nowhere are Swastikas more numerous than on the shards in the second layer of Troy, dating back to some 4,000 B.C.!) and in Mexico and Yucatan, civilized by a White and bearded god (according to tradition) – and a god from the East, apparently an Aryan. [Image: Greek goddess Artemis as "Mistress of Beasts," on a Boeotian vase, c. 700 BC.]

Nowadays the holy sign is popular – widespread and revered – only among us National Socialists and among Hindus (the only two sects of people among which the superiority of the Aryan race is also recognized and accepted as a matter of course. As I said, in India, the non-Aryan orthodox Hindus also accept it, of whatever caste they may be).

May the official propaganda of Westernized Indians concerning democracy and equality not deceive us and prevent us from seeing how close to us is – and always was – real Hindu India!

Jewish "racism" has been much discussed. And the doctrine of the "chosen people" is often regarded as an expression of this "racism." Yet in reality the Jews of Antiquity (I mean, of course, orthodox Jews) believed that membership in their race, that is, in the "family of Abraham," had value only if it were combined with exclusive service to the "jealous God" Jehovah, Israel's exclusive protector. According to the Bible, Moabites and Ammonites, though enemies of Israel, were closely connected racially to the Jews. Did not the former descend from Moab, son of Lot and his eldest daughter, and the latter from Ben-Ammi, son of Lot and his youngest daughter? (Genesis 19.36-38) Now, Lot, son of Haran, was the nephew of Abraham (Genesis 11.27). Evidently genealogical kinship did not facilitate relations between these peoples and the children of Israel. If blood joined them together, their respective cults nevertheless separated them. Chemosh, god of Moabites, and Milcom, god of the Ammonites, were in the eyes of the Jews "abominations" -- as were all the gods of the earth, save their own God -- and their worshippers, enemies to be exterminated. [Image: Savitri in India, ca. 1935.]

Jewish racism, independent of religion -- the attitude which consists in accepting as a Jew and treating accordingly anyone born Jewish, whatever his religious beliefs might be -- is apparently a much more recent phenomenon, dating at the earliest from the eighteenth or the seventeenth century, that is, from the time when masonic lodges of Israelite inspiration began to play a role in determining the politics of Western nations. It was perhaps a product of the influence of Western rationalism on the Jews -- in spite of themselves. It found its most striking expression at the end of the nineteenth century and during the twentieth in Zionism, which could be called an innovative, avant-garde Jewish nationalism. The Zionist movement does respect, certainly, the religious tradition of the Talmud and the Bible, but without in any way being identified with it. Its political faith is "national," but could not be compared with that of modern Greece, since the latter is so inseparable from the official state religion. But I shall call Zionism a nationalism rather than a "racism," because it implies the exaltation of the Jewish people as such, without any enthusiastic consciousness of a blood solidarity uniting all the various desert peoples customarily called "Semitic."

Although modern in its expression, this Jewish nationalism is not in its essence different from the solidarity which, after the introduction of the Mosaic law, existed among all the children of Israel from the thirteenth century before the Christian era. The religion of Jehovah played a paramount role then. But its role consisted precisely in forming a feeling in all Jews, from the most powerful to the most humble, that they were the chosen people, the privileged people, different from other people, including those closest to them in blood, and exalted above them all. The Jews have felt that more and more in modern times, without the aid of a national religion; hence the decreasing importance of this religion among them, except in a few permanent centers of Jewish orthodoxy.
 

Intolerance on the Occupied West Bank (Hebron, August 2001): A Palestinian mother is kicked by a Jewish boy while a Jewish woman rips off her Islamic headscarf.

In other words, the Jews, who for centuries had been an unimportant Middle Eastern tribe among so many others, a tribe quite close to others in language and religion before Abraham and especially before the Mosaic reform, gradually became, under the influence of Moses and his successors, Joshua and Caleb, and then under the influence of the prophets, a people completely filled with the self-image they had manufactured; having nothing but contempt for men of the same race who surrounded them and, with greater reason, for people of other races; seeing only "abominations" in all their gods; even repudiating, as the prophet Ezra commanded after they returned from their long Babylonian captivity, those of their kinsmen who, having remained in Palestine, had married Canaanite women, under the pretext that the latter would loosen the link that bound them and their families to Jehovah and thus weaken their consciousness that they were a "chosen people," a people unlike others.

They could have remained so indefinitely, isolated from the rest of the world by a national pride as incommensurable as it was unjustified, for even in Antiquity they were already rather mixed-race hybrids, if only because of their prolonged sojourn in Egypt. Had the Jews remained in their self-imposed isolation, the world would certainly have suffered no great loss -- quite the contrary. But they did not, because the idea of a "single, living God" -- the "true" God, in contrast to "false" gods, to local gods whose power was limited to other peoples -- could only imply, sooner or later, the idea of universal truth and human community. A God who alone "lives," while all others are merely insensate matter, at most inhabited by impure forces, can only be, logically, the true God of all possible worshippers, that is, of all men. To refuse to admit it would have required that they ascribe life, truth and benevolence to other peoples' gods as well, in other words, that they cease seeing them only as "abominations." And that the Jews refused to accept, after the sermons and threats of their prophets. The One God could indeed prefer a single people. But it was necessary that he be, by necessity, the God of all peoples -- the one whom they, in their insane folly, were unaware of, whereas the "chosen people" alone paid him homage.

The first attitude of the Jews, as conquerors of Palestine, toward peoples who worshipped gods other than Jehovah was to hate and exterminate them. Their second attitude -- after Canaanite resistance in Palestine had long ended, and especially after the Jews had lost most of what little international significance they had ever possessed, being reduced to mere subjects of Greek kings, Alexander's successors, and later of Roman emperors -- was to throw into the spiritual pasture of a declining world not only the idea of the futile emptiness of all gods (except their own), but also the false concept of "man," independent of and distinct from peoples; of "man," a nationless citizen of the world (and "created in the image of God") whom Israel, the chosen people, the people of Revelation, had the mission of instructing and guiding to true "happiness." This was the attitude of those Jews, more or less conspicuously daubed with Hellenism, who from the fourth century AD until the Arab conquest in the seventh century formed an increasingly influential proportion of the population in Alexandria, as well as in all capitals of the Hellenistic world, which would later become the Roman world. It is also the attitude of the Jews of our own era -- an attitude which, precisely, makes them a people unlike others, a dangerous people: the "ferment of decomposition" of other peoples.

It is worth tracing the history of this attitude.

Its seeds, as I have suggested, already existed in the fanaticism of the servants and prophets of the "sole" and "living God," from Samuel to the redactors of the Cabala. An important fact that should not be forgotten, if one wants to try to understand it, is that the "sole God" of the Jews is a transcendent god, but not immanent. He is outside of Nature, which he created from nothingness by an act of will, and in his essence is different from it, different not only from its sensible manifestations, but also from everything that could, in a permanent way, underlie them. He is not that Soul of the Universe in which the Greeks and all other Indo-European peoples believed, and in which Brahmanism still sees the supreme Reality. He made the world as an artisan manufactures a marvelous machine: from the outside. And he imposed upon it whatever laws he wanted, laws that could have been different, if he had wanted them different. He gave man dominion over all other creatures. And he "chose" the Jewish people from among other men not for their intrinsic value -- that is clearly specified in the Bible -- but arbitrarily, because of a promise made once and for all to Abraham.

From this metaphysical perspective, it was impossible to consider the gods of other peoples as "aspects" or "expressions" of the sole God, and all the less so since these gods represented, for the most part, natural forces or celestial bodies. It was also impossible to emphasize less the indeterminate variety of men and the irrefutable inequality that has always existed among the various human races and even among people more or less of the same race. "Man," whatever that might be, had to possess, alone of created beings, an immense intrinsic value, since the Creator had formed him "in his own image" and had placed him, for that very reason, above all other living creatures. The Cabala states the matter clearly: "There exists the uncreated Being, who creates: God; the created being, who creates: man; and ... the remainder: the entirety of created beings -- animals, plants, minerals -- which do not create." This is the most absolute anthropocentrism, and a false philosophy from the outset, since it is obvious that "all men" are not creators (far from it!) and that some animals can in fact be creators.

But that is not all. From this new humanist perspective, not only did Jewry maintain its position as the "chosen people" -- the "holy nation," as the Bible says -- destined to bear unique Revelation to the world, but everything that other peoples had produced or thought had value only insofar as it was consistent with this Revelation, or insofar as it could be interpreted in that sense. Unable to deny the enormous Greek contributions to science and philosophy, the Jews of Alexandria, Greek in culture (and sometimes with Greek names, like Aristobulus in the third century BC), did not hesitate to write that all of the most substantial products of Greek thought -- the works of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Aristotle -- were only due, in the final analysis, to the influence of Jewish thought, having their source in Moses and the prophets! Others, such as the famous Philo of Alexandria, whose influence on Christian apologetics was considerable, did not dare deny the obvious originality of Hellenic genius, but only retained, of the ideas they elaborated, those which they could, by altering or even by deforming them completely, bring into "concord" with the Mosaic conception of "God" and the world. Their work is that hybrid product which in the history of ideas bears the name "Judeo-Alexandrian philosophy" -- an ingenious collection of interrelated concepts drawn more or less directly from Plato, though not always in the spirit of Plato, mixed together with old Jewish ideas like the transcendence of the sole God and the creation of man "in his image." All of this was undoubtedly a superfluous scaffolding in the eyes of orthodox Jews, for whom the Mosaic Law was sufficient, but it was a marvelous instrument for seizing spiritual control over the Gentiles, in the service of Jews (orthodox or not) eager to wrest from other peoples the direction of Western (and later, global) thought.

Judeo-Alexandrian philosophy and religion, increasingly permeated with the symbolism of Egypt, Syria, Anatolia and so forth, and professed by the ever more racially debased people of the Hellenistic world, constitute the backdrop against which Christian orthodoxy gradually emerged in the writings of Paul of Tarsus and the first Christian apologists, eventually taking shape during a succession of Church Councils. As Gilbert Murray remarks of the latter: "it is a strange experience ... to study these obscure assemblies, whose members, proletarians of the Levant, superstitious, dominated by charlatans and desperately ignorant, still believed that God can procreate children in the womb of mortal mothers, misunderstood 'Word,' 'Spirit' and 'divine Wisdom' as persons bearing those names, and transformed the notion of the soul's immortality into the 'resurrection of the dead,' and then to think that it was these men who followed the main road, leading to the greatest religion of the Western world."

In this Christianity of the first centuries, preached in Greek (the international language of the Near East) by Jewish and later by Greek missionaries to raceless urban masses -- so inferior, from any point of view, to the free men of the ancient Hellenic polis -- there were undoubtedly more non-Jewish elements than Jewish. What dominated was a common religious subject I dare not call "Greek" but rather "Aegean" or "Mediterranean pre-Hellenic" -- or even Near Eastern pre-Hellenic, for the people of Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia all more or less exemplified it in their primeval cults. It was the myth of the young god cruelly put to death -- Osiris, Adonis, Tammuz, Attis, Dionysus -- whose flesh (wheat) and blood (grape juice) became food and drink for men, and who came back to life in glory every year in Spring. This subject had never ceased to be present in the mysteries of Greece, as much in the classical era as before. Transfigured and "spiritualized" by the allegorical meanings attached to the most primitive rites, it manifested itself in the international "salvation" religions, namely in the cults of Mithra and of Cybele and Attis, Christianity's rivals in the Roman Empire. As Nietzsche saw so clearly, the genius of Paul of Tarsus consisted in "giving a new meaning to the ancient mysteries," taking hold of the old prehistoric myth, revivifying it, interpreting it in such way that, in perpetuity, all those who accepted his interpretation would also accept Jewry's prophetic role and its status as "chosen people," bearer of unique revelation.

Historically next to nothing is known about the person of Jesus of Nazareth, so little about his origins and the first thirty years of his life that some serious authors have even doubted his existence. According to the canonical gospels, he was raised in the Jewish religion. But was he Jewish by blood? Several scriptural passages tend to make one believe that he was not. It has been said, moreover, that the Galileans formed a small island of Indo-European population within Palestine. At any rate, what is important, as the source of the historical turning point that Christianity represents, is that, Jewish or not, Jesus was presented as such, and what is more, was presented as the Jewish people's expected Messiah, by Paul of Tarsus, the true founder of Christianity, and by all the Christian apologists who followed over the centuries. What is important is that he was, thanks to them, integrated into the Jewish tradition, forming the link between it and the old Mediterranean myth of the young vegetation god who died and rose again, a myth the Jews had never accepted. He became the Messiah, acquiring the essential attributes of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Dionysus and all the other dead gods who triumphed over Death, pushing them all into the shade for his own profit, and that of his people, with an intransigence that none of them knew, the typically Jewish intransigence of Paul of Tarsus, his teacher Gamaliel, and all the servants of the "jealous God," Jehovah. Not only was "new meaning" given to the ancient mysteries, but this meaning was proclaimed the sole good and the sole truth, the rites and the myths of pagan antiquity, from the most remote times, having only "prepared" and "prefigured" it, just as ancient philosophy had only sensitized souls to receive the supreme revelation. And this revelation was, for Paul as for the Jews of the Judeo-Alexandrian school before him, and for all the Christian apologists that followed -- Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Ireneus, Origen -- given to the Jews by the God "of all mankind."

Jewish intolerance, until then confined to a single people (and to a despised people, whom no one dreamed of imitating) extended itself, with Christianity and later with Islam -- that reaction against the Hellenisation of Christian theology -- to half the globe. And, moreover, it is that very intolerance that accounts for the success of the religions linked with the tradition of Israel.

I have mentioned the salvation religions, in particular the cults of Mithra and of Cybele and her lover Attis, which flourished in the Roman Empire when Christianity was still young. At first sight, each of them had as much chance of attracting to itself the restless masses for whom Roman order was not sufficient, or was no longer sufficient, and who, increasingly bastardized, felt alienated from any national cult, whatever it might be. Each of them offered to the average individual all that the religion of crucified Jesus promised, and with rites all the more able to assure his adhesion, since they were more barbarous.

In the third century AD, the worship of Mithra -- the old Indo-European solar god, contemplated through the thousand deforming mirrors that the races and traditions of his new worshippers represented -- seemed destined to become dominant ... provided that no decisive factor should intervene in favor of one of his rivals. The god was popular among Roman legionaries and their officers. Emperors had believed it worthwhile to receive initiation into his mysteries, under a shower of the Bull's hot, redemptive blood. A growing number of common people followed the movement. One can say with complete confidence that the world dominated by Rome just barely failed to become Mithraic, instead of Christian, for some twenty centuries. One can say with no less certainty that, though it did not become Mithraic, this failure was due neither to any "superiority" of the Christian doctrine of salvation over the teachings of the priests of Mithra, nor to the absence of sanguinary rites among Christians, but rather to the protection granted to the religion of the Crucified by the emperor Constantine, and not to any other factor. Indeed it was Christianity's very intolerance -- especially, perhaps even exclusively -- that procured the preference of the master of the Roman world. [Image: Mithras Tauroctonos ("Mithra the Bull-Slayer").]

What the emperor wanted above all was to give to this immense world, populated by people of diverse traditions and ethnicities, the most solid unity possible, without which it would be difficult to resist for long the external pressures of the so-called barbarians. Unity of worship was certainly the only kind of unity that he could hope to impose on his empire, on condition that it could be achieved quickly. Among the popular religions of salvation, Mithraism undoubtedly counted the greatest number of faithful. But it did not seem capable of being spread rapidly enough, first and foremost because it did not claim to be the only Way and the only Truth. It risked allowing its rivals to survive, and the unity that Constantine so much desired would therefore not be accomplished -- or would take centuries -- whereas the interest of the empire demanded that it be done within a few decades.

One could say as much of the old cult of Cybele and Attis: its priests did not proclaim, following the example of the Jews, that they alone possessed the truth; on the contrary, they believed, as did all men of Antiquity (except the Jews), that truth has innumerable facets, and that each cult helps its faithful grasp an aspect of it. They, too, would have allowed rival religions to flourish in complete liberty.

Fourth-century Christianity, although penetrated with ideas and symbols borrowed from neo-Platonism, or from the old Aegean mystical substrate, or from still more remote forms of the eternal Tradition, had itself inherited the spirit of intolerance from Judaism. Even its most enlightened apologists, the most richly nurtured in traditional Greek culture -- such as a St. Clement of Alexandria or an Origen who, far from rejecting ancient wisdom, regarded it as a preparation for that of the gospels -- did not put the two wisdoms on the same plane. There was, they believed, "progress" from the former to the latter, and the Jewish "revelation" retained its priority over the distant echo of the sole God's voice which one could detect in the pagan philosophers. As for the great mass of Christians, they dismissed as "abominations" -- or "demons" -- all the gods of the earth, except that One who had been revealed to men of all races through the Old Testament prophets -- Jewish prophets -- and through Jesus and his posthumous disciple, Paul of Tarsus, the latter entirely Jewish, the former regarded by the Church as a Jew, a "son of David," though in fact his true origins are unknown and even his historicity could be questioned.

The profound link that attaches Christianity (and in particular the "Holy Sacrifice of the Mass") to the ancient mysteries ensured its survival down to our own era. And it was, for Paul of Tarsus, a stroke of (political) genius to have given to the oldest myths of the Mediterranean world an interpretation that ensured to his own people an indefinite spiritual domination over that world and over all the peoples it was destined to influence during the centuries that followed. It was, for the emperor Constantine, a stroke of genius (also political), to have chosen to encourage a religion which would, by its rapid diffusion, give to the ethnic chaos that the Roman world then represented the only unity to which it could still aspire. And it was, for the German tribal chief Clodwig, known in French history as Clovis, again a stroke of genius (political, in his case also) to have felt that nothing would better ensure him permanent domination over his rivals, other German leaders, than his own adhesion (and that of his warriors) to Christianity, in a world then already three-quarters Christian, where bishops represented a power to be sought out as allies. Political genius, not religious -- and still less philosophical -- because in each case it aimed at power, personal or national, at material stability, at success, but not at truth in the full sense of the word, that is, accord with the Eternal. It involved mundane human ambitions, not a thirst for knowledge of the Laws of Being, nor a thirst for union with the Essence of all things -- the Soul, at once transcendent and immanent, of the Cosmos.

For if it had been different, there would have been no reason for the religion of the Nazarene to have triumphed for so many centuries: its rivals were its equals. Christianity had only one practical "advantage" over them: its fanaticism, its infantile intolerance inherited from the Jews -- a fanaticism, an intolerance, which, during the early days of the Church, cultivated Romans or Greeks could only find laughable, and which Germans, nurtured in their own beautiful religion, simultaneously cosmic and warlike, could rightly find absurd, but which would give to Christianity a militant character, which it alone possessed, since orthodox Judaism remained -- and would remain -- the faith of a single people.

Christianity could henceforth be combated only by another religion with equally universal pretensions, just as intolerant as it. And it is a fact that, until now, it has lost ground on a significant scale only when confronted by Islam and, in our era, by the false religion which is Communism.

Another extremely important feature of our Nazi education (and of our whole system) is its absolute opposition to the pernicious "feminism" of our epoch -- that product of decadence, of which the effect is nothing less than a still further lowering of the level of the race.

We hate the very idea of "equality" of man and woman, forced upon the Western world more shamelessly than ever since the time of the First World War. For one, it is nonsense. No male and female of the same living species endowed by Nature with complementary abilities for the fulfillment of complementary destinies, can be "equal." They are different, and cannot be anything else but different, however much one might try to give them the same training and make them do the same work. It is also a nefarious idea; for the only way one can, I do not say make man and woman "equal" -- that is impossible -- but force them, willy-nilly, into the same artificial mould, accustom them to the same type of life, is by robbing woman of her femininity and man of his virile qualities, i.e., by spoiling both, and spoiling the race. (In modern English literature, no author has exposed the feminist fallacy more brilliantly than D.H. Lawrence, in nearly all his works.)

I do not deny that there are and always have been isolated instances of women more fitted for manly tasks than for motherhood, or equally capable of both. But such exceptions need no "feminism" in order to win for themselves the special place that Nature, in her love of diversity, has appointed to them. Around about 3,200 before Christ, Azag-Bau, a wine merchant in her youth, managed to raise herself to such prominence as to become the founder of the Fourth Dynasty of Kish (Cambridge Ancient History, 1924 ed., vol. I). In those days, women did not vote -- nor did men, by the way -- any more in Sumeria than elsewhere. Nor did they, in general, compete with men in all or nearly all walks of life, as in modern England and the USA. [Image: Azag-Bau, queen of the Sumerian city of Kish, here divinized as Kubaba.]

Curiously enough, the most fanatical female feminists are, as a rule, those in whom virile qualities are the most lacking. Masterful women, as Nietzsche remarks, are not feminists. Most remote Azag-Bau, or Queen Tiy of Egypt, or Agrippina, or, nearer our times, the little known but most fascinating virile feminine figure of Mongolian history, Ai Yuruk, who spent her life on the saddle and, along with her father Kaidu (son of Kuyuk, son of Ogodai, son of Genghis Khan) "held the grazing lands of mid-Asia for nearly forty years" (Harold Lamb, The March of the Barbarians, 1941 ed., p. 244), all would have burst out laughing at the idea of "women's emancipation" and all the twaddle that goes with it -- in fact, at all the typically democratic institutions that our degenerate world so admires.

But exceptions need no special education; or if they do, they educate themselves. Our National Socialist education for the present and future welfare of a healthy community, was -- and will still be, when the time comes to enforce it once more -- based upon the acceptation of the fact that men and women have entirely different parts to play in national life, and that they need, therefore, an entirely different training; that "the one aim of female education must be with a view to the future mother" (Mein Kampf, vol. II, Chap. II, 1939 ed., p. 460.)

We did not "force" every woman to become a mother. But we gave every healthy woman of pure blood the necessary training and every opportunity to become a useful one, if she cared to. Girls were taught to consider motherhood as a national duty as well as an honor -- not as a burden. They were trained to admire manly virtues in men, and to look upon the perfect warrior as the ideal mate, as is natural. Not every girl, also, could marry every man, even within the Party. The greater the man's qualifications, the greater were the woman's to be. For instance, a girl who wished to become the wife of an SS man -- a great honor -- had not only to prove that she was of unmixed Aryan descent (as every marriageable German was expected to) but also to produce a diploma attesting that she was well­versed in cooking, sewing, housekeeping, the science of child welfare, etc., in one word, that she had been tested and found fit to be an accomplished housewife.  [Image: NS Art Poster.]

