Savitri Devi (Maximiniani Julia Portas) 1905 - 1982

[KALKI]

Savitri Devi Mukherji (September 30, 1905 – October 22, 1982) was the pseudonym of the Greek-French writer Maximiani Portas, a prominent proponent of animal rights, deep ecology and Nazism, who served the Axis cause during World War II by spying on Allied forces in India. She wrote about animal rights movements and was a leading member of the Nazi underground during the 1960s.

An admirer of German National Socialism (Nazism), Savitri Devi was also an animal-rights activist who authored the book The Impeachment of Man in 1959 and was a proponent of Hinduism and Nazism, synthesizing the two, proclaiming Adolf Hitler to have been sent by Providence, much like an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. She believed Hitler was a sacrifice for humanity which would lead to the end of the Kali Yuga induced by who she felt were the powers of evil, the Jews.

Her writings have influenced neo-Nazism and Nazi occultism. Among Savitri Devi's ideas was the classifications of "men above time", "men in time" and "men against time". Rejecting Judeo-Christianity, she believed in a form of pantheistic monism; a single cosmos of nature composed of divine energy-matter.

She is credited with pioneering neo-Nazi interest in occultism, deep ecology and the New Age movement. She influenced the Chilean diplomat Miguel Serrano. In 1982, Franco Freda published a German translation of her work Gold in the Furnace, and the fourth volume of his annual review, Risguardo (1980–), was devoted to Savitri Devi as the "missionary of Aryan Paganism".

Savitri was an associate in the post-war years of Françoise Dior, Otto Skorzeny,Johannes von Leers, and Hans-Ulrich Rudel.

She was also one of the founding members of the World Union of National Socialists.

Born as Maximiani Julia Portas in 1905, Savitri Devi was the daughter of Maxim Portas, a French citizen of Greek and Italian ancestry and an Englishwoman, Julia Portas (née Nash). Maximine Portas was born two and a half months premature, weighing only 930 grams (2.05 lbs), and was not at first expected to live. She formed her political views early. From childhood and throughout her life, she was a passionate advocate for animal rights. Her earliest political affiliations were with Greek nationalism.

Portas studied philosophy and chemistry, earning two Masters Degrees and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Lyon.[3] She next traveled to Greece, and surveyed the legendary ruins. Here, she became familiar with Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of swastikas in Anatolia. Her conclusion was that Ancient Greeks were Aryan in origin. Her first two books were her doctoral dissertations: Essai-critique sur Théophile Kaïris (Critical Essay on Theophilius Kaïris) (Lyon: Maximine Portas, 1935) and La simplicité mathématique (Mathematical Simplicity) (Lyon: Maximine Portas, 1935).

Sometime between 1932 and 1935, she was the French tutor of the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997), as he revealed in a radio interview by Katherine von Bulow (France Culture – 20/4/96).[


In early 1928, she renounced her French citizenship and acquired Greek nationality. Joining a pilgrimage to Palestine during Lent in 1929, Portas decided that she was a National Socialist.

In 1932, she travelled to India in search of a living pagan Aryan culture. Formally adhering to Hinduism, she took the name Savitri Devi ("Sun-rays Goddess" in Sanskrit). She volunteered at the Hindu Mission as an advocate against Judeo-Christianity,[7] and wrote A Warning to the Hindus to offer her support for Hindu nationalism and independence, and to rally resistance to the spread of Christianity and Islam in India.

During the 1930s she distributed pro-Axis propaganda and engaged in intelligence gathering on the British in India.

In the late 1930s, through her personal contacts, she enabled Subhas Chandra Bose (leader during World War II of the Axis-affiliated Indian National Army), to make contact with representatives of the Empire of Japan


During World War II, Devi sided with the Axis powers, clashing with her mother, who served with the French Resistance during the German occupation of France.

In 1940, she married Asit Krishna Mukherji, a Bengali Brahmin with National Socialist views who edited the pro-German newspaper New Mercury.

During 1941, Devi chose to interpret Allied military support for Greece, against Italian and German forces, as an invasion of Greece.

