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INTRODUCTION TO HER "THE LIGHTNING AND THE SUN" Paul of Tarsus; or, Christianity and Jewry
Savitri Devi, whose birth name was Maximiani Portas, was one of the most compelling figures to emerge from the wreckage of post-War National Socialism. More than any single figure, it was Devi who would carry the torch of occult National Socialism through the grim period following World War II. Through her writings and her personal example, she would inspire a new generation of National Socialists to explore the occult byways of racial mysticism that were once blazed by such 19th century German figures as Guido von List and such Third Reich figures as Heinrich Himmler. Originally a French citizen, Devi was born on 30 September 1905 of Greek and British parents. Educated in France and in Greece, Devi earned masters’ level degrees in philosophy and science in France in the 1920s, and received a Ph.D. in chemistry on the basis of her dissertation, La Simplicité Mathématique in 1931. Mathematics and science however, held less allure to Devi than did contemporary politics, religious speculation, and of greatest import, the Aryan philosophical and religious traditions of ancient India. India in fact would be her home for much of her life. Before embarking on her spiritual quest, however, Devi took an active interest in politics. Even as a young girl, she was much attracted to Germany and to the German philosophical and intellectual traditions. Appalled by the betrayal of Germany at Versailles following the First World War, as well of the treatment of Greek refugees in the same period, Devi determined to learn more of what she instinctively felt were the deeper realities which determined the seemingly chaotic course of world events. It was during this youthful quest for hidden and suppressed knowledge that Devi acquired her life-long aversion to Judaism. Devi’s anti-Semitism was fed by several currents. First, there was the Bible, and in particular, the Old Testament which she felt was rife with examples of Jewish perfidy. This feeling would be considerably reinforced by reports of Zionist actions in Palestine in the 1920s. In 1929—the year of Arab riots and the killing of a number of Jews in Hebron—she visited Palestine and confirmed for herself the truth of these reports. Her studies brought her into contact with the intellectual anti-Semitism that was the common coin of the realm in the French academy, and this too seems to have been a factor. In this, the work of the intellectual anti-Semite Ernst Renan would be an important influence both in confirming her dim view of the Jews as racial and cultural outsiders and in fixing India and the Aryan myth of origins as the central interest of her life. Of considerable importance too was what she perceived to be the malign role of the Jews in the defeat of Germany in the First World War. This latter stream would come to dominate Devi’s view of the Jews as her admiration for Hitler and the Third Reich grew in the 1930s through the Second World War. Here, Devi seems to have been one of the select few who to actually read Alfred Rosenberg’s verbose and turgid 1930 opus The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Even the Führer would confide that, although he displayed this book prominently on his bedside table, he found it unreadable. Devi however, was enchanted. In the 1930s Devi moved to India and undertook what would prove to be a lifelong study of the classic Indian texts—the Vedas and the Upanishads. From these sources, and from their contemporary manifestations in the caste system, Devi felt that she had found the true sources of the once and future greatness of the Aryan race. In 1940, Devi married a pro-Nazi Indian nationalist named A. K. Mukherji. This gave her a British passport and the possibility of deepening her work for the Third Reich. In Calcutta, the Mukherji home became something of a salon for Allied diplomats and military officers, and whatever intelligence which could be gathered quickly found its way to the German consulate. Devi felt her greatest service to the cause, however, would be in her ongoing research and the book which she was writing which would set out a blue print for the new Aryan religion which she believed would be instituted in Germany after the inevitable Nazi victory. In the event of course, Germany was defeated. Devi’s dream of a global Aryan racial paradise would now never be realized, but through considerable adversity, she held fast to her ideals until her death in 1982. She returned to Europe in 1945, settling in England where her book on the religious heritage of Ancient Egypt, A Son of God, was published and well received in British intellectual and occult circles. It was the work that followed however, the Impeachment of Man, which was finished in London and published in 1946 that stands as a classic in the current world of National Socialism. Radical environmentalism, amounting indeed to a religion of nature, has always been strong in National Socialist thought, and with the wartime defeat, has become as much a trademark of the movement as anti-Semitism and racialist thought. The Impeachment of Man remains the strongest statement of the National Socialist nature religion that may be found today. Opening with epigraphs from Alfred Rosenberg (“Thou shalt love God in all things, animals and plants”) and Josef Goebbels who in a diary entry quotes the Führer’s resolve to create a post-war society that would eschew the eating of meat, the book is a passionate treatise on the rights of animals and of plants, as contrasted with man’s egocentric consumption and destruction of the natural world. The argument is couched in religious terms and the proof texts are drawn from the Aryan Golden Age. The book, long out of print, underwent a revival with a new Noontide Press edition which appeared in 1991. In 1946, Devi moved from England to Iceland. There, the ancient Norse pantheon joined the ancient Indian heritage as a source for Aryan religiosity. Here too Devi anticipated by decades Odinism’s popularization of the Norse/Germanic pantheon as a fitting Aryan racial religion in the post-War movement. Two years later, Devi undertook a more open pro-Nazi course of activism, traveling to occupied Germany and distributing propaganda leaflets. This resulted in her incarceration in 1949. While in jail, Devi expanded one of her leaflets into the book which she considered her magnum opus, Gold in the Furnace. Gold in the Furnace is at once an auto-biography and a dreamy meditation on what could have been. In it, she states explicitly that which until 1948 she had never dared to publicly utter: …I love this land, Germany, as the hallowed cradle of National Socialism; the country that staked its all so that the whole of the Aryan race might stand together in its regained ancestral pride; Hitler’s country…. Because for the last twenty years I have loved and admired Hitler and the German people…I was happy—oh so happy!--thus to express my faith in the superman whom the world has misunderstood and hated and rejected. I was not sorry to lose my freedom for the pleasure of bearing witness to his glory, now, in 1948. Devi was released from prison after six months, and then entered her most productive literary period. The autobiographical Defiance appeared in 1950. Devi’s example served as an inspiration to a new generation of National Socialists when a portion of the book was published in the Winter 1968 edition of the National Socialist World. Gold in the Furnace came out in 1952, followed by another memoir, Pilgrimage in 1958 (although some sources place the publication date as early as 1953). Her most important work, The Lightening and the Sun, appeared in 1956 and a condensed version was published in the premier edition (Spring 1966) of William Pierce’s American Nazi Party intellectual journal National Socialist World. The Lightening and the Sun is a remarkable exposition on occult National Socialism which explicitly deifies Hitler as the savior of the Aryan people. The first words of the book read: To the godlike individual of our times; the Man against time; the greatest European of all times; both Sun and Lightening: ADOLF HITLER. The Lightening and the Sun ranges through the ages, suggesting a religious and political history in which the Third Reich is the apex and the natural culmination of Aryan development. The book ends with at once a cry of despair and an affirmation of hope: Kalki will lead them through the flames of the great end, and into the sunshine of the new Golden Age. We like to hope that the memory of the one-before-the-last and most heroic of all our men against time—Adolf Hitler—will survive at least in songs and symbols. We like to hope that the lords of the age, men of his own blood and faith, will render him divine honors, through rites full of meaning and full of potency, in the cool shade of the endless regrown forests, on the beaches, or upon inviolate mountain peaks, facing the rising sun. As if to belie the heroic tones of her National Socialist dream, the 1950s was an empty time for Devi. While she could escape into the world of her literary dreams, and while she traveled intensively in these years, there remained a terrible void in her life. The man against time and his iron heroes were gone—many were dead, others living in hiding, still others captured and brought to the bar of allied justice. It was not until the 1960s that Devi could allow her hopes of a National Socialist revival to live again. Through the jungle telegraph linking European Nazis, Devi soon got wind of a rising young star on the American scene, George Lincoln Rockwell. Rockwell, who founded the American Nazi Party in 1959, began to correspond with Devi in 1960. It was Devi who introduced Rockwell to the man who would quietly become something of a mentor, the unreconstructed German National Socialist Bruno Ludke. Together with Britain’s Colin Jordan, the three became the core of the World Union of National Socialists—an organization which sought with little success to link together the far-flung National Socialist tribes from throughout the world. The high point of the effort was the 1962 meeting at Cottswald in England which resulted in the Cottswald Agreement, the World Union of National Socialists’ founding document which served as a theoretical blueprint for the revival of a global neo-Nazi movement. Cottswald, in which Savitri Devi served as the representative of France, was the first and last time that Devi and Rockwell would have the opportunity to meet. By all reports, Rockwell was mesmerized by Devi. Here was a living link to the original font of National Socialism—Nazi Germany—and here too was a visionary whose religious vision of National Socialist revival immeasurably deepened and enriched Rockwell’s more narrowly political conception of the movement. Moreover, the fact that Devi was the only woman in the upper echelons of National Socialism at that time was no small matter either. In the end, it mattered little. The World Union of National Socialists never rose above the level of squabbling ‘leaders’ more engaged in internecine plotting than in serious thought of revolutionary change and the institution of a neo-Nazi New Order. Worse, but five short years after Cottswald, Rockwell was dead, felled by bullets from the gun of a disgruntled former follower. The World Union of National Socialists soldiered on for decades, but as a mere shell of the organization envisioned by Rockwell, Ludke, Devi and Jordan. Devi’s remaining years were bleak. Much of it was spent back in mother India with her husband, writing, corresponding and marking time. She was an early convert to the field of holocaust denial, and it was under her influence that such well-known holocaust revisionists of the present day as Ernst Zundel were introduced to the field. Indeed, Devi’s chief contributions to the movement to which she had dedicated her life in the 1970s was through her tireless correspondence to true believers throughout the world. Her personal circumstances did not fare so well, however, and at her death in 1982 was reportedly penniless. In the course of her life, Devi’s achievements, if measured on the scale of her dream of the recreation of a National Socialist revival, were meager. At her death, the world of explicit National Socialism was, if anything, more fragmented and powerless than ever before. But her writings, and the powerful dream of a religio-mystical Aryan Golden Age which they so eloquently convey, are having a powerful impact on the movement, and indeed, beyond the narrow confines of the radical right and into the realms of radical ecology and New Age thought. See also: American Nazi Party; Hitler, Adolf; Jordan, Colin; Ludke, Bruno; Odinism; Pierce, William; religion of nature; Rockwell, George Lincoln; World Union of National Socialists. Further reading: Savitri Devi, “The Lightening and the Sun (A New Edition),” National Socialist World 1 (Spring 1966); Savitri Devi, “Gold in the Furnace,” National Socialist World 3 (Spring 1967); Savitri Devi, “Defiance,” National Socialist World 6 (Winter 1968); Savitri Devi, Impeachment of Man (Costa Mesa, CA: Noontide Press, 1991); Nicholas Goodrick-Clark, Hitler’s Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Occult Neo-Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Fritz Nova, Alfred Rosenberg: Nazi Theorist of the Holocaust (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1986); Phillip Rees, Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990); Frederick J. Simonelli, American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).
Savitri Devi: Life and WorkIrmin
Savitri Devi, priestess of esoteric national socialism, was born Maximiani
Portas on September 30, 1905, in Lyons, France, of a Greek father and an English
mother. [Image: Savitri in India, c. 1935.]
The passionate iconoclasm that would mark so much of her life began early: At age eleven, during the First World War, she chalked anti-Entente slogans on the Lyons railway station ("Down with the Allies, Long Live Germany") as a protest against the illegal Allied invasion of neutral Greece. A true polymath, Portas earned degrees in chemistry and philosophy, wrote her doctoral thesis on the philosophy of science, and would eventually master at least seven languages, including Bengali and Hindi. Her earliest political convictions were pan-Hellenic, and in 1928 Portas renounced her French citizenship and became a Greek national. While studying in Athens her political nationalism, along with a fascination with Greco-Roman antiquity and a mistrust of Christianity, evolved into a broader pagan racialism, and a visit to Palestine in 1929 convinced her that Judeo-Christianity, whose outward observances in the Holy Land repelled her, was an alien intrusion into the West, distorting its natural spiritual evolution and imposing upon it a sterile monotheism and a servile philo-Semitism. It was in Palestine, she later said, that she first realized she was a National Socialist. In 1932 she traveled to India, in search of the Aryan paganism that Judeo-Christianity had supplanted. On the subcontinent she sought "gods and rites akin to those of ancient Greece, of ancient Rome, of ancient Britain and ancient Germany, that people of our race carried there, with the cult of the Sun, six thousand years ago." Her exemplar was Julian the Apostate, the fourth-century emperor who briefly restored paganism and the cult of the Sun to the Roman Empire. Portas took up residence in Calcutta and
quickly immersed herself in the Hindu nationalist movements, lineal ancestors of
the modern BJP, that were then waging a two-front political campaign against
Islam and British colonialism. She worked as a traveling lecturer for the Hindu
Mission, a nationalist organization with NS sympathies, and adopted the Hindu
name Savitri Devi, after the Indo-Aryan sun-god (cf. Rig Veda 3.62.10).
Her new racialist Hinduism was a reflection of her NS beliefs: In the swastika,
the Aryan sun-wheel, she saw "the visible link between Hitler and orthodox
Hinduism."
In 1940, largely to avoid deportation for her pro-Axis activities, Savitri married the Brahmin Asit Krishna Mukherji, pan-Aryan editor of the openly NS journal New Mercury. During the war the couple gathered intelligence on behalf of the Axis, and Mukherji put militant Hindu nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose in contact with the Japanese, who would later support his Indian National Army in its abortive campaign against the British. Savitri was overwhelmed by Germany's defeat and post-war dismemberment. She returned to Europe in 1945 determined to propagandize on behalf of her now reviled NS beliefs, staying briefly in London (where she published Son of God, her study of Akhnaton's solar religion), France, Iceland, Scotland (where she began her most influential work, Lightning and the Sun) and Sweden (where she met Sven Hedin, the famous explorer and committed national socialist). In 1948 and 1949, at the height of de-nazification, she conducted a series of clandestine propaganda missions into a prostrate Germany still devastated by mass starvation and the Allied terror bombing, distributing leaflets and posting handbills urging resistance to the often brutal occupation:
Savitri was eventually arrested along with a comrade in February 1949, convicted of promoting national socialist ideas, and sentenced to six years imprisonment, of which she served only seven months, returning to Lyons in the summer of 1949. There she wrote Defiance and completed Gold in the Furnace, both based on her experiences in occupied Germany. [Image: An Aryan racial loyalist salutes the Sun rising behind the rubble of bombed-out Germany; Savitri's own cover art for Defiance.]
Savitri returned to India in 1957, but was back in Europe three years later. The friendships she had made during her imprisonment provided entrée into murky world of post-war national socialism -- she was already on friendly terms with such luminaries as Hans Rudel, Otto Skorzeny, and Leon Degrelle -- and while living in London she became involved with the politics of the British Racial Right, attending, along with George Lincoln Rockwell, the international WUNS conference in the Cotswolds in 1962, site of the famous Cotswold Declaration. In 1971 Savitri returned again to India, where she spent most of the 1970s corresponding with her comrades abroad and influencing a number of young racialists who visited her in Delhi. She died in the United Kingdom in 1982, while preparing for a speaking tour of the United States.
Savitri Devi
Introduction
To the godlike Individual of our times; the Man against time; the greatest European of all times; both Sun and Lightning: ADOLF HITLER.