This does not mean that, in a National Socialist State, women are not to be taught anything else but domestic sciences and child-welfare. In new Germany, they were given general knowledge also. And Point Twenty of the Party Program, which stresses, among other things, that "the understanding of the spirit of the State (civic knowledge) must be aimed at, through school training, beginning with the first awakening of intelligence," is to be taken into account in the education of girls as well as of boys.

Also, seldom was there, on the part of any State, a more sincere and serious attempt to provide every child with the maximum possibilities of development and advancement. "We demand the education of gifted children of poor parents, whatever their class and occupation, at the expense of the State," said the Führer, again in the same Point of his program. And he kept his word to the letter and gave the German people in that line as in others, even more than he had promised, as his enemies themselves are forced to admit.

However, apart from the fact that this could not be said in a political programme in 1920 -- or even in 1933 -- it could still less be done in a day. Christianity could not be too openly and too bitterly opposed, before the Nazi philosophy of life had become widely accepted as a matter of course; before it had firmly taken root in the subconscious reactions of the German people, if not also of many foreign Aryans, so as to buttress the growth of the new -- or rather of the eternal -- religious conception which naturally goes hand in hand with it. Until then, it would have been premature to suppress the Christian faith radically, however obsolete it might appear to many of us. "A politician," our Führer has said, "must estimate the value of a religion not so much in connection with the faults inherent in it, as in relation to the advantages of a substitute which may be manifestly better. But until some such substitute appears, only fools and criminals will destroy what is there, on the spot." [3]

One had to prepare the ground slowly, by creating anew a thoroughly Aryan soul in the young people, through their whole education; and, at the same time -- for the elder folk -- by giving a precise meaning (as National Socialistic as possible) to the expression "positive Christianity." That is what Alfred Rosenberg has endeavoured to do in his famous book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century. [4] His "positive Christianity" is something indeed very different from the Christianity of any Church, nay, from the Christianity of the Bible, based as it is solely upon Rosenberg's interpretation of what is obviously the least Jewish in the New Testament and upon Rosenberg's own National Socialist philosophy. The Christians themselves soon discovered that it was no Christianity at all. And of all the prominent men of the Party, Alfred Rosenberg is surely the one whom they dislike the most to this day -- although they are probably wrong in doing so, for there were and still are National Socialist thinkers far more radical than he. And he was, moreover, far too much a theoretician to be a real danger to the power of the Churches. [Image: Alfred Rosenberg.]

But it is certain that, under all this talk about "positive Christianity," there was, from the beginning, in every thoughtful National Socialist, the feeling that Germany in particular and the Aryan world at large need a new religious consciousness, entirely different from and, in many ways, in vigorous contrast to the Christian one; nay, that such a consciousness is already lurking in the general discontent, disquiet, and scepticism of the modern Aryan, [5] and that the Nazi Movement must sooner or later help it to awake and to express itself. Although he too speaks of "positive Christianity" and insists on the fact that "nothing is further removed from the intentions of the NSDAP than to attack the Christian religion and its worthy servants"; [6] and although he is very careful to separate the Movement from every endeavour to revive the old Germanic cult of Wotan, [7] Gottfried Feder cannot help mentioning that slowly rising new consciousness, and "the questions, the hopes, and the wishes whether the German people will, one day, find a new form by which to express their knowledge of God and religious life," if only to say that such questions, hopes, etc. are "far beyond the frame even of such a revolutionary programme as the one National Socialism proclaims." [8]

And it is no less certain that, although no attempt was ever made officially to overthrow the power of the Churches and to forbid the teaching of the Christian doctrine, books inspired through and through, not by the desire to revive any particular Cult of old -- that of Wotan or any other God -- but by the love and spirit of eternal Nordic Heathendom, some of which are exceedingly beautiful, were published under the Third Reich, and read, and sympathetically commented upon in Nazi circles; and that this was the first time that the real Heathen soul of the North -- the undying Aryan soul -- fully realised, after nearly fifteen hundred years, that it is alive; more so, that it is immortal, invincible. I have already quoted Heinrich Himmler's short but splendid book, The Voice of the Ancestors, that masterful condensation of our philosophy in thirty-seven pages, which only an out-and-out Pagan could write. It contains, among other things, a bitter criticism of the Christian attitude to life -- meekness, self-abnegation, delectation in the feeling of guilt and misery; "aspiration towards the dust" -- and, in opposition to it, a profession of faith of the proud and of the strong and free: "We do not exhibit our faults to anyone, we Heathens -- least of all to God. We keep quiet about them; and try to make good for our mistakes." [9]

Of the many other books of similar inspiration, I shall recall only two far less well-known than Alfred Rosenberg's famous Mythus but, I must say, far more radical, and deserving undoubtedly more, both the pious hatred that so many Christians of all persuasions waste upon that work and the wholehearted admiration and gratitude of all real modern Heathens: one is Ernst Bergmann's Twenty-Five Theses of the German Religion, [10] and the other, Johann von Leers' History on a Racial Basis. [11] There, the incompatibility of the National Socialist view of life and the Christian is shown as clearly, once for all, as any uncompromising devotee of either of the two philosophies could desire:

A people that has returned to its blood and soil, and that has realised the danger of international Jewry, can no longer tolerate a religion which makes the Scriptures of the Jews the basis of its Gospel. Germany cannot be rebuilt on this lie. We must base ourselves on the Holy Scriptures which are clearly written in German hearts. Our cry is: "Away with Rome and Jerusalem! Back to our native German faith in present-day form! What is sacred in our home, what is eternal in our people, what is divine, is what we want to build." [12]

I do not remember any writer having more strongly and decisively pointed out the contrast between the everlasting Aryan spirit and that of Christianity and, especially, having more clearly stressed the nature of the Aryan religion of the future. There is no question of reviving the Wotan cult, or any other national form of worship from Antiquity, as it was then. The wheel of evolution never turns backwards. The religion of resurrected Germany can only be that which would have been flourishing today, as the natural product of evolution of the old Nordic worship, had not "that Frankish murderer Karl," as Professor Bergmann calls Charlemagne, destroyed the free expression of German faith and forced Christianity upon the Germanic race by fire and sword, in the eighth and ninth centuries; or rather, had not Rome herself fallen prey to what her early emperors called "the new superstition," introduced by the Jews. And what can be said of the new German religion is no less true of the desirable new religion of every regenerate Aryan people, organised under a real national State.

The only international religion -- if such a thing is to exist at all -- should be the extremely broad and simple Religion of Life, which contains and dominates all national cults and clashes with none (provided they be true cults of the people, and not priestly distortions of such); the spontaneous worship of warmth and light -- of the Life energy -- which is not the natural religion of man alone, but that of all living creatures, to the extent of their consciousness. In fact, all the national religions should help to bring men to that supreme worship of the Godhead in Life; for nowhere can Divinity be collectively experienced better than in the consciousness of race and soil. And no religion definitely stamped with local characteristics, geographical or racial, should ever become international. When such a one does -- as Christianity did; as Islam did -- the result is the cultural enslavement of many races to the spirit of that one whence the religion sprang, or through which it first grew to prominence. An Indian Muslim, to the extent he is thoroughly Muslim, is outside the pale of Indian civilisation. [15] And, to the extent he accepts Christianity, a European accepts the bondage of Jewish thought. And a Northern European, to the extent he accepts Christianity, and especially Catholicism, accepts, in addition to that, the bondage of Rome. Germany, the first Aryan nation that has rebelled on a grand scale against the Jewish yoke -- cultural, no less than economical -- is also the first Nordic nation to have shaken off, partly at least, in the sixteenth century, the less foreign (while Aryan [16]) but still foreign bondage of Rome. Nothing shows better the spirit of the religious revolution -- of the religious liberation -- slowly preparing itself under the influence of National Socialism, than the outcry of Ernst Bergmann which I have quoted above: "Away with Rome and Jerusalem! Back to our native German faith in its present-day form!"

The same inspiration -- the same quest of the eternal Aryan faith under its present-day Germanic form -- fills Johann von Leers' History on a Racial Basis which I mentioned. There too one finds, applied to the domain of religion and culture, that passionate assertion of the rights of the Aryan North which constitutes, perhaps, the most characteristic feature of National Socialism on the political plane. For a political awakening of the type that Adolf Hitler provoked, stirring a whole nation to its depth, cannot go without a parallel awakening in all fields of life, especially in that of culture and religion -- of thought, generally speaking. There too, one finds -- based this time upon the extensive researches of Hermann Wirth in ancient lore -- a protest against the idea, current in all the Judeo-Christian world, that the old Aryan North was something "primitive" and "barbarous"; and a vision of the future in which Germany in particular and the Aryan race at large will rise again to unprecedented greatness, having re-discovered their glorious, eternal collective Self. The passage of Johann von Leers' book which comes a few pages after his tribute to Hitler as "the greatest regenerator of the people for thousands of years" [17] is worth quoting in extenso:

After a period of decadence and race-obliteration we are now coming to a period of purification and development which will decide a new epoch in the history of the world. If we look back on the thousands of years behind us, we find that we have arrived again near the great and eternal order experienced by our forefathers. World history does not go forward in a straight line, but moves in curves. From the summit of the original Nordic culture in the Stone Age, we have passed through the deep valleys of centuries of decadence, only to rise once more to a new height. This height will not be lesser than the one once abandoned, but greater, and that, not only in the external goods of life.... We did not pass through the great spiritual death of the capitalistic period in order to be extinguished. We suffered it in order to rise again under the Sign that never yet failed us, the Cross of the great Stone Age, the ancient and most sacred Swastika. [18]

I have previously recalled the Führer's words of wisdom concerning the growth of a new religion, better adapted than Christianity to the requirements of the people, namely, that "until such a new faith does appear, only fools and criminals will hurry to destroy what is there, on the spot." [19]

In 1924 -- when he wrote Mein Kampf -- he obviously felt that the time was not yet ripe for such a revolution.

From what one reads in the famous Goebbels Diaries, published by our enemies in 1948 (and therefore, no one knows to what extent genuine) he would appear to have been in perfect agreement with the Reich Propaganda Minister's radical opposition to the Churches at the same time as with his cautious handling of the religious question during the war. As long as the war was on, it was, no doubt, not the time to promote such changes as would, perhaps, make many people realise too abruptly that they were fighting for the establishment of something which, maybe, they did not want. But, when victory would be won, then, many things that looked impossible would be made possible. According to the Diaries, the Führer was even planning, "after the war," to encourage his people, gradually, to alter their diet, with a view to doing away with the standing horror of the slaughter-houses [20] -- one of the most laudable projects ever seriously considered in the history of the West, [21] which, if realised, would have at once put Germany far ahead of all other nations, raising her conception of morality much above the standard reached by Christian civilisation. He was certainly also planning the gradual formation of a religious outlook worthy of the New Order that he was bringing into being. Already, the most devotedly radical among the active Party members, the corps d'Élite; the SS men -- were expected to find in the National Socialist Weltanschauung alone all the elements of their inner life, without having anything to do with the Christian Churches and their philosophy. And if one recalls, not the Führer's public statements, but some of the most striking private statements attributed to him, one feels convinced that he was aware of the inadequacy of Christianity as the religion of a healthy, self-confident, proud, and masterful people no less than any of the boldest of the National Socialist thinkers, nay, no less than Heinrich Himmler himself and those whom he had in mind when he repeatedly wrote, in his brilliant booklet, "Wir Heiden" -- "We Heathens."

I know that the sayings attributed to a man, either by an admiring devotee in a spirit of praise or by an enemy, in a spirit of hatred, are, more often than not, of doubtful authenticity. Yet, when, while quoted in order to praise the one alleged to have uttered them, they in reality condemn him, or when, while quoted as "awful" utterances, with the intention of harming him, they in reality constitute praise; and when, moreover, they happen to be too beautiful, or too true, or too intelligent for the reporter to have invented them wholesale, then one can, I believe, accept them as authentic or most probably so.

Of the many books written purposely to throw discredit upon our Führer, I have only read one through and through; but that one -- the work of the traitor Rauschning, translated into English under the title Hitler Speaks -- I read not merely with interest, but with elation, for it is (much against the intention of its author) one of the finest tributes paid to the Saviour of the Aryan race. Had I come from some out-of-the-way jungle and had I never even heard of the Führer before, that book alone would have made me his follower -- his disciple -- without the slightest reservation. Should I characterise the author of such excellent propaganda as a scoundrel? Or is he not just a perfect fool: a fellow who joined the National Socialist Movement when he had no business to do so, and who recoiled in fright as soon as he began to realise how fundamentally opposed his aspirations were to ours? His aspirations were, apparently, those of a mediocre "bourgeois." After he turned against us, he did not actually lie; he did not need to. He picked out, in the Führer's statements, those that shocked him the most -- and that were likely to shock also people who resemble him. And he wrote Hitler Speaks, for the consumption of all the mediocre "bourgeois" of the world. As there are millions of them, and as the world they represent was soon to wage war on the Führer, the book was a commercial success at the same time as an "ideological" one [22] -- the sort of success the author had wanted: it stirred the indignation of all manner of "decent" Untermenschen against National Socialism. But one day (if it survives) a regenerate Aryandom will look upon it as the unwilling tribute of an enemy to the greatest European of all ages.

And Hitler's words about Christianity, reported by Rauschning in the fourth chapter of his book, would be admired -- not criticised -- in an Aryan world endowed with a consistently National Socialist consciousness, for they are in keeping with our spirit -- and ring too true not to be authentic. "Leave the hair-splitting to others," said the Führer to Hermann Rauschning before the latter turned renegade:

Whether it is the Old Testament or the New, or simply the sayings of Jesus according to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, it is all the same Jewish swindle. It will not make us free. A German Church, a German Christianity, is a distortion. One is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both. You can throw the epileptic Paul out of Christianity -- others have done so before us. You can make Christ into a noble human being, and deny his divinity and his rôle as a saviour. People have been doing it for centuries. I believe there are such Christians today in England and America -- Unitarians, they call themselves, or something like that. It is no use. You cannot get rid of the mentality behind it. We do not want people to keep one eye on life in the hereafter. We need free men, who feel and know that God is in themselves. [23]

That Aryan faith -- that worship of health, of strength, of sunshine, and of manly virtues; that cult of race and soil -- is the Nordic expression of the universal Religion of Life. It is -- I hope -- the future religion of Europe and of a part at least of Asia (and, naturally, of all other lands where the Aryan dominates). One day, those millions will remember the Man who, first -- in the 1920s -- gave Germany the divine impetus destined to bring about that unparalleled resurrection; the Man whom now the ungrateful world hates and slanders: our Hitler.

Imprisoned here for the love of him, my greatest joy lies in the glorious hope that those reborn Aryans -- those perfect men and women of the future Golden Age -- will, one day, render him divine honours.

Roughly fourteen hundred years before Christ, at the time Egypt was at the height of her power, King Akhnaton ruled over that great country for a few years.

He was a thinker; he was an artist; he was a saint -- the world's first rationalist, and the oldest Prince of Peace. Through the visible disk of the Sun -- Aton -- he worshipped "the Energy within the Disk" -- the ultimate Reality which men of all creeds still seek, knowingly or unknowingly, under a thousand names and through a thousand paths. And he styled himself as the Son of that unseen, everlasting Source of all life. "Thou art in my heart," he said in one of his hymns, "and no one knoweth Thee save I, Thy Son." And his words, long forgotten, have come down to us, recorded upon the walls of a nobleman's tomb -- these amazing words in what is perhaps the earliest poem which can be ascribed with certainty to any particular author: "I, Thy Son...." [Image: Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (Akhnaton), ob. ca. 1336 BC.]

Akhnaton is one of the very few men who ever put forth such a bold claim. The aim of this book is to show that, in doing so, he was no less justified than any other teacher of the truth, however impressive may appear the success of the latter contrasted with his defeat; however widespread may be his fame, contrasted with the total oblivion in which has lain the Egyptian king for the last thirty-three hundred years.

Who is a "son of God"?

There are men who vehemently deny the honour of that title to any person whosoever, in consistency with the fundamental idea of a transcendent God, above and outside the Universe and distinct from all that is within it. Others recognise no "Son" but the founder of their own creed, to whom they attribute a miraculous birth as the proof of a divine origin.

In harmony with an entirely different conception of God, we believe that any man who realises to the full the true relation of his finite individuality to the immanent, impersonal Essence of all things can call himself the Son of God -- at once human and divine -- for the relation of which he is then aware is one of substantial identity with that supreme Essence. We also believe that, properly speaking, the word "God" has no meaning except to those who have realised this. Such men are rare, always and everywhere. But they alone stand to justify the existence of the human species.

The aim of this book is to show that Akhnaton was one of those few men, and the earliest known, perhaps, among those whose life can be dated.

The failure of his teaching to survive him as an established religion can be regarded as one of the tragedies of history. We can explain it; we can even try to redeem it. But the bitter fact remains, for nothing can undo the past.

Other great souls have had disciples to preach their message, martyrs to bear testimony to their greatness in torture and death, missionaries to carry their name and domination to the limits of the earth; they have had commentators, admirers, detractors -- philosophers, poets, artists -- to keep their memory alive century after century. But Akhnaton's fate was different. He had no sooner died than the fervour of his followers seems to have been spent out. Within a few years, his name was anathematised, his new city pulled down stone by stone, his remains profaned and his memory systematically destroyed, without, apparently, a single cry of protest on the part of any of those eighty thousand or more who had, in their zeal, left Thebes with him, thirteen years before. Ever since then, until a part of his foreign correspondence and fragments of his hymns were brought to light, some fifty years ago, there was not a man on earth who knew of his existence. And to this very day, notwithstanding the genuine admiration of a learned few for his rational religion, there are hardly any people in the world whose daily life he fills with his presence.

Why?

Men who are in the habit of judging in haste will at once infer that his teaching cannot have been as perfect as those that have become the nucleus of living faiths.

But success is not the criterion by which one should decide on the value of a religion. In the diffusion of any doctrine far and wide there are too many factors at work for one to be able to ascribe its conquests to the sole amount of truth it contains. Moreover, it is only when that amount of truth appears to be of immediate and tangible use that it appeals to the herd of men sufficiently to help the propagation of the creed. The finer side of every religion is precisely that which escapes the attention and leaves unmoved the sensitiveness of its average followers. Therefore the number of people who profess a certain faith, and the extent of the geographical area in which it is recognised, prove nothing.

The quality of the nations that officially adhere to it does not stand any better as a guarantee of its value. For it is man who makes religion; not religion that makes man. Through some historic accident -- migration, conquest, or the whims of some powerful chief -- a sublime teaching can become and remain the collective creed of a pack of gross barbarians. They will no doubt misunderstand it; but they will, none the less, hold sacred the whole mythology and symbolism that tradition has attached to it. And reversely one has seen -- and one sees still -- cultured, progressive, rationally-trained nations adhere to childish dogmas invented or accepted by their uncritical ancestors. True, they do not fail to produce subtle theologians to interpret the nonsense in terms of hidden wisdom. But nonsense it remains.

A religion should be judged in itself, independently of its real or apparent influence upon any society, apart from its success or failure among men. And its founder -- when it has a founder -- is the only man whose life and personality one should consider when speaking of it. Judged in that manner, from the sole standpoint of its inner beauty, Akhnaton's simple and rational religion, of which hardly anybody knows, can be compared advantageously with recognised faiths professed by millions of men. And its promoter, with perhaps not more than one or two living disciples, can nevertheless be ranked among the divine souls that honoured this earth -- among those whom we call "incarnations" or "Sons of God."

We can now try to explain why the worship of Aton failed to endure as an organised collective cult. From the little that can be gathered of it through the existing fragments of Akhnaton's hymns and through the history of his life, one can assert, to say the least, that it was far in advance of the time in which it appeared.

The abyss that separates a man of genius from his contemporaries does not necessarily awe them into accepting his leadership. If it be the result of his superiority in technical knowledge or in skill, it will make him powerful -- a hero, a worker of wonders, a giant of war or of industry, whatever be the case. His counsels will soon be followed, and his inventions or discoveries soon admired and put to ever-increasing application because of the obvious advantages that they immediately procure. But if it be the abyss that separates a perfect man from the average human cattle, a rational mind and an enlightened soul from the superstitious crowd of believers; an all-loving, all-understanding heart, from the narrowly selfish majority of men, then, it only helps to render the great one lonely and powerless. The greater the difference between himself and his people, the lesser the immediate success of the man of moral, philosophical or religious genius. His words, his actions meet with no understanding; his lofty example has no imitators; the creation he strives to bring forth remains a dream. To be technically in advance of one's time is a source of strength, an assurance of worldly achievements; to be morally or philosophically ahead of it, is not.

The towering superiority of Akhnaton over his fellow-men has no parallel in the mechanical sphere. "Were it invented to satisfy our modern scientific conceptions," his religion "could not be logically improved upon at the present day," writes Sir Flinders Petrie. Could we imagine a man of the fourteenth century B.C. in possession of the secret of our modern aeroplanes, we would then realise what would have been the mechanical equivalent of Akhnaton's religious revolution. The very idea of it shatters us by its enormity. But, while our imaginary inventor could have safely conquered the world with the help of a single aircraft, the earliest rationalist failed to convince a minimum number of disciples capable of carrying on his work. His teaching "suitable for our own times," met little response in his. Those who could easily have gathered it from his lips and transmitted it to posterity in all its details, were not moved to do so. And we, who would have done so, were not yet born. That is the main reason why nothing was left of it after the thirteen glorious years during which it flourished.

There are other reasons for its extinction.

One of them is that the cult of Aton was too rational to appeal to tlie average people of any time. Another is that Akhnaton himself was too good -- and perhaps too farsighted, also -- to establish it by means of violence.

Three elements seem to have contributed to the propagation of every widespread religion: a mythology; miracles; and a more or less definite doctrine concerning the hereafter. (By "mythology," I mean the true or fictitious story of all natural or supernatural beings connected with the creed:men, angels, beasts, saints, demons, gods, etc.) I do not know of a religion which has stood up to now the test of time without one or two, at least, of these three elements. And most of the great international creeds owe much to all three.