Devi and Mukherji continued to gather intelligence for the Axis cause. This included entertaining Allied personnel, which gave Devi and Mukherji an opportunity to question them regarding military matters. The information gathered was passed on to Japanese intelligence officials and contributed to attacks on Allied airbases and army units

[KALKI]

Savitri Devi (1905 - 1982) was born Maximiani Portas, of English and Greek parents in Lyons, France. After becoming a Greek national she took to Hellenism, and was disillusioned with Christianity. It was the swastikasigns on the palace of Athens, built by 19th century German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, that stirred Maximiani's first feelings for the Aryan race. She left for India to search for the roots of the Aryan civilisation. She regarded Hinduism as the only living Aryan heritage in the modern world and was convinced that only Hinduism could take on and oppose the Judaeo-Christian heritage. Soon, she adopted the name Savitri Devi which would make her famous in neo-Nazi circles.

India fascinated her - she noted now even a street-side vendor would discuss the Mahabharat in the morning. In 1939, she published A Warning to Hindus under the auspices of the Hindu Mission. In the book, she scorned the Congress for its secular policies and said there was no India but a Hindu one and warned the Hindus not to let the Muslims overwhelm them. In 1939 Savitri Devi met and married a Bengali Brahmin, Asit Krishna Mukherjee, in a Hindu ceremony in Calcutta. During the war the couple gathered intelligence on behalf of the Axis, and Mukherji put Subhas Chandra Bose in contact with the Japanese, who would later support his Indian National Army in its abortive campaign against the British.




Saviitri Devi born Maximiani Portas, was disillusioned with Christianity and she took to Hellenism. India fascinated her deeply. She regarded Hinduism as the only living Aryan heritage in the modern world and was convinced that only Hinduism could take on and oppose the Judaeo-Christian heritage.

"We defend Hinduism, because it is India’s very self-expression; and we love India, because it is India." Hinduism is really superior to other religions, not for its spirituality, but for that still more precious thing it gives to its followers: a scientific outlook on religion and on life." "Even if India itself were to disappear just now, the philosophical and spiritual inheritance of the Hindus would remain. Mankind would preserve Hinduism, because it is worth preserving. It is immortal, and needs no one to defend it."

***

“If those of Indo-European race regard the conquest of pagan Europe by Christianity as a decadence, then the whole of Hindu India can be likened to a last fortress of very ancient ideals, of very old and beautiful religious and metaphysical conceptions, which have already passed away in Europe. Hinduism is thus the last flourishing and fecund branch on an immense tree which has been cut down and mutilated for two thousand years."

"Hinduism is the most perfect type of such "religions" Apart from the high philosophies contained in the Hindu Scriptures and from the high spiritual ideal realized by the Hindu seers, we want to defend Hindu civilization and society, against the increasing forces of rival proselytizing societies strongly united by the consciousness of a common creed. Even if India itself were to disappear just now, the philosophical and spiritual inheritance of the Hindus would remain. Mankind would preserve it, because it is worth preserving. It is immortal, and needs no one to defend it."

"We defend Hinduism, because it is India’s very self-expression; and we love India, because it is India." Hinduism is really superior to other religions, not for its spirituality, but for that still more precious thing it gives to its followers: a scientific outlook on religion and on life. Hindu spirituality is a consequence of that very outlook. That scientific character of Hinduism should be looked upon by the Hindus as their strength, not as a weakness, like some seem to believe. The man of one book and of one creed may be strong, for the time being; but in the long run, it is a strength (and the greatest of all strength) for a religion, to have no particular founder, no particular book, no particular creed, settled once forever; to be just a continuous flow of thought, in search of knowledge, on the basis of a continuously renewed experience." " free thought in all matters, including religion, is a feature of Hinduism." Philosophically, Hinduism is an attitude of mind, and an outlook on life. The Hindus are one of the few modern civilised people who are openly Pagans."





The Hindus are one of the few modern civilised people who are openly Pagans.

***

"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 (Shiva Nataraj), whose feet are over-treading life, and destroying it in a furious rhythm, . . . while His dispassionate face, expressing Knowledge, is as calm as the smiling sea. 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."

(source: L'Etang aux lotus (The Lotus pond) - By Savitri Devi, and A Warning to the Hindus - By Savitri Devi). Refer to The strange case of Savitri Devi - By Koenraad Elst.

[KALKI]

Remembering Savitri Devi:
September 30, 1905 to October 22, 1982


Savitri Devi was a philosopher, a religious thinker, and a tireless polemicist and activist for the causes of animal rights, European pagan revivalism, Hindu Nationalism, German National Socialism, and — after the Second World War — pan-European racial nationalism. She also sought to found a religion, Esoteric Hitlerism, fusing National Socialism with the Traditionalism of René Guénon and Julius Evola. All told, she was one of the most extraordinary personalities of the 20th century.

