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 t