But the cult of Aton seems to have been devoid of all three from the start. That is perhaps why some modern authors have called it a philosophy rather than a religion. But it did possess that stamp of devotion that distinguishes a religion from a philosophy. It was not purely a philosophy, whatever one may say. It even comprised a daily ritual, with hymns and music, incense and flowers. It was a religion, but one which offered its followers, at the same time, rational thought, the warmth of devotion, and a stately display of sensuous beauty.

But there were no marvellous tales connected with it. The one theme that could have become the centre of a whole literature, had the religion lasted a little longer, was the life of its Founder. And that was too simple, too human, too obviously natural to impress the coarse imagination of the commoners.

Akhnaton, in his love of truth, seems to have deliberately stripped himself of all the mystery that had helped his fathers to appear as gods in the eyes of their prostrate people. He was of unconventional manners and of kindly approach. His divinity was not the showy privilege of a Sun-born king, or of a prophet, asserted by external signs, but rather the innermost perfection of a man whose heart, will and understanding were in complete harmony with the eternal laws of life; of a man who had fulfilled man's divine purpose as naturally as others drift away from it. He felt therefore no need of ascertaining it by a fastidious pomp, any more than by strange renunciations. There was no excess in him; nothing that the vulgar eye could look upon as "striking," nothing that popular enthusiasm could catch hold of and magnify. He wrought no extraordinary deeds, as other teachers are said to have done. The only wonder of which he spoke was the everlasting miracle of order and of fertility -- the rhythm of day and night, the growth of a bird or of a baby. [Image: Neferteti, Akhnaton's wife, who may have been a princess of the Mitanni, an Indo-European people located east of the upper Euphrates.]

And he brought with him, apparently, no new ideas about death, and put no stress upon the ones that were common in Egypt in his time. From the beautiful prayer inlaid upon his coffin, and probably composed by himself, one infers that he believed in the eternal life of the soul. But that is all. No allusion to the nature of that life beyond death, and especially not a single reference to sin, reward and punishment can be found in at least what has survived of the young king's hymns, or in the inscriptions in the tombs of the nobles who boast of having "hearkened to his teaching." Not that the religion of Aton was in any way devoid of a moral character, as some of its modern judges have supposed -- a gratuitous assumption, contradicted by the very motto of Akhnaton's life: "Living in Truth." But its morality concerned what one was rather than what one did. It was the inherent character of a harmonious life rather than the outcome of any catalogue of "dos" and "don'ts." As all natural things are, it was foreign to the idea of promises and threats. And that was a reason for it not to appeal to a number of followers. Most men do not want true morality any more than true religion. They want mythologies and miracles to wonder at, and police regulations to abide by; illusions in this world, and punishments and rewards in eternity. In one word, they want eternity made small and exciting to suit the measure of average life. They do not want life simply stripped of its shallowness and made divine -- "life in truth." And as Akhnaton had nothing else but that to offer them, his teaching left them indifferent. It did not spread beyond a narrow circle of courtiers.

The one means by which he could have secured its success as an international creed was violence.

The religion was, indeed, far in advance of its time and of many future ages. And it lacked the elements that generally make a creed popular. Men would, no doubt, have misinterpreted it, misused it, and degraded it within a few years. But it would have spread. Force of money and force of arms can make any people accept any faith, even one that does not suit them. And Akhnaton was both the most powerful and the richest king of his days. We are convinced that, had he chosen to use his strength to impose his new cult upon the world, he would probably have largely succeeded.

But he felt too deeply and he knew too much to sacrifice the spirit of his doctrine to an illusory triumph. Far from using violence to propagate his religion, he did not even persecute those who tried to destroy it. As a result, it is they who enjoyed the thrill of triumph -- for the time being. It is they who imposed their will upon the world. They wanted Akhnaton to be cursed, and so he was; they wanted him to be forgotten, and so he was; it was their will that never, never again the world should hear his name, and for over three millenniums the world did not.

But his beautiful, rational teaching, however incompletely known, remains unstained by superstition, unmarred by compromise, unconnected with any of the crimes committed, in course of time, in the name of many a successful religion; pure, whole, as its Founder conceived it -- a thing of beauty for all ages to come.

But if there are psychological reasons for which Akhnaton's teaching had little chances of becoming one of the wide-spread creeds of the world, it could have remained, at least, the religion of an elite. It could have; and it most probably would have, in different surroundings. One of its main features is the diversity of its appeal. It satisfies reason; it fulfils our highest aspirations towards the beautiful; it implies love, not of man alone, but of all creatures. In the midst of general superstition and strife, the better men could have sought in it an ideal to live up to. A pious tradition could have kept the name of Akhnaton sacred to the few who are worthy to know of him.

But such a tradition was never started, or at least never permitted to develop. Egypt, in the fourteenth century B.C., was already too deeply engrossed in formalism to respond to the forgotten message of living life. And the countries around her were either too barbaric or too decadent to understand it. Strangled at home by priestly fanaticism and by popular indifference, the new religion was submerged, abroad, amidst a crowd of conflicting practical faiths that promised men tangible advantages in this world as well as in the next. Persecuted as an organised cult, it soon ceased to exist even as a secret worship. To keep it alive, it would have needed an atmosphere of earnestness and of toleration, a truly religious atmosphere as it was difficult to find anywhere on earth for many centuries, except perhaps among a minority of Hindus.

We may remark here that none of the lofty doctrines of antiquity which originated before Christianity have survived, west of India. And, unexpected as this may seem, India might well be the only land that would have given the youthful worshipper of Radiant Energy a place worthy of him in his time, had she heard of his teaching; the only land, also, who probably would have continued to venerate him to this very day as one of the incarnations of the Supreme Soul.

The aim of the present book is to tell the world how perfect Akhnaton was.

We believe that no teaching would meet, better than his, the exigencies of the critical modern mind. Yet, it is not our intention to try to revive it on a broad scale, as the basis of a public cult. We do not think it desirable to attempt what its Founder himself does not seem to have aimed at -- he who, though fully conscious of its universal value, did not try to explain it to the many. With all their pride in progress, our times are no less foolish and no less barbaric than his. We now use electric fans, while in Thebes they did not; that is about all the difference. The resuscitated religion of Cosmic Energy would soon offer, in the hands of any crowd, as ludicrous a sight as that of the great "living" faiths of to-day. We do not wish to rob the other world-teachers of a few millions of insignificant admirers in order to give a noisy following to the great man who is dear to us. We know too well, through daily experience, what the quality of that following would be.

But we do wish to make the name and teaching of Akhnaton popular among the best of our contemporaries -- among those who really represent the higher tendencies of our sceptical and at the same time mystical age; among those to whom dogmas no longer appeal, whom wonders no longer impress, whom religion without a background of positive knowledge, and science without the feeling of the seriousness of life, leave equally unsatisfied. It is among such people that we earnestly wish to revive the spirit of him who, a thousand years before Socrates and nearly nine hundred years before the Buddha, united the boldest rationalistic views to the deep intuitive certitude of the oneness of God, the oneness of Life, and the brotherhood of all creatures.

Modern scholars have already recognised his undeniable greatness. The earliest and most eminent of all those specialists who have laboured to revive his memory among the learned, Sir W. Flinders Petrie, has paid him a magnificent tribute. But what we want also is that Akhnaton's name be held sacred by all those who, without being scholars, can think in terms of truth and feel in terms of beauty and who are capable of modelling their lives on an immortal example of living perfection.

More so, if few be likely to live up to the spirit of his teaching, let all at least know that there has been such a man as he, once, long long ago. Let them remain superstitious, vulgar and violent, if they will; but let them know that there has been a man in whose life religion and reason walked hand in hand; a man whose very being was harmony, balance, supreme elegance, and who lost an empire for the sake of truth. Few meditate upon the beauty of the Sun; yet all behold it. Above man's unchanging mediocrity He shines in glory. In a similar manner, worshipped by a few, but familiar to all after thirty-three hundred years of silence, we want the name of Akhnaton, Son of the Sun, young for ever, to live once more in the consciousness of our old world.

This will no doubt appear as a stupendous dream.

The aim of this book is to make others feel that the dream will become true the moment they sincerely realise its beauty.

Pessimistic Pantheism, rooted in the doctrine of birth and rebirth -- which seems to be the essence of Hindu thought -- is definitely an otherworldly philosophy. So are the man-centered creeds that sprang, in the West, from Judaism (creeds based upon the belief in transcendent Godhead cannot but be so). Western Free Thought, in all its different forms, has, as we pointed out, retained Christian ethics while doing away with Christian metaphysics. It is not other-worldly at all, but it has never preached or even conceived a love more comprehensive than that of humanity. And every one of its aspects, from Descartes to Karl Marx, is as man-centered as any philosophy can be.

On the other hand, the immemorial social and ethical wisdom of the Chinese, centered around the sacred continuity and expansion of the human family -- that one, real, everlasting religion of China, more solidly established in the subconscious mind of her millions than either the popular indigenous nature cults or any of the great imported faiths -- is, as far as we know, eminently man-centered. Its outlook is human-social, not cosmic. It is the rational religion of humanity, if ever there was any. But no more than a religion of humanity.

And as for that aspect of Indian religion which seems to have escaped the general pessimistic trend of Hindu thought while accepting the idea of the oneness of life, or which flourished before that general trend of pessimism had appeared; as for that outlook expressed, for instance, in those old Vedic hymns in which the conquering Aryans asked their Gods for numerous male descendants, for herds of cows, and for the strength to destroy their enemies in battle, it can surely not be accused of having an otherworldly tint. But it has equally very little to do with universal love, as good King Asoka understood it (if we take the beautiful archaic scriptures as they are written). It is the product of a healthy, warrior-like, animal-sacrificing race, much akin, in spirit, to the Achaeans of the Homeric epics -- one of the most intelligent and aesthetically-minded among the sturdy races of Antiquity, no doubt, but surely not of a race endowed with the softer virtues of the Indians of the "Buddhist period." And it seems fair to notice that something has survived of that outlook in India at nearly all epochs, more or less.

In other words, there have been, and there still are philosophies "faithful to this earth" and centered around something narrower than mankind (around a nation, for instance, or a class, or a family). There are and there have been philosophies equally devoid of any human welfare. There are and there have been religions and philosophies with a background of otherworldly faith or speculation, of which some are centered around man and others around life in general.

But we know of no historic civilization based upon a joyous earthly wisdom, implying active love towards all living creatures; upon a religion of this world and of this life in flesh and blood, which would be neither man-centered nor pessimistic, nor lacking truly universal kindness in the Buddhistic sense of the word. We only know of a very few individuals who have put forward such a philosophy, professed such a religion -- consciously or unconsciously -- from time to time; a few individuals of whom the most ancient and the most illustrious seems to have been Akhnaton, King of Egypt, and Founder of the Religion of the Disk in the early fourteenth century B.C. -- perhaps the one man who ever dreamed of building a world civilization upon the basis of a joyous wisdom like that to which we have just alluded.

The basis of his "Teaching of Life" was extremely simple. It was, first of all, the enthusiastic admiration of an artist for the beauty of our Parent Star. It was also the assertion that from this visible shining Father of ours -- the Sun -- comes all life and power on earth and that, if we need to worship anything, the best is to worship Him, or rather, His "ka" or soul: the energetic Principle at the root of all existence. And it seems to have been scientifically unshakable, for it implied that idea of the equivalence of heat and light and of all different aspects of energy, no less than -- ultimately -- of energy and of that which appears to our senses as matter; the equivalence of the "Heat-and-light-within-the-Disk" (Akhnaton's One, everlasting, impersonal God) and of the fiery Sun-disk itself. The worship of the Sun-disk meant, in reality, the worship of immanent, cosmic Energy.

No code of ethics was explicitly attached to the Religion of the Disk, as far as we know. But Akhnaton's creed, while fully accepting the fact of God-ordained diversity, and upholding the separation of races on religious grounds*, certainly did imply the broadest and most impartial love, not merely towards man, irrespective of race or nationality, but also towards all living creatures, irrespective of species. It looked upon them all as children and co-worshippers of the one universal "Father-and-Mother" -- the Sun; and in the two surviving hymns from which can be gathered our only direct knowledge of its spirit, the marvel of birth and growth, the joy of being alive in the beautiful sunlit world, and the religious rapture of creatures all adoring the Sun, each one in its way, are emphasized, both in the case of men, of quadrupeds, of birds, of fishes, and even of plants, in the same breath. [Image: Akhnaton and family offering to Aton.]

[*"Thou hast put every man in his place, Thou hast made them different in shape, in speech and in color; As a divider, Thou hast divided the foreign people (from one another)"; from Akhnaton's Longer Hymn to the Sun -- Savitri's note.]

And though, unfortunately, nothing had remained of that happy cult of light and tangible beauty, one can say with hardly any risk of making a mistake that, had it endured, it would have been perhaps the one joyous creed of worldwide scope, making it impossible not to claim for animals (and plants) a right to our full active love in everyday life. Whatever might have been Akhnaton's personal views regarding death -- views which he appears never to have preached -- it is certain from his hymns that he valued the beauty of this ever-changing world, and more than all the beauty of any living organism, masterly sample of what divine heat-and-Light can produce under favorable conditions. Individual life, finite and brief as it surely is, was precious in his eyes because it is beautiful. And without any speculation about the intimate nature of life, or about its alleged "higher purpose"; without any theory about the soul of creatures and its ultimate destiny, a man filled with the young king's love would be bound to be disturbed at the idea of any creature's suffering-especially of its physical suffering. He would be bound to interfere in favor of the hungry street dog, of the homeless kitten, of the overloaded horse, ass, camel or buffalo he meets on his way, and to do for each of them all that a sincere Christian would do for a hungry man, a homeless child, and ill-treated and overworked human slave.

The man-centered creeds, based upon the assumption of man's special value without, apparently, any thought for other living creatures, tell us to love all men as ourselves. The existing creeds of universal love, centered around the idea of "liberation" of creatures from the prison of finite individuality, can be interpreted in both ways; they lead only a few men to actually universal charity (extended to all living beings) and remain, more often than not, for the others, an excuse for general indifference to suffering. The creed based solely upon the full consciousness of the beauty of daylight and of the sweetness of life as such, apart from any metaphysics; upon the filial worship of the subtle Essence of Life -- Energy -- through the resplendent Star, origin and regulator of our planetary system, that creed, we say, logically implies active sympathy -- a warm sort of fellow feeling -- for all that lives. If, indeed, one realizes to the full the brotherhood of all creatures in the father-and-motherhood of the life-giving Sun, and if one is happy to be alive and to see His beauty, then one cannot, it seems, but do one's utmost to help all bodies endowed with life to live and enjoy their span of years; one cannot but contribute one's best to give them, in every daily circumstance, whatever is necessary for them to be, and to remain, what the intimate finality of their nature intended them to be: beautiful living hymns of joy to the splendor of Him Whose radiance and movements ordain all life on earth.

It is this joyous wisdom that we profess to follow, to the extent it is compatible with the natural struggle for survival, the laws of which rule Life at all levels. It may not be possible -- it may not even be essential -- that all men should adhere to it out of love and reverence for the great historic figure who first preached it and lived up to it. But its spirit seems to be the only spirit worthy of a future society, better than ours; of a society in which increasing intellectual agnosticism -- already apparent among the scientifically-minded people of today -- would exclude hasty metaphysical assertions, but in which increasing consideration for the right of all sufferers (especially of all the exploited) would logically bring man to include all sentient creatures within the range of his active sympathy.

Secondly, it was a rational and natural religion -- not a dogmatic one. It was neither a creed nor a code of human laws. It did not pretend to reveal the Unknowable, or to regulate in details the behaviour of man, or to offer means to escape the visible world and its links. It simply invited us to draw our religious inspiration from the beauty of things as they are: to worship life, in feeling and in deed; or, to put it as an outstanding nineteenth-century thinker [Nietzsche] has done, to be "true to the earth." Based as it was, not upon any mythology, nor any metaphysics, but upon a broad intuition of scientific truth, its appeal would have increased with the progress of accurate knowledge -- instead of decreasing, like that of many a better-known religion.

Finally -- and this was perhaps its most original feature -- it was, from the very start, a Teaching that exalted individual perfection (life in truth) as the supreme goal, and at the same time a State-religion. Not only the religion of a State, but a religion for the State -- for any and every State -- no less than for the individual. It was a Teacliing in which (if we may judge by the example of its Founder) the same idea of "truth" that was to inspire personal behaviour through and through was also to determine the attitude of a monarch towards the friends and foes of his realm, to guide his decisions regarding peace and war; in one word, to dominate international relations. It implied, not the separation of private and public life, but their identity -- their subjection to the same rational and aesthetic principles; their common source of inspiration; their common goal.

Such was the message of Akhnaton, the only great religious Teacher, west of India, who was at the same time a king; and perhaps the only undoubtedly historic originator of a religion on earth, who, being a king, did not renounce kingship but tried to tackle the problems of State -- particularly the problem of war -- in the light of religious truth.

The thirteen years of Akhnaton's personal rule were but a minute in history. But that minute marks a level of perfection hardly ever approached in subsequent years (save perhaps in India, during the latter part of the reign of Asoka, or under Harshavardhana, or again, after many centuries, in the latter part of the reign of Akbar).

From the far-gone days of Tutankhamen down to the time in which we live, the history of the Western world -- that is to say, roughly, of the world west of India -- presents an ever-broadening gap between the recognised religions and rational thought; a more and more complete divorce, also, between the same recognised religions and life, especially public life.

When, under the pressure of his masters, the priests of Amon, Tutankhaton, renamed Tutankhamen, signed the decree reinstalling the national gods of Egypt in their former glory, he opened an era of intellectual conflict and moral unrest which has not yet to-day come to an end. Before Akhnaton, the world -- the Western world at least -- had worshipped national gods, and had been satisfied. After him, it continued to worship national gods, but was no longer fully content with them. 

For a minute, a new light had shone; great truths -- the universality of the supreme Essence; the oneness of all life; the unity of religious and rational thought -- had been proclaimed in words, in song and in deeds, by one of those men who appear once in history. The man had been cursed, and it was henceforth a crime even to utter his name. He was soon forgotten. But there was no way to suppress the fact that he had come. The old order of blissful ignorance was gone for ever. Against its will, the world dimly remembered the light that the priests had sought to put out; and age after age, inspired men of various lands set out in search of the lost treasure; some caught a glimpse of it, but none were able to regain it in its integrity. The Western world is still seeking it -- in vain.

To make our thought clear to all, let us follow the evolution of the West from the overthrow of Akhnaton's work to the present day. By "West" we mean Europe, Europeanised America (and Australia), and the countries that stand at the background of European civilisation -- that is to say, Greece and a great part of the Middle East. 

With the earliest "physiologoi" of lonia -- eight hundred years after Akhnaton -- rational thought made its second appearance in the West. And this time it did not wither away after the death of one man, but found its mouthpieces in many. Generations of thinkers whose ambition was intellectual knowledge -- the logical deduction of ideas and the rational explanation of facts -- succeeded one another. Among them were such men as Pythagoras and Plato, who united the light of mystic insight to the clear knowledge of mathematics, and who transcended the narrow religious conceptions of their times. 

But the Greek world could never transcend them; and Socrates died "for not believing in the gods in whom the city believed" -- the national gods -- though there had been no more faithful citizen than he. Those gods, adorned as they were with all the graces that Hellenic imagination could give them, were jealous and revengeful in their way. They would have been out of date (and harmless) had men accepted, a thousand years before, the worship of the One Essence of all things, with all it implied. But they had not; and the conflict between the better individuals and the religion of the State had begun. Rational thought was left to thrive; but not so the broad religious outlook that was linked with it. Theoretically -- intellectually -- any universal God (First Principle, supreme Idea of Goodness, or whatever it be) was acceptable. But the conception of Something to be loved more than the State and worshipped before the national gods was alien to Greece, to Rome, and in general to all the city-minded people of the Mediterranean. Seen from our modern angle of vision, there was a strange disparity between the high intellectual standard of the Hellenes of classical times -- those creators of scientific reasoning -- and their all-too-human local gods, in no way different from those of the other nations of the Near East.

There appears, also, to have been in their outlook a certain lack of tenderness. One can find, it is true, in the Greek tragedies, magnificent passages exalting such feeling as filial piety or fraternal love. But the other love -- that between man and woman -- they seem to have conceived as little more more than a mainly physical affair, a "sickness," as Phaedra says in Euripides' Hippolytus. And their relation to living nature, outside man, seems to have been confined to an aesthetic interest. Bulls being led to the sacrifice and horses carrying their youthful caviliers in the Panathenaic procession are admirably sculptured on the frieze of the Parthenon. But apart from some really touching verses in Homer (such as those which refer to Ulysses' faithful old dog, who recognises him after twenty years' absence) there is hardly an instance, in classical Greek literature, in which a friendly feeling for animals is expressed -- not to speak of attributing to them yearnings akin to ours.

Christianity is the next great wave in the history of Western consciousness. And one can hardly conceive a sharper contrast than that which exists between the clear Hellenic genius and the spirit of the creed destined to overrun Hellas, Europe, and finally America and Australia. It was originally -- as preached by Paul of Tarsus, the Apostle of the Gentiles -- an irrational and unaesthetic creed, fed on miracles, bent on asceticism, strongly stressing the power of evil, ashamed of the body and afraid of life. But its God was a universal God and a God of love. Not as universal, it is true, as might have been expected from a supreme Being proposed to the adoration of a rationally-trained people; nor as impartially loving as a follower of the long-forgotten Religion of the Disk would have imagined his God to be. It was a God who, in fact, never shook off entirely some of the crude attributes which he possessed when worshipped by the Jews as their tribal deity; a God who, of all living creatures, gave man alone an immortal soul, infinitely precious in his eyes, for he loved man in the same childishly partial way as old Jehovah loved the Jewish nation; a democratic God who hated the well-to-do, the high-born, and also those who put their confidence in human intellect instead of submitting to the authority of his Gospel; who hid his truth "from the wise and the learned, but revealed it to the children."

Still, with all its shortcomings, the mere fact of Christianity's being a creed to be preached "to all nations," in the name of a God who was the Father of all men, was an immense, advantage over the older popular religions. The element of love and mercy that the new worship undoubtedly contained -- however poor it might be, compared, for instance, to that truly universal love preached in India by Buddhism and Jainism -- was sufficient to bring it, in one way at least,  nearer to the lost religious ideal of the West even than the different philosophies of the Hellenes (if we except from them Pythagorism and Neo-Pythagorism). 