She was born Maximine Portaz born in Lyons, France on September 30, 1905. Her mother, Julia Nash was English, descending from Viking stock. (She claimed that the name Nash is derived from Ash, as in the World Ash Tree.) Her father, Maxim Portaz, was three fourths Italian from Savoy, one fourth Greek. Because of her mixed-European heritage, she identified herself simply as “European.” She also described herself as a “nationalist of all nations.”

For an account of her life and work, read R. G. Fowler’s tribute to Savitri Devi on her 100th birthday: “Woman Against Time: Remembering Savitri Devi’s 100th Birthday.” (Translations: German, French, Czech, Norwegian.)

Savitri Devi died on October 22, 1982 in Sible Hedingham, Essex, England at the home of her friend Muriel Gantry. For a sad account of her passing, see Muriel Gantry’s “The Last Days of Savitri Devi,” selected from her correspondence by R. G. Fowler.

[KALKI]

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."

The circumstances of Savitri Devi's birth were not auspicious. She was born two and a half months premature, having been conceived on the night of 13-14 March 1905. The delivery was difficult, and she weighed only 930 grams. The doctor told her parents that she would not live. She was to be an only child. Her mother Julia Portaz (née Nash) was forty, her father Maxim Portaz forty-four. Fearful of another difficult pregnancy, they never made love again. They named the baby Maximine Julia Portaz, then waited for her to die.

But the Life Force was strong in her. It had something great in store.

Savitri Devi had remarkable intellectual gifts, which she manifested at an early age. As a young child she learned French and English from her parents, then taught herself Modern Greek and some Ancient Greek. In time she became fluent in seven languages (English, French, Modern Greek, German, Icelandic, Hindi, and Bengali) and had knowledge of several others (e.g., Ancient Greek, Italian, Urdu, and other Indian languages).

Savitri Devi also earned two Masters Degrees, in philosophy and physics-chemistry, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Lyons. Her first two books were her doctoral dissertations: Essai-critique sur Théophile Kaïris (Critical Essay on Theophilius Kaïris) (Lyons: Maximine Portaz, 1935) and La simplicité mathématique (Mathematical Simplicity) (Lyons: Maximine Portaz, 1935).

Savitri Devi also had a vast knowledge of religion and history, particularly ancient history, as well as an amazing memory, particularly for dates and names. She was also a brilliant and mesmerizing teacher who could lecture at length on countless topics without reference to notes.

A self-described "nationalist of every nation" and an Indo-European pagan revivalist, Savitri Devi embraced National Socialism in 1929 while in Palestine. In 1935, she traveled to India to experience in Hinduism the last living remnants of the Indo-European pagan religious tradition. Settling eventually in Calcutta, she worked for the Hindu nationalist movement, which defended Hindu tradition from all universalistic and egalitarian ideologies, such as Christianity, Islam, Communism, and liberal democracy. In 1939, Savitri Devi married a Bengali Brahmin, the pro-Axis publisher Asit Krishna Mukherji (1904-1977). During World War II, she and her husband spied for the Japanese.

In 1935, while studying at Rabindranath Tagore's Shantiniketan Ashram in Bengal, Maximine Portaz, at the suggestion of some fellow students, took the pen name Savitri Devi. "Savitri" is one of the Sanskrit names of the sun, and "Devi" means goddess. It was a perfect name, since Savitri was a devotee of what she considered the primordial Aryan religion: the worship of Life and Light. ("Devi," by the way, is not a surname, but a title that all Aryan women in India are entitled to take. Thus Savitri Devi should not be referred to simply as "Devi" for short, but as "Savitri" -- just as Saint Paul is referred to as "Paul" not as "Saint." By themselves, titles such as Saint, Mister, Doctor, or Devi do not refer to any particular person.)