The idea of progress — indefinite betterment — is anything but modern. It is probably as old as man's oldest successful attempt to improve his material surroundings and to increase, through technical skill, his capacity of attack and defense. Technical skill, for many centuries at least, has been too precious to be despised. Nay, when displayed to an extraordinary degree, it has more than since been hailed as something almost divine. But apart from the incredible feats of a handful of individuals, the ancients as a whole distinguished themselves in many material achievements. They could boast of the irrigation system in Sumeria; of the construction of pyramids revealing, both in Egypt and, centuries later, in Central America, an amazing knowledge of astronomical data; of the bathrooms and drains in the palace of Knossos; of the invention of the war chariot after that of the bow and arrow, and of the sand clock after that of the sundial — enough to make them dizzy with conceit and overconfident in the destiny of their respective civilizations. Yet, although they fully recognized the value of their own work in the practical field and surely very soon conceived the possibility — and perhaps acquired the certitude — of indefinite technical progress, they never believed in progress as a whole, in progress on all lines, as most of our contemporaries seem to. Whether Hindus or Greeks, Egyptians or Japanese, Chinese, Sumerians, or ancient Americans — or even Romans, the most "modern" among people of antiquity — they all placed the Golden Age, the Age of Truth, the rule of Kronos or of Ra or of any other gods on earth — the glorious beginning of the slow, downward unfurling of history, whatever name it be given — far behind them in the past. And they believed that the return of a similar age, foretold in their respective sacred texts and oral traditions, depends not upon man's conscious effort but upon iron laws, inherent in the very nature of visible and tangible manifestation, and all-pervading; upon cosmic laws. They believed that man's conscious effort is but an expression of those laws at work, leading the world, willingly or unwillingly, wherever its destiny lies; in one word, that the history of man, as the history of the rest of the living, is but a detail in cosmic history without beginning or end; a periodical outcome of the inner necessity that binds all phenomena in time. And just as the ancients could accept that vision of the world's evolution while still taking full advantage of all technical progress within their reach, so can — and so do — to this day, in the very midst of the over-proud industrial cultures, a few stray individuals able to think for themselves. They contemplate the history of mankind in a similar perspective. While living apparently as "modern" men and women — using electric fans and electric irons, telephones and trains and airplanes, when they can afford it — they nourish in their hearts a deep contempt for the childish conceit and bloated hopes of our age and for the various recipes for "saving mankind" which zealous philosophers and politicians thrust into circulation. They know that nothing can "save mankind," for mankind is reaching the end of its present cycle. The wave that carried it for so many millennia is about to break, with all the fury of acquired speed, and to merge once more into the depth of the unchanging ocean of undifferentiated existence. It will rise again, some day, with abrupt majesty, for such is the law of waves. But in the meantime nothing can be done to stop it. The unfortunate — the fools — are those men who, for some reason best known to themselves — probably on account of their exaggerated estimation of what is to be lost in the process — would like to stop it. The privileged ones — the wise — are those few who, being fully aware of the increasing worthlessness of present-day mankind and of its much-applauded "progress," know how little there is to be lost in the coming crash and look forward to it with joyous expectation as to the necessary condition of a new beginning — a new Golden Age, sunlit crest of the next long-drawn, downward wave upon the surface of the endless ocean of life. To those privileged ones — among whom we count ourselves — the high-resounding "isms" to which their contemporaries ask them to give their allegiance are all equally futile: bound to be betrayed, defeated, and finally rejected by men at large, if containing anything really noble; bound to enjoy, for the time being, some sort of noisy success, if sufficiently vulgar, pretentious, and soul-killing to appeal to the growing number of mechanically conditioned slaves that crawl about our planet, posing as free men; all destined to prove, ultimately, of no avail. The time-honored religions, rapidly growing out of fashion as present-day "isms" become more and more popular, are no less futile — if not more: frameworks of organized superstition void of all true feeling of the divine, or — among more sophisticated people — mere conventional aspects of social life, or systems of ethics (and of very elementary ethics, at that) seasoned with a sprinkling of outdated rites and symbols of which hardly anybody bothers to seek the original meaning; devices in the hands of clever men in power to lull the simpletons into permanent obedience; convenient names, round which it might be easy to rally converging national aspirations or political tendencies; or just the last resort of weaklings and cranks: that is, practically, all they are — all they have been reduced to in the course of a few centuries — the lot of them. They are dead, in fact — as dead as the old cults that flourished before them, with the difference that those cults have long ceased exhaling the stench of death, while they (the so-called "living" ones) are still at the stage at which death is inseparable from corruption. None — neither Christianity nor Islam nor even Buddhism — can be expected now to "save" anything of that world they once partly conquered; none have any normal place in "modern" life, which is essentially devoid of all awareness of the eternal. The exponents of the belief in "progress" put forth many arguments to prove — to themselves and to others — that our times, with all their undeniable drawbacks, are, on the whole, better than any epoch of the past, and even that they show definite signs of improvement. It is not possible to analyze all their arguments in detail. But one can easily detect the fallacies hidden in the most widespread and, apparently, the most "convincing" of them. All the advocates of "progress" lay enormous stress upon such things as literacy, individual "freedom," equal opportunities for all men, religious toleration, and "humaneness," progress in this last line covering all such tendencies as find their expression in the modern preoccupation for child welfare, prison reforms, better conditions of labor, state aid to the sick and destitute, and, if not greater kindness, at least less cruelty to animals. The dazzling results obtained, of recent years, in the application of scientific discoveries to industrial and other practical pursuits, are, of course, the most popular of all instances expected to show how marvelous our times are. But that point we shall not discuss, as we have already made it clear that we by no means deny or minimize the importance of technical progress. What we do deny is the existence of any progress at all in the value of man as such, whether individually or collectively, and our reflections on universal literacy and other highly praised signs of improvement in which our contemporaries take pride, all spring from that one point of view. We believe that man's value — as every creature's value, ultimately — lies not in the mere intellect but in the spirit; in the capacity to reflect that which, for lack of a more precise word, we choose to call the divine, i.e., that which is true and beautiful beyond all manifestation; that which remains timeless (and therefore unchangeable) within all changes. We believe it with the difference that, in our eyes — contrarily to what the Christians maintain — the capacity to reflect the divine is closely linked with man's race and physical health; in other words, that the spirit is anything but independent from the body. And we fail to see that the different improvements that we witness today in education or in the social field, in government or even in technical matters, have either made individual men and women more valuable in that sense, or created any new, lasting type of civilization in which man's possibilities of all-round perfection, thus conceived, are being promoted. Progress? — It is true that today at least in all highly organized (typically "modern") countries, nearly everybody can read and write. But what of that? To be able to read and write is an advantage — and a considerable one. But it is not a virtue. It is a tool and a weapon; a means to an end; a very useful thing, no doubt; but not an end in itself. The ultimate value of literacy depends upon the end to which it is used. And to what end is it generally used today? It is used for convenience or for entertainment, by those who read; for some advertisement or some objectionable propaganda — for money making or power grabbing — by those who write; sometimes, of course, by both, for acquiring or spreading disinterested knowledge of the few things worth knowing, for finding expression of or giving expression to the few deep feelings that can lift a man to the awareness of things eternal, but not more often so than in the days in which one man out of ten thousand could understand the symbolism of the written word. Generally, today the man or woman whom compulsory education has made "literate" uses writing to communicate personal matters to absent friends and relatives, to fill forms — one of the international occupations of modern, civilized humanity — or to commit to memory little, useful, but otherwise trifling things, such as someone's address or telephone number, or the date of some appointment with the hairdresser or the dentist, or the list of clean clothes due from the laundry. He or she reads "to pass time" because, outside the hours of dreary work, mere thinking is no longer intense and interesting enough to serve that purpose. We know that there are also people whose whole lives have been directed to some beautiful destiny by a book, a poem — a mere sentence — read in distant childhood, like Schliemann, who lavishly spent on archaeological excavations the wealth patiently and purposely gathered in forty years of dreary toil, all for the sake of the impression left upon him, as a boy, by the immortal story of Troy. But such people always lived, even before compulsory education came into fashion. And the stories heard and remembered were no less inspiring than stories now read. The real advantage of general literacy, if any, is to be sought elsewhere. It lies not in the better quality either of the exceptional men and women or of the literate millions, but rather in the fact that the latter are rapidly becoming intellectually more lazy and therefore more credulous than ever — and not less so; more easily deceived, more liable to be led like sheep without even the shadow of a protest, provided the nonsense one wishes them to swallow be presented to them in printed form and made to appear "scientific." The higher the general level of literacy, the easier it is for a government in control of the daily press, of the wireless, and of the publishing business — these almost irresistible, modern means of action upon the mind to keep the masses and the "intelligentsia" under its thumb, without their even suspecting it. Among widely illiterate but more actively thinking people, openly governed in the old, autocratic manner, a prophet, direct mouthpiece of the gods, or of genuine, collective aspirations, could always hope to rise between secular authority and the people. The priests themselves could never be quite sure of keeping the people in obedience forever. The people could choose to listen to the prophet if they liked. And they did, sometimes. Today, wherever universal literacy is prevalent, inspired exponents of timeless truth — prophets or even selfless advocates of timely, practical changes, have fewer and fewer chances to appear. Sincere thought, really free thought, ready, in the name of superhuman authority or of humble common sense, to question the basis of what is officially taught and generally accepted, is less and less likely to thrive. It is, we repeat, by far easier to enslave a literate people than an illiterate one, strange as this may seem at first sight. And the enslavement is more likely to be lasting. The real advantage of universal literacy is to tighten the grip of the governing power upon the foolish and conceited millions. That is probably why it is dinned into our heads, from babyhood onward, that "literacy" is such a boon. Capacity to think for one's self is, however, the real boon. And that always was and always will be the privilege of a minority, once recognized as a natural elite and respected. Today, compulsory mass education and increasingly standardized literature for the consumption of "conditioned" brains — outstanding signs of "progress" — tend to reduce that minority to the smallest possible proportion; ultimately, to suppress it altogether. Is that what mankind wants? If so, mankind is losing its raison d'être, and the sooner the end of this so-called "civilization," the better. What we have said of literacy can roughly be repeated about those two other main glories of modern democracy: "individual freedom" and equality of opportunities for every person. The first is a lie — and a more and more sinister one as the shackles of compulsory education are being more and more hopelessly fastened round people's whole being. The second is an absurdity. One of the strangest inconsistencies of the average citizen of the modern, industrialized world is the way in which he criticizes all institutions of older and better civilizations, such as the caste system of the Hindus or the all-absorbing family cult of the Far East, on the ground that these tend to check the "liberty of the individual." He does not realize how exacting — nay, how annihilating — is the command of the collective authority which he obeys (half of the time, unknowingly) compared with that of traditional collective authority, in apparently less "free" societies. The caste-ridden or family-ridden people of India or of the Far East might not be allowed to do all that they like, in many relatively trifling and in a few really all-important matters of daily life. But they are left to believe what they like, or rather what they can; to feel according to their own nature and to express themselves freely about a great number of essential matters: they are allowed to conduct their higher life in the manner they judge the wisest for them, after duties to family, caste, and king have been fulfilled. The individual living under the iron and steel rule of modern "progress" can eat whatever he fancies (to a great extent) and marry whom he pleases — unfortunately! — and go wherever he likes (in theory at least). But he is made to accept, in all extra-individual matters — matters which, to us, really count — the beliefs, the attitude to life, the scale of values, and, to a great extent, the political views that tend to strengthen the mighty socioeconomic system of exploitation to which he belongs (to which he is forced to belong, in order to be able to live) and in which he is a mere cog. And, what is more, he is made to believe that it is a privilege of his to be a cog in such an organism; that the unimportant matters in which he feels he is his own master are, in fact, the most important ones — the only really important ones. He is taught not to value that freedom of judgement about ultimate truth, aesthetical, ethical, or metaphysical, of which he is subtly deprived. More still: he is told — in the democratic countries at any rate — that he is free in all respects, that he is "an individual, answerable to none but to his own conscience" ... after years of clever conditioning have molded his "conscience" and his whole being so thoroughly according to pattern, that he is no longer capable of reacting differently. Well can such a man speak of "pressure upon the individual" in any society, ancient or modern! As for "equality of opportunities," there can be no such thing anyhow, really speaking. By producing men and women different both in degree and in quality of intelligence, sensitiveness, and willpower, different in character and temperament, Nature herself gives them the most unequal opportunities of fulfilling their aspirations, whatever these might be. An overemotional and rather weak person can, for instance, neither conceive the same ideal of happiness nor have equal chances of reaching it in life, as one who is born with a more balanced nature and a stronger will. That is obvious. And add to that the characteristics that differentiate one race of men from another, and the absurdity of the very notion of "human equality" becomes even more striking. What our contemporaries mean when they speak of "equality of opportunities" is the fact that, in modern society — so they say — any man or woman stands, more and more, as many chances as his or her neighbor of holding the position and doing the job for which he or she is naturally fitted. But that too is only partly true. For, more and more, the world of today — the world dominated by grand-scale industry and mass production — can offer only jobs in which the best of the worker's self plays little or no part if he or she be anything more than a merely clever and materially efficient person. The hereditary craftsman, who could find the best expression for what is conveniently called his "soul" in his daily weaving, carpet making, enamel work, etc ..., even the tiller of the soil, in personal contact with, Mother Earth and the sun and the seasons, is becoming more and more a figure of the past. There are fewer and fewer opportunities, also, for the sincere seeker of truth — speaker or writer — who refuses to become the expounder of broadly accepted ideas, products of mass conditioning, for which he or she does not stand; for the seeker of beauty who refuses to bend his or her art to the demands of popular taste which he or she knows to be bad taste. Such people have to waste much of their time doing inefficiently — and grudgingly — some job for which they are not fitted, in order to live, before they can devote the rest of it to what the Hindus would call their sadhana and the work for which their deeper nature has appointed them; their life's dedication. The idea of modern division of labor, condensed in the oft-quoted phrase "the right man in the right place," boils down, in practice, to the fact that any man — any one of the dull, indiscriminate millions — can be conditioned to occupy any place while the best of human beings, the only ones who still justify the existence of the more and more degenerate species, are allowed no place at all. Progress .... There remain the "religious toleration" of our times and their "humaneness" compared with the "barbarity" of the past. Two jokes, to say the least! Recalling some of the most spectacular horrors of history — the burning of heretics and witches at the stake, the wholesale massacre of "heathens," and other no less repulsive manifestations of Christian civilization in Europe and elsewhere — modern man is filled with pride in the "progress" accomplished, in one line at least, since the end of the dark ages of religious fanaticism. However bad they be, our contemporaries have, at any rate, grown out of the habit of torturing people for such "trifles" as their conception of the Holy Trinity or their ideas about predestination and purgatory. Such is modern man's feeling — because theological questions have lost all importance in his life. But in the days when Christian churches persecuted one another and encouraged the conversion of heathen nations by means of blood and fire, both the persecutors and the persecuted, both the Christians and those who wished to remain faithful to non-Christian creeds, looked upon such questions as vital in one way or another. And the real reason for which nobody is put to torture, today, for the sake of his or her religious beliefs, is not that torture as such has become distasteful to everybody, in "advanced," twentieth-century civilization, not that individuals and states have become tolerant, but just that, among those who have the power of inflicting pain, hardly anybody takes any vivid, vital interest in religion, let alone in theology. The so-called "religious toleration" practiced by modern states and individuals springs from anything but an intelligent understanding and love of all religions as manifold, symbolical expressions of the same, few, essential, eternal truths. It is, rather, the outcome of a grossly ignorant contempt for all religions; of indifference to those very truths which their various founders endeavored to reassert, again and again. It is no toleration at all. To judge how far our contemporaries have or have not the right to boast of their spirit of toleration, it is best to watch their behavior toward those whom they decidedly look upon as the enemies of their gods: the men who happen to be holding views contrary to theirs concerning not some theological quibble, in which they are not interested, but some political or sociopolitical ideology which they regard as "a threat to civilization." Nobody can deny that in all such circumstances, and specially in war time, they all perform — to the extent they have the power — or condone to the extent they have not, themselves, the opportunity of performing — actions in every respect as ugly as those ordered, performed, or tolerated in the past, in the name of different religions (if indeed the latter be ugly). The only difference is, perhaps, that modern, cold-blooded atrocities only become known when the hidden powers in control of the means of herd-conditioning — the press, the wireless, and the cinema — decide, for ends anything but humanitarian, that they should be, i.e., when they happen to be the enemy's atrocities, not one's own — nor those of one's "gallant allies" — and when their story is, therefore, considered to be good propaganda, on account of the current of indignation it is expected to create and of the new incentive it is expected to give the war effort. Moreover, after a war, fought or supposed to have been fought for an ideology — the modern equivalent of the bitter religious conflicts of old — the horrors rightly or wrongly said to have been perpetrated by the vanquished are the only ones to be broadcasted all over the world, while the victors try as hard as they can to make believe that their high command at least never shuts its eyes to any similar horrors. But in sixteenth-century Europe, and before; and among the warriors of Islam conducting jihad against men of other faiths, each side was well aware of the atrocious means used, not only by its opponents for their "foul ends," but by its own people and its own leaders in order to "uproot heresy" or to "fight popery" or to "preach the name of Allah to infidels." Modern man is more of a moral coward. He wants the advantages of violent intolerance — which is only natural — but he shuns the responsibility of it. Progress, that also. The so-called humaneness of our contemporaries (compared with their forefathers) is just lack of nerve or lack of strong feelings — increasing cowardice, or increasing apathy. Modern man is squeamish about atrocities — even about ordinary, unimaginative brutality — only when it happens that the aims for which atrocious or merely brutal actions are performed are either hateful or indifferent to him. In all other circumstances, he shuts his eyes to any horrors — especially when he knows that the victims can never retaliate (as is the case with all atrocities committed by man upon animals, for whatever purpose) and he demands, at the most, not to be reminded of them too often and too noisily. He reacts as though he classified atrocities under two headlines: the unavoidable and the avoidable. The unavoidable are those that serve or are supposed to serve modern man's purpose — generally: "the good of humanity" or the "triumph of democracy." They are tolerated, even justified. The avoidable are those which are occasionally committed, or said to be committed, by people whose purpose is alien to his. They alone are condemned, and their real or supposed authors — or inspirers — branded by public opinion as "criminals against humanity." Surely modern man does not "uphold" slavery; he denounces it vehemently. But he practices it nevertheless — and on a wider scale than ever, and far more thoroughly than the ancients ever could — whether in the capitalistic West or in the tropics, or (from what one hears outside its impenetrable walls) even in the one state supposed to be, today, the "workers' paradise." There are differences, of course. In antiquity, even the slave had hours of leisure and merriment that were all his own; he had the games of dice in the shade of the columns of his master's portico, his coarse jokes, his free chatter, his free life outside his daily routine. The modern slave has not the privilege of loitering, completely carefree, for half an hour. His so-called leisure itself is filled with almost compulsory entertainment, as exacting and often as dreary as his work, or — in "lands of freedom — poisoned by economic worries. but he is not openly bought and sold. He is just taken. And taken, not by a man in some way at least superior to himself, but by a huge, impersonal system without either a body to kick or a soul to damn or a head to answer for its mischief. But more cowardly and more hypocritical, perhaps, than anything else, is "progressive," modern man's behavior toward living nature, and in particular toward the animal kingdom. Primitive man — and, often, also man whose picturesque civilization is anything but "modern" — is bad enough, it is true, as far as his treatment of animals is concerned. One only has to travel in the least industrialized countries of southern Europe, or in the Near and Middle East, to acquire a very definite certitude on that point. And not all modern leaders have been equally successful in putting an end to age-old cruelties to dumb beasts, whether in the East or in the West. Gandhi could not, in the name of that universal kindness which he repeatedly preached as the main tenet of his faith, prevent Hindu milkmen from deliberately starving their male calves to death, in order to sell a few extra pints of cow's milk. Mussolini could not detect and prosecute all those Italians who, even under his government, persisted in the detestable habit of plucking chickens alive on the ground that "the feathers come off more easily." There is no getting away from the fact that kindness to animals on a national scale does not ultimately depend upon the teachings of any superimposed religion or philosophy. It is one of the distinctive