And it had over them all -- and over the antique Teaching of Akhnaton himself -- the practical advantage of appealing both to the intellectually uncritical, to the emotionally unbalanced, and to the socially oppressed or neglected -- barbarians, to women, to slaves -- that is to say, to the majority of mankind. That advantage, combined with the genuine appeal of a gospel of love and with the imperial patronage of Constantine, determined its final triumph. From the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, it slowly but spread, as one knows, to the whole of Europe and to all the lands that European civilisation has conquered.

But the Western world could not definitely forget centuries of rational thought. Nor could it renounce for ever that avowed ideal of visible beauty, of strength, of cleanliness, of healthy earthly life -- that had been connected with the various religions of the ancients. As far as it was possible -- and many more things are possible than one can imagine -- it soon re-installed Greek metaphysics and polytheism under a new form in the very midst of Christianity. And later on, the Greek love of song and pleasure, and the deification of the human body, in the plastic arts as well as in life, prevailed in the spiritual capital of Christendom and throughout most Christian countries. The Western man gradually came to realise what an amount of inconsistency that mixture of Hellenic and Hebrew thought (and remnants of popular myths, much older than Greece and Moses) which composed his traditional religion. He then grew increasingly sceptical, and Christianity remained for him little more than a poetic but obsolete mythology, in some ways less attractive than that of Greece and Rome. The tardy reaction of the bold critical spirit of classical Hellas against judeo-scholastic authority had come; and modern Free Thought -- the triumph of Euclid over Moses -- had made its way.

Eight hundred years before the Renaissance, and twelve hundred years before Darwin, a very different, but equally important reaction had taken place in the eastern and most ancient portion of the Western world. And that had given birth to Islam, which one could roughly describe, we believe, without any serious misinterpretation, as Christianity stripped of its acquired Pagan elements -- especially of its Greek elements -- and brought back to the rigorous purity of Semitic monotheism.

The fact that Islam appeared and thrived long before the rebirth of critical thought (and of classical taste) in Europe, and that its whole political history seems to run quite apart from that of most European countries, must not deceive us. If we consider the Western world as a whole (Europe and its background), and not only the small portion of it which one generally has in mind when speaking of "the West," then we have to include in it the countries of the Bible -- Syria, Egypt, Arabia, Iraq -- no less than Greece; for they are the geographical and cultural background of Christianity, the religion of Europe for centuries. And if this be so, we have, in this outsketch of the history of culture, to take account of Islam as one of the most important religious upheavals of the West, however paradoxical this coupling of words may seem. 

Like Free Thought -- its latter European parallel -- Islam (at least, as we understand it; we may be mistaken) was a broad movement brought about by the incapacity of Christianity to fully satisfy the exigencies of the human mind. But the weaknesses of the Christian faith that the two reactions were destined to make up for were not the same ones. Free Thought was essentially an intellectual reaction against the dogmatism of the Christian Church and the puerility of the stories (of whatever origin) that go to make up the Christian mythology. Its growth was naturally slow, for man takes time to question the value of his cherished beliefs on intellectual grounds. Only in the nineteenth century did it begin to affect the bulk of the people, and still to-day its influence remains confined to those countries in which elementary scientific education is granted to many individuals.

Islam, on the contrary, was a definitely religious movement -- a wild outcry against every form of polytheism under whatever disguise; a reassertion of the continuity of revealed monotheism through Abraham, Moses, and Jesus of Nazareth; a reaffirmation of the brotherhood of all men, that basic truth taught already by Christ to the Jews, but less and less remembered by the Christians. It appeared more rapidly and more suddenly, for the evils against which it rose were more shocking to the simple sincere man in search of the One God, and therefore easier to detect than logical fallacies or historical inaccuracies -- even than physical impossibilities. It was easier -- not perhaps, recently, for us, but then, for a man of strong beliefs, fed on Jewish tradition -- to detect idolatry under every form of image-worship than to feel, for instance, how ridiculous is such a tale as that of Joshua causing the Sun to stand still.

But the two reactions -- the early medieval and the modern, the religious and the intellectual, the one of Semitic origin and the other started by thinkers mostly of Aryan blood and speech -- failed to give the world west of India the feeling that a goal had been reached. They failed even to give it, for more than a century or two, the impression that it was on its way to reach a state of intellectual and emotional equilibrium preferable to that attained in a relatively recent past.

True, for many generations, the Islamic portion of what we have broadly called "the West" seems to have enjoyed, through all the vicissitudes of its political history, the mental peace that a few definite, simple, overwhelming religious convictions bring to people in whose life religion holds the first place. True, the problem of religion and State -- that the Free-thinkers of Europe never had the opportunity (or the power) to tackle in a practical manner -- was for a short time solved, to some extent, under the early Khalifs. But rationalism, strengthened by the fact of modern science, even when it has not altogether shaken the basis of their faith, seems to be influencing more and more many an educated Muslim of the present day in a sense similar to that in which it influenced so many Christians, from the sixteenth century onwards. The result of that influence upon the most liberal of the contemporary Turks, Persians, Egyptians, and even some of the Muslims of India, is obvious. On the other hand, the solution of the problem of religion and State as put forward by the Khalifs, in the early days of Islam, is too closely linked with a particular religious faith to be extended, at the present day, to all countries. It rests upon a somewhat strictly theocratic conception of the State, and upon a rigid line of demarcation between all men who have accepted the revelation of the Prophet -- the faithful -- and the others. And, rightly or wrongly, the modern world seems evolving in the sense of the separation of the State from religious questions of purely dogmatic interest.

Now, if we turn to the latter reaction against the shortcomings of Christianity -- namely, Free Thought -- we find that it has left the people who have matured under its influence in a state of moral unrest far greater than that of those Mussulmans whom their inherited medieval outlook on life no longer satisfies.

Thanks to the undeniable influence of Free Thought, the conclusions of intellectual investigation are not to-day subordinate to Christian theology as they once were. When a scientific hypothesis concerning the texture of atoms or the origin of man is put forward, it matters little whether it tallies or not with the narrative of the Genesis. Even good Christians are ready to accept it, provided it explains facts. Moral questions, too, have been nearly completely freed from the overshadowing idea of a supernatural imperative. Right behaviour is valued because it is thought to be right -- no longer because it is the behaviour ordained by God.

But that is about all the difference between the modern "rationalist" outlook and the Christian outlook before the Renaissance. Theoretically, it may seem considerable. In life, it is hardly felt. Important as it is, the fact that, in the field of pure knowledge, thought is now independent from clerical or scriptural authority, plays little part in the formation of the spirit of our times. Thoughts, opinions, intellectual conclusions are, indeed, constructive only to the extent they determine our reactions in the field of behaviour. And there we fail to see how the old authorities have ceased to hold their sway. Except for sexual morality -- in regard to which the modern man has become more and more lenient because it suits his fancy, but has not yet, however, outdone the magnificent toleration of many a cardinal of the sixteenth century -- the behaviour styled as "right" is precisely that which is in accordance with Christian standards; that which approaches the charitable, democratic, and somewhat narrow ideal of the Christian Gospel; that which obeys the Commandment: "Love thy neighbour as thyself."

The builders of the Parthenon had not gone even as far as that, it is true. But modern rationalism has never gone further than that. It may have, to some extent, taught the present day Westerner to think in terms of Cosmic Realities. But has not yet taught him to feel in terms of cosmic values. It has denounced Christian metaphysics as obsolete; but it still clings to the no less obsolete man-centred conception of right and wrong. It no longer maintains that man alone has an immortal soul, and it has forsaken the naive idea that world and all it contains was purposely created for man. But it seems to see no harm in man's exploiting, destroying, even torturing for his own ends the beautiful innocent creatures, animals and plants, nourished by the same sunshine as himself in the womb of the same mother earth. For all practical purposes, it seems to consider them no more worthy of attention than if they were, indeed, created for him -- by that very God who caused the fig-tree in the Gospel to wither in order to teach a lesson to Christ's disciples, and who allowed the evil spirits to enter the Gadarene swine in order to relieve a human being from their grip. 

There are, of course, free-thinkers who have personally gone beyond the limits of Christian love and embraced all life in their sympathy. Many a broad-hearted Mohammedan saint, also (such as Abu-Hurairah, the "Father-of-cats"), has shared the same conception of truly universal brotherhood. But these individual cases cannot blind us to the fact that neither of the two great movements that sprang up, so as to say, to supersede Christianity, has actually emphasised that fundamental truth of the unity of all life (with its practical implications) which the Christian Scriptures had omitted to express. There are, no doubt, remarkable Christians -- for instance, Saint Francis of Assisi -- who have grasped that truth and lived up to it. Still, in the omission of the Gospel to put the slightest stress upon it lies, in our eyes at least, the main weakness of Christianity compared with the great living religions of the East -- Vedantism, Buddhism, Jainism -- and also, nearer its birthplace, with the lost Religion of the Disk. The only two large-scale attempts ever made west of India to restore to men the consciousness of that all-important truth were Pythagorism (and, later on, Neo-Pythagorism) in Antiquity, and nowadays Theosophy -- both movements that owe much to direct or indirect Indian influence. The interest shown for the latter by many of our educated contemporaries points out how much ordinary Free Thought -- a scientific conception of the world, plus a merely Christian-like ideal of love and charity -- is insufficient to meet the moral needs of the most sensitive among us.

There is more to say. Modern Free Thought has completely dissociated, in the minds of most educated people, the idea of positive knowledge -- of science -- from that of worship. Not that a man of science cannot be, at the same time, a man of faith -- he often is -- but he considers the two domains as separate from each other. Their objects, he thinks, cannot be interchanged any more than their aims. One does not know God as one knows the data of sensuous experience or the logical conclusions of an induction; and however much one may admire the supremely beautiful picture of visible reality that modern science gives us, one cannot worship the objects of scientific investigation -- the forms of energy, the ninety-two elements, or such.

And the tragedy is that, once a rational picture of the world has imposed itself upon our mind, the usual objects of faith appear more and more as poetic fictions, as hidden allegories, or as deified moral entities. We do not want to do away with them altogether; yet we cannot help regretting the absence, in them, of that character of intellectual certitude that makes us cling so strongly to science. We feel more and more that moral certitude is not enough to justify our wholehearted adoration of any supreme Principle; in other words, that religion without a solid scientific background is insufficient.

On the other hand, there are moments when we regret the lost capacity of enjoying the blessings of faith with the simplicity of a child -- without the slightest mental reservation, without strain, without thought. We wonder, at times, if the men who built the Gothic cathedrals were not, after all, happier and better men than our contemporaries; if the tremendous inspiration they drew from childish legends was not worth all our barren "rational" beliefs. We would like to experience, in the exaltation of the "realities" which we value, the same religious fervour which they used to feel in the worship of a God who was perhaps an illusion. But that seems impossible. Men have tried it and failed. The cult of the Goddess Reason put forward by the dreamers of the French Revolution, and the cult of Humanity, which Auguste Comte wished to popularise, could never make the Western man forget the long-loved sweetness of his Christian festivals, interwoven with all the associations of childhood. How could one even think of replacing the tradition of Christmas and Easter by such dry stuff as that? Science, without the advantages of religion, is no more able to satisfy us than religion without a basis of scientific certitude. Prominent as some of them may be, the men who nowadays remain content with Free Thought are already out of date. The twentieth century is growing more and more aware of its craving for some all-embracing truth, intellectual and spiritual, in the light of which the revelations of experience and faith, the dictates of reason and of intuition -- of science and religion -- would find their place as partial aspects of a harmoniously organic whole. The evolution that one can follow in the outlook of such a man as Aldous Huxley is most remarkable as a sign of the times.

Along with the divorce of religion from science, we must note the divorce of religion from private and public life. As Aldous Huxley timely points out in one of his recent books [Ends and Means], the saints proposed to our veneration as paragons of godliness are rarely intellectual geniuses; and the intellectual geniuses -- scientists, philosophers, statesmen -- and the artists, poets, writers who have won an immortal name are hardly ever equally remarkable as embodiments of the virtues which religion teaches us to value. So much so that we have ceased to expect extraordinary intelligence in a saint, or extraordinary goodness in a genius according to the world, and least of all in a political genius. For nowhere is the separation of religion from life more prominent (and more shocking) than in the domain of international relations.

The much-quoted injunction of Christ to "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's" illustrates -- as it is generally interpreted -- a division of duties which has survived the belief in dogmatic Christianity. Whether he be a Christian or a Free Thinker -- or a Mussulman, in one of the modern Islamic States that have undergone the influence of European ideas -- the Western man, as a man, is guided, in life, by certain principles different from, and sometimes in contradiction with those that lie at the basis of his outlook as a citizen. Caesar and God are more often than not in conflict with each other. And when this happens -- when there is no way of serving both -- then the Western man generally serves Caesar first, and offers God, in compensation, some scraps of private piety. But more and more numerous are growing those who denounce this duality of ideals as a sinister product of deceitful casuistry.

In the ancient world, as long as religion was a national concern, and connected with practices rather than with beliefs, its actual separation from life was impossible. In one way, that may seem better than what we see now. And the bold ideologists who, in recent years, in Europe, have endeavoured to wipe out altogether the spirit if not the name of Christianity and to raise the Nation -- based on the precise physiological idea of race -- as the object of man's ultimate devotion, those ideologists, we say, may seem wiser and more honest than their humanitarian antagonists. If religion indeed, does not, as it is, respond any longer to the needs of life, it is better to change it. It is far better to openly brush aside two thousand years of errors (if errors they be) and to come back to the national gods of old, and to be true to them to the bitter end, than to keep on rendering divine honours to the Man who said: "Love thy neighbour," and to wage a war of extermination upon men of rival nations whom one has not even the excuse of considering as "infidels" or "heretics."

There is no hypocrisy in the votaries of the religion of Race, as in those of the religion of man. The only weakness one could point out in their creed -- if the latter be artificially separated from the Religion of Life, of which it is, fundamentally, and remains, in the minds of its best exponents, the true expression -- is that it has been transcended, and that therefore it is difficult to go back to it, even if one wishes to. The religion of man itself has been transcended long before its birth. The truth is that both are too narrow, too passionately one-sided, too ignorant of great realities that surpass their scope, to satisfy any longer men who think rationally and who feel the beauty and the seriousness of life, unless they be integrated into the Religion of Life.

To frankly acknowledge a moral ideal still narrower than that of Christianity or humanitarian Free Thought will not ultimately serve the purpose of filling the gap between life and religion. The higher aspirations of the spirit cannot entirely be suppressed. The gap will soon reappear -- this time between the religion of race, nation or class, and the life of the better individuals; a sad result. That gap will always exist, under some form or another, as long as a religion of integral truth, transcending man, and of truly universal love is not acknowledged, in theory and in practice, by individuals and groups of individuals.

Moreover, the mystic of race (or of nation, or of any entity with a narrower denotation than that of "man") is, nay, under its narrowest and least enlightened aspect, unassailable, unless and until the ideology of man, inherited by Free Thought from Christianity, is once and for ever pushed into the background in favour of an ideology of life. For if, indeed, one is to believe that living Nature, with all its loveliness, is made for man to use for his profit, then why should not one admit, with equal consistency, that the bulk of mankind is made for the few superior races, classes or even individuals to exploit at will?

Ultimately, one has to go to the limit, and acknowledge cosmic values as the essence of religion, if religion is to have any universal meaning at all. And if it is to be something more than an individual ideal; if it is no longer to remain separated from the life of States; if truth, in one word, is ever to govern international relations as well as personal dealings, then one has to strive to put power into the hands of an intellectual and moral elite -- to come back to Plato's idea of wise men managing public affairs, makers of laws and rulers of men, uncontested guides of reverentially obedient nations.

Another, and perhaps a more expressive word for Hinduism would be: Indian Paganism.

The Christian missionaries call "Pagans" all those who are neither Christians, nor Mohammadans, nor Jews, that is to say, all those whose religious tradition has no connexion with the Bible and tradition of the Jews. We accept the word, because it is a convenient one. It points out some sort of similarity between all non-creedal religions of the past as well as of the present day.

Once, practically all the world was "Pagan." Now that half its people have been converted either to Christianity or to Islam, the number of Pagans is less. That is no proof of the lesser value of different Paganisms, compared to the great creedal religions. It is surely an advantage, to be numerous; but it is no virtue. And therefore the number of its followers has nothing to do with the value of a cult.

We have remarked that among the so-called Christians, there are more and more people who are no total believers in the Bible at all, but "free thinkers." And we have said that free thought in all matters, including religion, is a feature of Hinduism. This does not mean that we consider all the free thinkers of the World as Hindus.

Philosophically, Hinduism is an attitude of mind, and an outlook on life. But it is not only that. It is a number of cults, among which one may choose. And, whatever cult it may be, it is a cult, one of the immemorial Pagan cults, surviving in the midst of the modern world. The Hindus are one of the few modern civilised people who are openly Pagans.

The Japanese, with their official Shintoic ritual, are another of these people. And they being one of the leading nations of the modern world, their example is priceless. They show magnificently that, even if it be indispensable to adopt any new mechanical inventions, in order to compete with other nations, and live, yet it is not necessary to adopt the religion and the civilisation of the inventors, wholesale. Aeroplanes and war-tanks, and modern banking business on a broad scale, can perfectly go together with the existence of a Solar dynasty of king-Gods, in whose Godhood everyone actually believes, as well as an Egyptian did, six thousand years ago. When India, freed from internal weakness and foreign yoke, will become again a world power, then she will, still better perhaps than Japan, stand as a witness of such sort of truth as this.

In the meantime, she remains the last great country of Aryan civilisation, and, to a great extent, of Aryan tongue and race, where a living and beautiful Paganism is the religion both of the masses and of the intelligentsia.
 

We like this word "Paganism," applied to the Hindu cults. It is sweet to the ears of more than one of the fallen Aryans of Europe, accustomed to refer to "Pagan Greece," and to "Pagan beauty" as the most perfect expressions of their own genius in the past. That is also why we use the word, preferably to any other.

India has perhaps never enjoyed yet, even in the days of her glory, the world-wide popular fame she enjoys nowadays. This world-wide fame is greatly due to the repeated assertion of Hindu "spirituality," and to the philosophy of non-violence, preached by Mahatma Gandhi.

Very few people have grasped the spirit of Christ as well as Mahatma Gandhi, and several other prominent Hindus of the present day and of the last century. And among the few Europeans who have been sincerely attracted by Hinduism, practically all have sought, in it, if not a doctrine, at least a moral creed, or, better say a moral attitude of love and kindness -- the very same thing they could have found in Christianity, if only they took the trouble of separating the simple and luminous personality of Christ from all theological and heretical entanglements. In other words it is, generally, the dream of a better Christianity that brings fair people from across the seas to "serve mankind" in the Ramakrishna Mission, or to express their pure devotional love as inmates of some Vaishnava Math.

The Hindus of the present day like such admirers. Many of them also like the idea that there is more true Christian spirit among outstanding Hindus, than among most Christians. There is nothing to say about these likings, if not that they are, to a great extent, a subtle expression of unfortunate India's deep-rooted inferiority complex.

Pure spirituality (realisation of one's soul) naturally transcends creed, as well as ceremonies. So a realised Hindu will look like a realised Christian. That is true. It is true also that, in such a complex set of teachings as those contained in the innumerable Hindu books (including Jain, Buddhist, Vaishnava etc., scriptures), there are many elements which are to be found also in Christianity. Others will say that there are a great deal of Hindu elements (or Buddhist elements) which have creeped into Christianity, and there are theories to prove this influence of Indian thought. And one may safely assume that the failure of Christian preaching among the educated and fully conscious Hindus, is mainly due to the existence of these elements. A religion of love is not a new thing to India, as it must have been to the people of ancient Europe.

But all this does not lessen the fact that the Hindu religion, both as a set of philosophies and as a cult, has also the characteristics which Aryan Paganism had, before it was overcome by Christianity in the West. We find here, like in ancient Greece, contrary philosophical tendencies, with a very few main common ideas between them (such as the idea of transmigration of souls, for instance, and one or two others). And, what is more, we find in Hindu cult, in Hindu life, that essential thing, which is the only one worth living for: Beauty.

Visible beauty leads to the invisible, says Plato.

Nowadays, when people speak of India, they seem to speak too much of its invisible beauty, and to ignore the visible. "Spirituality, spirituality...." They all talk of it, those who know something about it, and those who know nothing. It is the fashion. One does not look like a friend of India, if one does not put stress on that point. Nor does one feel like a true Indian patriot.

But nobody puts stress upon the physical beauty of the Hindu people. Yet they are Hinduism, they are India, more than all the philosophies put together; and the first qualification, for a nation as well as for an individual, is the beauty of its body. No mean soul can reside in a really beautiful body. The body expresses, reflects the interior self. And a beautiful race is a noble race, with high possibilities. People speak of Hindu culture as of an abstract entity, as if it could have grown anywhere and everywhere. They forget to say that those who live it, as a nation, are amongst the most beautiful races of mankind. There is, no doubt, a mysterious identity between that culture and them. [Image: Aishwarya Rai, Indian film star, former Miss World.]

To a great number of Hindus, the Hindu ritual has a great symbolical value. To the large majority of the Hindus, it is practically everything. Yet, nobody puts stress upon the visible beauty of the Hindu daily "puja," of the Hindu festivities, of the Hindu ceremonies. Many educated Hindus seem to think it below their dignity to praise, in their religion, what appeals to one's eyes and ears, what is "exterior."

But it is not possible to deny the attraction of beauty.

We have mentioned the burning regret of the past, among some Western Aryans, who seem to have a retrospective consciousness of what their race was, and an idea of what perhaps it could have been still, had their ancestors been faithful to the old national cults of Europe. This nostalgia for the past is not a new thing in the Christian West and Near East. It begins sixteen hundred years ago, with the desperate attempt of the Emperor Julian to restore the religion and society of the "Ancient World" to their former splendour, and it increases, in the heart of the few, as the "Ancient World," seen from a greater distance of time, seems more and more lovable.

This Ancient World had its shortcomings. It had its vices also, which brought its down-fall. But its wise men were the pride of human intelligence. And above all, it is lovable for what Europe and the Near East have never known since: the open cult of Visible Beauty.

This cult is to be found nowhere, nowadays, except in to last sunny home: Hindu India.