While in India, Savitri authored several books: In 1937 she completed L'Etang aux lotus (The Lotus Pond) (Calcutta: Savitri Devi Mukherji, 1940), recording her first impressions of India. The Lotus Pond combines vivid travelogues with philosophical reflections on Indian culture and tradition. Her next book, A Warning to the Hindus (Calcutta: Hindu Mission, 1939), is her manifesto of Hindu Nationalism. Hinduism is a radically pluralistic and tolerant religion, and this often blinds Hindus to the dangers posed by the intolerant Biblical religions and their secular offshoots: liberal democracy and communism. Savitri seeks to awaken Hindus to this danger and demonstrate the necessity of cultivating a unified Hindu national consciousness that cuts across yet respects and preserves India's myriad communal and caste distinctions. Savitri also clearly thought that such a Hindu national consciousness was a necessary condition for Indian independence. A Warning to the Hindus was translated into six Indian languages and remains in print today. A third book, The Non-Hindu Indians and Indian Unity (Calcutta: Hindu Mission, 1940), deals with the question of the integration of non-Hindu minorities into a Hindu nation, both in the struggle for Indian independence and in an independent India. Savitri's plea is for Indian Muslims, Christians, and other non-Hindus to recognize that they are Indians first, i.e., products of a Hindu culture, even though they do not profess the Hindu religion.

Akhnaton and NefertitiAnother focus of Savitri's interest while in India was a fellow sun-worshipper, the Ancient Egyptian "Heretic Pharaoh" Akhnaton (14th century BC), who was surely one of the most remarkable and enigmatic personalities in history. Akhnaton sought to replace Egyptian polytheism with a monotheistic religion that honored the Life Force under the image of the solar disc pouring forth its life-giving rays. Although Akhnaton's monotheism was as intolerant as the Biblical monotheism that Savitri despised, she was fascinated with Akhnaton's life and character and strongly attracted to his religion on philosophical, spiritual, and aesthetic grounds. Indeed, she believed that Akhnaton's religion was essentially identical to the primordial Aryan religion of Life and Light, and she even suggested that Akhnaton's reforms might have been influenced by the Mitanni, an Aryan people who had settled in upper Mesopotamia. Akhnaton himself was part Mitannian, through his paternal grandmother Mutemwiya and perhaps also through his maternal grandfather Yuya, and there were other Mitannians present at the Egyptian court as well. [Image: Akhnaton and Nefertiti worshipping the radiant disc of the sun-god.]

Savitri's first publication on Akhnaton is a pamphlet entitled Akhnaton's Eternal Message: A Scientific Religion 3,300 Years Old (Calcutta: A.K. Mukherji, 1940). This was followed by a children's novel, Joy of the Sun: The Beautiful Life of Akhnaton, King of Egypt, Told to Young People (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. Ltd., 1942), illustrated with Savitri's own drawings and paintings, which are crude and child-like, but appropriately so.

Savitri's major work on Akhnaton is A Son of God: The Life and Philosophy of Akhnaton, King of Egypt (London: Philosophical Publishing House, 1946). Originally published by the Theosophical Society, the book was republished by the Rosicrucian Order as Son of the Sun: The Life and Philosophy of Akhnaton, King of Egypt (San Jose, California: Supreme Grand Lodge of AMORC, 1956). (Savitri regarded both organizations as subversive but was surely pleased that they published her book.) Son of the Sun has only recently gone out of print in English, and it has been translated into French and Dutch.

Nearly 60 years later, Son of the Sun is still one of the best books on Akhnaton. It is beautifully written, with a novelist's eye for concrete and colorful details. It is rigorously researched, drawing on all the relevant literature of the time. But most importantly, it is philosophical. Savitri draws upon Akhnaton's Hymns to the Sun and other writings, the iconography associated with his cult, and contemporary documents such as the Amarna letters, to produce the most comprehensive and plausible reconstruction of Akhnaton's world view ever offered.

In 1948, Savitri published Akhnaton: A Play (London: Philosophical Publishing House, 1948), which deals with the destruction of Akhnaton's cult and the persecution of his followers after his death. It is a thinly disguised allegory for what was happening in occupied Germany at that very moment.

Savitri was devastated by the defeat of Germany in World War II. In June of 1945, near Varkala on the Malabar Coast, she resolved to kill herself by walking into the ocean. But when the water was up to her shoulders, suddenly the Life Force stirred within her. A thought flashed through her mind like lightning. It was a command: live! Live to bear witness to the truth. Live to see the day of vengeance, when the victors of 1945 are hurled into pits. Live to say, "I told you so!" As Savitri put it in a letter to George Lincoln Rockwell dated 28 August 1965, "I walked out of the sea for the sake of that future possible enjoyment, and for that alone, and started living without hope, only for hatred's sake."

From that point on, Savitri embarked upon an itinerant, ascetic life. Her two chief activities were tireless witness on behalf of National Socialism and caring for homeless and abused animals, primarily cats.