characteristics of the truly superior races. And no religious, philosophical, or political alchemy can turn base metal into gold. This does not mean to say that a good teaching cannot help to bring the best out of every race, as well as out of every individual man or woman. But modern, industrial civilization, to the extent it is man-centered — not controlled by any inspiration of a superhuman, cosmic order — and tends to stress quantity instead of quality, production and wealth instead of character and inherent worth, is anything but congenial to the development of consistent, universal kindness, even among the better people. This is the age in which falsehood is termed truth and truth persecuted as falsehood or mocked as insanity; in which the exponents of truth, the divinely inspired leaders, the real friends of their race and of all the living — the godlike men — are defeated, and their followers humbled and their memory slandered, while the masters of lies are hailed as saviors; the age in which every man and woman is in the wrong place, and the world dominated by inferior individuals, bastardized races, and vicious doctrines, all part and parcel of an order of inherent ugliness far worse than complete anarchy; the age which the Hindus have characterized from time immemorial as Kali Yuga — the Dark Age, the Era of Gloom. This is the age in which our triumphant democrats and our hopeful communists boast of "slow but steady progress through science and education." Thanks very much for such "progress"! There are no cruelties in ancient history — no Assyrian horrors, no Carthagenian horrors, no old Chinese horrors — which the inventiveness of our contemporaries of East and West, aided by a perfected technique, has not outdone. But cruelty — the violence of cowards — is merely one expression of violence among many, though admittedly the most repulsive one. Aided and encouraged by more and more staggering scientific achievements, which can be put to use for any purpose, man has, throughout history, become more and more violent — and not less and less so, as people fed on pacifist propaganda are often inclined to think! And, which is more, it could not have been otherwise; and it cannot be otherwise at any period of the future, until the violent and complete destruction of that which we call today "civilization" opens for the world a new Age of Truth; a new Golden Age. Until then, violence, under one form or another, is unavoidable. It is the very law of life in a fallen world. The choice given us is not between violence and nonviolence, but between open, unashamed violence, in broad daylight, and sneaking, subtle violence — blackmail; between open violence and inconspicuous, slow, yet implacable persecution, both economic and cultural: the systematic suppression of all possibilities for the vanquished, without it showing; the merciless conditioning of children, all the more horrible that it is more impersonal, more indirect, more outwardly gentle; the clever diffusion of soul-killing lies (and half lies); violence under the cover of nonviolence. The choice is also between selfless ruthlessness put to the service of the very cause of truth; violence without cruelty, applied in view of bringing about upon this earth an order based on everlasting principles, that transcend man; violence in view of creating, or maintaining, a human state in harmony with life's highest purpose, and violence applied to selfish ends. The more disinterested be its aims and the more selfless its application, the more frank and straightforward violence is. While, on the other hand, the more sordid be the motives for which it is in reality used, the more it is itself, hidden, even denied; the more the men who resort to it boast of being admirers of nonviolence, thus bluffing others and sometimes also themselves, acting as deceivers and being deceived — caught in the network of their own lies. As time goes on and as decay sets in, the keynote of human history is not less and less violence; it is less and less honesty about violence. But violence is not a bad thing in itself. True, it set in as a necessity only after the world had become, to a great extent, "bad," i.e., unfaithful to its timeless archetype; no longer in keeping with the creative dream of the universal Mind, that it had once expressed. Yet, violence cannot be judged apart from its purpose. And the purpose is good or bad; worth its while, or not. It is worth its while when those who pursue it do so, not merely unselfishly — with no primordial desire of personal glory or happiness — but also in keeping with an ideology expressing timeless, impersonal, more-than-human truth; an ideology rooted in the clear understanding of the unchanging laws of life, and destined to appeal to all those who, in a fallen world, still retain within their hearts an invincible yearning for the perfect order as it really was and will again be. Any purpose which is intelligently, objectively consistent with the war aims of the undying forces of light in their age-old struggle against the forces of darkness, i.e., of disintegration — that struggle illustrated in all the mythologies of the world — any such purpose, I say, justifies any amount of selfless violence. Moreover, as the era of gloom in which we are living proceeds, darker and darker and fiercer and fiercer year after year, it becomes more and more impossible to avoid using violence in the service of truth. No man — no demigod can bring about, today, even a relative amount of real order and justice in any area of the globe, without the help of force, specially if he has but a few years at his disposal. And, unfortunately, the further this world advances into the present age of technical wonders and human abasement, the more the great men of inspiration are submitted to the factor of time, as soon as they attempt to apply their lofty, intuitive knowledge of eternal truth to the solution of practical problems. They just have to act, not only thoroughly, but also quickly, if they do not want to see the forces of disintegration nip their priceless work in the bud. And whether they like it or not, thoroughly and quickly means, almost unavoidably, with unhesitating violence. One can say, with more and more certainty as the dark age goes on, that the godlike men of action are defeated, at least for the time being, not for having been too ruthless (and thus for having roused against themselves and their ideas and their collaborators the indignation of the "decent people"), but for not having been ruthless enough — for not having killed off their fleeing enemies, to the last man, in the brief hour of triumph, for not having silenced both the squeamish millions of hypocrites and their masters, the clever producers of atrocity tales, by more substantial violences, more complete exterminations. From all this it is quite clear that to condemn violence indiscriminately is to condemn the very struggle of the forces of life and light against the forces of disintegration — struggle, all the more heroic and all the more desperate, also, as the world rushes on toward its doom. It is to condemn that struggle which, at every one of its age-long, varying phases, and even through temporary disaster, has been securing for the world, beyond its deserved doom, the glorious new beginning, which the few alone deserve. Within the bondage of time, specially within this kali yuga, one cannot be consistently nonviolent without contributing, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, to the success of the forces of disintegration; of what we call the death forces. As for that violence which is used to forward the war aims of the death forces, it is, and has always been, twofold: directed on one hand against life itself — first, against the whole of innocent, living Nature, then, against the vital interests of higher mankind, in the name of "the common man" — and, on the other, against those particular men who, more and more conscious of the tragic realities of a darkening age, put up a stand in favor of the recognition of life's eternal values and of the restoration of order upon its true, eternal basis. In the attempt to bring about the triumph of the worthless and the slow but steady disintegration of culture, in fact, less and less violence is needed. The world evolves naturally toward disintegration, with accelerated speed. It might have been, once, necessary to push it on along the slippery path. It has no longer been so, for centuries. It rolls on to its own doom, without help. In that direction, therefore, the champions of disintegration enjoy an easy task. They only have to follow and flatter the vicious tendencies of the increasingly despicable majority of men, to become the world's darlings. But in their war against the few, but more aware and practical exponents of the higher values — the upholders of the natural hierarchy of races; the worshippers of light, of strength, of youth — they are (and are bound to be) more and more violent, more and more relentlessly cruel. Their hatred grows as history unfolds, as though they knew — as though they felt, with the sharpness of physical perception — that every one of their victories, however spectacular it be, brings them nearer the final, redeeming crash in which they are bound to perish, and out of which their now persecuted superiors are bound to emerge as the leaders of the new age. Their hatred grows, and their ferocity too, as the redeeming crash draws nigh, and, along with it, the dawn of the universal new order, as unavoidable as the coming of spring. They are in a hurry — not, as the heroic elite, out of generous impatience; not out of any longing to see the age of truth re-established before its time, but out of feverish lust; out of the will to snatch from the world, for themselves, all the material advantages and all the satisfactions of vanity they possibly can, before it is too late. And as time goes on, their hurry amounts to frenzy. The one obstacle that stands in their way and still defies them — that will always defy them, till the end — is precisely that proud elite that disaster cannot discourage, that torture cannot break, that money cannot buy. Whether consciously or unconsciously, whether they be, themselves, thoroughly wicked, or just blind, through congenital stupidity, the workers of disintegration wage war upon the men of gold and steel, with unabated, hellish fury. But theirs is not the frank, unashamed violence of the inspired idealists striving to bring forth, speedily, a lofty sociopolitical order too good for the unworthy world of their times. It is a sneaking, creeping, cowardly sort of violence, all the more effective that it is, outwardly, more emphatically denied, both by the scoundrels who apply it or condone it, and by the well-meaning fools who actually believe that it does not exist. It is prompted by such feelings as one cannot possibly exhibit, even in a degenerate world, without running the risk of defeating one's own purpose: by bare hatred, rooted in envy — the hatred of worthless weaklings for the strong, for no other reason than that they are strong; the hatred of ugly souls (incarnated, more often than not, in no less ugly bodies) for the naturally beautiful ones; for the noble, the magnanimous, the selfless, the real aristocracy of the world; the hatred of the unhappy, and, even more so, of the bored -- of those who have only their pockets to live for, and nothing at all to die for -- for those who live, and are ready to die, for eternal values. Such is, more and more, the widespread violence of our times, less and less recognized, in its subtle disguise, even by the people who actually suffer through it. The ancients knew better than our contemporaries who were their friends and who were their enemies. And this is natural. In a world rushing to its doom, there is bound to be increasing ignorance — ignorance precisely of those things one should know the best, in order to survive. The ancients suffered, and knew whom to curse. Modern men and women, as a rule, do not know; do not really care to know; are too lazy, too exhausted, too near the end of their world to take the trouble to inquire seriously. And clever rascals, themselves the authors of all the mischief, incite them to throw the blame of it upon the only people whose unfailing wisdom and selfless love could have saved them, had they but wanted to be saved; upon that hated elite that stands against the current of time, with the vision of the glorious new beginning beyond the doom of the present-day world, clear and bright before its eyes. Thousands of well-meaning and foolish people, who take for granted whatever they are given to read and inquire no further, have no idea of the horrors perpetrated by their compatriots in other people's countries as colonists or as members of occupying armies, no idea of what goes on in their own country, behind prison bars, in torture chambers for political investigation, and in concentration camps. Indeed, in England and in other democratic nations, many are under the impression that their government never tolerated such things as concentration camps and torture chambers for human beings. Only "the enemy" had them — so they believe. Years ago, they would have thought nothing of admitting that "everybody has them"; must have them; that one cannot run a war without those unpleasant but extremely woeful accessories. But now hypocrisy concerning violence has reached its pitch. Never has there been, in the world, so much cruelty, allied to such a general attempt to hide it, to deny it, to forget it, and, if possible, make others forget it. Never have people been so willing to forget it, in externally "decent" and kindly surroundings — houses and streets in which no torture of man or beast can be seen or heard — provided, of course, it is not "the enemy's" cruelty.
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Paul
of Tarsus; or, Christianity and Jewry
 SAVITRI DEVI was born Maximiani Portas on September 30, 1905, in Lyons, France, of a Greek father and an English mother. A true polymath, Portas earned degrees in chemistry and philosophy, wrote her doctoral thesis on the philosophy of science, and would eventually master at least seven languages, including Bengali and Hindi. Her earliest political convictions were pan-Hellenic. While studying in Athens her political nationalism, along with a fascination with Greco-Roman antiquity and a mistrust of Christianity, evolved into a broader pagan racialism, and a visit to Palestine in 1929 convinced her that Judeo-Christianity, whose outward observances in the Holy Land repelled her, was an alien intrusion into the West, distorting its natural spiritual evolution and imposing upon it a sterile monotheism and a servile philo-Semitism. It was in Palestine, she later said, that she first realized she was a National Socialist. In 1932 she traveled to India, in search of the Aryan paganism that Judeo-Christianity had supplanted. On the subcontinent she sought “gods and rites akin to those of ancient Greece, of ancient Rome, of ancient Britain and ancient Germany, that people of our race carried there, with the cult of the Sun, six thousand years ago.” Her exemplar was Julian the Apostate, the fourth-century emperor who briefly restored paganism and the cult of the Sun to the Roman Empire. Portas took up residence in Calcutta and quickly immersed herself in the Hindu nationalist movements, lineal ancestors of the modern BJP, that were then waging a two-front political campaign against Islam and British colonialism. She worked as a traveling lecturer for the Hindu Mission, a nationalist organization with NS sympathies, and adopted the Hindu name Savitri Devi, after the Indo-Aryan sun-god (cf. Rig Veda 3.62.10). Her new racialist Hinduism was a reflection of her NS beliefs: In the swastika, the Aryan sun-wheel, she saw “the visible link between Hitler and orthodox Hinduism.” She said, in her Pilgrimage: “... Greece, India, Germany: these are the three visible landmarks in the history of my life. Just as other women love several men in turn, so have I loved the essence of several cultures, the soul of at least three nations. But in all three and above all three, it is the essential perfection of Aryandom which I have sought and worshipped all my life. I have sought God — the Absolute — in the living beauty and the manly virtues of my own god-like Race, as other women seek Him in their lovers’ eyes, and give everything for the joy of adoring Him in them, not in heaven, but here on earth.” In 1940, largely to avoid deportation for her pro-Axis activities, Devi married the Brahmin Asit Krishna Mukherji, pan-Aryan editor of the openly NS journal New Mercury. During the war the couple gathered intelligence on behalf of the Axis, and Mukherji put militant Hindu nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose in contact with the Japanese, who would later support his Indian National Army in its abortive campaign against the British. Devi was overwhelmed by Germany’s defeat and post-war dismemberment. She returned to Europe in 1945 determined to propagandize on behalf of her now reviled NS beliefs, staying briefly in London (where she published Son of God, her study of Akhnaton’s solar religion), France, Iceland, Scotland (where she began her most influential work, The Lightning and the Sun) and Sweden (where she met Sven Hedin, the famous explorer and committed National Socialist). Devi was eventually arrested along with a comrade in February 1949, convicted of promoting National Socialist ideas, and sentenced to six years imprisonment, of which she served only seven months, returning to Lyons in the summer of 1949. There she wrote Defiance and completed Gold in the Furnace, both based on her experiences in occupied Germany. In 1953 Devi returned illegally to Germany on a self-styled pilgrimage, lasting four years, to the holy sites of National Socialism and Germanic paganism. She lived for two years at Emsdetten in Westphalia at the home of an NS sympathizer, where she wrote Pilgrimage, and completed The Lightning and the Sun. Devi returned to India in 1957, but was back in Europe three years later. The friendships she had made during her imprisonment provided entrée into murky world of post-war National Socialism — she was already on friendly terms with such luminaries as Hans Rudel, Otto Skorzeny, and Leon Degrelle — and while living in London she became involved with the politics of the British racial right, attending, along with George Lincoln Rockwell, the World Union of National Socialists conference in the Cotswolds in 1962, site of the famous Cotswolds Declaration. In 1971 Devi returned again to India, where she spent most of the 1970s, corresponding with her comrades abroad and influencing a number of young racialists who visited her in Delhi. She died in the United Kingdom in 1982, while preparing for a speaking tour of the United States. -- Irmin Vinson This article was originally published in National Vanguard magazine number 118. You may see a sample of the latest issue by clicking on the 'magazine' button at the top of this page. More works by Savitri Devi are available here. ( http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=158 ) National Vanguard • Box 5145 • Charlottesville • VA 22905 • USA NationalVanguard.org
The Death of Adolf HitlerSavitri Devi
Others have described -- or
tried to describe -- far better than I (who was not on the spot) ever could, the
last days of the Third German Reich: the irresistible advance of the two frantic
invading armies (and of their respective auxiliaries) into the heart of the
land, in which years of unheard-of bombardment had left nothing but ruins; the
terror of the last and fiercest air raids that disorganized everything, while
streams and streams of refugees kept pouring westward (realizing that they had,
in spite of all, less to fear from the Americans -- enemies of National
Socialism with no faith to put in its place -- than from the Russians, who were
fighting in full awareness of their allegiance to the contrary faith); the
horror of the last desperate battles, intended to immobilize for a while an
enemy that one now knew to be the winner; and the moral breakdown -- the
frightening, blank hopelessness, the bitter feeling of having been mocked and
cheated -- of millions in whose hearts faith in National Socialism had been
inseparable from the certitude of Germany's invincibility: the moral ruins, even
more tragic and more lasting than the material ones.
World War II's
victors hoist the hammer-and-sickle flag over the Reichstag in Berlin. On the
afternoon of April 30, 1945, Others have described or tried to describe the horror of the last days of Berlin under the relentless fire of the Russian guns -- Berlin which, seen from above, "looked like the crater of an immense volcano." [These are the words of the well-known German airwoman, Hanna Reitsch, who saw it -- Devi's note.] In the midst of the capital ablaze, stood the broad and yet untouched gardens of the Chancellery of the Reich. There, surrounded by a few of his faithful ones in his bunker, underground, Adolf Hitler, the man against time, lived the apparent end of all his life's work and of all his dreams, and the beginning of his people's long martyrdom. More or less accurate reports have reached the outer world about his last known gestures and words. But nobody has described in all its more-than-human grandeur the last, real, inner phase -- the tragic failure, and yet (considered from a standpoint exceeding by far that of the politician) the culmination -- of his dedicated life. In August Kubizek's biography of him as a young man, there is a passage too significant for me not to quote it nearly in extenso. It is the description of a walk to the Freienberg (a hill over-looking Linz) in the middle of the night, just after the future Fuehrer and his friend had attended together, at the opera, a performance of Richard Wagner's Rienzi. "We were alone," writes Kubizek. "The town had sunk below us into the fog. As though he were moved by an invisible force, Adolf Hitler climbed to the top of the Freienberg. I now realized that we no longer stood in solitude and darkness, for above us shone the stars." "Adolf stood before me. He took both my hands in his and held them tight -- a gesture that he had never yet made. I could feel from the pressure of his hands how moved he was. His eyes sparkled feverishly. The words did not pour from his lips with their usual easiness, but burst forth harsh and passionate. I noticed by his voice even more than by the way in which he held my hands how the episode he had lived (the performance of Rienzi) had shattered him to the depths. "Gradually, he began to speak more freely. The words came with more speed. Never before and also never since have I heard Adolf Hitler speak like he did then, as we stood alone under the stars as though we had been the only two creatures on earth. "It is impossible for me to repeat the words my friend uttered in that hour. "Something quite remarkable, which I had not noticed before, even when he spoke to me with vehemence, struck me at that moment: it was as though another self spoke through him; another self, from the presence of which he was as moved as I was. In no way could one have said of him (as it sometimes happens, in the case of brilliant speakers) that he was intoxicated with his own words. On the contrary! I had the feeling that he experienced with amazement, I would say, that he was himself possessed by that which burst out of him with elemental power. I do not allow myself a comment on that observation. But it was a state of ecstasy, a state of complete trance, in which, without mentioning it or the instance involved in it, he projected his experience of the Rienzi performance into a glorious vision upon another plane, congenial to himself. More so: the impression he had received from that performance was merely the external Impulse that had prompted him to speak. Like a flood breaks through a dam which has burst, so rushed the words from his mouth. In sublime, irresistible images, he unfolded before me his own future and that of our people. "Till then I had been convinced that my friend wanted to become an artist, a painter, or an architect. In that hour there was no question of such a thing. He was concerned with something higher, which I could not yet understand ... He now spoke of a mission that he was one day to receive from our people, in order to guide them out of slavery, to the heights of freedom ... Many years were to pass before I could realize what that starry hour, separated from all earthly things, had meant to my friend." Calmer now, amid the thunder of explosions and the noise of crumbling buildings -- the flames and ruins of the Second World War -- than then, at the top of the Freienberg, under the stars; freed from the temporary wild despair that had seized him at the news of the Russian advance west of the Oder River, Adolf Hitler beheld the future. And that future -- his own and that of National Socialism and that of Germany, which had now become, forever, the fortress of the new faith -- was nothing less than eternity; the eternity of truth, more unshakable (and more soothing) in its majesty even than that of the Milky Way. The Russians could come, and their "gallant Allies" from the West could meet them and rejoice with them upon the ashes of the Third Reich (as Winston Churchill and his daughter Sarah, who were actually to be seen a few days later giggling with Russian officers before the skeleton of the Reichstag); Berlin could be wiped out -- or bolshevized -- and Germany, cut in two or in four, could, for years and years, suffer such an ordeal as no nation in history had yet suffered. In spite of all, National Socialism, the modern expression of cosmic truth, would endure and conquer. National Socialism would rise again because it is true to cosmic reality and because that which is true does not pass. Germany's via dolorosa was indeed the way to coming glory. It had to be taken, if the privileged nation was to fulfill her mission absolutely, i.e., if she was to be the nation that died for the sake of the highest human race, which she embodied, and that would rise again to take the lead of those surviving Aryans who are -- at last! -- to understand her message of life and to carry it with them into the splendor of the dawning Golden Age. Oh, now -- now under the ceaseless fire and thunder of the Russian artillery; now, on the brink of disaster -- how the man against time clearly understood this! Above him and above the smoke of the Russian cannons and of the burning city, above the noise of explosions, millions and millions of miles away, the stars -- those same stars that had shed their light over the adolescent's first prophetic ecstasy forty years before -- sparkled in all their glory, in the limitless void. And the man against time, who could not see them, knew that his National Socialist wisdom, founded upon the very laws of life; his wisdom that this doomed world had cursed and rejected, was and would remain, in spite of all, as unassailable and everlasting as their everlasting dance.