It is said that, one day, Julian tried to organise a procession through the streets of Constantinople, in honour of Dionysos, the God of impetuous Joy, and overflowing Life.

But it was already too late, and the attempt proved a failure. The procession was but a ridiculous show, and when returning, at evening, after it was finished, Julian was as sad as if his eyes had embraced the whole gloomy future of the Mediterranean World. It is said that he was sitting in the gardens of his palace, in front of old blocks of marble, half-hidden with ivy, when a faithful friend, guessing the cause of his sadness, asked him: "What else did you expect? These are the days of our death. What was your aim, in ordering this procession? What did you want?" The Emperor looked at him silently; then, pulling aside the ivy, he pointed out to him what was behind: a master-piece of some artist of the ancient days: a procession in honour of Dionysos, carved out in white marble; a smile of the World's youth; a thing of beauty: "This is what I wanted."

This was at the time when the great Samudra Gupta was ruling over India.

Oh! if only Julian could have seen what a display of beauty, in daily life and in festivities, and in processions in honour of Gods and Goddesses much akin to his, was going on, over there! If only he could have seen that Aryan Paganism would live and flourish forever, in that luxuriant land; that India would preserve the World's youth from age to age, through an endless future!

Then, certainly, he would have blessed the great country, with tears of joy.

Just go to Madura or to Rameswaram, nowadays, and see a real Hindu procession there, with elephants bearing immemorial signs of sandal and vermillion upon their foreheads, and draperies of silk and gold flowing over their backs, down to the ground; with flutes and drums, and torches reflecting their light upon the half-naked bronze bodies, as beautiful as living Greek statues; with chariots of flowers, slowly going around the sacred tank. Just see the pious crowd (hundreds and thousands of pilgrims, gathered from all parts of India), throwing flowers, as the chariots pass. And above all this, above the calm waters, the beautiful crowd, the mighty pillars, the huge pyramidal towers, shining in the moon-light ... above all this, behold the one, simple, phosphorescent sky.

Just watch an ordinary scene of Hindu life: a line of young women walking into a temple, on a festival day. Draped in bright coloured sarees, sparkling with jewels, one by one they come, the graceful daughters of India, with flowers in their hair, with flowers and offerings in their hands. In the background: thatched huts, among the high coconut trees and green rice-fields all around -- the beauty of the Indian countryside.

One by one they come ... like the Athenian maidens of old, whose image we see upon the prize of the Parthenon. The lover of Beauty, Julian, the Sun-worshipper, if only he could have seen them, would have said, beholding the reality of his own dream: "This is what I wanted!"

But it is not through the forms and colours of popular Hindu cult alone that Hinduism is a religion of beauty. Its conception of God, creative and destructive, is the expression of a broad artistic outlook on life and on the universe.

In creedal religions, the centre of interest is man; the background, man's short history, man's misery, man's craving for happiness; the scope, man's salvation. God, man's Father, has a particular, and somewhat partial tenderness towards this privileged creature of His.

In intelligent Hinduism, this anthropomorphic view has no place. The centre of interest is this eternal universe of Existence, in which man is only a detail. God is the inner Force, the deeper Self, the Essence of that Existence -- the "Greatest Soul." (Paramatma).

No personal likings and dislikings, in Him. No special favour to any of the creatures that appear and pass away, in the course of time. Nothing but an endless succession of infinite states, of infinite expressions of the unknown Thing, which is the reality of all things; a dancing succession of birth and death and rebirth, over and over again, which is never the same, and yet, is always the same; a play, (lila) which has no beginning nor end, nor purpose, but which is beautiful, whatever may be the temporary fate of any particular species, in its course.

The fate of all species, of all individuals, is to grow slowly more and more conscious of the beauty of the Play, and, at end, to experience their substantial identity with the Force which is playing -- playing with its own Self. Nobody knows what this Force is, except those who have realised it in themselves. But we all adore It, and bow down to It. We do not bow down to It because we know It, and because It is God. It is because we bow down to It, that we call It God. And we bow down to It and worship It, in its millions and millions of expressions (those which destroy us, as well as those which seem to help us), because, in its millions and millions of expressions, It is beautiful.

Creation is only half the Play of Existence. Men thus generally worship only one side of God. But the Hindus praise Him all round, for the beauty of His Play. They praise Him in Destruction, as well as in Creation. They praise His Energy (Shakti) in Mother Kali, in Durga, in Jagaddatri, in Chinnamasta, continuously destroying and recreating Her own Self; in all the ten "Mahavidyas," who are one and the same. They praise Him in the Dancing King (Nataraj), whose feet are over-treading life, and destroying it in a furious rhythm, ... while His dispassionnate face, expressing Knowledge, is as calm as the smiling sea. [Image: Shiva, god of cosmic destruction and renewal, as Nataraj.]

Creation and destruction are one, to the eyes who can see beauty.

And the greatest praise to India is this: not only are her people beautiful; not only are her daily life and cult beautiful; but, in the midst of the utilitarian, humanitarian, dogmatic world of the present day, she keeps on proclaiming the outstanding value of Beauty for the sake of Beauty, through her very conception of Godhead, of religion and of life.

If I had to choose a motto for myself, I would take this one -- "pure, dure, sûre," [pure, hard, certain] -- in other words: unalterable. I would express by this the ideal of the Strong, that which nothing kills, nothing corrupts, nothing forces to change; those on whom one can count, because their life is order and fidelity, in accord with the eternal. 

Oh, you who exalt the fight without end, be it without hope, attach yourself to what is eternal! That alone is; the remainder is only shadow and smoke. No individual, man or beast, no group of individuals, no people as such deserves your concern for them; each, on the other hand, deserves, as a reflection of the eternal, that you devote yourself to it to the limit of your capacities. And individual beings and natural groups reflect the eternal more or less. They reflect it insofar as they approach, on all levels, the archetype of their species, insofar as they represent it as living things. He who represents only himself, be he one of those who make and unmake history and whose name resounds from afar, is only shadow and smoke.

You who exalt the image of the solitary rock delivered to all the assaults of the Ocean, lashed by the winds, battered by the waves, struck by lightning at the height of the tempest, unceasingly covered by the furious foam, but always standing, millennium after millennium -- you who would like to identify with your brothers in faith, with this tangible symbol of the Strong, in order to feel, "That is us! That is me!," free yourself from two deadly superstitions: the search for "happiness" and concern for "humanity" -- or take care never to fall into them, if the gods grant you the privilege of being exempt in your youth.

Happiness -- which, for them, consists in unopposed natural development, to be neither hungry, nor thirsty, nor cold, nor too hot; to be able to freely live the life for which they are made, and sometimes, for some of them, also to be loved -- would have to be granted to living things which do not have the Word, the father of thought. It is compensation that they are due. Use all your power to ensure it to them. Help the animal and the tree -- and defend them against the selfish and mean-spirited man. Give an armful of grass to the horse or the weary donkey, a bucket of water to the buffalo dying of thirst, harnessed since day-break with its heavy cart under the burning sky of the tropics; a friendly caress to the beast of burden, whatever it is, whose master treats it like a thing; nourish the dog or the abandoned cat that wanders in the uncaring city never having had a master; set a saucer of milk at the edge of the path and caress it with your hand if it allows you. Carry the green branch, torn off and thrown in the dust, into your house so that it is not trampled, and put it in a vase of water; it too is alive and is entitled to your solicitude. It has nothing more than silent life. That, at least, you can help it to enjoy. To live, that is its way -- the way of all the beings of flesh, to which the Word was not given -- of being in harmony with the eternal. And to live, for all these creatures, is happiness.

But those who have the Word, father of thought, and among them the Strong especially, have something better to do than pursue "happiness." Their supreme task consists in finding this harmony, this accord with the eternal, of which the Word seems initially to have deprived them; to hold their place in the universal dance of life with all the enrichment, all the knowledge, that the Word can bring to them or help them to acquire; to live, like those who do not speak, according to the holy laws that govern the existence of the races, but, this time, knowing it and wanting it. The pleasure or the displeasure, the happiness or the discontent of the individual does not count. Well-being -- beyond the minimum that is necessary for each to fulfill his task -- does not count. Only the task counts: the quest for the essential, the eternal, through life and through thought.

Attach yourself to the essential -- to the eternal. And never worry about happiness -- neither your own nor that of other men; but accomplish your task, and help the others achieve theirs, provided that it does not thwart your own.

He who has the Word, father of thought, and who, far from putting it in service of the essential, wastes it in the search for personal satisfactions; he who has technology, fruit of thought, and who makes use of it especially to increase his well-being and that of other men, taking that for the main task, is unworthy of his privileges. He is not worthy of the beings of beauty and silence, the animal, the tree -- he who himself follows their path. He who uses the powers that the Word and thought give him to inflict death and especially suffering on the beautiful beings that do not speak, in view of his own well-being or that of other men, he who uses the privileges of man against living nature sins against the universal Mother -- against Life -- and the Order that desires "noblesse oblige." He is not Strong; he is not an aristocrat in the deep sense of the word, but petty, an egoist and a coward, an object of disgust in the eyes of the natural élite.

All society, all "civilization" that proceeds from the same aspiration to human well-being above all, to well-being or human "happiness" at any price, is marked by the seal of the Powers of Decadence, enemies of the cosmic order of the play of forces without end. It is a civilization of the Dark Age. If you are obliged to suffer it, suffer it by unceasingly opposing it, denouncing it, combating it every minute of your life. Make it your glory to hasten its end -- at least to cooperate with all your might with the natural action of the forces leading to its end. For it is accursed. It is organized ugliness and meanness.

Rid yourself not only of the superstition of "happiness," if it ever allured you, but also that of man. Protect yourself from the attitude, as vain as it is stupid, that consists in trying "to love all men" simply because they are men. And if this attitude was never yours, if, from childhood, you were impermeable to the propaganda of the devotees of "humanity," give thanks to the immortal Gods to whom you owe this innate wisdom. Nothing prohibits to you, certainly, from giving a hand to a man who needs help, even the most worthless. The Strong are generous. But in that case, they would be good to him as living flesh, not as a man. And if it is a question of choosing between him and a creature deprived of the Word but closer to the archetype of its species than he is to that of the ideal man, i.e., the superior man, give your preference and your solicitude to this creature: it is more an artwork of the eternal artist.

For "man," who is esteemed so highly, is not a reality but a construction of the mind starting from living elements of a disconcerting variety. No doubt all "species" are a construction of the mind: their names correspond to general ideas. But there is an enormous difference: the living realities that are the individuals of each species resemble each other. The species exists in each one of them. All the specimens that are attached to it reflect the eternal to the same degree, or thereabouts. The individuals of the same race, races that do not have the Word, are almost interchangeable. Their possibilities are fixed. One knows what the world of living things gains every time a kitten is born; one knows what it loses every time a cat, young or old, dies. But one does not know what it gains -- or loses -- every time a human baby is born. Because what is a man?

The most perfect Nordic specimen, whose heart is noble and whose judgment is firm and just, and whose features and carriage are those of the Greek statues of the finest age, is "a man." A Hottentot, a Pygmy, a Papuan, a Jew, a Levantine mixed with Jews, are "men." "Man" does not exist. There exist only quite diverse varieties of primates that by convention are called "human" because they share an upright stance and the Word, the latter to quite unequal degrees. And within the same race -- moreover, within the same people -- there are insurmountable divergences, psychic as well as physical, divergences that one would like to be able, even though morbidity explains them partly, to blame on interbreeding in the remote past, so much do such differences between individuals of the same blood appear to be against nature. It is already shocking to witness such frequent and violent ideological (or religious) oppositions between racial brothers. It is even more shocking to learn that, even though Saint Vincent de Paul was French, there are child-abusers who are French also, or to learn that the beautiful and virtuous Laure de Noves, countess of Sade, had, four centuries after her death, among her descendants the marquis of ill repute who bears the same name. [Image: Athenian statesman Pericles (495-429 BC).]

Thus I repeat: one does not know, one cannot predict, what the world of living things gains or loses every time a young being called human is born or dies. And the less the race is pure, i.e., the fewer possibilities each baby has from the start, and roughly uniform -- and also, the less the society tends to pour all individuals of the same group into the same mold, i.e., the less it tends always to encourage the development of the same possibilities, and that, roughly, in the same direction -- the less it is possible to guess it. Because then, the more the exception -- unclassifiable individuality -- will be frequent within a group of the same name, this "name" corresponding no more to reality. It will be relatively possible, and also easy, to envisage in precise circumstances the reactions of a member of an American Indian, African, or Indian tribe -- say, a Jivaro or a Masai or a Santal remaining in his natural environment and subjected to his tradition -- and those of an Aryan (German or not) who is at the same time an orthodox Hitlerian. It will be more difficult to envisage those of an unspecified non-aligned Western European.

It is, however, true that -- beyond a certain degree of mixing of races and cultures and conditioning on a vast scale, thanks to all the modern means of communication -- people end up resembling each other strangely, psychically if not physically; they resemble each another in nullity. They think that everything testifies to their independence and originality, yet, in fact, their reactions in similar circumstances are as identical as those of two individuals of the same tribe of Blacks or Red-skins, or ... those of people of the same race, bound by the same faith. The extremes meet. The ethnic chaos of the masses of a metropolis at the forefront of technological progress tends to acquire a uniformity of grayness, a kind of manufactured homogeneity -- desired by those who control the masses -- a sinister caricature of the relative unity natural to people of the same blood that binds a scale of values and common practices; a uniformity which, far from revealing a "collective mind," at whatever level of awareness, reveals only the deterioration of a society that has definitively turned its back on the eternal -- in other words: a damned society.

But one can still sometimes discover an exceptional individual within such a society, an individual who disdains the ethnic chaos that he sees around him and of which he is perhaps himself a product, and who, in order to escape, adheres to some doctrine of the extinction of the species, or even puts himself completely at the service of a true race, with all the renunciation that entails for him. The mechanism of heredity is so complex and the play of external influences so random that it is not possible to envisage who among the children of a declining society will become such individuals -- no more than it is possible to envisage which new-born member of a tribe will aspire one day to something other than received values and ideas, or which child raised in a particular faith will hasten to leave it as soon as he can.

The exception is sometimes probable and always possible in a human group, even if it is homogeneous -- which is not to say that, in practice, one can or even must always take this into account: that would complicate the relationships between groups ad infinitum. Moreover the exception, if he represents something more than himself, changes groups whenever he can. If there were an Aztec who was shocked by the sacrifices offered to the gods of his people, this man would be among the first to adopt the religion of the Spanish conquerors; and an Aryan of Europe who, in our time, feels only contempt for the "Christian and democratic" values of the West and dreams of a society in the image of ancient Sparta, adheres, if he has a taste for combat, to the Hitlerian faith.

It follows from these observations that the concept of humanity does not correspond to any concrete reality, separable from the whole ensemble of living things. The Word and an upright stance, the only features common to all men, do not suffice to make them "brothers"; they do not mean that they are closer to each other than any one of them is to a being of another species. Thus there is no moral obligation to love all men, unless one postulates a duty to love all living things, including the most harmful insects, because a man (or a group of men) that, by nature or choice, spreads ugliness, lies, and suffering, is worse than any harmful insect. It would be absurd to fight the one, the least powerful and therefore the least dangerous of all, and to tolerate -- and worse, to "love" -- the other.

Love, therefore, the higher man, the Aryan worthy of the name: beautiful, good, and courageous; responsible; capable of all sacrifices for the achievement of his task; the Aryan healthy and strong. He is your brother and your comrade in arms in the fight of your race against the forces of disintegration, he whose children will continue this sacred fight in your place, when your body is returned to the elements.

Respect the man of noble races other than your own, who carries out, in a different place, a combat parallel to yours -- to ours. He is your ally. He is our ally, be he at the other end of the world.

Love all living things whose humble task is not opposed in any way to yours, to ours: men with simple hearts, honest, without vanity and malice, and all the animals, because they are beautiful, without exception and without exception indifferent to whatever "idea" there may be. Love them, and you will see the eternal in the glance of their eyes of jet, amber, or emerald. Love also the trees, the plants, the water that runs though the meadow and on to the sea without knowing where it goes; love the mountain, the desert, the forest, the immense sky, full of light or full of clouds; because all these exceed man and reveal the eternal to you.

But despise the mass man with his empty heart and shallow mind; the mass egoist, mean and pretentious, who lives only for his own well-being and for what money can buy. Despise him, while using him as much as you can. If he is of our race and sufficiently pure, then from him children can be born who, educated in our care at a time when we will again have our say, will be worth infinitely more than he is. It is the best, perhaps the only, service he can render. Any time that a man of good race, cheerfully integrated into "consumer society," disappoints you, tell yourself that he does not count as a conscious individual; only his blood counts. See in him only what the breeder of horses or dogs considers in his subjects: his pedigree. Let us be frank: what he says, believes, and thinks is of no importance.

As for the enemy of immutable values, the enemy of Nature and Life -- he who would like to sacrifice the most beautiful to the least beautiful or the downright ugly, the strong to the weak, the healthy to the suffering, sick, and defective; he who rises up, alone or in a group, against the eternal: fight him with all the ardor of your heart, all the force of your arms, all the power of your intelligence. It is not necessary to hate him. He follows his nature and achieves his destiny while being opposed to the eternal values. He plays his role in the cosmic dance without beginning or end. But -- and precisely for this reason -- it is necessary and even urgent to fight him, and by all means, without respite and weakness. For he is your absolute opposite -- our opposite and consequently our natural enemy -- in the pitiless play of forces.

Fight him with detachment and all your power: the Strong preserve a serene balance even in the most exultant fanaticism. Fight him with violence; fight him without violence -- as the case may be. Fight him by thinking day and night of the opposition between your role and his.

Never underestimate ritual. Wherever it exists a certain order reigns. And any order implies submission of the individual will, discipline, hence renunciation -- preparation to pursue the eternal.

Any true religion is a path open to those who tend towards the eternal, consciously or not. And there is no true religion without ritual. And as soon as there are rituals, simple though they may be, there is the outline of religion. I say "outline," for even though ritual is necessary, essential even, for all true religion, it does not suffice to create one. It is necessary that doctrines be added that are an expression of the Tradition, i.e., that help the faithful to live the eternal truths. Needless to say -- for it is plain to see -- among people who are attached nominally to a given religion, each one lives it more or less, and the great majority (at least in decadent ages such as ours) does not live it at all. One almost can define a decadent age simply by saying that it is an age when traditional doctrines, that is to say, those that raise the faithful to the contemplation of the eternal, cease to interest men, except for a negligible minority.

In centuries when degeneration continues and is intensified, properly political doctrines, in the minds and hearts of the majority of people, take the place of the traditional doctrines, generally called "religious," and -- what is perhaps worse still -- men use the names of different religions for struggles which, in the end, are over nothing but personal and material advantages.

The properly political doctrines are, contrary to those which concern the Tradition, centered on immediate concerns and "historical," i.e., temporal, considerations at most; on what does not recur -- what one will not see twice. A doctrine that helps its followers solve immediate problems of a political or even economic nature, while teaching them the truths that transcend those by far, and inculcating in them a corresponding scale of values, is something other than a political doctrine. It is a Weltanschauung, a "vision of the Universe." It would suffice to add rituals to it to make it the basis of a religion. And those of its followers who have a sense of ritual, a need for ritual -- which they express how -- ever they can, such as by observing auspicious and inauspicious dates, joyous or sad anniversaries related to the history of their community, or by visiting on certain dates places rich in meaning for them -- are already the faithful.

But, I repeat: in order for a Weltanschauung, a vision of the Universe, a "philosophy," once infused with the magic of ritual, to become the basis of a true religion, it is necessary not only that it contain no internal contradictions, but also that its fundamental propositions are true, not relatively but absolutely; true at all times and everywhere; true in time and apart from time; eternally. It is necessary, in other words, that it rest on nothing less than the laws of the cosmos, on the laws of Life without beginning or end, the laws that apply to man but surpass man as they surpass all finite beings. It is necessary, in a word, that it have a cosmic philosophy capable of integrating itself into the eternal Tradition.

Extremely rare are the alleged doctrines of "liberation," and rarer still are political doctrines (if their base is "philosophical"), that meet this condition. If one of them, while not meeting it, under the pressure of a need of the human heart as old as mankind, adopts rituals, it will tend to give rise to a false religion -- to a sacrilegious organization, in other words, a counter-Tradition. This is, in our age, the case with Marxism, insofar as a pretence of ritual life began to be introduced there. The humble and sincere Slavic peasant who, among many others, waits in front of the mausoleum of Lenin for the moment when he will finally be allowed to gather in the presence of the body, rendered artificially incorruptible, of the man who made the ideas of the Jew Marx the basis of a world revolution, is a man of faith. He came there in pilgrimage, to nourish his devoted heart, as his fathers went to prostrate themselves, in some famous church, in front of a miraculous icon. The food of the heart remains, or has become again, for him more significant than that of the stomach. There he would remain, if need be, for two days without eating and drinking, to live in the minute when he will pass in silence in front of the mummified flesh of Lenin. But the heart lives on truth, on contact with that which is, always and everywhere. The untruths that it believes divert it from this contact and leave, sooner or later, a hunger for the absolute. But the whole philosophy of Marx, adopted by Lenin as the foundation of the proletarian State, is based on flagrant untruths: on the assertion that man is nothing more than what his economic milieu makes of him; on the negation of the role of heredity, therefore of race; on the negation of the role of superior personalities (and races) in the course of history. The sincere man, religiously devoted to the Masters who have exalted this error in theory and unleashed from it a revolution on a worldwide scale, serves unknowingly the Forces of disintegration; those which, in the more or less dualistic terminology of more than one traditional teaching, one calls the "Powers of the Abyss."

Among the doctrines of the twentieth century called political, I know of only one that, while being in fact infinitely more than "political," meets the condition sine qua non, without which it is impossible for a Weltanschauung, even with the aid of ritual, to be used as the basis of a true religion, namely, that it rests on eternal truths, exceeding by far mankind and its immediate problems, not to mention the particular people to whom it was initially preached and the problems they had then. Only one, I say, and I speak of the true Aryan racism, in other words, Hitlerism.