Savitri revered National Socialist Germany as a Holy Land for all Aryans. But she never saw it during its glory days. Her first glimpse of it was in 1948, in ruins. Gold in the Furnace (Calcutta: A.K. Mukherji, 1952) is Savitri's dark and powerful account of her experiences in occupied Germany in 1948 and 1949. But Savitri did not regard the destruction of the Third Reich as the end of National Socialism, but as a purification -- as a trial by fire that would separate the base metal from the gold -- as the prelude to a new beginning. Thus Gold also contains chapters on the philosophical foundations and positive political program of National Socialism. In 1949, Savitri was arrested, tried, and imprisoned by the British Occupation authorities for distributing National Socialist propaganda leaflets. She describes her experience in Defiance (Calcutta: A.K. Mukherji, 1950). In 1953, Savitri made a pilgrimage to sacred National Socialist sites in Austria and Germany, describing it in her book Pilgrimage (Calcutta: Savitri Devi Mukherji, 1958).

Savitri's greatest work is The Lightning and the Sun (1958), which synthesizes National Socialism and the Aryan cyclical theory of history and advances the stunning claim that Adolf Hitler was an avatar -- a human incarnation -- of the Hindu god Vishnu, the sustainer of order. According to Aryan tradition, history moves in cycles, beginning with a Golden Age or Age of Truth and declining from that point until one reaches the nadir, the fourth age, the Dark Age or Kali Yuga, in which evil and falsehood reign. At that point, the forces of decay expire from their own corruption and a new Golden Age dawns. According to Hindu tradition, the present Kali Yuga will be ended and the next Golden Age inaugurated by the tenth avatar of Vishnu, Kalki, the avenger, who is portrayed as a warrior on a white horse. When Hitler's star was rising, Savitri Devi and many Indians thought that he was Kalki. When he was defeated, she concluded that Hitler was not the tenth avatar, but only his forerunner, and that Kalki has yet to come.

In The Lightning and the Sun, Savitri distinguishes between three kinds of men in terms of their relationships to the downward trajectory of history: Men in Time, Men above Time, and Men against Time. Men in Time are those who go with the downward flow of time and contribute to its disintegrating tendencies. Men above Time try to rise above history's downward trajectory and insulate themselves from the sordidness of the world. Men against Time fight against degeneration and seek to restore the Golden Age. Their goal, of course, is impossible. One cannot turn back the clock. But Men against Time are born fighters. Resisting decadence is their duty, their destiny. It does not matter that they cannot win. But even if they fail to turn back the clock, they might speed it up, i.e., they might hasten the destruction of the Dark Age and help usher in a new Golden Age. The bulk of The Lightning and the Sun is devoted to illustrating these three types of men through three mini-biographies: Genghis Khan is the paradigmatic Man in Time, Akhnaton the Man above Time, and Adolf Hitler the Man against Time.

One of the many ways in which The Lightning and the Sun is an extraordinary book is that it is absolutely unbelievable and absolutely compelling at the same time. Probably no one who has read it has taken it literally. Savitri Devi herself probably did not take it literally. But her vision has poetic beauty and explanatory power. The Lightning and the Sun moves in the realm of myth. I believe that Savitri's goal was to create the founding myth of a new religion. Savitri was fascinated with Paul of Tarsus, who founded a religion by taking a failed political revolutionary and transforming him into an incarnation of God who had come to save the world. And in less than three centuries, the religion Paul created triumphed over the Roman Empire. Savitri too took a failed political revolutionary and transformed him into an incarnation of God who had come to save the world. She hoped thereby to found a religion that would serve as the vehicle for the ultimate triumph of her ideals.

Savitri Devi was also a passionate crusader for vegetarianism, animal welfare, and deep ecology. She summarized her views on these matters in Impeachment of Man (Calcutta: Savitri Devi Mukherji: 1959). In the 1970s, long before PETA and the Animal Liberation Front, an elderly and crotchety Savitri Devi and her Indian servant broke the law to liberate cats and dogs destined for medical experiments at the All India Institute for Medical Sciences in New Delhi. Savitri's other book on animals is Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess, or the true story of a "most objectionable Nazi" and ... half-a-dozen cats (Calcutta: Savitri Devi Mukherji, 1965). A fictionalized autobiography focusing on her relationships with her favorite cats, this is Savitri's best written and most eccentric book.