The Last Man Against TimeSavitri Devi
 Not
only had Adolf Hitler done all he possibly could to avoid war, but he did
everything he possibly could to stop it. Again and again -- first in October,
1939, immediately after the victorious end of the Polish campaign; then on the
22nd of June, 1940, immediately after the truce with defeated France -- he held
out his hand to England; not the hand of a supplicant, still less that of a man
afraid, but that of a farsighted and generous victor whose whole life was
centered around a creative idea, whose program was a constructive program, and
who had no quarrel with the misled blood brothers of his own people, who saw in
them, despite their hatred of his name, his future friends and collaborators.
The fact that all Adolf Hitler's efforts to avoid war -- or to end it speedily and victoriously, at least honorably -- remained fruitless, proves by no means his inefficiency as a statesman or as a strategist. It only proves that the forces of disintegration -- the coalesced forces of our dark age, embodied in all-powerful, international Jewry -- were, in spite of his insight, in spite of his genius, too strong for him; that it needed a still harder man against time than he in order to break them; in other words, that he is not the last man against time. He knew it himself, from the early
days of the struggle. And nothing shows more clearly how aware he was of his own
place and significance in history than the words he addressed Hans Grimm in
1928, in the course of a conversation that lasted an hour and a quarter: "I know
that some man capable of giving our problems a final solution must appear. And
that is why I have set myself to do the preparatory work (die Vorarbeit);
only the most urgent preparatory work, for I know that I am myself not the
one. And I know also what is missing in me (to be the one). But the
other one still remains aloof, and nobody comes forward, and there is no more
time to be lost."
 The last incarnation of He Who Comes Back -- the last man against time -- has many names. Every great faith, every great culture, every true (living or obsolete) form of a tradition as old as the fall of man has given him one. Through the eyes of the visionary of Patmos, the Christians behold in him Christ, present for the second time: no longer a meek preacher of love and forgiveness, but the irresistible leader of the celestial white horsemen destined to put an end to this sinful world and to establish a new heaven and a new earth. The Mohammedan world is awaiting him under the features of the Mahdi, whom Allah shall send "at the end of times," to crush all evil through the power of his sword -- "after the Jews will once more have become the masters of Jerusalem" and "after the Devil will have taught men to set even the air they breathe on fire." And the millions of Hindustan have called him from time immemorial and still call him Kalki, the last incarnation of the world-sustaining power: Vishnu; the one who will, in the interest of life, put an end to this age of gloom and open a new succession of ages. I have called him here by his Hindu name, not in order to show off an erudition which I am far from possessing, but simply because I happen to know of no other tradition in which the three types of manifested existence -- above time, against time, and in time -- which I tried in these pages to evoke and to define, have so obviously their counterpart as in the Hindu trinitarian conception of divinity.
The well-known Hindu Trinity -- Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, so masterfully evoked in Indian art -- is anything but the blending of three inseparable gods into one; anything but the triple aspect of one transcendent and personal god. It symbolizes something by far more fundamental, namely, existence in its entirety: manifested and unmanifested; conceivable, visible and tangible, and beyond conception. For existence -- being -- is the one thing divine. And there is no divinity outside it; and nothing outside divinity. [Image: Bust of Trimurti ("having three forms") in the caves at Elephanta.] Now Brahma is existence in und fuer sich -- in and for itself; being unmanifested, and thereby outside and above time; being, beyond the conception of the time-bound mind, and thereby unknowable. It is significant that Brahma has no temples in India -- or elsewhere. One cannot render a cult to that which no time-bound consciousness can conceive. One can, at the most, through the right attitude (and also through the right ascetic practices) merge one's self into it; transcend individual consciousness; live above time -- in the absolute present which admits no "before" and no "after," and which is eternity. Vishnu -- the world sustainer -- is the tendency of every being to remain the same and to create (and procreate) in its own likeness; the universal life force as opposed to change and thereby to disaggregation and death; the power that binds this time-bound universe to its timeless essence -- every manifested being to the idea of that being, in the sense Plato was one day to give the word idea. All men against time (all centers of action against time, in the cosmic sense of the word) are embodiments of Vishnu. They are all -- more or less -- saviors of the world: forces of life, directed against the downward current of irresistible change that is the very current of time; forces of life tending to bring the world back to original, timeless perfection. Shiva -- the destroyer -- is the tendency of every being to change, to die to its present and to all its past aspects. He is Mahakala -- time itself; time that drags the universe to its unavoidable doom and -- beyond that -- to no less irresistible regeneration; to the spring of a new Golden Age and again, slowly and steadily, to degeneracy and death, in an endless succession.
In other words, Vishnu and Shiva, the world sustainer and the world destroyer, the force against time and time itself -- Mahakala -- are one and the same. And they are Brahma, timeless existence, the essence of all that is. They are Brahma manifested in time (and automatically also against time) and yet timeless. Hindu art has symbolized this metaphysical truth in the figure of Hari-Hara (Vishnu and Shiva in one body) and in the famous Trimurti: three-faced Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva. In the manifested universe as we experience it at our scale, no living being embodies that triple and complete idea of existence -- the everlasting, universal law of constant change away from, and of untiring aspiration toward and ceaseless effort back to, original perfection and the ineffable inner peace of timelessness, inseparable from it -- better than the everlasting and ever-returning man against time; He Who Comes Back, age after age "to destroy evildoers and to establish upon earth the reign of righteousness." The man in time has hardly any of the Vishnu or, as I have called them, sun qualities. The man above time has hardly any of the lightning qualities of Shiva, the destroyer. The man against time -- who lives in eternity while acting in time, according to the Aryan doctrine of detached violence -- has Vishnu's faithfulness to the original pattern of creation, Shiva's holy fury of destruction (in view of further creation), and Brahma's fathomless serenity which is, I repeat, the serenity of all three: timeless peace beyond the roar of all wars in time. Yet no hero against time has ever expressed that triple aspect of immanent divinity with absolute adequacy, and none will, save the last one. That last, great individual -- an absolutely harmonious blending of the sharpest of all opposites; equally sun and lightning -- is the one whom the faithful of all religions and the bearers of practically all cultures await; the one of whom Adolf Hitler (knowingly or unknowingly) said, in 1928: "I am not he; but while nobody comes forward to prepare the way for him, I do so"; the one whom I have called by his Hindu name, Kalki, on account of the cosmic truth that this name evokes. Contrarily to Adolf Hitler, he will spare not a single one of the enemies of the divine cause: not a single one of its outspoken opponents but also not a single one of the lukewarm, of the opportunists, of the ideologically heretical, of the racially bastardized, of the unhealthy, of the hesitating, of the all-too-human; not a single one of those who, in body or character or mind, bear the stamp of the fallen ages.
They are the bridge to supermanhood, of which Nietzsche has spoken; the last battalion, in which Adolf Hitler has put his confidence. Kalki will lead them, through the flames of the great end, into the sunshine of the new Golden Age. We like to hope that the memory of the one-before-the-last and most heroic of all our men against time -- Adolf Hitler -- will survive, at least in songs and symbols. We like to hope that the lords of the age, men of his own blood and faith, will render him divine honors, through rites full of meaning and full of potency, in the cool shade of the endless regrown forests, on the beaches, or upon inviolate mountain peaks, facing the rising sun. Excerpted from Devi's Lightning and the Sun, 3rd abridged edition (Wellington, NZ: Renaissance Press, 1994), 74, 82-83. First published in Calcutta in 1958. The title above is editorial.
Rocks of the SunSavitri DeviThe Externsteine, 23rd of October 1953, in the evening. We rolled through and past Horn, without stopping, turned to our right as we reached the outskirts of the town and then, after another five hundred yards, to our left, and followed a beautiful asphalted road bordered with trees and meadows beyond which more trees -- that same, unending Teutoburg Forest in autumn garb, that I was never tired of admiring -- could be seen. I looked right and left, and ahead, and did not speak. I was watching the approach of evening upon the fiery red and yellow and brown of the leaves ready to fall, and thinking of the captive eagles and of enslaved Germany, and longing for the Day of Revenge -- "der Tag der Rache" -- as steadily as I had been, as a matter of fact, for the last eight and half years. Then, suddenly barring the road, a row
of vertical rocks about a hundred feet high -- but looking much higher,
specially from a short distance -- appeared, evenly grey against the bright
background of the sunset sky. I recognised them at once for having seen pictures
of them, and exclaimed in a low voice, with ravishment: "Die Externsteine!"
We stepped out of the car. I stood, automatically, apart from the other travellers, as though I were aware of the fact that we belonged to two different worlds; that they, even though they were Germans, were, here, but tourists, while I, even though a foreigner, was already a pilgrim. I looked up to the irregular stone shapes that stood between me and the further forest, into which the motorable road leads. The familiar outlines fascinated me. Not that I was, for the first time in my life, visiting a place stamped with the prestige of immemorial Sun-worship: it was anything but the first time! I had seen Delphi and Delos, and the ruins of Upper and Lower Egypt: Karnak and the Pyramids. And I had, in India, visited the celebrated "Black Pagoda" built in the shape of a Sun-chariot resting upon twelve enormous wheels, each of which corresponds to a sign of the Zodiac, and presenting in sculpture the most splendid illustration of Life at all its stages -- in all its fullness -- from the wildest erotic scenes that adorn most of the surface of the lower walls, to the serene stillness of lonely medication --: the meditation of the Sun-god Himself, whose seated statue dominates the whole structure. And I had visited the extraordinary temple of Sringeri, every one of the twelve columns of which is struck in turn by the first Sun-rays, on the day the Sun enters a new constellation.
But I had never yet (save once, in Sweden) found myself upon a spot sanctified by the Worship of our Parent Star -- the old worship of Light and Life -- in a Germanic country. And these Rocks, I knew, had been the centre of Germanic solar rites in time without beginning. I felt like a person who has walked a long way and a long time -- who has come from a very, very distant country -- with a definite purpose, and who, at last, reaches the goal. I had now attained, if not the end (for there is no end), at least the culminating point of my pilgrimage through Germany and through life. And I was happy. I had reached the Source where I could replenish my spiritual forces for the eternal Struggle in its modern form: the Struggle of the Powers of Light against the Powers of Gloom, experienced by me as that of the National Socialist values against those both of Christianity and of Marxism -- of the oldest and of the latest Jewish doctrine for Aryan consumption, which I had fought and would continue fighting untiringly. I gazed at the irregular dark grey Rocks; and tears filled my eyes. And as the people with whom I had travelled bade me good-bye to follow the guide who had come to take them round, I was glad: I wished to see the Rocks without haste and, as far as possible, alone.
It is difficult to tell what the
sanctuary once looked like. To-day, nearly twelve hundred years after its
systematic destruction through Christian fanaticism, one steps onto a stone
pavement some six yards long and not quite four yards wide, without a roof. At
one end of the room, to one's right as one now comes in, i.e., to the
North-East, one sees a huge piece of rock -- a part of the very cliff on which
one is standing -- carved out into a vaulted hollow, the ground-level of which
is a foot higher than the pavement. In the midst of it, hewn out of the same one
block of stone, is a stand, with a flat, table-like top about a foot wide and
two and a half feet deep; and above this, cut out in the solid, natural,
north-eastern wall of the mysterious room, an opening, as perfectly circular as
can be, something over a foot (37 centimetres, exactly) in diameter. At the
other end of the pavement -- to one's left as one enters, from the bridge, i.e.
to the south-west -- is a rectangular niche, higher than even a very tall man,
some five feet broad or so and over a foot deep, with a pillar each side of it.
And in the rock wall opposite the bridge -- to the north-west -- is a window
looking over the neighbouring cliff and the lake beyond. The once existing walls
between the vaulted room and the rest of the structure, on the south-east and
the north-west, are now replaced by iron railings. The roof of the sanctuary was
the eastern portion of the top of the cliff itself. It has been destroyed,
leaving the whole place, with the exception of the vaulted hollow, as I have
said, open to the sky.
My back to the south-western wall, behind which the Sun was now setting, I gazed at the ruins of the venerable high-place. Here, at the time the great Egyptian kings of the Twelfth Dynasty were building their mighty temples and ever-lasting tombs; at the time the mysterious sea-lords of "Middle Minoan II" ruled Crete and the Aegean Isles; before the earliest dated Aryan conquests in the East -- four thousand years ago and more -- the wise men, spiritual leaders of the Germanic tribes, and guardians of the natural Values that made their lives worth living, would gather, and greet the Earliest Sun-rise, on the sacred Day, in June. In the midst of the stand in the vaulted chamber, one can still see a square socket. There used to be a rod stuck into it, the summit of which was on a straight line both with the lowest spot on the brim of the round opening in the north-eastern wall, and a spot in the middle of the niche against which I was standing -- the Solstice-line, running North-east South-west. So that, when the rising Sun would appear exactly at the lowest brim of the round stone opening, and, at the same time, exactly behind the upper extremity of the rod, to an observer standing in a rigorously determined place in the middle of the niche, then one could say, with certainty, that it was the Summer Solstice Day, on the correct detection of which the whole calender -- and, subsequently, the festivals, and the whole life of the community -- was dependent. For a few days before and a few days after the Summer Solstice, the rising Orb would appear within a certain radius, on the side brim of the round opening. The spot ot its appearing would seem to travel, from a place on the side of the circle down to the lowest section of it, and up again. The wise men used to watch it day after day, in order to make out when, exactly, the earliest Sunrise -- the Sunrise rigorously according to the unchanging Solstice-line -- would be. And as they saw it -- one spot of intensely bright gold on the rim of the circular opening; one ray of light into the dark chamber -- they would shout from the top of this rock the spell of victory announcing the beginning ot the great Summer festivity to the people assembled below: "Siege, Light" -- "Triumph, Light." I thought of this, which I had read, and which I had been told by modern Germans faithful to the old solar Wisdom; Germans who had gone back to it, in an unexpected way, through that modern Faith in Blood and Soil -- that Aryan Faith: National Socialism -- that binds me to them. I thought of this, and imagined, or tried to imagine, the solemn scenes that have taken place, year after year, upon this rock, for centuries, nay, millenniums; scenes of which the regularity had seemed eternal like that of the reappearing of the sacred Days. And I thought of the abrupt end of the Cult of Light; of the destruction of this most holy place of ancient Germany by Charlemagne and his fanatical Frankish Christians. I pictured myself half the top of the Rock -- which had once been the root of this sanctuary -- violently split from the rest of it and thrown down there, where its fragments can still be seen: the desecrated holy room; the persecuted holy Land, on whose people the foreign creed of false meekness, of which they are, even to-day, not yet free, was forced by fire and sword. I pictured myself the Frankish soldiery -- men of Germanic blood, "crusaders to Germany" in the name of a foreign prophet and of a foreign earthly power -- storming these hallowed Rocks; killing whomever they found; setting fire to whatever would burn; through terror, preparing the way for the new teachers: the monks, true "re-educators of Germany" in the worst sense of that much-detested word, who would (if they could) stamp out every spark of the old solar Wisdom -- of Aryan wisdom -- in its main European Stronghold. This had happened in the year 772 of the Christian era -- one thousand one hundred and eighty-one years before. But how tragically modern it all looked! These very first "crusaders to Germany" appeared to me, more vividly than ever, as the forerunners of Eisenhower's sinister "crusaders to Europe." They had fought in the name of the self-same hated Christian values, ultimately for the triumph of the self-same international power, both temporal and spiritual -- the Church -- which was, and still is, the power of Jewry in disguise. They had fought against the self-same everlasting values of Germanic Heathendom -- the natural, heroic religion of the noblest people of the West, in which, both then and now, the Aryan Soul has found its most accurate expression on this continent. And they had persecuted them with similar savagery, and still greater efficiency, perhaps; with similar, and even greater, Germanic thoroughness. And I remembered that Eisenhower (a curse upon him!) is also of German descent. And once more I hated the madness that has, so many times in the course of history, thrown people of the same good Nordic blood into fratricidal wars for the sake the childish superstitions which the Jews -- and their willing or unwilling agents -- have put into their heads without them even suspecting it. And as the picture of the destruction of the old religion and of the christianization of Germany, not merely in all its cruelty, but in all its thoroughness imposed itself more tragically upon me, I realised -- not for the first time, but yet, perhaps more intensely than ever before -- that the main dates of Charlemagne's war against the Saxons, 772 and 787, are, from the German and, which is more, from the broader Aryan standpoint, even worse than 1945. For the stamp of the foreign creed, and specially of the foreign, anti-natural, anti-racial scale of values, is visible to this day in all but a minority of Germans; in all but an even smaller minority of Europeans. The spirit of the healthy Aryan warrior and sage -- the spirit of detached violence for the sake of duty alone; our spirit -- took over a thousand years to re-assert itself through a proper doctrine of German inspiration, in a German élite, after the disaster inflicted, then, upon those who expressed it. While in spite of enormous losses and no end of suffering we -- the National Socialist minority; the modern Aryan Heathen -- have survived this disaster; survived it, with our burning faith and our will to begin again. And we shall not need a thousand years, nor even a hundred, nor even ten (if circumstances be favourable) to rise once more to power. It may be that the new world we were building lies -- for the time being -- in ruins, at our victors' feet. But our Weltanschauung is intact within our hearts. And there are younger ones ready to carry on our work, when we shall be dead; younger ones who shall, one day, defy Germany's "reeducators" and their programme, and their teaching and their spirit, even if an angry time denies them the pleasure of killing their persons. At the thought of