In a passage of his novel The Seven Colors,* Robert Brasillach describes the consecration ceremony for the new flags of the Third Reich at one of the great annual meetings at Nuremberg, at which he himself was present. After the imposing procession of all the organizations dependent upon or attached to the National Socialist Party, the Führer solemnly advanced under the eyes of five hundred thousand spectators crowded on the steps of the immense stadium, on which reigned an absolute silence. One after another, he raised the new banners and put them in contact with the "Blood Flag": the standard that his earliest disciples had carried during the Putsch of 9 November 1923 and to which the blood of the Sixteen who fell this day had given a sacred character. In this way, each flag became similar to that one; "charged" like it with a mystical fluid by participation in the sacrifice of the Sixteen. And the French writer remarks, quite justly, that he whom the religious meaning of this act escapes "does not understand anything of Hitlerism." He emphasizes, in other words, that this act is a ritual.

[*Robert Brasillach, Les Sept Couleurs (Paris: Editions Plon, 1939). On 6 February 1945 Charles De Gaulle's "Liberation Government" executed Brasillach for treason. -- Trans.]

But this ritual, to which many others can be added, would never have sufficed to give Hitlerism the character of a religion, if it had not already been a more-than-political doctrine: a Weltanschauung. And above all, it would have been unable to make it a true religion, if, at the base of this Weltanschauung, there had not been eternal truths and a whole attitude which was not (and does not remain), in last analysis, anything other than the quest for the eternal even in what changes -- the traditional attitude par excellence.

These words may seem strange in 1969, more than twenty-four years after the defeat of Hitler's Germany on the battlefield and the collapse of its political structure. They can seem strange, now that one would seek in vain, in the whole geographical region covered by the Third Reich, a visible sign of the resurgence of National Socialism such as the Führer intended it, and that the majority of the organizations which, beyond the old frontiers of the Reich, claim they would rescue the condemned Movement, are just pale imitations without heart, or just lamentable caricatures, sometimes in the service of other goals. But the value of a doctrine -- its truth -- has nothing to do with the success or the failure of its members on the material plain. This success or failure depends on the accord or discord of the doctrines with the aspirations of people at a given moment of history, and also on the fact that its adherents are or are not, from the military point of view, the diplomatic point of view, from the point of view of the art of propaganda, able to impose themselves -- and consequently do impose themselves -- on their adversaries. The fact that the doctrine is or is not an expression of cosmic truth is of no account here. But it submits in the long run, right or wrong, to these doctrines, in the sense that a society that refuses to accept a teaching in harmony with eternal laws and prefers untruths works for its own disintegration, in other words, damns itself.

It is correct that Hitlerians had been vanquished on all fronts in 1945; it is correct that the Third German Reich was dismembered; that the National Socialist party does not exist anymore; that in Germany and elsewhere there are no more Swastika flags in the windows, no streets bearing the name of the Führer, no publications of any kind that honor his memory. It is correct that thousands of Germans learned how to scorn or hate He whom their parents had acclaimed, and that millions are no more interested in him and his teaching than if he had never lived. Yet it remains no less true that the essence of the Hitlerian doctrine is the very expression of eternal laws; the laws that govern not only man, but life; which represent, as I wrote in a book in the German language, "the wisdom of the starry heaven,"* and that the choice posed to the world is, consequently, the same after 1945 as before. It is the acceptance of this more than human wisdom, it is this accord with the spirit of the Nature, which Hitlerism implies, or disintegration, ethnic chaos, the degeneration of man -- separation from the Heart of the cosmos; damnation. It is -- and the words are again mine -- "Hitler or hell."**

[*"Die Weisheit des sternhellen Weltraumes," in Hart wie Kruppstahl [Hard as Krupp Steel], completed in 1963. ]

[**"Hitler or Hell," in Gold in the Furnace (Calcutta: A.K. Mukherji, 1952), 416, written in 1948-49.]

People of our planet seem to have chosen hell. It is what a declining humanity invariably does. It is the very sign that we are completely in what the Hindu tradition calls the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age.

But the ages follow one another. The laws that regulate their succession remain.

It is equally correct that very many acts of violence were committed in the name of Hitlerism, and it is for them that it is reproached so obstinately by the herd of right-thinking people, the "decent people," deeply attached (in theory at least) to humanitarian values.

There are, however, two kinds of acts of violence -- or acts leading to violence -- "committed in the name of a doctrine." There are those that, in the spirit of the doctrine, are necessary, or at least justifiable, in the circumstances in which they take place. And there are those that are by no means that way, and whose authors, far from being true followers of the doctrines, of which they display the visible symbols, represent in reality only themselves and use the prestige of the doctrine and the authority that it confers on them to promote their own interests, to satisfy personal grudges, or simply to give free reign to their passions.

There was, at the time of the Third German Reich, the man who denounced a Jew because he quite sincerely believed him dangerous to the regime to which he trusted the safety of his own people. And there was the man who denounced a Jew -- who profited from the power to denounce that the regime gave him -- ... because he coveted his apartment. There was the soldier -- or civil servant -- who obeyed orders. And there was the man who, under cover of the authority conferred by his uniform, committed, or had committed, under the sway of anger, jealousy, or simply his natural brutality -- or for an unhealthy pleasure -- useless acts of violence, even of cruelty, without having received orders. There are always, among the nominal adherents of any doctrine, and a fortiori among those that do not repudiate violence in principle, sincere combatants and opportunists; people who serve the cause to which they are devoted body and soul and people who pretend to be devoted to it and who use it for themselves. (I say "cause," and not "doctrine" on purpose. For one serves a cause, i.e., the application of a doctrine, the materialization of a dream in time, which may be in the direction of time or a counter-current. A doctrine does not merely have to be of "service." It is true or false, in accord or discord with the Laws of the cosmos. All the devotion of the world, plus the sacrifice of a million martyrs, would not succeed in making it true if it is false. And the resounding negation of its basic propositions by all the "scholars" and all the priests of the world, plus the hatred of all peoples at all times, would not suffice to make it false, if it is true.)

Unjustified acts of violence committed, under cover of "reasons of State," by opportunists disguised as Hitlerians, do not touch in the least the cause of the German Reich: the application of Hitlerism to the problems of Germany at a given time; a cause, moreover, to which they rendered disservice rather than service. Even less do they touch the Hitlerian doctrines themselves. The acts of violence committed in the spirit of Hitlerism -- according to its profound logic -- far from calling its truth into question, on the contrary, only underscore it. For the application of a true doctrine -- that is to say, expressing the very laws of life -- in a society, however privileged, of the Dark Age, in other words, in a society which, along with all humanity, is, in spite of its progress on the technical level, and perhaps because of it, in regression from the point of view of Nature, can only be done "against Time"; against the universal current of decline that characterizes the Dark Age. And that is materially impossible without violence.

Among the proselytizing international religions, it is, to my knowledge, only Buddhism that was spread practically without violence. And note that it is the religion of renunciation, the religion "of extinction" par excellence; that which, applied absolutely, would lead to exalting celibacy -- like Jainism, its contemporary, confined to India, and like Catharism, many centuries later -- inciting mankind to leave the planet. Christianity, centered on the love of man, alone among living beings created (according to it) "in the image of God," was largely propagated by bribery and violence, under the patronage of kings or emperors who believed they were serving their interests by proclaiming it the state religion and imposing it on conquered peoples. Innumerable crimes against man -- and, in general, against superior men -- have marked its expansion, from the massacre in 782, by order of Charlemagne, in Verden on the Aller, of four thousand five hundred German chiefs, faithful to the gods of their fathers, to the butchers of the Holy Inquisition -- crimes that do not preclude all that Christianity has retained of the eternal Tradition, which remains unshaken. And it acts, here, as a religion whose founder himself declared that his kingdom "is not this world"; as a religion, therefore, to which violence is, in principle, foreign. If it is true that the acts of violence of its adherents do not at all decrease its value, as such, it is more so with the adherents of doctrines, centered, not on man considered as a being "apart," but on Life, and the fight without end that it implies -- of a doctrine like Hitlerism, whose spirit and application in this world can only go against the current of our time -- do not alter at all its excellence as an expression of immutable laws.

A strictly political doctrine is judged by its success. A doctrine likely to receive the consecration of ritual -- or already having received it -- is judged by its approach to eternity, whatever may be the consequences, happy or unhappy, that accrue to it on the political plane.

On 28 October 1953, in front of some comrades, very few in number, gathered at Holzminden on the Weser, the Hitlerian Félix F. told me: "Up to 1945, we were a party; after 1945, let us be the core of a great international faith." He believed, no doubt, that even in an age of universal degeneration such as ours, the Strong of Aryan blood were still numerous enough and conscious enough to be linked in a "great international faith" around the only doctrine worthy of them.

Only the future will tell if he was right or not. But I affirm today that, even if stripped of everything that could be contingent -- temporal -- in its first expression as a political doctrine, Hitlerism never managed to impose itself on the Aryan élite wherever it exists, it nevertheless remains the Way of the Strong, open to the eternal, their asceticism, in all ages of accelerated decadence, at all "ends of the cycle."

All true religions, all those that can be integrated into the Tradition, lead to the eternal, certainly. But they do not carry all the same people to it. The religions "of extinction," as I call them -- such as Buddhism, Jainism, and later Catharism -- guide the lost and the desperate for whom the absence of hope is suffering, people broken or rejected by the fight without end and who aspire to "leave it." The doctrines that preach action in detachment and enthusiasm without hope are addressed to the Strong, to those whom the fight, though "useless," never tires, and who need neither the anticipatory vision of a paradise after death, nor that of a "better world" for their sons and their nephews, to fight with zeal and until the end, according to what is, for them, duty.

The Varnashramdharma of the Hindus -- a religion based on the natural hierarchy of the castes (thus of the races, the Hindu castes being hereditary and having nothing to do with the goods that can be acquired) and on the natural succession of duties in the course of a man's life -- is a religion of the Strong. It is dominated by the doctrine of detached Action as it has reached us in the Bhagavad-Gîta. It was conceived as the basis of a traditional society, already decadent, no doubt -- the decline begins, in each temporal cycle, at the end of the first Age, called the Age of Truth, Satya Yuga, or Age of Gold -- but incommensurable with ours, as it is infinitely closer to the ideal or divine order.

Hitlerism considered in its essence, i.e., stripped of all that attaches it to the political and economic contingencies of a particular time, is the religion of the Strong of the Aryan race, as opposed to a world in decline; a world of ethnic chaos, contempt of living Nature, the silly exaltation of "man" in all that is weak, morbid, eccentrically "individual," different from other beings; a world of human selfishness (individual and collective), of ugliness and cowardice. It is the reaction of the Strong of this race, originally noble, to such a world. And it is that which they offer to all their brothers in race.

There are, parallel to it, the religions that exalt the same virtues, the same asceticism of detachment; which rest on the same glorification of combat without end and the same worship of Blood and Soil, but which are addressed to other races -- religions, sometimes very old, but continuously renewed, rethought, thanks to the vitality of their followers. Shin-toism, based on the deification of the heroes, the ancestors, the Sun, and of the very soil of Japan, is one. As a Japanese said to me in 1940: "Your National Socialism is, in our eyes, a Western Shintoism; it is our own philosophy of the world, thought by Aryans and preached to Aryans." (Alas! In Gamagori, not far from Hiroshima, the Japanese raised a temple to Tojo and those whom the victors of 1945 killed with him as "war criminals." When will one see in Germany monuments, if not "temples," to the glory of all those Germans hung from 6 October 1946 and after, up to 7 June 1951, for having been faithful to their faith, which is also ours, and having done their duty?)

But that is another question.

Let us return to what constitutes the eternity of Hitlerism, that is to say, the not only more-than-political but more-than-human -- cosmic -- character of its basic truths, in particular of all that relates to race, biological reality, and the people, historical and social reality.

The Führer said to each of his compatriots and, beyond those, to each of his brothers in race and to any man of good race: "You are nothing; your people is all." He has, in addition, in Point Four of the famous Twenty-Five Points which constitute the program of the National Socialist Party, indicated what, in his eyes, made the essence of the concept of the "people": "Only he who is a member of the people can be a citizen of the State. Only he who is of Germanic blood can be a member of the (German) people. From whence it follows that no Jew can be a citizen of the (German) State."*

[*Text of item four of the Twenty-Five Points.]

It is a return, pure and simple, to the ancient conception of the people: of the German conception, certainly, but also the Greek, that of the Romans before the Empire, with that of all peoples, or almost all. It is the negation of the Roman attitude of the centuries of decadence, which allowed any inhabitant of the Empire, any subject of the Emperor, to become a "Roman citizen," be he Jewish, like Paul of Tarsus or Flavius Josephus, or Arab, like the Emperor Philip -- and, later, it sufficed to be "Christian," and of the same Church as the Emperor to be an Byzantine "citizen," able to reach the highest offices.* It is the negation of the ideas of the "people" and the "citizen" such as presented by the French Revolution at the moment when, at the suggestion of the Abbé Grégoire and others as well, the Constituent Assembly proclaimed "French" all the Jews residing in France and speaking French.

[*Such as Leon "the Armenian" who reached the throne of Byzantium.]

In other words, if a people is an historical and social reality, if its common memories, glorious and painful, common habits and, in general, common language, are factors of cohesion among its members, it is also more than that. It is part of a great race. It is an Aryan or Mongoloid people, an Australoid, Negro, or Semitic people. It can, without ceasing to be a true people, contain a more or less large proportion of different sub-races, provided that these are all part of the great race to which it belongs. (The Führer himself was physically as "Alpine" as he was Nordic, and perhaps more. The brilliant and faithful Goebbels was almost purely Mediterranean. And they are not the only greater Germans or the only personages in the first rank of the Third Reich not to be one hundred percent Nordic.)

It is race in the broad sense of the word that gives a people its homogeneity across time; that makes it remain, in spite of political and economic upheavals, always the same people, and through which the individual, in renouncing what is his own and putting himself totally in its service, approaches the eternal.

One could undoubtedly say that neither the people nor the race nor mankind -- nor even the life on a given planet -- will always endure. Moreover "duration," which is "time," has nothing to do with timeless eternity. It is not the indefinite succession of the generations, physically and morally more or less similar to one another, but the ideal Archetype which these generations approach to a certain extent; it is the perfect type of the race, towards which each specimen of this race tends more or less, that we consider when we speak about the "eternity of the race." The people which, even in the midst of the ethnic chaos that reigns more and more everywhere on earth, "devotes all its energy" to preventing interbreeding and "to promoting its best racial elements," writes the Führer, "is sure to become sooner or later the master of the world,"* (provided, naturally, that it is a dynamic and creative people). Consequently, it will live; it will remain a true people, while each of its competitors, more and more invaded, submerged by heterogeneous elements, will have ceased to be such -- and for the same reason, cease to merit (and to rouse) the sacrifice of individuals of value.

[*Mein Kampf, German edition of 1935, 782.]

The sincere man who, in agreement with the spirit of Aryan racism, i.e., of Hitlerism or any other noble racism, effaces himself before a true people that is his; who, in order to serve it above all, tramples personal interest, money, pleasure, the glory of his own name; this man approaches the eternal. His good citizenship is devotion and asceticism.

But he needs a true people to serve. For he who is devoted to a mixed "people," in other words to a human community without race and definite character, a "people" in name only, wastes his time. His activity is a little less shocking than that of people who devote themselves to the service of the handicapped, retarded, deficient, of human refuse of all kinds, because the mongrel, if he is healthy in body, is nevertheless quite useful. Just the same, it would be better for an individual of value who emerges by chance from a "people" which is not one, to devote himself in all humility to a true people of a superior race, or that he be content to serve innocent life, beautiful non-human life, that he defend animals and trees against man, or, if he can, that he combine the two activities. Perhaps then -- supposing the widespread Indian belief in an unknown reality -- he will be reborn one day in a human community worthy of him ... provided that he does not act in view of such an honor, that he never desires it.

Never forget that the race -- the racial Archetype towards which all generations of the same blood tend (with more or less success) -- is the visible and tangible eternity, concrete to some extent; it is the only eternity available to all living things, because of which, simply in living -- prolonging faithfully and immutably their species, without any thought -- they have already gone beyond Time, by the door of individual renunciation.

It is curious that the more beings are strangers to the word and to thought, the more they are unshakably faithful to the race.

If one admits, as I would readily, that "the Divine sleeps in the stone, wakes up in the plant, feels in the animal, and thinks in the man" (or at least in certain men) one will admire first, in all the bodies of the same chemical family, i.e., of a similar atomic structure, which accord perfectly with the "type" that they represent and which they cannot deny, a harmony that we call their common function. One will also admire no less the fidelity of each plant -- from the oak, the cedar, the conquering banyan to the vulgar dandelion -- to its race. It is not here a question of spontaneous interbreeding. It is not a question with animals either, as long as those remain "in a natural state," i.e., out of contact with man, including even the men said to be the most "primitive" -- those who remained at, or later descended (through poverty of words and increasing absence of thought) to the level of the primates deprived of articulated language, or lower still. The mixture began with the evil pride born of the Word: the pride that pushed the man to believe himself a being apart and against the iron laws that attach him to the earth and to Life; that made him dig an imaginary trench between himself and all other living things; that encouraged him to place his whole species on a pedestal; to scorn, in the name of the false fraternity of the Word, flagrant racial inequalities, and to think that he could with impunity bring together what Nature separates; that he was "superior," above this prohibition, above divine law.

Hitlerism represents, in the midst of ethnic chaos, in the midst of an epoch of the world's physical and moral decline, the supreme effort to bring the thinking Aryan back to respect for the cosmic order as it is affirmed in the laws of development, conservation, and disintegration of the races, back to willing submission to Nature, our Mother -- and to lead back, willingly or by force, the non-thinking Aryan, who is nevertheless valuable because of the possibilities of his descent. The cult of the "people" -- at the same time of Blood and Soil -- leads to the cult of the race common to people of the same blood and the eternal Laws that govern its conservation.

"The fools scorn Me when I take on human form;
My essence, supreme source of beings, escapes them."

--Bhagavad Gita, IX, verse ii

 

All the candidates -- I should say "the novices" -- of the SS, were not trained and educated in the same Ordensburg. And all those of the same Ordensburg did not receive -- especially at the higher levels -- the same teaching. That depended on the tasks for which they were judged apt, even within the élite. Because it comprised several organizations, from the most visible, the Waffen [Armed] SS -- the most famous also, because of the superhuman heroism of which it gave proof so many times during the Second World War -- up to the most secret, the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage), founded in 1935, and all the more difficult to know since many documents which referred to it (also secret, which goes without saying) were destroyed, "before the arrival of the Allies in Germany," and which "the members of this organization who survived the collapse of Third Reich ... concealed with a strange resolution" (André Brissaud, Hitler and the Black Order, 283).

It is at least logical to think that it was probably the Ahnenerbe which, in "the Black Order" of Adolf Hitler, was the agent of the Tradition -- and more specifically, certain sections of the Ahnenerbe, because it comprised many of them, including "fifty-two scientific [sections]" (Brissaud, 285), i.e., dealing with objective research, though not necessarily in the spirit and employing the methods used in the applied sciences. According to the declarations of Wolfram Sievers before the tribunal of the victors in Nuremberg, to whom one owes this detail, the same Institute "carried out or tried to carry out more than one hundred missions of research of great extent" (Brissaud, 285). The nature of some of this research reveals a very clear interest in esoteric questions. Thus they studied the symbolism of the harp in Ireland; also, the question of the survival of the true Rosicrucian brotherhood -- in other words, of initiatory groups still having the complete tradition of the Templars (of which the first Rosicrucian brotherhood would have received the heritage). Thus they reconsidered the Bible and the Kabbalah, while trying to draw the hidden meaning from them -- wondering, in particular what role the symbolism of numbers plays in one and the other. Thus they further studied the physical and mental structure of human specimens of various races -- that of the Nordic with the very special care that one can guess -- in order to prove the value of the concept of heredity and race, so fundamental in Hitlerism. Thus they devoted systematic and sustained efforts to all research aimed at revealing to the Germans the glory of their own Antiquity, historic or prehistoric -- and of their Middle Ages -- and to highlight the importance of the corresponding sites.

Without denying that there is, in Christianity as in Judaism itself, and all the associated religions or philosophies close to or even far from the Tradition, a share of esoteric truth, they put the emphasis on the traditional form specific to the Germanic people. The traces of this one are found in the symbols, engraved on rock, of most remote prehistory, and, after the bloody eradication of the worship of Wotan by Charlemagne and his immediate successors, in certain rites practiced in the Middle Ages in the Chivalric Orders or the Holy Vehm. It would be interesting to know if the latter, which did not cease to exist as a secret organization, has, or had at a given time, some relationship with the Thule Society.

Heinrich Himmler -- the Head of the SS, and the man whose career, so much decried outside Hitlerian circles, is (besides that of the Führer himself) stamped more than any other with the detached violence that signifies a higher quality of being -- insists on the above, albeit in "a veiled expression," "intentionally vague" in his speech of January 1937 (Brissaud, 283), which contains the sole public or semi-public reference to the Ahnenerbe. There is high ideological importance to archaeological discoveries made by the Institute of this name in Altchristenburg, in East Prussia: as of this day, several layers of Germanic fortifications, increasingly old, refute the opinion that East Prussia was a Slavic land. But there is more: the "reorganization" and "maintenance" of cultural centers consecrated "to the greatness of Germany and the German past ... in each area where an SS company is found" is recommended (Brissaud, 284). And he gives examples of such centers. One is Sachsenhain, close to Verden, where 4,500 rough blocks, each transported from a Saxon village, had been set up one after another on both sides of a road in the middle of a forest, in memory of 4,500 Saxons decapitated there, on the banks of the Aller, in 782, by order of Charlemagne, because they persisted in refusing a foreign God whom he wanted to impose to them. The other is the site of the Externsteine, impressive vertical rocks marking, close to Horn, one of the great spiritual centers of the world of all time, and the sacrosanct place of worship of the ancient Germans. At the top of the highest of the rocks, in the place of the ancient Irminsul of gold torn off in 772 by the soldiers of the same Christian conqueror, floated henceforth -- the victorious, liberating symbol of the reconciliation of all the opposite aspects of German history in the knowledge of its deep unity -- the red, white, and black flag with the Swastika of the Third Reich. [Image: Die Externsteine.]

And the examples show sufficiently that it was not only about "culture," but about secret knowledge, or, about the national culture of the Germans in general, and, for the initiates of Order of the SS and in particular of Ahnenerbe, of secret knowledge of the great cosmic truths, apprehended through traditional symbolism such as the Germanic people knew it, and such as a quiet minority preserved it.