Savitri's other writings include Souvenirs et réflexions d'une Aryenne (Memories and Reflections of an Aryan Woman) (Calcutta: Savitri Devi Mukherji, 1976), her most comprehensive presentation of her philosophy; and And Time Rolls On: The Savitri Devi Interviews (Atlanta: Black Sun Publications, 2005), the edited transcripts of ten hours of interviews given in New Delhi in 1978, which is an ideal introduction to Savitri's life and thought.

Savitri Devi's 100th Birthday will be honored today. But it will be a quiet affair. A few of her surviving friends will call one another and reminisce. Those whose lives she has touched are scattered over the globe. They cannot not gather together to raise a toast, so they will raise their toasts alone. In Germany, Regin-Verlag is publishing a special issue of the magazine Junges Forum in Savitri's honor. They are also publishing The Lotus Pond and Impeachment of Man in German translation. In England, Historical Review Press has published a new edition of Gold in the Furnace. In the United States, Black Sun Publications is bringing out And Time Rolls On: The Savitri Devi Interviews. In cyberspace, I flatter myself to think that people all over the globe are reading these words. I had also hoped that my Web site, the Savitri Devi Archive, would appear today, but it has been delayed. When it is up, you can buy copies of And Time Rolls On there.

How can you honor Savitri today, if you are so inclined? In a letter to a young American comrade dated 13 April 1975, Savitri discussed how she would celebrate Adolf Hitler's approaching birthday:

This is just a short note to tell you how I shall think of you (and of all our comrades and superiors far and near) on the great Birthday a week ahead. It happens to be a Sunday this year, so -- thank goodness I shall not have to go to my dreary work and shall be able to be entirely alone and just ... think. I am thinking our Führer would be now -- in a week's time -- 86, were he alive. And I wonder whether we, the few of His disciples in whose lives He actually has the first place, are as numerous and fervent as were the early Christians in 86 A.D., that is to say, under Emperor Domitian. There had been a spectacular persecution of Christians in 64 AD (under Nero), but none since. But surely one would have burst out laughing on hearing that "one day" the despised and now and then persecuted sect would dictate its dogmas to the whole West and even force them into yet undiscovered continents and islands. Who could have imagined the personality and power of Philip II of Spain in those far gone days? And who can tell now, whether there is or not, in 1500 years to come, to rise some equally powerful Aryan racialist, a worshipper of our Führer, our equivalent of Philip II the Catholic? In one way it is a good thing that the future -- although it exists already, as well as does the past -- is totally unpredictable to finite minds.

It is good that we cannot predict the future because that allows us to hope. So honor Savitri Devi's 100th birthday by thinking, and hoping.

Savitri Devi's 100th Birthday will not be celebrated like those of two other philosophers who were also born in 1905: Jean-Paul Sartre and Ayn Rand. There will be no international scholarly symposia, no newspaper articles, no souvenir t-shirts and coffee mugs. But this is to be expected. After all, both Sartre and Rand -- one a Communist, the other a libertarian individualist -- are united in their opposition to all racial nationalism, except Jewish supremacism. (Rand was born a Jew, and Sartre wished he had been.) In short, both Sartre and Rand were very much "in Time." Their philosophies are celebrated precisely because they do not challenge the forces of decay but actually defend and promote them. Savitri Devi, by contrast, was a Woman against Time. She will not find fame in this Dark Age, but in the Golden Age to come.

[KALKI]

Savitri Devi


HitlerSomeone 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!"


Bharat's Pan-Hindu Flag
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.

Germanic Sun Wheel"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."

Artemis as Mistress of BeastsThere 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!



Published as "Hitlerism and the Hindu World" in The National Socialist, no. 2 (Fall 1980): 18-20. "Hitlerism and Hindudom" was Savitri's original title. Ramana Maharishi died in 1950.

[KALKI]

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.


Jewish Settlers Assault Palestinian Woman
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.

Mithra the Bull-SlayerIn 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.



The preceding text is from Chapter III of Savitri Devi's Souvenirs et réflexions d'une Aryenne (Calcutta: Savitri Devi Mukherji, 1976). Trans. Irmin Vinson. Savitri's footnotes have been omitted; the title is editorial. The original French text is also available.

[KALKI]

Savitri Devi


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.)

Azag-BauI 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.)

NS Art PosterWe 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 well*versed 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.