this, I felt elated. I looked round me, at the lonely, desecrated sanctuary; above me, at the overhanging, slanting rock, from which the massive monolithic root had been violently rent, nearly twelve hundred years before -- the permanent scar left by the first "crusaders to Germany" upon this high altar of the national cult of Light. And in a flash I recalled my own life-long struggle against the Christian plague -- in Greece, in the name of destroyed Hellenism; in India, in the name of unbroken Hindu Tradition; everywhere in the name of Aryan pride and Nature's truth. And I imagined the similar part I would like to play, here. among my Führer's people, after the re-installation of the National Socialist New Order, one day, never mind when. "Yes, we are alive," thought I, full of self-confidence and full of confidence in the German minority that thinks and feels as I do. "Defeat has not killed us; it has only made us a little bitterer and still a little more ruthless. One day we will avenge you, wounded Rocks that have been calling us for so long, and you, our elder brothers, warriors who died defending the approaches of this high-place! Wherever I be when our Day dawns, may the heavenly Powers grant me to come back, and take an active part in the revenge!" The preceding text is from the final chapter of Devi's Pilgrimage (Calcutta, 1958), an account of her clandestine visit to occupied Germany in 1953. A few obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Man-centered CreedsSavitri DeviAccording to the religious creeds which we have characterized as "man-centered," man, alone created "in the likeness of God," is God's most beloved child, perhaps even his only child on this earth. The heavenly Father of the Christian Gospels no doubt loves the sparrows. But he loves man infinitely more. He loves the lilies too; he has clothed them more beautifully "than Solomon in all his glory"; yet, man is the main object of his solicitude, not they. Among all the living beings that are born in the visible world man alone is supposed to be endowed with an immortal soul. He alone was created for eternity. The transient world was made for him to enjoy and exploit during his short earthly life, and creatures of several species were appointed -- both quadrupeds and birds -- as meat for him to eat. And that is not all. A whole scheme of salvation was worked out for him by God himself, so that man might still reach everlasting bliss in spite of his sins. God raised prophets to urge rebellious humanity to repentance and to point out the way of righteousness. And according to the Christian belief, he even sent his only Son to suffer and die, so that his blood might become the ransom of all sinners who put their faith in him. All the splendor of the material world; all the grace, strength and loveliness of millions of beasts, birds, fishes, trees and creepers; the majesty of the snow-clad mountains, the beauty of the unfurling waves -- all that and much more -- is not worth, in God's eyes, the immortal soul of a human imbecile -- so they say, at least. That is why the hunting of tigers and deer, the butchering of innocent woolly lambs, so glad to live, the dissecting of pretty white guinea pigs or of intelligent dogs, are not "sins" according to the man-centered faiths -- not even if they imply the most appalling suffering. But the painless chloroforming of worthless human idiots is a "crime." How could it be otherwise? They have two legs, no tail, and an immortal soul. However degenerate they be, they are men. I cannot help here recalling the answer of a French medical student, a member of the "Christian Federation of Students," whom I had asked, twenty-five years ago, how he could reconcile his religious aspirations with his support of vivisection. "What conflict can there be between the two?" said he. "Christ did not die for guinea pigs and dogs." I do not know what Christ would actually have said to that. The fact remains that, from the point of view of historical Christianity, the boy was right. And his answer is enough to disgust one forever with all man-centered creeds. Man-centered creeds do not even enjoy that minimum of inner consistency which forces one sometimes to recognize a certain strength in a bad system of thought. Those who believe in them and who happen not to be by nature too irredeemably irrational, try to justify their point of view by saying that man, as a whole, is superior to the dumb beasts. He can speak, and they cannot. That is certain. He can speak, and subsequently he can define and deduce, and pass from one deduction to another. He can transfer to other people the conclusions of his reasoning and the results of his experience. He becomes more aware of his own thoughts by expressing them. In a word, he can do all that is only possible by means of a conventional system of symbolical sounds, which we call language and which beasts and birds do not possess. His very being is raised above the immediate needs of everyday life, and his mind rendered capable of evolution, by the use of such a system. Anyone will agree that this is true to a great extent, though all may not necessarily see what relation there is between this human advantage of speech and the exploitation of dumb animals by man. It is more difficult to understand the privileged place which religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam give to man, when one remembers that the sacred books of those three famous creeds admit the existence of heavenly creatures far more beautiful and more intelligent than he, mainly of angels -- creatures who need not wait for the day of resurrection to acquire a "glorious" body, but who are, here and now, in their raiment of light, free from disease, decay and death. They, and not the clumsy sons of Adam, should have been the ones for whom nature and man were made, for it would seem, from whatever one can gather about them in the holy Scripture, that angels are as much above men as the most brilliant men can claim to be above animals, and even more so. Still, apparently God loves man the best. All human sinners can expect to be saved by his grace; while those poor angels who once, at the dawn of time, rebelled against their Maker under the leadership of Lucifer, have no other alternative but to remain damned forever. No Redeemer was ever sent to pay the ransom of their sin. No hope of salvation was ever given to them. No repentance of theirs, it seems, would be of any avail. Why? Goodness knows. They are not men, not God's spoilt darlings. That is the only explanation one can give, if any can be given of old Father Jehovah's strange justice and queer tastes. They are not men. Intelligent and beautiful as they may be, and full of endless possibilities for good no less than for evil if only they were given a chance, they are apparently not worth, in God's eyes, the repentant drunkard who weeps aloud at the end of a Salvation Army meeting. God's ways cannot be discussed. But then, don't tell us that his love for man is "justified" by man's superiority, and that the right he gave the chosen species to exploit the rest of his weaker creatures is founded on a reasonable basis. It is not. For, if it were, there would have been, in Paradise, a place for the repentant fallen angels, and at least as much joy for one of them as for the souls of ten thousand drunkards from the East End of London. The real reason for this continual stress upon the welfare of man alone, in this world and in the next, seems to lie in God's incapacity to transcend a certain puerile partiality -- we speak, of course, of the personal God of the man-centered faiths rooted in Judaism, and not of that impersonal Power behind all existence, in which we are inclined to believe. The God of the Christians, the God of Islam, and the God of most of those later Free Thinkers who are not out and out atheists, never succeeded in shaking off completely the habits he once had when he was but the patron deity of a few tribes of desert wanderers, slaves in the land of the Pharaohs. He was able to raise himself from the rank of a national god to that of a God of all humanity. But that is all. His love seems to have been spent out in its extension from the "chosen People" of Israel to the Chosen Species of mankind. He had not in him the urge to broaden his fatherly feelings still beyond those narrow limits. It never occurred to him how narrow they were in fact and how irrational, how mean, how all-too-human that childish preference for man was, in a God that is supposed to have made the Milky Way. The bloodthirsty national gods of West-Asian Antiquity -- once his rivals; now all dead -- were more consistent in their narrowness. They limited their sphere to a town, or at the most to a country, and in cases of emergency accepted -- some say: asked for -- human victims as well as burnt offerings of animal flesh. Grim gods they were, most of them. But there was something outspoken and reassuring in their very limitations. One knew, with them, where one stood. One was not carried away in their name by prophets and saints who took one right along the path leading to universal love, only to leave one in the middle of it. The prophets of Jehovah might call them "abominations," but they were consistent. So was Jehovah, as long as he remained merely the tribal god of the Jews. But when later Jews proclaimed him to be the God of all mankind; when he crept into Christianity as the Heavenly Father of Christ and the First Person of the Holy Trinity; and into Islam as the One God revealed to man through his last and definitive mouthpiece, the Prophet Mohammed; and finally, when he colored the ideology of the humanitarian theists -- and even atheists -- as the unavoidable remnant of a tradition hard to die, then the conception of him became more and more irrational. There was less and less any reason for his solicitude to stop at mankind. Yet it did stop there. There was, more and more, every reason for him to evolve into a truly universal God of all life. Yet he did not evolve that way. He could not drop the long-cherished propensity of picking out a fraction of his creation and blessing it with a special blessing, to the exclusion of the rest. That fraction of the great Universe had once been the Jewish people. It was now the human race -- a trifling improvement, if one ponders over it from an astronomical (that is to say, from what we can imagine to be the only truly divine) angle of vision. The great creeds of the world west of India remained man-centered, it would seem, because they never could free themselves entirely from the marks of their particular tribal origin among the sons of Abraham. The Jews never were a race that one could accuse of giving animals too great a place in its everyday life and thoughts. Christ, who came "to fulfil" the Jewish law and prophecies (not to introduce into the world a different, more rational, and truly kindlier trend of thought) appears never to have bothered his head about the dumb creatures. We speak, of course, of Christ as the Christian Gospels present him to us. That Christ -- we have no means whatsoever of finding out whether a "truer" one ever lived -- never performed a miracle, never even intervened in a natural manner, in favor of any beast, as his contemporary, Apollonius of Tyana, not to speak of any more ancient and illustrious Master such as the blessed Buddha, is supposed to have done. He never spoke of God's love for animals save to assert that He loved human beings a fortiori, much more. He never mentioned nor implied man's duties towards them, though he did not omit to mention, and to stress, other duties. If the Gospels are to be taken as they are written, then his dealings with nonhuman sentient creatures consisted, on one occasion, of sending some evil spirits into a herd of swine, that they might no longer torment a man, and, another time, of making his disciples, who were mostly fishermen by profession, as every one knows, catch an incredible quantity of fish in their nets. In both cases his intention was obviously to benefit human beings at the expense of the creatures, swine or fish. As for plants, it is true that he admired the lilies of the fields; but it is no less true that he cursed a fig tree for not producing figs out of season and caused it to wither, so that his disciples might understand the power of faith and prayer. Fervent English or German Christians, who love animals and trees, may retort that nobody knows exactly all that Jesus actually said, and that the gospels contain the story of only a few of his numberless miracles. That may be. But as there are no records of his life save the Gospels, we have to be content with what is revealed therein. Moreover, Christianity as an historical growth is centered around the person of Christ as the Gospels describe him. And, as Norman Douglas has timely remarked, it remains a fact that the little progress accomplished in recent years in the countries of North western Europe and in America, as regards kindness to dumb beasts, was realized in spite of Christianity, and not because of it. To say, as some do, that every word of the Christian Gospels has an esoteric meaning, and that "swine" and "fishes" and the "barren fig tree" are intended there to designate anything but real live creatures, would hardly make things better. It would still be true that kindness to animals is not spoken of in the teaching of Jesus as it has come down to us, while other virtues, in particular kindness to people, are highly recommended. And the development of historical Christianity would remain, in all its details, what we know it to be. That people whose outlook is conditioned by biblical tradition should put a great stress upon the special place of man in the scheme of life; that they should insist on man's sufferings, and on the necessity of man's happiness, without apparently giving as much as a thought to the other living creatures, one can understand. They follow the Book to which they may or may not add some secondary scriptures based upon it. They cannot be expected to go beyond what is prescribed in it or in those later scriptures. But there are, in the West, ever since the Middle Ages, increasing numbers of people who dare to do without the Book altogether; who openly reject all divine revelation as unprovable, and who see in their conscience the only source of their moral judgements and their only guide in moral matters. It is remarkable that these people, free from the fetters of any established faith, still retain the outlook of their fathers as regards man's relation to animals and to living nature in general. Free Thought, while rightly brushing aside all man-centered metaphysics; while replacing the man-centered conceptions of the Universe by a magnificent vision of order and beauty on a cosmic scale -- a scientific vision, more inspiring than anything that religious imagination had ever invented, and in which man is but a negligible detail -- Free Thought, we say, omitted entirely to do away with the equally outdated man-centered scale of values, inherited from those religions that sprang from Judaism. Sons of Greek rationalism, as regards their intellectual outlook, the Westerners who boast of no longer being Christians -- and the few advanced young men of Turkey and Persia, and of the rest of the Near and Middle East, who boast of no longer being orthodox Musulmans -- remain, as regards their scale of moral values, the sons of a deep-rooted religious tradition which goes back as far as some of the oldest fragments of the Jewish Scriptures: the tradition according to which man, created in God's own image, is the only living being born for eternity, and has a value altogether out of proportion with that of any other animal species. There has been, it is true, in the West, in recent years -- nay, there is, for nothing which is in harmony with the Laws of Life can ever be completely suppressed -- a non-Christian (one should even say an anti-Christian) and definitely more than political school of thought which courageously denounced this age-old yet erroneous tradition, and set up a different scale of values and different standards of behaviour. It accepted the principle of the rights of animals, and set a beautiful dog above a degenerate man. It replaced the false ideal of "human brotherhood," by the true one of a naturally hierarchised mankind harmoniously integrated into the naturally hierarchised Realm of life, and, as a logical corollary of this, it boldly preached the return to the mystic of genuine nationalism rooted in healthy race-consciousness, and the resurrection of the old national gods of fertility and of battle (or the exaltation of their philosophical equivalents) which many a Greek "thinker" and some of the Jewish prophets themselves had already discarded -- politely speaking: "transcended" -- in decadent Antiquity. And its racialist values, solidly founded upon the rock of divine reality, and intelligently defended as they were, in comparison with the traditional man-centered ones inherited, in Europe, from Christianity, are, and cannot but remain, whatever may be the material fate of their great Exponent and of the regime he created, the only unassailable values of the contemporary and future world. But it is, for the time being, a "crime" to mention them, let alone to uphold them -- and their whole recent setting -- in broad daylight. The opposite ideologies, more in keeping with the general tendencies of modern Free Thought from the Renaissance onwards, have only broken off apparently with the man-centered faiths. In fact, our international Socialists and our Communists, while pushing God and the supernatural out of their field of vision, are more Christian-like than the Christian Churches ever were. He who said, "Love they neighbor as thyself" has to-day no sincerer and more thorough disciples than those zealots whose foremost concern is to give every human being a comfortable life and all possibilities of development, through the intensive and systematic exploitation by all of the resources of the material world, animate and inanimate, for man's betterment. Communism, that new religion -- for it is a sort of religion -- exalting the common man; that philosophy of the rights of humanity as the privileged species, is the natural logical outcome of real Christianity. It is the Christian doctrine of the labor of love for one's neighbors, freed from the overburdening weight of Christian theology. It is real Christianity, minus priesthood -- which Christ thoroughly disliked -- and minus all the beliefs of the Church concerning the human soul and all the mythology of the Bible -- which he surely valued far less than a single spontaneous movement of the heart towards suffering mankind. Christ, if he came back, would probably feel nowhere so much "at home" as in the countries which have made love for the average man as such the very soul of their political system. And that is not all. Even Christian theology will perhaps not always remain as totally worthless to them as our Communist friends often think. It may be, one day, that they will bring themselves to use it. And, if ever they do, who will blame them but those nominal Christians who have forgotten the out and out "proletarian" character of their Master and of his first disciples? The myth of the God of mankind taking flesh in the son of the carpenter of Nazareth may well be interpreted as a symbol foreshadowing the deification of the working majority of men -- of the "masses"; of man in general -- in our times. In other words, the rejection of the belief in the supernatural, and the advent of a scientific outlook upon the material world, has not in the least broadened the Westerners' moral outlook. And, unless they be consistent Racialists, worshippers of hierarchised Life, those who today openly proclaim that civilization can well stand without its traditional Christian (or Muslim) background, stick to a scale of values that proceeds, either from a yet narrower love than that preached in the name of Christ or of Islam, (from the love of one's mere individual self and family) or, at most, from the same love -- not from a broader one; not from a true universal love. The generous "morality" derived from modem Free Thought is no better than that based upon the time-honored man-centered creeds that have their origin in Jewish tradition. It is a morality centered -- like the old Chinese morality, wherever true Buddhism and Taoism have not modified it -- around "the dignity of all men" and human society as the supreme fact, the one reality that the individual has to respect and to live for; a morality which ignores everything of man's affiliation with the rest of living nature, and looks upon sentient creatures as having no value except inasmuch as they are exploitable by man for the "higher" purpose of his health, comfort, clothing, amusement, etc. The moral creed of the Free Thinker today is a man-centered creed -- no less than that of Descartes and Malebranche and, later on, of the idealists of the French Revolution, and finally of Auguste Comte. We believe that there is a different way of looking at things -- a different way, in comparison with which this man-centered outlook appears as childish, mean and barbaric as the philosophy of any man-eating tribe might seem, when compared with that of the Christian saints, or even of the sincerest ideologists of modern international Socialism or Communism. The preceding text is excerpted from the opening chapter of Devi's Impeachment of Man (Calcutta, 1959). The book was written in 1945-46. The most recent reprint can be purchased from Noontide Press.