For -- and it is here a point to be noted -- in spite of the very strong "pagan" current that underlies Hitlerism, and which appears especially in the unreserved rejection of any anthropocentrism, such as the whole personal God, it was never a question of rejecting or even under appreciating anything which in the German -- and European -- ancestral heritage gives honor to the Aryan genius.

The Führer had, says André Brissaud, "the feeling" -- I myself would say the certainty -- that "all that which in recent Western history had taken the form of a religion, and the Christian religion particularly ... pertains to the 'too human'," and therefore did not have a great deal to do with really transcendent values, and, moreover, "offers a general climate or an inner order scarcely compatible with its own provisions and its vocation, set alongside the truths and the dogmas of the faith suggested to the ordinary man" (Brissaud, 111). However, it is the whole of Western civilization which is at the same time "recent" and "Christian." It never should be forgotten.

That did not, however, prevent Adolf Hitler, who was impartial, as is necessary for any sage (and even more so for any human expression of the Divine), from admiring Charlemagne -- the Sachsenschlächter or "exterminator of the Saxons," as he was called by Alfred Rosenberg, Johannes von Leers, Heinrich Himmler, and a good number of other high-ranking dignitaries, thinkers, and men of action of the Third Reich. He saw in him a conqueror with an immense will to power, and above all the first unifier of the Germans; he who, alone in his time, had had the idea of the Reich, even if it had been useful to impose on it the artificial unity of "faith," and if this "faith" was the Christian faith, i.e. a foreign faith. One remembers that Adolf Hitler insisted on the corrosive action of Christianity on the Greco-Roman world, and that he described it as "pre-Bolshevism." But it does not matter what this faith was (and still is), if it were the cement of a conquering Germanic Empire and, later, the occasion for all the flowering of art that one knows. Insofar as this art is beautiful, it presupposes, in any event, a certain knowledge of that which is eternal. The Führer thus accepted with respect, as a German heirloom, a replica of the sword of the Emperor of West.

He also admired the great Hohenstaufen Emperors -- especially Frederic Barbarossa, he-who-must-return -- and who had returned, in him (for only a little while, alas!); and Frederic II, Stupor Mundi [Wonder of the World], in whom so many of his contemporaries believed they saw the Antichrist -- as men nowadays, deceived by propaganda, were to see in him, the Founder of Third Reich, the incarnation of Evil. He admired Frederic II of Prussia, Bismarck, all those in whom the conquering force of the German people had been expressed, of whose cultural -- and much more than cultural -- mission he did not have the slightest doubt.

And Heinrich Himmler himself, while paying a brilliant homage to the Saxon warriors, martyrs of the ancient national faith in Verden, in the year 782 of the foreign God, professed a veritable adoration of the Emperor Henry I and exalted the Knights of the Teutonic Order -- certainly not because the latter had, with great reinforcement of brutality, forced the Slavs (and finally the Prussians*) to accept Christianity, but because they had, by the sword, "prepared the way for the German plow": made possible the German colonization of vast territories in the east.

[*The Prussians were still "pagans," that is to say, faithful to their German gods, in the fourteenth century.]

What there was, moreover, of the eternal in the warlike religion of Wotan and Thor -- and, before that in the immemorial Nordic religion of the Sky, the Earth, and "Son" of the one and the other, which Dr. Hermann Wirth studied -- was to survive in Christian esotericism, and in esotericism as such. This has, parallel to the teaching of the Churches, continued throughout history to have its initiates, less and less numerous, undoubtedly, but always present, and sometimes very active. (One counts among them such immortal creators as the great Dürer and, later, Goethe, Wagner, and to a certain extent, Nietzsche.) And it is known that Frederic II, "the Great," King of Prussia -- the hero par excellence of the Führer -- was Grand Master of the Old Prussian Lodges). The deep significance of the ancient Irminsul, Axis of the world, is not, at the bottom, different from that of the Cross, detached of all Christian mythology, i.e., of the story of the execution of Jesus considered as a fact in time. The point of the venerable Germanic symbol indeed aims at the Pole star, which appears as the "One" or supreme Principle; and its curved branches are supposed to support the circle of the Zodiac, symbol of the Cycle of manifestation, being driven around its motionless center. There are in certain very old churches of Germany today "crucifixions" in which the cross itself has the curved branches of the "pagan" Irminsul -- the ensemble suggesting the fusion of the two religions in their most elevated and most universal symbolism. In addition -- according to Professor von Moth, of Detmold -- the Fleur de Lys, connected, as everyone knows, with the idea of royal or imperial power, is, in its form, a somewhat stylized Irminsul, or "Pillar of All," having like it a polar and axial significance. Any legitimate power comes indeed from On-high. And the Swastika, also "essentially the sign of the Pole" thus of the "rotational movement which is achieved around a center of an immutable axis" and -- the movement representing life -- of "the vivifying role of the Principle in relation to the cosmic order" is connected thereby to the Irminsul and the cross (René Guénon, Fundamental Symbols of Sacred Science, 89, 90). [Image: Irminsul, sacred pillar ("world-tree") of the Saxons.]

What, therefore, was important, what was exalted, was all that had contributed, or could contribute, to reinforce the Germanic will to power -- condition of the universal "rectification," which only regenerated Germany could begin. It was, in addition, to keep alive the deposit of traditional truth, i.e., of more than human -- cosmic -- truth transmitted down through the ages. The expression of this heritage, the form in which it was presented, could certainly vary from one time to another thanks to the political fluctuations of the visible world, but at bottom remained one, and is explicated as well in the supreme beauty of the old Scandinavian sagas as in the music, eminently Christian in inspiration, of Johann-Sebastian Bach, and, this goes without saying, in the "complete artwork" [Gesamtkunstwerk] (musical and literary), also initiatory, of Richard Wagner.

This deposit, more invaluable than anything, came from mysterious Hyperborea, original homeland of the "transparent men," sons of the "Intelligences of Beyond"; of the Hyperborea whose center -- the "capital" -- was Thule.

It is undoubtedly unnecessary to point out that the "transparency" in question here is not anything material and consequently visible. It seems to be a state of being more subtle than that which we know, more open to direct contact with the intangible and even the formless. In other words, the Hyperboreans, guardians of the primordial Tradition, would have been capable of intellectual intuition to a degree that we cannot conceive.

Who were they? And -- if they really existed -- where did their territory extend? The more or less evocative allusions made by the ancients -- by Seneca in his Medea; by Pliny the Elder, Virgil, Diodorus of Sicily, Herodotus, Homer (in the Odyssey) and the author or the authors of Genesis, and especially the enigmatic Book of Enoch -- are rather vague, though all refer to the "Far North." And the evocation of the extreme "whiteness" of the Hyperboreans, of the inexpressible beauty of their wives and the "extraordinary gifts of perspicacity" of some of them (Brissaud, 59), would make one think of an Aryan race immensely higher than the average Nordic of today, which is not astonishing since they belong to a past which is lost in the mists of time. But there is more: the scholar Bal Gangadhar Tilak,* better known under the name of Lokomanya Tilak, a learned and wise Hindu, has, in his work The Arctic Home in the Vedas, very clearly connected the oldest tradition of India to an area located in the high latitudes, an area of the long polar night and Midnight Sun and ... the aurora borealis; an area where the stars do not rise nor set, but move, or seem to move, circularly along the horizon.

[*Born on 3 July 1856, died 1 August 1920. He was a Brahman of Maharashtra, of the sub-caste of Chitpavan.]

The Rig-Veda, which he studied in particular and from which he draws the majority of the quotations in support of his thesis, would have been, as well as the whole of the Vedas -- or knowledge "seen," i.e., direct -- revealed to these "Aryas," i.e., "Lords" of the extreme North, and preciously preserved by them during the migrations which have, over centuries, brought them little by little into India.

Tilak places the abandonment of the Arctic fatherland at the time when it lost its moderate climate and its green vegetation to become "icy," i.e., at the time when the axis of the Earth shifted more than twenty-three degrees some eight thousand years ago. He does not specify if the island or the portion of the continent thus struck with sudden barrenness was swallowed up, as in the Legend of Thule, or continues to exist somewhere in the vicinity of or inside the Arctic Circle. He does not mention, either, the stages that the trustees of the eternal Vedas -- Wisdom hidden in the sacred texts of this name -- had to traverse between their Arctic fatherland and the first colonies they founded in the Northwest of India. And, his work not being addressed to initiates -- who would have no need for it anyway -- but only to oriental scholars of good faith, whom he knew are insensitive to any argument not supported by proof, he does not evidently say anything of the "underground" initiatory centers, Agartha and Shambhala, which are so often an issue in the secret teaching that the "Thule Society" gave its members -- a teaching that was thus received by, inter alia, Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess, Dietrich Eckart and, probably via the latter, Adolf Hitler himself. (Agartha, or Agarthi, is the center placed "under the wheel of the Golden Sun," that is to say, that to which are attached the contemplatives who refuse in advance to take part in the businesses of this world: that of sages whom I called "men above Time." Shambhala is, by contrast, the spiritual center of the men "against Time": initiates who, while living in the eternal, agree to act in this world "in the interest of the Universe" according to immutable values, or, to employ the equivalent words of the Führer, according to the "original sense of things." It was, naturally, to this second center of the Masters of Action that Adolf Hitler was attached.)

It is remarkable that the names of Agartha and Shambhala "appear several times on the lips of more than one head of the SS during the Nuremberg tribunals, and, more particularly, of the SS who were among the persons in charge of the Ahnenerbe" (Brissaud, 56-60). This organization, inter alia, sent to Tibet "an expedition directed by the ethnologist Standartenführer SS Doctor Scheffer" (Brissaud, ibid). The fragments of his reports, which exist on microfilms in the "National Archives in Washington, D.C.," appeared "extraordinary" to André Brissaud, who read them. Why such an expedition? Admittedly not to try to find in Central Asia, "the origins of the Nordic race," as Brissaud seems to believe. Under the Third Reich, even school children knew from reading it in their textbooks -- some of which, such as that of Klagges/Blume, So ward das Reich, were remarkable -- that this race had migrated from the North towards the South and the East, and not conversely (Klagges/Blume, 15.) No. What was wanted, undoubtedly, by Doctor Scheffer and his collaborators, was rather to try to penetrate the mystery of Agartha and Shambhala, perhaps to test, with the assistance of the heads of a spiritual center where it appears, to come into contact with the principle (because it is a principle, not a character) that René Guénon calls the "King of the World" (Guénon, The King of the World, 13). That seems all the more plausible as, among the sections of the Ahnenerbe whose work was classified "secret business of Reich" and "of which one was entirely unaware," "one included, in addition to the study of old languages, of cosmology and archaeology, that of 'Yoga and Zen'," and another was interested "in esoteric doctrines and magic influences on human behavior" (Brissaud, 285).

Moreover, it is not only with the initiates of the Forbidden City of Lhasa (and perhaps with the Dalai-Lama himself) which the spiritual élite of the Order of the SS -- which was that of a new Traditional civilization in potentiality, if not currently in gestation -- sought to make contact. In my humble knowledge, there were also similar encounters in India -- meetings that people hardly suspect in the West -- and completely apart from the political conversations that took place with certain Hindu leaders, such as Subhas Chandra Bose, in India and in Germany, before and during the Second World War.

There appeared in Calcutta, beginning in 1935, a "cultural" review, The New Mercury, very skillfully published by Sri Asit Krishna Mukherji in collaboration with Sri Vinaya Datta and some others. The speeches of the Führer, of which the official press in English as well as in Bengali reported only extracts, were printed there in extenso, especially if they presented, as was often the case, an interest beyond "politics." One of them, which had then particularly drawn my attention, related to the subject of "Architecture and Nation." But the aforementioned review also published studies on anything that could illuminate a profound non-political connection, going back very far and very deep, between traditional Hindu civilization, which had never ceased to exist, and traditional Germanic civilization, as it had existed long before Christianity, and aspired to rebirth in what was essential. These studies revealed in their authors, beyond indispensable archaeological scholarship, a serious knowledge of cosmic symbolism. Several were, it goes without saying, centered on the Swastika. They seemed to want to show -- indirectly -- the exceptional character of a great modern State that recognized for "its own" a Sign of such a universal range, which engraved it on all its public monuments, stamped it on all its standards. It suggested at the same time the aspiration of this great State to renew contact with the primordial Tradition -- from which Europe had been detached for centuries, but which India had kept as a priceless deposit. [Image: Swastika-adorned bowl from Athens, c. 800 BC.]

I do not have any evidence that the services of the Ahnenerbe played any role whatsoever in the publication of The New Mercury. That appears to me, in fact, as very improbable since this special section of the SS was itself founded only in 1935 -- the same year as the review. But I know that the latter was at least partly supported financially by the government of the Third Reich. Germans, and the representatives -- German or not -- of German firms in India, were supposed to subscribe to it. And one of them at least, to my knowledge, was recalled to Germany, having been dismissed from the direction of the branch which he governed for years, for having refused to do so and declaring that "this propaganda in a new style" (sic) did not interest him.

The founder and editor of the periodical, Sri A.K. Mukherji, remained in close contact with Herr von Selzam, Consul General of Germany in Calcutta, as long as he remained in this station. And this official representative of Adolf Hitler, the day before his departure, gave to Mukherji a document addressed to the German authorities in which it was specified in all letters that, "no person in Asia has rendered services comparable to his." I saw this document. I read it and read it again, with joy, with pride -- as Aryan and as Hitlerian, and as wife of Sri A.K. Mukherji. I already mentioned this in these discussions.

It is not possible for me to say if the "services" in question had or had not gone beyond the rather narrow limits of the activities of Sri A.K. Mukherji as an editor of a semi-monthly review that was Traditionalist and at the same time Hindu and pro-German. It would indeed seem that they went beyond them -- because the review lasted only two years, the English authorities having prohibited it towards the end of 1937, shortly after the definitive "turning" in the evolution of the British policy vis-à-vis the Reich. In any event, I did not yet personally know Sri A.K. Mukherji at that time: his name evoked for me only the existence of the sole review of clearly Hitlerian tendencies that I knew in India. But something leads me to believe that the knowledge that he had subsequently, and even before, of esoteric Hitlerism, i.e., of the profound connection of the secret doctrines of the Führer to the eternal Tradition, did not have any common measure with the vague impressions that I myself could have had on the same subject. During the very first conversation that I had with him, after having had the honor of being introduced -- on 9 January 1938 -- to him who, less than two years later, was destined to give me his name and his protection, asked me incidentally what I thought of ... Dietrich Eckart.

I knew that he was the author of the famous poem "Deutschland Erwache," a combatant of the very first days of the Kampfzeit, dead a few weeks after the failed "Putsch" of 9 November 1923 at the age of fifty-five years, the comrade to whom Adolf Hitler had dedicated the second part of Mein Kampf. I was still unaware of the existence of the Thulegesellschaft and was consequently far from suspecting the role that the poet of the national revolution had been able to play for the Führer.

I displayed with enthusiasm my pitifully small scholarship. My interlocutor who had rendered -- and was soon going to render -- to the Third Reich (and later to its Japanese allies) "services comparable to those of no one other," smiled and passed on to another subject.

The most convincing counter-argument seems to come from India. In the West, indeed, the confusion in the field of knowledge of principles is today such as it is difficult to say if there is there still a group that legitimately can pride itself on a true affiliation with the Tradition. There is not, therefore, a point of comparison between the attitude of true initiates and that of charlatans. According to René Guénon, practically all the societies of Europe that claim nowadays to be "initiatory" would be classified under the latter heading. However, it is their members who make themselves heard, who are agitated, who take a position against Hitlerism -- as Louis Powels and the Jew Bergier did every time they could in the review Planet. In fact, I do not know of even one European group interested in esoteric doctrines that is not definitely anti-Hitlerian. (I may be deceived, certainly. I would like, on this point, to be deceived.)

But it is not the same in India.

Initially, one faces there a completely different "spiritual landscape." Instead of dealing with groups with more or less "initiatory" pretensions moving in the midst of an immense secular society infatuated with applied sciences and "progress," and especially worried about its material well-being, we are in the presence of a traditional civilization, quite alive in spite of the increasing influence of technology. The man of the masses, not-poisoned by propaganda since he still enjoys the "blessing of illiteracy" (to use again a favorite expression in the Führer), thinks more than an individual of the same social standing in the West -- which among us is not an achievement! He thinks, especially, in the spirit of the Tradition; witness the Sudra youth whose story I recalled at the beginning of these Memories and Reflections.

The Hindu who has attended school and even studied in Europe or in the USA is not therefore hostile to the Tradition. The idea of natural hierarchy, of biological -- thus racial -- heredity, closely related to the Karma of each person, is familiar to him. And in the immense majority of cases, he sees according to immemorial rules of his caste -- even though the "progressive" government of so called "free" India (in reality a grotesque copy of the Democracies of the West) has proclaimed the suppression of the castes and imposed universal suffrage. In certain cases, of course, he brings subversive ideas or shocking practices back from his contacts with foreigners. But then he is scorned by his own, and orthodox society turns away from him -- no government having the power to force matters, he has to accept it whether he likes it or not. As for the traditional initiatory groups and the isolated Masters of true secret science, they continue to exist as in the past -- in silence, unperceived by the general public. They are held, in theory, out of the swirl of politics and do not give press conferences. At most a word, a remark made near a visitor respectful of the Tradition although himself uninitiated, can sometimes allow one to divine the terrestrial sympathies of this or that sage.

There are also, as one has to expect in a time of universal decline, people who make a profession of "spirituality" and groups that claim transcendent Masters and claim to transmit a so-called "initiation" without having a shadow of a right. The charlatans in orange tunics -- or naked, their bodies covered with ashes -- who trail around the temples, especially in the places of pilgrimage, living by begging or swindling, posing as "gurus" to credulous widows, are not lacking. They are rascals, but of small scale and limited noxiousness. Infinitely more dangerous are the individuals or the groups who work to inject into India -- as much as possible -- the anthropocentrism inherent in the religious or political doctrines influenced more or less directly by Judaism or the Jews. I mean by this all the individuals or groups who, under cover of a false fidelity to the Tradition which they twist and disfigure as they please, preach egalitarian principles, democracy, horror of any violence, even detached violence, when this is exerted against "men," whoever they may be -- whereas the monstrous exploitation of animals (and trees) by man hardly disturbs them (if they are not completely indifferent there, and even if they do not justify it!). I think of all those who claim to pay homage to "true ancient wisdom" by obstinately denying any natural racial hierarchy, by condemning the caste system in principle, by preaching the "right" of people of different races to marry if they believe they are finding "their happiness." I think of those who would like to replace, among Hindus, the old privileges of caste with privileges based on "education" (in the Western sense of the word), and replace the concern with metaphysical orthodoxy with an increasingly more intense preoccupation with the "social," the "economic," "the improvement of the living conditions for the masses." I think of the organizers of "Parliaments of Religions," of advocates of a fusion between "East and West" at the expense of the spirit of the Tradition common, in the beginning, to both, and that Hinduism alone preserved as the basis of civilization; with missionaries of a morality centered on "man," as conceived in the Christian West and the rationalist West.

The "Mission" which claims divine Ramakrishna -- a true initiate who lived in the last century -- seems more and more to tend in this direction, under the influence of Western benefactors, especially Americans. But this tendency does not date to today. It has been more than one hundred and fifty years since the foundation of the Brahmo Samaj Society of deists profoundly marked by their English university education and the "Protestant" form of Christianity. This sect, under pretext of bringing Hinduism back to a so-called "original purity," interpreted it according to the "modern spirit," which René Guénon so correctly deplored as the influence of Europe. But, as Guénon goes on to say, in spite of the social position of its members and, what is more, the high the caste of the best known of them, they are rejected by orthodox Hindus. They refuse to give them their daughters in marriage -- or to accept theirs for their sons. And in the villages, they would not accept from them a glass of water -- and, I repeat, no government has the power to force them. This attitude comes from what the followers of Brahmo Samaj reject as the principle of the caste system: the unequal "dignity" of men according to their heredity. It comes from the fact that Brahmo Samaj is not Indian -- no more than are the other sects of the same spirit, whatever they are.*

[*For example Arya Samaj, which has "Arya" in its name even though it too rejects the idea of a natural hierarchy of races.]

I do not want to go into detail on those. That would carry the reader too far. But it is not possible for me to overlook two organizations that were founded in South India: one, the Theosophical Society in Adyar close to Madras; the other, the community that was formed in Pondicherry around wise the Bengali Aurobindo Ghosh, now deceased.

The first is a vast international institution of subversion in the deep sense of the word, as Guénon has shown extremely well in his book Theosophy, a False Religion. What they would like to pass off as "doctrines" is a farrago of arbitrary constructions of the intellect and various notions and beliefs of which the names -- karma; transmigration of souls, etc. -- are drawn from the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. These notions and beliefs are quite as arbitrary, and scarcely as orthodox, as the theories they go into -- such as, for example, the idea of the "group soul" of animals dear to Leadbeater; such as, also, everything the Theosophists teach about their various "Masters": Koot Hoomi, Rajkoski, and others. The illustrious Lokornanya Tilak, whose work I quoted above, compared Annie Besant, President of the Theosophical Society until her death in 1933 -- and for a time President of the Indian National Congress -- with the she-devil Putna, sent to nurse the Child-God, Krishna, in order to kill him with her poisonous milk. Tilak hoped that, like the young God who, while assimilating the poison with impunity, finally killed Putna by emptying her of all her substance, Hindu society could be defended and confound those who try to seduce it with skillfully disguised untruths.

The other institution developed around an apparently genuine sage. However it tended, already during his life, to descend to the level of an enterprise of very skilful and very lucrative exploitation. Indeed, it bought one after the other all the houses of Pondicherry that were for sale, so that it included in 1960, apart from the center where some disciples dedicated themselves to meditation, many workshops for pottery, joinery, weaving, etc, etc. ... whose products were -- and are still to -- day-sold for profit; co-educational schools, with sports classes; a university, provided with richly equipped laboratories.