Edited by R.G. Fowler from Savitri Devi's Gold in the Furnace (Calcutta: A.K. Mukherji, 1952), ch. 11, "The Constructive Side," pp. 281-4. The title was provided by the editor.

[KALKI]

Savitri Devi


An entirely new culture can hardly be conceived among people who retain the same religion as before. The Programme proclaimed at Hofbräuhaus states, it is true, that "the Party as such stands for a positive Christianity." [1] But, as I have said before -- and as all the most intelligent National Socialists I met have admitted to me -- it was well-nigh impossible, in 1920, to say anything else, if one hoped at all to gather a following. And it also remains true that the very fact of replacing, as we did, the link of common faith by the link of common blood -- the creedal conception of community by the racial one -- is contrary to the spirit of Christianity, no less than to its practice, always and everywhere, up to this day. It remains true, in other words, that if whatever religion that is "a danger to the national State" [2] is to be banned, then, Christianity must go -- for nothing is more incompatible with the fundamental principles upon which rests the whole structure of any National State.
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]
And Thesis Two of the Twenty-Five Theses -- the number seems to have been chosen to match the Twenty-Five Points of the National Socialist Party Programme, so as to show that the "new" (or rather eternal) "German religion" is ultimately inseparable from the creation in Germany of a true National State -- the second "thesis," I say, states that the German religion is "the form of faith appropriate to our age which we Germans would have today, if it had been granted to us to have our native German faith developed, undisturbed, to the present time." [13] As for Christianity, it is frankly called "an unhealthy and unnatural religion, which arose two thousand years ago among sick, exhausted, and despairing men, who had lost their belief in life," [14] in a word, exactly the contrary of what the German people (or, by the way, any Aryan people) need today.
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]
The form and particulars of a modern Aryan religion destined to rule consciences in the place of obsolete Christianity are not yet laid out -- and how could they be? But the necessity of such a religion could not be more strongly felt and expressed; and its spirit and main features are already defined. It is the healthy religion of joy and power -- and beauty -- which I have tried to suggest in the beginning of this book. In other words, it is the eternal aspect of National Socialism itself or (which means the same) National Socialism extended to the highest sphere of life.
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]
Indeed, however clever he might have been, Rauschning was not the man to concoct this discourse out of pure imagination. As many other statements attributed to the Führer in his book, this one bears too strongly the stamp of sincerity, of faith -- of truth -- to be just an invention. Moreover, it fits in perfectly with many of the Führer's known utterances, with his writings, with the spirit of his whole doctrine which is, as I said before, far more than a mere socio-political ideology. For, whatever might be said, or written, for the sake of temporary expediency, the truth remains that National Socialism and Christianity, if both carried to their logical conclusions -- that is to say, experienced in full earnest; lived -- cannot possibly go together. The Führer certainly thought it premature to take up, publicly, towards the Christian doctrine as well as the Churches, the attitude that the natural intolerance of our Weltanschauung would have demanded; but he knew that we can only win, in the long run, if, wherever essentials are concerned, we maintain that intolerance of any movement sincerely "convinced that it alone is right." [24] And he knew that, sooner or later, our conflict with the existing order is bound to break out on the religious and philosophical plane as well as on the others. This is unavoidable. And it has only been postponed by the material defeat of Germany -- perhaps (who knows?) in accordance with the mysterious will of the Gods, so as to enable the time to ripen and the Aryan people at large, and especially the Germans, to realise, at last, how little Christianity can fulfil their deeper aspirations, and how foolish they would be to allow it to stand between them and the undying Aryan faith implied in National Socialism.
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.



Extract from Savitri Devi, Gold in the Furnace, ed. R.G. Fowler (Uckfield, England: Historical Review Press, 2005), ch. 11, "The Constructive Side," 211-22. The title of the preceding selection was provided by the editor. Most of Gold was written during Savitri's imprisonment in Germany, which she mentions in the final paragraph of this excerpt. The complete book is available for purchase at Historical Review Press.

[KALKI]

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.

NefertetiAkhnaton, 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.



The preceding text is the introductory chapter of Devi's A Son of God (London, 1946). Subsequent editions have been retitled Son of the Sun. The complete text is now online.

[KALKI]

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.

Akhnaton and Family Offering to AtonNo 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.



The preceding text is excerpted from the third chapter of Savitri's Impeachment of Man (Calcutta, 1959). The book was written in 1945-46. The most recent reprint can be purchased from Noontide Press.