The Unforgettable NightSavitri Devi
I was coming from Sweden and going back to England through Germany and Belgium. The train was rolling on toward the German frontier, which I was to cross at Flensburg on the same day, the 15th of June, 1948, at about 6 P.M. All these years I had lived six thousand miles away, in India. I had never seen Germany in the grand days of Hitler's power. Now, the gods had ordained that I should have a glimpse of her ruins. Bitter irony of fate! But there must be a meaning to it, I thought. All that the gods do has a meaning. I was traveling -- officially -- as a dresser in a theatrical company. And I marveled at the network of circumstances that had been preparing for me, of late, a new life. Never, perhaps, had I felt more grateful to the principal of the company for having taken me to Sweden two months before. That trip had been for me the welcome awakening after a long nightmare. I had met in Stockholm an old friend: the sincerest, perhaps, and surely the most intelligent of all the English Nazis I happened to know: a fine character, and the one person to whom I had been able to open my heart in London when I first came there from India in that wretched year, 1946. We had talked again, and he had managed to convince me that things were now a little less awful, from our point of view. And through that friend, I had soon met others, Swedish Nazis, magnificent men and women of the purest Nordic stock, faithful to our eternal ideals, real Pagans according to my heart. And through these -- and through the will of the gods -- I had had the honor of meeting one of the great men of the New Order, the famous explorer and the Leader's friend: Sven Hedin, aged eighty-three, looking forty-five, and speaking as only everlasting youth can express itself. I had had a four-hour interview with him on that memorable Sunday, June 6th. "Have confidence in the future," he had told me, among other things: "There are millions like you in darkest Europe. Trust them as you would trust yourself." And as I had recalled our irreparable losses, in particular, the death of the martyrs of Nürnberg, he had replied: "Germany has other such men, of whom you never heard." After three years of despair and disgust, I had felt an inexpressible happiness fill my breast. I had known from that minute that a new life had begun for me; that all was not finished -- that all was perhaps just beginning. I had then told Sven Hedin what I intended to do during this first journey of mine through Germany. He had not discouraged me, but only told me that "times were not yet ripe" and tried to make me realize how risky my project was. Several young Swedes who had indulged in similar activities had never come back or been heard of again. Still I had said, "I shall try." The pleasure of defying those who have set out to destroy the National Socialist Idea was something too tempting for me to resist. So I had spent two nights copying on separate papers, five hundred times, in my own handwriting -- for I knew nobody in Sweden who could print such literature -- the following words in German: Men and women of Germany:And now I was sitting in a corner of the railway carriage, with my precious papers in my pockets and in my luggage, waiting to throw them out of the windows of the train at every station we passed through, as soon as we reached Germany. I was sitting and thinking of the glorious past, so recent, and of the wretched present -- and of the future, for now I knew we had a future. The train rolled on. I was not the only one to think of these things. There were in the same compartment as myself three Indian girls -- three dancers of the company with which I was traveling -- and also two Jewesses. One of the Indians, a Maharashtrian of the warrior caste, started relating how, in Stockholm, she had read in an American magazine an article discussing the question whether Adolf Hitler is alive or dead; and she added: "How I do wish he is alive! For the good of the whole world, such a man should live!" My first impulse was to press the girl in my arms for having said that. My second one was to reply that such men always live, but that this ugly world of knaves and fools is unworthy of them. I refrained from both these forms of self-expression, and merely gave the girl a sympathetic smile. With five hundred leaflets in my pockets, I could not afford to attract further attention to myself. But I thought: "Even a twenty-year-old girl from the other end of the world finds it impossible to feel herself nearing the German frontier without thinking of our Leader." And I recalled in my mind the words heard long ago, in the days of glory: "Adolf Hitler is Germany; Germany is Adolf Hitler." These words still express the truth. They always will. And I thought: "Just as, today, this daughter of the southernmost Aryans, so, for endless centuries to come, the whole world will identify in its consciousness Hitler and Germany and National Socialism -- as one cannot help identifying to this day the Islamic civilization, Arabia, and the Prophet of Islam." Once more I marveled how broad and how eternal National Socialism is. But the two Israelites present did not allow me for long to think in peace. "How dare you?" exclaimed one of them, turning to the high-caste Hindu, while the other sprang up like a wounded snake from the place where she was reclining and thrust herself at the girl: "Yes, indeed," said she, "how dare you praise such a man? -- Hitler, of all people! What do you know about him? You should learn before you speak..." Her eyes flashed. And she spat out, against the Germans in general, and against the Leader himself, the vilest, the most nauseating tirade I had ever heard since the gloating of one of her racial sisters over the Nürnberg Trial, in a London boarding house in 1946. The world accuses us of cruelty. I am supposed to be "cruel" and -- if given power -- would surely be more merciless to our enemies than any other National Socialist whom I personally know. And yet even I have never said -- never thought -- that I would "be delighted to see" any man, any devil, "torn in two." I have not said that of the rascals who conducted the Nürrnberg Trial, nor of those who organized the bombing of Germany to the finish. Can a Jewess hate our Leader more than I hate those people? No. But what the world miscalls our "cruelty" is just ruthlessness -- earnest and frank use of violence whenever it is necessary. The really cruel ones are the Jews. And that is why the fate of any of us in their hands is incomparably worse than the fate of any Jew in our power. I shuddered as I heard that young daughter of Zion speak. Nobody yet had ever, in my presence, uttered a word against Adolf Hitler without my replying vehemently. But now, though burning with indignation, I was mute and motionless. I had those precious leaflets with me. I thought of the god-like Man for the sake of whom the German people are so dear to me. Was I to defend him against that tapeworm of a woman and to create a row and get discovered and become useless -- or to distribute my message of pride and hope to the people he so loved? I held my peace. But I gave the woman such a glance of hatred that she recoiled -- and was never again to address a word to me. And I rose from my place and went and wept in the one place in which, even in a train, one is always sure to be alone. The train rolled on toward the German border. There were some difficulties awaiting me at Flensburg. I was asked to get out of the train to be questioned on the platform by a man -- visibly a Jew -- to whom the stage manager of my employer's company, also a Jew, was already talking. I possess a pair of Indian earrings in the shape of swastikas. I had them on and intended to wear them right through German territory, in sheer defiance of all "de-nazification" schemes. I threw a shawl over my head (there was no time to do anything else) and came out. The man on the platform, I was told, was "a member of the police." "Are you Mrs. Mukherji?" said he, as he greeted me. "Yes, I am." "Well," he continued, "there are rumors about you. Can you tell me how far they are justified?" "What rumors?" said I. "You surely know." "I do not. I have not the faintest idea. People say so many things." "Some say you are a Nazi. Are you really?" "Does it matter what one is, in a land to which you are supposed to have brought 'freedom' -- so you say?" I replied ironically. "It does," said the man. "We don't welcome people likely to make the already difficult task of the Occupying Powers still more difficult." "I don't see how anyone could display such might from behind the windows of the Nord Express," I answered -- wishing all the time I could. I had hardly finished saying these words when one of the youngsters of the company, who knew I was wearing my lovely and dangerous earrings, pulled the shawl off my head from behind, "for a joke," he later explained. The "joke" could have proved a tragic one. But the boy did not know -- nobody knew -- what I was carrying with me and what I was intending to do. The hallowed Symbol of the Sun gleamed on each side of my face, in that first German frontier station, now in June, 1948, as it did in the streets of Calcutta in glorious 1940. "I see it is useless talking to you any longer, Mrs. Mukherji," said the man to me. "You'd better stay off the train. We shall search your luggage." "You can," I replied with outward calm. But I ran to the principal of the company, who was taking a stroll, and took him aside at the other end of the platform. "You must help me to get on that train again at once, without their searching my things," said I. I explained what had happened, and the principal promised he would try to help me. I could not tell what he said to the official or semi-official "member of the police" who had questioned me. He probably pointed out to him that no person seriously intending to indulge in Nazi underground activities would be such a fool as to advertise herself beforehand by wearing a pair of golden swastikas. And the argument apparently proved convincing. My very stupidity saved me. My luggage was not searched. At last the train moved on. "The gods still love us," thought I, as I rolled triumphantly into German territory. Right and left the land stretched out, green and smiling, in all the glory of its summer garb -- "as beautiful," thought I, "as when he ruled over it." I stood in the corridor, with as many of my leaflets as my pockets and handbag could carry some concealed in packets of ten or twenty cigarettes or in small parcels of sugar, coffee, cheese, or butter (whatever I could buy in Sweden), others placed in envelopes, others just loose. The railway ran parallel to a road. Walking along the road were a woman and a child. I waved to them and threw a little packet of sugar out of the window -- a packet with a leaflet in it, naturally. The woman picked it up and thanked me. I was already far away. By the side of a small station through which we passed without stopping was a cafe. A youngster and a girl were seated at one of the tables, out of doors, drinking beer. I threw them a packet of cigarettes also containing a leaflet. The packet fell a little further from the table than I had thought it would. The young man got up to take it and smiled at me while I leaned out of the window to catch a glimpse of him. He was a fine young man: tall, well-built, blond, with bright eyes. The girl -- a graceful and slim maiden with golden locks -- had also got up and was standing at his side. She too was smiling, glad to have the cigarettes. As the train carried me further and further away out of their sight, I imagined them opening the packet, finding the paper, unfolding it. I imagined their eyes sparkling as they saw at the top -- once more after three dark years -- the unexpected Sign of the Sun, and as they read the words written for them from the depth of my heart: "Hold fast to our glorious National Socialist faith, and resist! ... One day, we shall rise and triumph again." They had thought they had got twenty cigarettes, and, lo, they had got that along with them: a message of hope. I was happy. The idea did not enter my head that the message was perhaps wasted on them; that, after all, they might not necessarily be Nazis. I took it for granted that they were, at heart. However much this may seem childish, nay, foolish, utterly out of keeping with the seriousness of what I was doing, they struck me as too beautiful to be anything else. And on I went, through the lovely country side, my head at the open window. Whenever we passed through a station, or whenever I saw anybody within my reach -- workmen on the side of the railway, people walking along a road or waiting at a level-crossing for our train to pass -- I threw out some small parcels and a handful of loose leaflets. The faces of which I caught a glimpse were haggard and tired but dignified faces; faces of men and women who, obviously, had not had enough to eat for a long time, but whom an iron will kept alive and whom an invincible pride kept unsubdued. I admired them. A little before we reached Hamburg, I thrust from the toilet window over a hundred of my leaflets onto the crowded platform of some station through which we passed and then came back into the corridor. The train was rushing on at full speed. I had no time to see what happened. "But surely," I thought, "some of my papers must have fallen in good hands." Then it struck me that some, also, being so light, might well have flown back into the train. I knew that the Jew, T., the stage manager of the company, was sitting in a railway carriage nearer the end of the train than mine. And I shuddered at the idea of his suddenly seeing one fly in from the window and fall upon his lap. "Oh, dear!" said I to myself, "I must be more careful henceforth!" The sun had already gone down, and we were running through the suburbs of Hamburg. For the first time, I beheld what I was soon to see every day: the ruins of Germany. Black against the pale green and golden sky -- the afterglow of the late summer sunset -- saw no end of shattered walls; of heaps of wreckage; of blocks of iron and stone out of the midst of which emerged, now and then, the skeleton of what had once been a boiler, or a wagon, or an oil tank; no end of long dark streets in which no life was left. The whole place looked like an immense excavation field. Tears came to my eyes, not because these were the ruins of a once prosperous town, the lamentable remnants of happy homes and useful human industries, but because they were the ruins of our New Order; all that was materially left of that supercivilization-in-the-making which I so admired. Far in the distance, I noticed the steeple of a church standing, untouched, above the general desolation -- like a symbol of the victory of the Cross over the Swastika. And I hated the sight of it. Once more, as in the last days of the war and in the months that followed, I experienced for a while the feeling of despair. In my mind, I recalled those darkest days: my departure from Calcutta already at the close of 1944 -- when one knew what the end would be -- not to hear, not to read, and, if possible, not to think about the war; not to be told when National Socialist Germany would capitulate; and then my wanderings from place to place, from temple to temple, all over central, western, and southern India, without my being able to draw my attention away from the one fact: the impending disaster. I saw myself again in a train on my way to Tiruchchendur, at the extreme south of the Indian peninsula. A man holding a newspaper in English was sitting opposite me. And I could not help reading the headlines in big letters: "Berlin is an inferno." It was in April, 1945, a day or two after the Leader's birthday. The man had looked up at me as he had seen me reading and had said: "Well, we are safe out here, anyhow!" And I had replied, "It is all right for you, but I wish I were not safe. I wish I were there." And before he had had time to overcome his astonishment and to ask me why, I had got up and gone out into the corridor, and there, easily abstracting myself from my tropical surroundings, I had thought of that inferno -- as far as one can think of such a thing without having seen it. And I had pictured to myself the Man against whom and around whom was then raging the fury of a world possessed by demons; the Man who had striven for peace and on whom three continents were waging war: my beloved Leader -- in the midst of the noise of exploding bombs and of crumbling buildings, his stern and beautiful face lighted up now and then by the sudden glow of new fires started in the vicinity. And I had felt all the more tormented in my security far away, because I could not look up to that tragic face in the hour of ruin and tell my betrayed Leader: "The East and West may turn against you now, but I am with you forever!" And I recalled, upon my return to Bengal in July, 1945, the news: Germany divided into four "zones"; and then the three long, gloomy years that had followed, until I had found in Sweden a new ray of hope.
Broad, lurid streaks of phosphorus filled the sky. In their glaring, white light the outlines of a city could be seen for the last time. A few seconds later the whole place was ablaze; a few hours later it was a heap of ruins still on fire. The very earth, soaked in phosphorus, burnt on slowly, for days. Not one, not ten or twenty, but all the German towns were submitted to that systematic destruction by the enemies of the New Order -- "Crusaders to Europe," as the American lot called themselves. That was to punish the German people for loving Adolf Hitler, their Leader, their savior, and their friend. That was also to punish Adolf Hitler for loving the German people and the Aryan race at large more than anything in the world; for having dared, for their sake, to challenge the might of the unseen Jew behind the screen of world politics. The rascals who planned and carried out that inhuman bombing knew that the surest way to torture him was to inflict that terror and that suffering upon his helpless people. They smashed Germany so that he might see it smashed. They burnt thousands of Germans alive stuck in the boiling tar of the streets they had not time to cross, or roasted in the cellars where they flocked for shelter -- so that the thought of their horrid death might haunt him day and night. They reduced the whole country to heaps of smoking ruins, so that he, poor great one, might suffer even more than the men and women that the phosphorus bombs affected materially. The most effective devastators of all times, the Assyrians in Antiquity and the Mongols in the Middle Ages, were pretty thorough in warfare; nearly as thorough, in fact, as the airmen who poured fire and brimstone over unfortunate Germany only yesterday. But even they did not display such a fiendish will to exterminate a whole enemy population. The Mongols definitely spared, as potential concubines and slaves, the desirable women, the useful craftsmen, and the children not taller than the wheel of a cart. The airmen of the United Nations spared nobody. The only people who, in olden times, proved to be as enthusiastic mass-murderers as they (to the extent the technique of ancient warfare permitted) are the Jews. One has but to re-read, in the Bible, the monotonous but instructive accounts of the conquest of Canaan by that self-styled "Chosen People" -- accounts of unbiased Israelitish source, all of them -- in order to understand what I mean. Today, as one walks through the bombed streets of Hamburg, Cologne, Coblenz, Berlin, or any other German city; or even as one beholds, from the windows of a railway carriage, those miles and miles of ruins in whatever part of the country it charred walls of which the torn outlines stick out against the grey or blue sky, or the glow of sunset, as far as the eye can see; impossible piles of twisted iron, disjointed stones, and blocks of cement, heaped over endless waste spaces where life once flourished, where men once were happy; where the Leader held out his hand to little children less than five years ago -- as one sees that, I say, and as one recalls in one's mind the inferno that preceded and caused such appalling devastation, one does not only think of the glorious pre-war days and feel: "That is what they did to kill new Germany!" One also evokes another, and quite different picture: the muddy beach of Dunkirk and the pitiable survivors of the British Expeditionary Force gathered there in the late spring of 1940, tattered and torn, wounded and hungry, but, above all, scared out of their wits like hunted animals; the roaring sea before them, the German divisions behind them, rain and lightning and the dark night all round them; awaiting in terror the only fate that seemed likely to befall them: death. It would have been easy for the victorious German Army to step forth and kill them all off -- and put an end to the war. Oh, so easy! But orders came from above, to the bewildered generals and the soldiers on their onward march; orders from that Man whom England was fighting, but who was not fighting England; from the generous, loving, trusting German Leader, who recognized no enemies in the misled Aryans who composed the bulk of the British Army: "Leave several kilometers between them and the German Army"; in other words, "Spare them! Allow them to wait undisturbed for their ships and to reach the coast of England safe and sound." Whatever the German High Command might have felt toward the defeated aggressor, orders were orders. The remnant of the British Expeditionary Force was allowed to live and go home; allowed to recover and fight again.
Under that continuous terror the German people suffered, at first with the hope that the ordeal would soon be over, that victory was at hand; and then, more and more, as months passed and no sign of betterment appeared, with no hope. The traitors became bolder and bolder. And disaffection grew among the ordinary folk who could not understand how anything -- including unconditional surrender -- could possibly be worse than what they were enduring. In May, 1945, when Germany did actually acknowledge defeat, very little seemed to remain of the splendid spirit that had lifted the country so high between the two world wars, and in the early part of the war. From East and West hostile armies rushed forth to occupy disarmed Germany. The bulk of the tortured nation looked at them coming, with the tired resignation of those who have reached the limit of what it is possible to suffer. The eastern gang raped all the women they could catch; stole everything they fancied; drove millions out of house and home in order to replace them by Russians, Poles, or Czechs. The western gang, while behaving with perhaps a little less savagery as regards women, were hardly better in other respects. They stamped about the streets, loaded with edibles, in front of the starving population. They brought their families over to occupy the best remaining houses and to be fed and fattened at the expense of exhausted Germany. They gave people anything between fifteen minutes and an hour to leave their flats and go wherever they liked -- wherever they could -- when they wanted comfortable lodgings. Usually they would turn the flats into pigstys in a couple of days and carry off whatever objects they found desirable when they moved. They built a shockingly luxurious "victory club" in the midst of the ruins of Hamburg and, like the Russians, tore down all the likenesses of the Leader from public buildings, burnt all the National Socialist literature they could set hands upon, and pursued with systematic hatred all those whom they knew -- or believed they knew -- to be National Socialists. Whatever might have been their professional efficiency, none of these were allowed to retain the positions they had formerly held. Most were not permitted to work at all. Thousands were arrested, imprisoned, savagely tortured, sent to concentration camps or to their doom. Among these were Hitler's closest collaborators: the members of the National Socialist Government, the generals of the German Army, the leaders of the SS regiments and of the Youth Organizations -- some of them the finest characters of modern times. For weeks and weeks, months and months -- in fact, for over a year and a half -- the all-too-famous Trial of 1945-46, that most repulsive of all the parodies of justice staged by man since the dawn of history, dragged on. It ended, as everyone knows, by the ignominious hanging, in the slowest and cruelest possible way (each execution lasting about twenty-five minutes), of men whose only crime was to have done their duty without having succeeded in winning the war. And that atrocity took place in what was left of the old, medieval city which, only a few years before, had been witnessing the glory of reborn Germany in the splendid pageantry of the annual Party rallies: Nürnberg. When, between the two wars, a couple of Italian Communists, Sacco and Vanzetti, were tried and executed in the United States of America, a wave of indignation rose from the four corners of the earth. Placards were posted against walls and public demonstrations were held in all the large towns of Europe to protest against the condemnation of the two martyrs of Marxism. In 1945, 1946, and 1947, no such feelings stirred God-forsaken Europe (or the God-forsaken world, at that) in favor of the victims of the Nürnberg Trial, or of the thousands of other National Socialists labeled by their persecutors as major or minor "war criminals," and condemned as such by the bogus Allied tribunals in occupied Germany. And either the boisterous glee of triumphant savages over the sufferings inflicted on their captured enemies, or else the still more revolting smugness of self-righteous rogues and fools; the patronizing lectures of self-appointed reformers of mankind, hoping that after such historic "justice" the Germans would at last "learn their lesson," i.e., renounce National Socialism and toe the line with their victors' ideology like good little boys; talks on the wireless about the gradual return of the German people to the "ideals of Christian civilization," now that the Nazi "monsters" were dead. How I remember that silly, vulgar, cruel, positively nauseating gloating of English-speaking apes of varied breeds over the greatest crime of history, and that hypocrisy in addition to it all! Never, perhaps, could one feel more keenly what a curse the very existence of Christian civilization was. Pagans would not have disgraced themselves to that extent. We would certainly not have behaved in any like manner, had we won the war -- we whose aim was to resurrect the proud Pagan spirit among the Aryans of the whole world. We might have crushed all opposition out of existence, but we would have neither made a farce of justice in order to condemn our enemies, nor tried to convert them to our philosophy. For we know how to kill, and we know how to die; but we do not know how to lie in order to justify our actions in our own yes and in other people's. Our only justification is the triumph of National Socialism. We need no other. Our enemies persecute us in the name of "morals" in which they do not believe. We despise them from the bottom of our hearts. We despise them more than we can ever hate them. Maybe we lost this war; but we would prefer to perish forever, even in men's memories, having remained ourselves to the end, rather than to rule the world and resemble our victors. We would prefer to perish, and leave in the dark infinity of time, as a flash in the night, the unrecorded fact of our brief and beautiful passage, rather than to acquire a single one of their democratic "virtues."