This prosperity is, I am told, due mainly to the business genius of the "Mother" of the ashram -- a woman of Jewish origin, the widow of a Jew, then of a Frenchman* -- and the son that she had with her first husband. Members of the organization, full at the same time with zeal and practical direction and enjoying the confidence of these two people, are also, perhaps, persons in charge, each one following his talents. In any event, in the reception hall, where there are many photographs of the late guru and the "Mother" for sale -- large and small, for all budgets -- one is impressed by the business-like atmosphere of the place, an impression that is specified and intensified during a visit of the workshops. And one recalls, by contrast, the spiritual energy that emerges from certain writings of Aurobindo Ghosh: his Commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, his Divine Life or his Synthesis of Yogas. There is the feeling of a deep rift between this more than flourishing organization which covers two thirds of a city of more than one hundred thousand inhabitants, and the wise one who lived there in the most complete isolation -- invisible to the crowd and even to his disciples, except for a few hours a year.

[*Mr. Paul Richard, her first husband, was called Alfassa. The "Mother," still alive when these pages were written, died since then -- in 1973 -- at 95 years of age.]

However, there is a fact which seems to me eloquent, and it is this: in the midst of this traditional civilization that is still that of India, it is precisely from these organizations -- the most secular, the most "modern," in a word the most anti-traditionalist -- that the gestures, writings, and declarations hostile to Hitlerism came.

Aurobindo Ghosh himself did not, to my knowledge, ever express a judgment "pro" or "contra" any of the great figures or the great political (or more-than-political) faiths of our time. He had definitively left action -- and what action!* -- for contemplation, and it was confined to the spiritual domain. But at the end of 1939 -- or was it 1940? -- the newspapers of Calcutta published that the "Ashram of Pondicherry" had made the colonial Government of India a gift of ten million pounds sterling "to help the British war effort." Mr. de Saint-Hilaire, known as Pavitra, secretary of the Ashram, whom I questioned on this point in 1960, answered me that he "could not say to me" if information collected and published twenty years earlier in the press of Calcutta was exact. But he told me that "that could well be," considering that Hitlerism went, according to him (and undoubtedly also according to more than one person having some influence in the ashram), "against the direction of human evolution." (Against evolution? And how! Nothing could be truer! But far from being a reason to fight it, it would be, on the contrary, a reason to support it. Universal decline is a sign, more and more visible, that our cycle advances rapidly towards its end. Any combat against it, all "return to the eternal principles," necessarily goes "against the direction of human evolution." It is a phase of the perpetual fight against the current of Time. But this is, I repeat it, I insist on it, a reason -- the imperative reason -- to exalt rather than to condemn it.)

[*He had, at the beginning of the century, played a leading role in the anti-British "terrorist" movement of Bengal.]

In addition, the heads of the Theosophical Society -- according to René Guénon, Masters of counter-initiation, in spite of their claims to the contrary -- proved, during and after the Second World War, how much they hated (and hate still) the doctrines of Adolf Hitler. Arundale, then President of the Society, traversed India in search of compliant, i.e., purchasable, priests and ordered prayers for the victory of the "Crusade" against National Socialism.* And one only has to open any issue of Conscience, the official organ of Theosophy, to see displayed in black and white anti-Hitlerian propaganda that has nothing to envy in the contemporary newspapers of England or the USA, and even the press of the Soviet Union (after they heard of the rupture of the Germano-Russian Pact of 23 August 1939). It is not only to the supposed invisible "Masters" of the Theosophists, Koot Hoomi, Rajkoski, and others -- that one attributed "secret missions" for the success of the United Nations.**

[*Crusade to Europe is the title of the book of General Eisenhower on his campaign against Germany.]

[**In 1947 Gretar Fels, President of the Theosophical Society of Reykjavik, assured me that "Master Rajkoski" had "helped the Allies" to fight Nazism.]

Apart from the Theosophical Society -- even it in close connection with certain Western Masonic Lodges -- it is among the Hindus of the dissident sects, such as Brahmo Samaj, where I met the only anti-Hitlerians who crossed my path in India -- apart from, of course, the great majority of non-German Europeans and all the Communists without exception. I will cite, for example, only the open air University of Shantinikétan, which represents then and always the Brahma Samajist milieu par excellence. The poet Rabindranath Tagore, its founder, was still living when, in 1935, I spent six months at this university in order to improve my knowledge of the Bengali language and to learn Hindi there. I noticed there nothing special except the presence, as "a German professor," of a Jewess of Berlin, Margaret Spiegel, known as Amala Bhen, who had come, after two years of staying in the ashram of Gandhi, to spread her hatred of the Third Reich to the pupils who were entrusted to her and the Hindu colleagues whom she could indoctrinate. I soon knew that "Govinda," the Buddhist monk whose saffron-colored robe and beautiful Burmese parasol added a picturesque note to the landscape, was also a Jew from Germany. I was also told of the profound friendship that bound the poet to Andrews, a British former Christian missionary. But nobody expressed to me hostility towards my Hitlerian faith -- except Amala Bhen.

This one, to whom somebody thought it good to introduce to me "as European" on my arrival in Shantiniketan, was, at the end of hardly half an hour of conversation, extremely well versed on the "pan-Aryan" nature of Hitlerism such as I conceived it and always conceive it. She hastened to tell me -- she who had come to the end of the Earth "not to see the shadow of a Nazi anymore" -- that I was "worse than the whole pack rolled in one" -- of those whom she wanted to avoid so much. Indeed, she told me, they marched in the streets of the cities of the Reich singing: "Today Germany belongs to us; tomorrow, the whole world!" but they thought especially of Germany, in spite of the words of their song. While I, while insisting on the deep identity of the Hitlerian spirit and of that of orthodox Hinduism, prepared the way for future military and moral conquest and the unlimited influence of the German Reich which would extend throughout Asia.

These remarks flattered me well beyond my merits. But the hostility of Margaret Spiegel, known as Amala Bhen -- and undoubtedly that of "Govinda," which he took good care not to present to me -- appeared to me still confined to the non-Hindu element of the University of Shantinikétan.

It was surprised to learn a few months before the Second World War that the poet Rabindranath Tagore himself had sent to the Führer a telegram of protest against the invasion of "poor Czechoslovakia." Why did he interfere? -- he whom I could not help but exalt for his work as an artist. Didn't he realize that it was especially the poor Germans of the Sudetenland who had the right to be protected? Didn't he know that Czechoslovakia had never been anything but an artificial State, an assembly of elements that could not be more disparate, built of all parts to be used as permanent thorn in the side of German Reich? But what could I say? Would he have even been able to trace the map of it? Then why this indiscreet intervention? Had it been suggested to him -- or inspired -- by the foreigners, Christians or Jews, whom I have just named, and by others, all humanitarians and antiracists -- at least anti-Aryans -- who haunted Shantiniketan occasionally, or who lived there? [Image: Ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland greet their liberators (1938)] 

Or wasn't I rather to admit that such an artist -- who could reveal, under his pen of genius, something luminous and musical in a neo-Sanskrit language such as Bengali -- a Brahman who rejected en bloc the caste system, could only be anti-Hitlerian? The standpoint of the poet against the Defender of the Aryan élite of Europe, in a European conflict, shocked me even more as Rabindranath Tagore had a complexion of ivory and the most traditional features of the White race -- physical signs of a relationship without mixture with those Aryan conquerors who transmitted to old India the Tradition of Hyperborea. But I could -- I would -- have thought that, if these same visible signs of Aryan nobility had not been able to prevent him from joining his voice to that of the despisers of the "Law of color and social function" -- varnashramdharma -- in India, it was not very probable that they had been able to become in him the occasion of an awakening of ancestral conscience, bound as it must with an unspecified sympathy to this European and modern form of "the Brahminic spirit" that is Hitlerism.

On the other hand, I was always agreeably struck by the comprehension that I met, as a Hitlerist, from orthodox Hindus of all castes.

I have, at the beginning of these discussions, related the episode of the Sudra youth with the beautiful historical name of Khudiram* who showed more understanding of true values -- and a more exact appreciation of the role of Adolf Hitler -- than all Democrats of Europe and America put together. I also quoted Satyananda Swami, the founder of the Hindu Mission, for whom, however, the creation of a Hindu front united against the influence of Islam, Christian missionaries, and Communism, counted much more even than the strict observance of orthodoxy. This one held our Führer to be an "incarnation of Vishnu -- the only one in the West."

[*It is the name of a young hero of Bengal, who gave his life for the independence of India].

I could, on this subject, multiply my recollections and recall, for example, the admirable Brahman of Poona, Pandit Rajwadé, so versed in knowledge of the works of Nietzsche as if they were sacred texts (which he commented on, twice per week, in front of a narrow circle of disciples) and who professed deepest admiration for the "king chakravartin of Europe" come "to restore the true order" in a world adrift. I could also tell of another hardly ordinary man -- less well-read perhaps, but gifted with a strange power of clairvoyance -- whom I met at the beginning of the war in a friendly family, of which he was the guru or spiritual master. This sage said to me: "Your Führer can only be victorious because it is the Gods themselves who dictate his strategy to him. Every evening, he doubles himself and comes here to the Himalayas to receive their instructions."

I wondered what Adolf Hitler would have thought of this unexpected explanation of the victories of the German army. I said to the holy man then: "It is, in this case, unquestionable that he will gain the war".

"No," he responded, "because there will come a time when his generals will reject his divine inspiration and will disobey him -- will betray him."

And he added: "It cannot be otherwise; if he is an Incarnation, he is not the supreme Incarnation -- the last of this cycle" -- Alas!

But that is not all. How could I forget the atmosphere of the orthodox Hindu families that I know best? That, for example, of the house of one of my brothers-in-law, then still alive, a doctor in Medinipur, where I was at the time of the Norway campaign and the beginning of the France campaign? All agreed with enthusiasm with my suggestion to go to the temple of the Goddess Kali -- to the "House of Kali," as one says in Bengali -- to return thanks to She who at the same time blesses and kills for the triumphal advance of the soldiers of great German Reich. We went there in a procession, carrying offerings of rice, sugar, flour, fruits, scarlet garlands of flowers -- in the absence of the blood sacrifice the idea of which the family rejected as much as me. I still recall accompanying a youth also proud of his Aryan descent, standing in front of the terrible Image with the curved saber. Inhaling the incense fumes, soothed by the enchanting musicality of the Sanskrit liturgical formulas, I sometimes closed my eyes to see better in spirit the imposing fresco of the procession of the German armored tanks along the roads of Europe. I intensely lived my role of unifier between the oldest living Aryan civilization of the East and this Aryan West that Adolf Hitler was in the process of conquering in order to return it to itself and to regenerate it. Then I looked over my nephews and nieces, and the young Brahmans, their neighbors and fellow students, who had accompanied me. And I dreamed of the day when I would finally see the new Emperor -- the eternal Emperor -- of the Twilight Lands [Abendland = West], awakened and emerged from his mysterious cave, and when, greeting him with my extended arm, I would say to him: "Mein Führer, I bring to you the allegiance of the élite of India!" [Image: Kali standing upon a recumbent Shiva.] 

That did not appear an impossible dream then.

How could I forget the general joy in Calcutta -- and undoubtedly also in the rest of the peninsula -- at the news of the entry of the troops of Adolf Hitler into Paris, or, some twenty month later, with the news of the stunning advance of our Japanese allies to the border of Assam and beyond? The children themselves, newsvendors, their faces radiant, triumphantly threw to the public the names of the cities taken -- every day the news: Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Rangoon, Mandalay, Akyab ... Imphal, in Indian territory -- one after the other. The colonial government had prohibited listening to German radio. People who understood German listened to it clandestinely. I know Hindus who lent their ears without comprehending a word of it -- simply to hear the voice of the Führer. They felt that He who spoke to the Aryan world in an "Indo-European" language that was unknown to them was also addressing them -- at least the racial élite of their continent.

But still that is nothing. What is even more extraordinary is that this worship of the Führer has survived in this country after the downfall of Third Reich. I found it alive at the time of my stay in India from 1957 to 1960, and I find it again, to my joy and in spite of intensified Communist propaganda, in 1971, and that, I repeat, especially in the milieus most faithful to the Tradition.

In the book devoted to India in the "Small Planet" collection, the orientalist Madeleine Biardeau, herself definitely hostile to our Weltanschauung, is obliged to note it -- with regret, not to say with bitterness. "In no country," she writes, "did I hear more praise of Hitler. Germans are congratulated for the sole reason that they are his compatriots."* And she is as obliged to admit that the resentment of the Hindus towards British domination -- now finished anyway -- does not suffice to explain this worship. The scholar has, underhandedly as one would expect it, an explanation that is suitable for her. The Hindu, she says, feels and honors the presence of the Divine in all that is "great" -- even the "great in the evil." In other words he is free of the moral dualism that still underlies, almost always, the value judgments supported by the man of West.

[*Madeleine Biardeau, L'Inde, "Small Planet" series.]

That is certainly true. But that is not a sufficient explanation. The only justification for this praise addressed to a foreign Aryan leader in India resides, not in the fact that the Hindu easily transcends moral dualism, but in the reason that accounts for this fact. This reason is to be sought in the attachment of the Hindu to the Tradition, in addition, in his acceptance of the sacred knowledge with complete confidence, even if he himself did not acquire it. It is in the name of this more than human science that he finds natural that, in certain circumstances, that which, on an average human scale, would seem "evil," is not. It is in the light of the doctrines of necessary violence, exercised without passion "in the interest of the Universe" -- i.e., of Life, not of "man" -- it is in the light of the venerable Bhagavad Gita, which proclaims the innocence of violence of this nature, that the orthodox Hindu can precisely see in the Master of the Third Reich -- despite all the propaganda about concentration camps that has saturated all the rest of the men on this Earth for several decades -- something other than "the incarnation of Evil."

Moreover, it is impossible for him not to be struck by the similarity of spirit which exists between Hitlerism and -- not, certainly, philosophies of non-violence, which were detached from the Brahmanic trunk, or the sects of Hindu dissidents -- the most rigorous and oldest Brahmanism. One and the other are centered on the idea of purity of blood and the unlimited transmission of healthy life -- above all of the life of the racial élite; the life that allows the man who controls himself to rise to the level of a god. One and the other exalt war fought with an attitude of detachment -- "war without hatred"* -- because "nothing can be better to the Kshatriya" -- or the perfect SS warrior -- "than just combat" (Bhagavad Gita, Song II, verse 31). One and the other establish on the Earth -- as do all the "traditional" doctrines as well -- a visible order modelled on cosmic realities and cosmic Laws of life.

[*It is the subtitle of a book published after the war on the career of Field Marshall Rommel.]

This worship of the Führer, surviving in India in spite of so much enemy propaganda well beyond the disaster of 1945, is, moreover, a proof -- if one were in need of one -- that Hitlerism, stripped of its contingent German expression, is also indeed attached to the primordial -- Hyperborean -- Tradition of which Brahmanism seems to be the most ancient living form. It is undoubtedly attached to it by what has, in spite of the imposition of Christianity, survived in Germany of a very old and properly Germanic traditional form, rising from a common Source: the holy "Arctic fatherland" of the Vedas ... and the Edda.

It is impossible to say to what extent the Thulegesellschaft was in possession of this priceless heritage from the depths of the ages. No doubt some of its members -- Dietrich Eckart, Rudolf Hess, and, of course, the Führer himself -- were. One of the features specific to the initiate would be the capacity to simulate -- at all times he considered it suitable to his designs -- anger, madness, imbecility, or every another human state. Now the Führer compelled himself -- he says so himself -- "to appear hard." And his too famous paroxysms of rage -- on which the enemy pounced with delight as a source of ridicule exploitable ad infinitum -- was, according to Rauschning, "carefully premeditated" and "was intended to disconcert his entourage and to force them to capitulate" (Rauschning, 84). Hermann Rauschning, who at the time he wrote his book apparently hated his former Master, did not have any reason to destroy, as he does with the stroke of a pen, the legend that aimed at discrediting him in the eyes of more than one level-headed man. Or rather, if he had a reason, this could be, despite everything, a remnant of intellectual honesty.

As for Rudolf Hess, the comedy of "amnesia" that he so masterfully played during the Nuremberg Tribunal misled the most informed psychiatrists. And the "normal" tone, sometimes even playful, of his letters to his wife and his son* -- which disconcerts the reader from a man more than thirty years a prisoner -- suffices to prove his super-humanity. Indeed, only an initiate can write, after three decades in a cell, in the light and detached manner of a husband and father traveling far from his family for three weeks. [Image: Rudolf Hess.]

[*Frau Ilse Hess published two collections of letters of her captive husband: London, Nuremberg, Spandau and Prisoner of Peace.]

The Führer, according to all appearances, exceeded his Masters of the Thule Society (or anywhere else), and escaped the influence that some of them -- one will never truly know which -- would have liked to have had on him. He had to do it, being sovereign, being one of the visages of He-who-returns.

And if abruptly the war took a bad course; if -- what is at the very least disconcerting -- the point of no return was Stalingrad, which, according to some, was even the site even of ancient Asgard, fortress of the Germanic Gods, it is undoubtedly because, for some hidden reason, it had to be so. And hadn't the young Adolf Hitler had that revelation under the night sky, at the top of Freienberg, at the gates of his beloved town of Linz, at sixteen years of age?

The immediate material cause, or rather the occasion of the fatal turning, had to be not a fault of strategy on behalf of the Führer -- it is recognized that he was never mistaken in this field -- but some stiffening, as sudden as it was unfortunate, in his attitude vis-à-vis the adversary. Siegfried, the superman, once showed such pride fraught with consequences by refusing -- so as not to seem to yield to a threat and therefore to fear -- to return to the Rhine maidens the Ring that belonged to them by right. This gesture would have saved Asgard and the Gods. The refusal of the hero precipitated its downfall. The new Siegfried, undoubtedly, also not to appear "weak," although no challenge had been launched against him, refused to exploit, as he certainly could, the goodwill of the people of the Ukraine -- anti-communists, aspiring to their autonomy -- who had initially received his soldiers as liberators.

Did he do it knowingly, realizing that the loss of the war, written in the stars from all eternity, was a catastrophe necessary for Germany and the entire Aryan world that only the test of fire could one day purify? It is something only the gods know. The speed with which Germany has, since the first years of the post-war period, taken the bait of material prosperity without any ideals, shows how much, in spite of the enthusiasm of the large National Socialist gatherings, it was only incompletely freed from its comfortable humanitarian moralism and superficially armed against Jewish influence, as well as profound "politics," i.e., exerted in the field of values.

It remains true that, in his famous Testament, the Führer calls upon the Aryans -- all the Aryans, including the non-German ones -- "of centuries to come," exhorting them "to keep their blood pure," to fight the doctrines of subversion, in particular Communism, and to remain confident of themselves and invincibly attached to the aristocratic ideal for which he himself fought. The National Socialist party can be dissolved; the name of the Führer can be proscribed, the faithful hunted down, forced into silence, dispersed. But Hitlerism, nourished from the Source of super-human knowledge, cannot die.

It also remains true that the men of the Ahnenerbe were not all, after 1945, hung as "war criminals" or killed with a bullet in the dungeons or the concentration camps of the victors. Some even seem to have enjoyed a strange immunity, as if a magic circle had surrounded them and protected them before the "judges" of the Nuremberg Tribunals.

The section of the Ahnenerbe that dealt in particular with esoteric doctrines had, according to André Brissaud, "eminent collaborators in the persons of Friedrich Hielscher, Wolfram Sievers, Ernst Jünger, and even of ... Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher"(Brissaud, 285). (Why not, indeed, if this Jew had reached a high degree of knowledge in "pure metaphysics," and was not politically active? Doesn't D.H. Lawrence write somewhere [in The Plumed Serpent] that "the flowers meet and mix their colors at the top"?) André Brissaud "does not know" if Friedrich Hielscher was a member of the Thulegesellschaft. He presumes it. But he knows that this senior SS officer "certainly played a great role in the secret, esoteric activity of the Ahnenerbe, and had a great influence on his disciple, Doctor Wolfram Sievers, Standartenführer SS and secretary-general of this Institute" (Brissaud, 285). "At the time of the last trial in Nuremberg," continues the historian of The Black Order, "Friedrich Hielscher, who was not prosecuted, testified in a curious manner: he made political diversions 'to drown fish' [to waste time] and made intentionally absurd racist remarks, but did not say anything of the Ahnenerbe. Sievers too did not speak. He listened to the evocation of his 'crimes' with an apparent detachment and heard himself condemned to death with total indifference. Hielscher obtained the Allies' authorization to accompany Sievers to the gallows, and it was with him that the condemned said the prayers particular to a cult about which he never spoke, neither during interrogations, nor during his trial" (Brissaud, 285-96).

One cannot but wonder how many old SS members like Hielscher of some section of the Ahnenerbe -- this guardian of the profound orthodoxy of Hitlerism, i.e., of the esoteric knowledge which constitutes the base of it -- escaped the revenge of the victors and live still today on the surface of our Earth, it does not matter where. There is perhaps in Germany even that one circle that one does not know because they carry the Tarnhelm of divine Siegfried: the helmet that allows the warrior to appear in whatever form he pleases and even to make himself invisible. It would be even more interesting to know how many young men less than twenty-five years old are already affiliated, in absolute secrecy, with the fraternity of the knights of the Black Order, whose "honor is loyalty," and are preparing, under the direction of the elders, to climb the levels of initiation -- or are, perhaps, the first climbers of it.

No book like that of André Brissaud, or René Allau, or anyone, will ever provide, on this point, the curious with information which they only have to find and which, once in their possession, would risk being spread sooner or later through irresponsible chattering. For true disciples of the Führer, who did or did not meet him in the visible world, the existence of such a top secret, pan-European, even pan-Aryan network, is not in doubt anymore. The raison d'être of this invisible and quiet fraternity is precisely to preserve the core of more than human traditional knowledge -- on which Hitlerism is centered, and which ensures its perenniality. Sincere Hitlerists, but still without experience of initiation, will come there if the Masters, guardians of the faith, judge them worthy. But then they will not speak any more than Friedrich Hielscher or Wolfram Sievers, or so many others. "He who speaks does not know; he who knows does not speak," said Lao-Tsu, whose wisdom remains intangible and whole, even if his country -- most ancient China -- rejects it today.

All Articles On This Page Were Reproduced With Deep Gratitude From: http://library.flawlesslogic.com/1d.htm

Go to Savitri Deva Page I with many of her articles and pictures

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1949: PROPHETESS OF THE SAUCERS (About Savitri Devi from UFO web site)
Lengthy well written article!