In the winter of that same awful year, 1945 -- or was it in the beginning of 1946?; the eye-witnesses who reported the episode to me did not remember -- a train passed through Saarbrücken, carrying off to different concentration camps in occupied Germany several thousands of German prisoners of war whose sole crime was to belong to that elite of the National Socialist forces: the SS. The young men, squeezed against one another, had been standing for goodness knows how many hours in the dark, freezing cattle wagons, without food, without water, without the most indispensable human commodities. They were going toward a destiny worse than death; toward the very chambers of hell, and they knew it. And yet, although no one could see them (for the wagons were completely closed save for a narrow slit at the top) one could hear them. They were singing -- singing the glorious song of the SS legions in defiance of their horrid present conditions and of the still more horrid future awaiting them. As the train rolled past, well-known words reached the silent and sullen crowd gathered on the platform -- an echo of the great days of National Socialism and, in the midst of Germany's martyrdom, the certitude of indestructible might and already the promise of the new rising, never mind when and how: "If all become unfaithful, yet we remain faithful ..." [Wenn alle untreu werden, so bleiben wir doch treu ...] Every bystander was moved to tears. And so was I, when now -- nearly three years later -- the fact was brought to my knowledge. The train passed by and disappeared in the distance. One could no longer hear the song of the SS. But one knew the young warriors were still singing. And one remembered the words that sprang from their lips -- the motto of their lives tomorrow, for months, perhaps for years, in hunger, fever, and agony; in torture at the hands of the cowardly Jew and of his agents, till the very minute of death: "... faithful as the German oak trees, as the moon and as the sunshine." [... treu wie die deutschen Eichen, wie Mond und Sonnenschein.] Where are they now, those fine young National Socialists, real men among apes, followers of a god among men? Dead, probably, by this time, most of them; or back from captivity with a ruined health and apparently no future -- crushed by the all-powerful machinery of "de-nazification," that whole organization set up in Germany by the sub-men to grind to dust all that is naturally strong and beautiful, alive, intelligent and proud, and worthy to rule; all that the worms cannot understand and therefore hate. I was thinking of all this as the train halted in Hamburg station, along the one remaining platform of the twenty-eight the station once possessed. I soon noticed a gathering before one of the windows of our train -- the window of a compartment nearer the end than the one I occupied. People were rushing forward, pushing one another, struggling with one another for something at their feet on the platform. Then, for a minute, all was calm again -- all eyes were once more gazing at the window in expectation until, at last, the desired thing fell, and all again rushed to pick it up. The thing was a cigarette -- a single one. I walked down the corridor to the carriage from which it had dropped. It was the one occupied by the stage manager of the company, the Jew whom I mentioned. And there I actually saw Israel T. standing at the window, gloating over the ruins of Hamburg and of all Germany at the top of his voice -- saying he was sorry an atom bomb had not been dropped on each town -- and throwing onto the platform one cigarette at a time (only one) just to have the pleasure of seeing twenty people rush forward to pick it up. Twenty people who less then ten years -- less than five years -- ago had acclaimed the Leader at the height of his glory with their right arm outstretched and the cries of "Sieg! Heil!" -- twenty people who had fought for the triumph of the Aryan Ideology and for the over-lordship of the Aryan race in this world were now, after three years of systematic starvation, oppression, and demoralization, fighting for a cigarette thrown to them -- like a dry bone to a pack of hungry dogs -- by a fat, ugly, mean, cruel, gloating Jew! My heart ached with shame and indignation. I wanted to get down from the train, to rush to the ones on the platform -- to my Leader's people; to my people -- and tell them: "Don't pick up that thing! It is the gift of mockery. Don't!" But the train had already started moving on. I turned to Israel T. with cold, contained rage: "If you must see people fight for your damned cigarettes, you could at least throw out a packet of twenty -- something worth having." I loathed the spiteful, cowardly creature from the depth of my heart, but I just could not keep silent. The Jew looked around at me and said; "I keep my cigarettes for Englishmen, and would advise you to do the same, if you have any." "Mr. T.," I replied, "what have you in common with England and Englishmen? As for advice, let me tell you straight away that I take none from my racial inferiors." It was the first time I ever had shown the creature my National Socialist feelings in all their glaring nakedness! He was taken aback. "What is the matter with you?" he said. He did not know me enough -- yet -- to understand at once. "What is the matter with me?" I repeated. "Nothing. We are in Germany. That's all." The train moved forth between further expanses covered with ruins. Yes, we were in Germany. It was now dark. A bright, starry night and that desolation -- those endless charred and blasted walls and those emaciated, stern, and dignified faces -- beneath the splendor of the heavens; and I, still standing in the corridor with a new supply of leaflets in my pockets. Why had I not come years before, during our great days? Why had I not stood, I too, along those now devastated streets and cried out "Sieg! Heil!" at the passage of the one Man of my times whom I revered as a god? Why had it been my destiny to spend all those years six thousand miles away from Europe and to come now -- now that proud Germany lay in the dust?
I was alone in the corridor save for a young man standing there -- a handsome blond with a frank, trustful face. I had sworn to myself not to touch food or drink of any sort and not to sleep as long as I was in Germany -- a manner of self-imposed penance for not having come before and a symbolical expression of solidarity with the starving and the homeless among my Leader's people. I continued to distribute my leaflets. Save for two papers concealed, one in a packet of sugar and the other in a small tin of butter, I had now only loose messages left. Each time we stopped, I expected the police to come, the train to be searched, and me found out and arrested. I knew I was doing something risky and had not for one moment hoped to get away with it. When on the morning before I had seen the Baltic Sea gleam in the sunshine and watched the sea gulls come and go in the bright sky, I had felt convinced that these were my last hours of liberty. I was prepared for the worst. But nothing happened. The young blond I have mentioned did not seem to be watching me or even to have noticed what I was doing. Yet I thought I had better try to find out who he was and what views he held ... "in case." I went up to him, and we started talking. He was a Dane, he told me. I had met in Iceland, over a year before, a couple of Danes who were convinced Nazis. But I knew, of course, that a very great number were not. I put to this one the testing question which, generally, no European whose country was recently under National Socialist rule can answer without revealing his tendencies: "How did you fare with the Germans during the war? Badly?" He smiled and replied: "Better than since they left." I thought for a minute that he had guessed his answer would please me. But no. That could not have been. It was not written on my face that I am a National Socialist. And also, I was then dressed in the Indian style, in a sari, as I always had been, for years, before I came to live in occupied Germany. And few people knew what a response Hitler's message had found in the hearts of some of the "southern- most Aryans." The young man was probably sincere. And I felt I could talk a little freely to him. I told him how the sight of the ruins shattered me to the depth and how I was in sympathy with Germany in her martyrdom. "Yes," he said, "I see you throw cigarettes and food to these people." "And better than that," I suddenly replied, as though something had prompted me to betray myself -- or as though I were sure the young Northerner would not betray me. "What do you mean by 'better than that'? What is better than food for the starving?" said he. "Hope," I replied; "the certitude of a future. But don't ask me for further explanations." "I shall not. I think I understand you now," he said. "And you have all my sympathy," be added in a voice that seemed sincere. "But may I ask you only one question: you are not yourself a German, are you?" "I am not." "Then what is your nationality?" "Indo-European," I replied. And I felt my face brighten. In a flash, I imagined on the map of the world the immense stretch of land from Norway to India on which, from time immemorial, the different nations of my race created cultures. And as the young Dane seemed puzzled, I explained. "Yes," said I, "I have no other nationality. Half Greek and half English, brought up in France, and wedded to a Brahmin from far-away Bengal, what country can I claim as mine? None. But I can claim a race -- a race that stands above conventional boundaries. Fifteen years ago, to someone who asked me whether I gave my allegiance to Greece or to India, I answered: "To neither -- or to both along with many other lands. I feel myself an Aryan, first and last. And I am proud to be one." I did not add: "And I love this land, Germany, as the hallowed cradle of National Socialism; the country that staked its all so that the whole of the Aryan race might stand together in its regained ancestral pride; Hitler's country." But the young man understood; "I know," he told me; "and I repeat: you have all my sympathy. I shall not betray you." I was now sure he would not. He talked a little longer to me and then withdrew into his compartment. I soon was alone, awake in the sleeping train rushing on at full speed in the night through Germany. We halted at Bremen and at other stations. But, in order to avoid getting found out, I threw out my leaflets, as much as possible, at small stations through which we passed without stopping, whenever I saw people on the platforms. Every time the train stopped I thought I might have been detected; I expected to be asked to get down and follow some man in uniform to the nearest police station. But nothing happened. Of all those who had picked up my message dropped from the windows of the Nord Express, none had yet been willing to betray me. The train halted at Duisburg, and although it must have been about 3:30 A.M. there were plenty of people on the platform. To throw out a handful of leaflets was out of the question. The train was stopping. I would have been seen and arrested at once, without any profit to anybody. But I had an idea: I stuffed the pockets of one of my coats with leaflets, folded the coat in four carefully, and, as soon as the train began to move once more, threw the bundle out of the window. Someone, I thought, would be glad to wear it the following winter. (It was a good coat, given to me in Iceland.) In the meantime, whoever picked it up would find in the pockets enough Nazi propaganda for himself and all his friends. The train moved on ... but stopped again. Had I been discovered this time? I experienced that same uneasy feeling of danger which I had known so often since my narrow escape at the frontier station. Then I noticed two men in railway uniform get into the train by one of the doors that opened into the corridor where I was standing. One of them was carrying my coat. The uneasy feeling left me all of a sudden, as by a miracle, and was replaced by absolute calm. I now was sure I was going to be caught. I watched the two men walk toward me as the train started once more. They greeted me and asked me whether I spoke German. "A little," said I. "You come from India?" the same man asked again, noticing the white cotton sari in which I was draped. "Yes." "And you threw that coat out of the window?" "Yes. It is my coat. I hoped someone among the people would pick it up." "But there are papers in the pockets of that coat -- very dangerous papers. Did you know of them?" "Yes," I said calmly, nearly casually -- my fear had completely vanished -- "I wrote them myself." "So you know what you are doing, then?" "Certainly." "In that case, why do you do it?" "Because, for the last twenty years, I have loved and admired Adolf Hitler and the German people." I was happy -- oh, so happy! -- thus to express my faith in the superman whom the world has misunderstood and hated and rejected. I was not sorry to lose my freedom for the pleasure of bearing witness to his glory now, in 1948. "You can go and report me, if you like," I added almost triumphantly, looking straight into the faces of the two bewildered men. But neither of them showed the slightest desire to report me. On the contrary, the one who had spoken to me now gazed at me for a second or two, visibly moved. He then held out his hand to me and said: "We thank you, in the name of all Germany." The other man shook hands with me too. I repeated to them the words I had written in my leaflets: "We shall rise and conquer once more!" And, lifting my right arm, I saluted them as one would have in the glorious years: "Heil Hitler!" They dared not repeat the now-forbidden words. But they returned the gesture. The man holding my coat gave it back to me: "Throw it out in some small station in which the train does not stop," he whispered. "It is no use taking unnecessary risks." I followed his advice. The coat -- and the papers it contained -- must have been found at daybreak, lying on the lonely platform of some station of which I do not know the name, between Duisburg and Düsseldorf. The two men had long since got down from the train. The name of Düsseldorf reminded me of the early days of the National Socialist struggle, of the days when the French occupied the Ruhr after the First World War. It also reminded me of one of the Leader's speeches there, on the 15th of June, 1926, and I recalled a sentence from that speech: "God, in His mercy, has made us a marvelous gift: the hatred of our enemies whom we hate in return with all our hearts." Yes, I thought, whoever cannot thus hate is also incapable of loving ardently. I loved. And I also hated. And for the thousandth time I realized all that I had lost for never having seen the Leader with my own eyes. Oh, why had I come so late, to behold nothing but ruins? I did not know that in less than a year's time I should have the honor of being tried before a Control Commission Court in that same town -- Düsseldorf -- for having indulged in "Nazi propaganda." In the meantime, the words of the unknown railway employee filled my consciousness: "We thank you, in the name of all Germany." Was it to hear these words addressed to me that I had come from so far? And was it to deserve the love of my Leader's faithful ones -- now in the days of trial, when only the faithful ones remained -- that I had come so late? The train rolled on. I was still there in the corridor, standing in the same place. I was neither tired nor sleepy, although this was the third night I was spending awake. The thrill of danger and my devotion to our Leader sustained me. And the memory of those glorious, unexpected words addressed to me by one of the thousands who still love Him -- and the first German in the country who had spoken to me -- filled me with joy and pride. I would soon be out of Germany now. But I longed to come back -- although I could not imagine how -- to come back and begin again. We reached Cologne -- another ruined city. In the bright morning sunshine this time I saw once more those same endless rows of burnt and shattered houses, those deserted streets. The sight was perhaps even more heartrending than in the subdued light of evening. The wounds of the martyred town gaped in all their horror, calling for vengeance. I saw people pass in the streets below the level of the railway -- those same worn and dignified faces I had noticed all over Germany. When we came to a bridge built above a street, I threw out my last leaflets and my last parcel -- some sugar (and, naturally, a leaflet) wrapped in green paper. The train halted on the bridge, and I watched people pick up my message. They had a look at the papers, saw the swastika at the top, and quickly put them in their pockets; such literature was not to be read in public. For a long time the green parcel lay in the middle of the street. Then a young man on a bicycle stopped and picked it up. He felt the parcel. Lumps of sugar -- or perhaps sweets -- something fit to eat, anyhow. He put it in the basket fixed to his bicycle and disappeared. I imagined him reaching his home -- some cellar or some narrow rooms in a half-destroyed house -- and opening it; seeing the old, sacred Sign of the Sun, which is also the sign of National Socialism, at the top of the paper; reading the writing. He would show it to his friends. And when his friends would ask him where he had got it, he would say: "From nowhere. It dropped from heaven into the street. The gods sent it." Yes, the gods. And the words of hope would travel from one end of the country to the other. The train moved backward. Had someone at last betrayed me, and was I going to be asked to get down? No. I was not to be arrested till several months later, in this very station of Cologne, but through my own abysmal stupidity, not through the betrayal of any German. The train was only changing lines. As we, passed before a ruined house of which the ground floor alone was inhabited, I saw before the door a plate out of which a stray cat was eating something -- some black bread soaked in water, probably; all that the poor people could spare for it. And I was deeply moved by that kind of attention to dumb animals on the part of starving people, in the midst of a town in ruins. The train started to move again, slowly. For a while I went back to my carriage, where I found two of the Indian girls alone. The Jewesses were not there thank goodness! I stood at the window, gazing at what was left of Cologne. Then, turning to the girl from the warrior caste -- the one who had said, the evening before, that she would like to feel that Hitler were alive -- I said to her, in Bengali: "Look! Look what they did to beautiful Germany -- to my Leader's land!" And I burst into tears. Then I remembered the splendid, starry sky I had seen all night from the windows of the corridor. And I remembered the Dark Blue Goddess, the mother of destruction, whose presence I had felt that night. In far-away India, during the war, I had visited her temples and offered her wreaths of blood-red jaba flowers for Hitler's victory. The implacable Force had not answered my prayer. But I knew that the ways of the gods are inscrutable. I now turned -- my face to the sky, as though the Dark Blue One had been there, invisible but all-pervading -- but irresistible standing above the ruins: "Kali Ma," I cried, again in Bengali, "pratishod kara!" -- "Mother Kali, avenge!" The Hindu girl saw how moved I was, and heard my appeal to heaven. She looked up to me from her corner and said: "Savitri, believe me, I understand you. The way these people treated Germany is disgraceful." Aachen, another city in ruins. Our train stopped again. It must have been, by now, nine o'clock in the morning. A woman came to sweep the train, a woman with a kind, sympathetic face. Seeing me alone and willing to talk, she talked to me. She showed me the ruins one could see from the train and told me the whole country was in the same state. "Alles kaputt," she said. "Jawohl, alles kaputt," I repeated -- all lies in the dust. "But that is not the end. The great days will come back, believe me," I said, with the accent of sincerity. I had no leaflets left to give her. But I knew their contents by heart. I told her what I had written: "We are the pure gold put to test in the furnace. Let the furnace blaze and roar! Nothing can destroy us. One day we shall rise and triumph again. Hope and wait." She looked at me, bewildered, hardly daring to believe that she really heard my words. "Who are you?" she asked me. "An Aryan from the other end of the world," I answered. "One day, the whole race will look up to the German people as I do today." And I added in a whisper, as she pressed my hands in hers: "Heil Hitler!" She looked at me once more. Her tired face now shone. "Yes," she said, "he loved us -- the poor, the working people, the real German nation. Nobody ever loved us as he did. Do you believe he is still alive?" she added. I said: "He can never die." Some people were coming. We parted. The two Jewesses were walking up the corridor with the stage manager. The female who had spoken like a devil from hell on the evening before did not address a word to me -- the gods be praised! But the other one burst out at me in anger. She felt she could say what she pleased to the dresser. "Where were you all night?" she asked me. "Standing in the corridor." "Why weren't you in your place in the compartment?" "I wanted fresh air. And whose business is it, anyhow, whether I care to sit or stand?" "Fresh air, my foot!" she exclaimed. "You were feeding your bloody Germans all night. Don't we know?" "Feeding them, only," thought I. So they did not know the whole truth after all. "Can't I feed whom I please with my own money?" I replied. "Again, what business have you to pry into my affairs?" But the stage manager stepped into the row. "The Germans!" said he. "You should go and live with them, if you find them so wonderful -- live on boiled potatoes in some cellar, like they do, and see how you like it!" My eyes flashed, and my heart beat in anticipation of the beautiful life that I so wanted to be mine. Without understanding what he had said, the Jew had expressed my most ardent, my dearest desire. "Gods in heaven," I thought with a longing smile, "help me to come back and live among my Leader's people." But the Jew was not shutting his mouth. My silence, and possibly the happy expression on my face, irritated him. "You should be ashamed of yourself," he continued. "You should think of the British soldiers who lost their lives in this country before you go giving butter and cigarettes to these people." "Mr. Israel T.," I replied, stressing that word Israel that used to precede all Jews' names officially under the National Socialist regime -- "Mr. Israel T., I happen to be half British. And my other half is at least European. You are neither British (save by a misuse of the word) nor European." "A bloody Nazi, that's what you are!" the Jewess now shouted at me as loudly as she could, so that all the English-speaking people in the carriage could hear. My face beamed. "The highest praise given me in public since I left India," I wanted to say. But I held my peace. We were still in Germany. There was no purpose in further irritating those angry dogs and calling for unnecessary trouble. I needed my freedom to come back -- and begin again. The row subsided, as rows always do. I was once more standing at the window alone, my head against the wind. My task was done -- for the time being. I looked back to those fifteen intense hours across Germany. I thought of those famishing people, living among ruins. Five hundred of them had got my message. Any of these could easily have taken the paper to the police and said that it dropped from the Nord Express, and with the reward given him bought enough black-market food to stuff himself for a month. The Nord Express would have been stopped and searched, and I arrested. But no; of five hundred Germans taken it random along a route of four hundred miles or more. not one had wished to betray the holy sign of the Swastika -- not for money, not for food, not for milk for their children. I admired these people, even more than I had in 1940. My Leader's people, I thought. I'll come back to you somehow. I wish to share your martyrdom, and fight at your side in these dark days. And wait with you for the second dawn of National Socialism. I crossed the Belgian frontier without difficulty. The train now carried me on toward Ostend, toward the sea. Still standing in the corridor, I was singing an Indian hymn to Shiva, the Creator and Destroyer -- the very hymn I had sung over a year before in Iceland, on the slopes of burning Hekla, when I had faced in the night the majesty of the volcano in full eruption. At regular intervals mighty subterranean roarings then answered my song. Now I felt as though the noise of the redeeming war -- the voice of that irresistible coming Vengeance that I had invoked -- were answering me. Out of further ruins -- the ruins of the whole world this time -- the people who had not betrayed me, Hitler's beloved people, would one day rise again, the Voice said. On the evening of that day, June 16th, 1948, I was back in London. A few weeks later, the gods had granted me my wish. I was again in Germany, having entered the French Zone with over six thousand more leaflets -- printed ones, and larger ones too -- also written by me. My new life, or rather the period which stands as the culmination of my whole life, had begun. The preceding text was excerpted from Savitri Devi's Gold in the Furnace (Calcutta, 1953), most of which was written during her imprisonment, and was published in National Socialist World (Spring 1967). A complete e-book of Gold in the Furnace can now be purchased from savitridevi.com. For background on the Allied misconduct that Savitri describes, see History's Greatest Mass Rape, Bombing of Dresden, Did the Allies Starve Millions of Germans?, and (off-site) Allied Terror Bombing. Hitler's apparent decision to allow the British Expeditionary Force to escape at Dunkirk is discussed in John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 610ff: "The blood of every single Englishman is too valuable to be shed. Our two people belong together, racially and traditionally -- this is and always has been my aim."
Nefertiti and AkhnatonSavitri Devi
[Image: The famous limestone bust of Nefertiti, found abandoned and incomplete in a sculptor's workshop in Akhetaten (modern Tell Amarna), Akhnaton's new city of the Aton. The name Nefertiti means "A Beautiful Woman Has Come."] Scholars do not agree about the bride's parentage. Sir Flinders Petrie identifies her with Tadukhipa, daughter of Dushratta, king of Mitanni. Arthur Weigall rejects this view on account of the princess's "typically Egyptian" features, and supposes her to be the daughter of Ay, a court dignitary, while the striking resemblance between her portraits and those of her young husband has prompted others to suggest that she was his half, or even his full sister. Brother and sister marriages were common in Egypt, as everyone knows. We have no opinion to express on the subject. Yet, we find it difficult to dismiss Sir Flinders Petrie's version on the sole ground of Nefertiti's looks. For, if the princess were indeed the daughter of Dushratta, then her mother would be the sister and her paternal grandmother, the paternal aunt of Amenhotep the Third, while the prince's paternal grandmother -- the chief wife of Thotmose the Fourth -- was, as we know, Dushratta's paternal aunt. In other words, the wedded children would be even more closely related than ordinary first cousins are, and there would be nothing strange in their resembling each other as brother and sister. However, it makes little difference whose daughter Nefertiti actually was. To history, she remains Akhnaton's beloved consort. It is curious to observe that her beauty, revealed in her famous limestone portrait-busts -- the loveliest masterpieces of Egyptian sculpture -- has made her far more widely known than her great husband to the modern European public at large.
The two played together, sat and read or looked at pictures together, listened together to the stories that grown-up people told them. They admired together a lotus-bud that had just opened; they watched a velvety butterfly on a rose, or a flight of swallows going north with the coming of hot weather. A painted bas-relief, dating perhaps a few years later, pictures the prince leaning gracefully on a staff while Nefertiti gives him a bunch of flowers to smell. An indefinable sweetness pervades the whole scene, which we may plausibly take to be a faithful likeness of the young couple's everyday life. It is probable, too, that Prince Amenhotep soon initiated his child-wife into what could already be called his higher life. Whatever be her parentage, the worship of the Sun was nothing new to the little princess. But through her daily contact with the inspired child with whom she was now wedded, what had meant to her, until then, little more than a mere succession of grown-up people's gestures, became an act of personal love. Although his own ideas were yet far from definite, Prince Amenhotep probably taught her to see the Sun as he did, that is to say, as the most beautiful and the kindest of gods; we do not know if we should add, at this early stage of his religious history: as the only God worth praising. If Nefertiti be, as Sir Flinders Petrie suggests, the daughter of the king of Mitanni, then one may suppose that she told her young husband about Mithra and perhaps Surya, the sun-gods of her country, and that she described to him in a clumsy manner, putting too much stress upon details, as children do, some of the rites with which they were worshipped there. It is doubtful whether there could be in those details, as she presented them, anything impressive enough to be of psychological importance in the prince's evolution. But he may have seized the opportunity to tell the little girl, pointing to the fiery Disk in heaven, that this was the only real Sun, under whatever name and in whatever way one may praise Him in different lands. And she possibly felt that there was truth in his childish remarks, and began to look up to him as to somebody very wise -- wiser even, perhaps, than the grown-up people. Besides his administrative duties; besides the State functions, and occasionally the State banquets over which he presided -- like that one given in honour of Queen Tiy's visit to the new City, and represented upon the walls of the tomb of Huya -- besides even the daily worship he offered publicly at the altar of the Sun, pictorial evidence reveals to us different episodes of Akhnaton's private life which lead us to infer, about him and his creed, more than one could expect at first sight. In nearly every painting he is portrayed with his consort and often (as in the feasting scene just mentioned) with one or more of his six (or seven) children. And the attitudes in which he has allowed the artists to represent him, doubtless in a spirit of absolute fidelity to living life, are most eloquent in their naturalness. We have already recalled the lovely painted relief of the Berlin museum in which the young Pharaoh is seen smelling a bunch of flowers that Nefertiti gracefully holds out to him with a smile. On the walls of the tomb of Huya he is pictured seated, admiring the performances of several pretty naked dancing-girls, while the queen, standing by his side, refills with wine his golden cup. In the tombs of Mahu and Aahmose he is painted in his chariot, with Nefertiti next to him, and actually kissing her while he drives. Princess Meritaton, his eldest daughter, stands in one of those pictures in front of her parents, and plays with the horses' tails while the king and queen look lovingly at each other, their lips ready to unite. Even in scenes depicting State solemnities, such as the reception of the tribute of the empire -- scenes in which, one might think, there was little place for intimacy -- Akhnaton and Nefertiti are represented side by side, hand in hand, and with their arms around each other's waist. And, contrarily to the age-old custom of Egyptian artists, the queen is nearly always pictured on the same scale as her husband. One finds hardly less evidence of their great love in the written documents than in the paintings. Whatever be the inscription in which she is referred to, the queen is seldom named without some endearing epithet. She is "the mistress of the king's happiness"; the "Lady of grace"; "fair of countenance"; "endowed with favours"; "she at the hearing of whose voice the Pharaoh rejoices." And one of the most current forms of oath used by the king on solemn occasions -- the oath engraved upon the boundary-stones of the new City, and quoted in the beginning of this chapter -- is: "As my heart is happy in the queen and her children ..."
One has, therefore, to accept without reservation the conclusion that forces itself upon one's mind through both pictorial and written evidence -- namely, that Akhnaton loved his consort ardently. As we have said before, he had not chosen her, but had been wedded to her when about ten years old or less. The marriage was, no doubt, the work of Queen Tiy; and if Nefertiti was, as Sir Flinders Petrie maintains, the daughter of Dushratta, king of Mitanni, it was perhaps chiefly prompted by political motives. But as it often happens in the case of child-marriages, the little prince and little princess soon grew tenderly attached to each other and, as years passed, they unconsciously stepped from affection to love. In the inscriptions on the boundary-stones of Akhetaton, which were erected between the official foundation of the City and the time the king and court came to settle in it -- between the sixth year and the eighth year of the reign -- one, and sometimes two of Akhnaton's daughters -- Meritaton and Makitaton -- are mentioned. The third one, Ankhsenpaton, was born, according to Weigall, just before the departure of her parents from Thebes. Three others at least -- Neferuaton, Neferura, and Setepenra -- (and perhaps four, if Weigall and other authors are right) were born in the new capital. All six (or all seven) were Nefertiti's children. And there is no allusion of any sort to other children, or to "secondary wives," in the existing documents concerning the royal family; so that, as far as history knows, Akhnaton, in contrast with most kings of antiquity, and of his own line, seems to have been contented all his life with the love of one woman, given to him to be his chief wife while still a child. Not that he had, apparently, any prejudice against the customs of his times regarding marriage, still less against polygamy as a human fact. And it would be absurd to attribute to him the mentality of a modern European bourgeois on this much-debated subject of private morality. In this matter, as in many others, he seems to have been well in advance of our times -- not to speak of more prudish ages. And if he possessed but one wife, as repeated evidence suggests, this was not because he had any moral objection to polygamy, but simply because he loved that one woman with deep, complete, vital love. If we judge him through the pictures his artists have left of him, Akhnaton was far from being one of those austere thinkers who shun pleasure as an obstacle to the development of the spirit or even as a meaningless waste of time and energy. He seems, on the contrary, to have believed in the value of life in its plenitude, and the paintings that represent him feasting, drinking, listening to sweet music, caressing his wife, or playing with his children, apart from their merit as faithful renderings of everyday realities, had possibly a definite didactic significance. In practically every one of them the lofty symbol of the Religion of the Disk -- the Sun with downward rays ending in hands -- radiates over the scene depicted, so as to recall the presence of the One invisible Reality in the very midst of it, and to emphasise the beauty, the seriousness, nay, the sacredness of all manifestations of life when experienced as they should be, in earnestness and in innocence, and considered with their proper meaning. Whether they stand together in adoration before His altar, or lie in each other's arms, the Sun embraces the young king and queen in His fiery emanation; His rays are upon them, holding the symbol ankh -- life -- to their lips. For life is prayer. One who puts all his being in what he feels or does -- as he who "lived in truth" surely did -- already grasps, through the joyful awareness of his body to beautiful, deep sensations, a super-sensuous, all-pervading secret order, source of beauty, which he may not be in a position to define, but which gives its meaning to the play of the nerves. And he is able above all to acquire, through the glorious exaltation of his senses in love, a positive, though inexpressible knowledge of the eternal rhythm of Life -- to touch the core of Reality. In allowing a few scenes of his private life to be thus exhibited to the eyes of his followers -- and of posterity -- was it Akhnaton's deliberate intention to teach us that pleasure, when enjoyed in religious earnestness, transcends itself in a revelation of eternal truth? We shall never know. But one thing can be said for certain, and this is that the instance of that perfect man, on one hand so aware of his oneness with the Essence of all things, on the other so beautifully human in his refined joie de vivre, is itself a teaching, a whole philosophy. And in him one can see an expounder of precisely that wisdom which our world of to-day, tired of obsolete lies, is striving to realise, but cannot; a man who lived to the full the life of the body and of the spirit, seriously, innocently, in harmony with the universal Principle of light, joy, and fecundity which he worshipped in the Sun. Whether we imagine him burning incense to the majesty of the rising Orb, or listening to the love-songs of the day in midst of merriment and enjoying them with the detachment of an artist; whether we think of him entertaining his followers of the marvellous unity of light and heat, thirty-three hundred years before modern science, or abandoning himself to the thrill of human tenderness in a kiss of his loving young queen, the same beauty radiates from his person. And it is that beauty which, before all, attracts us to him, and, through him, to the Religion of the Disk, that glorious projection of himself in union with the Cosmos. The importance of Akhnaton himself as a living illustration of his Teaching cannot be overestimated. He was, it seems, fully conscious of it when, in his hymns, he gave to posterity such sentences as the following: "I am Thy Son, satisfying Thee, exalting Thy name. Thy strength and Thy power are established in my heart; Thou art the living Disk; eternity is Thine emanation (or attribute)...." "He" (i.e., Aton, the One God) "hath brought forth His honoured Son, Ua-en-ra (the Only One of the Sun) like His own form, never ceasing so to do. The Son of Ra supporteth His beauties"; or when he wrote the significant passage already quoted: "Thou art in my heart. There is no other who knoweth Thee except Thy Son Nefer-kheperu-ra Ua-en-ra (Beautiful Essence of the Sun, Only One of the Sun). Thou hast made him wise to understand Thy plans and Thy power"; or the following words, still more strange at first sight: "Every man who (standeth on his) feet since Thou didst lay the foundation of the earth, Thou hast raised up for Thy Son who came forth from Thy body, the King of the South and the North, Living in Truth, Lord of Crowns, Aakhun-Aten, great in the duration of his life (and for) the Royal Wife, great in majesty, Lady of the Two Lands, Nefer-neferu-Aten Nefertiti, living (and) young for ever and ever." These bold statements of his relationship to God cannot be understood in their proper sense unless one replaces them in their context, that is to say, in the whole system of ideas at the basis of the Religion of the Disk; especially unless one connects them with that hardly less bold assertion that the "Heat-and-light-within-the-Disk" and the Disk itself -- Energy and Matter -- are one. This having been proved correct as a result of modern scientific speculations (correct, at least, in the manner of an hypothesis which does actually account for the known facts) cannot be called "dogma." Yet, religiously speaking, as we have previously tried to explain, it argues the substantial unity of God (an impersonal God, of course) and Nature, visible and invisible; the existence of the same unchangeable Thing -- divine Energy -- at the bottom of all things visible and invisible, material and immaterial, which change everlastingly. In other words, for as much as one is able to infer from the hymns -- his only surviving works -- Akhnaton's Teaching seems to have been founded on an implicit if not explicit pantheistic monism. As we have already endeavoured to make clear in a former chapter, the young king's claim to be the Son of God (without his pretending, as other Pharaohs, to have been miraculously conceived from any particular deity) was nothing but the expression of the total consciousness he had of the presence of the ultimate Essence of all things within him; the assertion, repeated at various epochs, by the author of the Chandogya Upanishad and by the fully "realised" souls of all the world, that he "was That." What we wish to stress here is that, though he found nowhere around him anyone who possessed, like him, the knowledge of the Unchangeable within the transient, of Godhead within nature and within man, he was aware that this direct, sensuous, so as to say, experience of oneness was the goal of created life. And he was aware that he himself, who had reached it, stood apart from the average man -- as far apart from him, indeed, as he from the crowd of still less awakened sentient beings, if not further; apart from him, and yet linked up with him, as each definitely superior species is linked up with the less conscious ones that precede and condition its coming into being. He was a man -- physically conceived and born as all men -- and yet more than a man. He was, not merely in name but in fact, the Beautiful-Essence-of-the-Sun, since he felt that Essence, that indefinable Energy, running through his nerves; the Only-One-of-the-Sun, since he alone was aware of the real nature of the fiery Disk, while other creatures, though worshipping It, knew It but dimly or not at all; Akhnaton -- the Joy of the Sun -- since every new step towards more complete consciousness brought new joy (experience had taught him that), and since the Soul of the Sun, which is the Soul of the Universe -- the One without second -- became fully conscious of Itself within him; the Son of God, Who was alone to know His Father. As the visible Disk and the invisible, intangible "Heat and Light," the Energy within it, were one, so was he one with that same all-pervading Radiant Energy experienced within him. And he knew it. His nerves knew it. His body -- an atom of matter finally tracing its origin to our parent star (like all matter on earth) -- was aware of the Power within its depth; of its soul, which is none but the Sun's own Essence, which is God. God and created nature were one in him, Akhnaton, precisely because he was not, by a miraculous birth, set apart from nature, but was a man naturally conceived and born and reared. They were all the more one because he was, also, a man who, with both his exceptional intellectual gifts and his clear insight into eternal truth beyond the reach of pure intellect, lived to the full the happy natural life of all creatures. On the other hand, he could and he did live the natural life of the body and of the mind in perfect beauty and "in truth," only because he fully knew the higher meaning of it; because he was a "realised soul," a perfect Individual -- a Son of God. Now, perhaps, we can venture to explain what appears to be the strangest of those assertions of Akhnaton's divinity, to which scholars hardly ever refer in their comments on his religion save, at most, like Sir Wallis Budge, in a spirit of biased criticism which misses the point. The statement we are thinking of is the last one quoted in a preceding paragraph: "Every man who (standeth on his) feet, since Thou didst lay the foundation of the earth, Thou hast raised up for Thy Son who came forth from Thy body, the King of the South and the North, living in Truth, etc.... and for the Royal Wife, great in majesty, Lady of the Two Lands, Nefer-neferu-Aten Nefertiti, living and young for ever and ever." Taken literally, this would seem to indicate that Akhnaton believed all men to have been born and to have lived for himself and for his consort, from the dawn of the human race onwards, which is obviously not what he intended to say. But if, as we have tried to show above, the young Pharaoh was aware at the same time of his divinity as a fully conscious centre of Cosmic Energy and of his humanity as one who had human parents; and if, in his eyes, to reach that total consciousness of the divine within one's self was to exhaust the highest possibilities of our species (becoming one's self, so as to say, the culmination of it), then the amazing passage appears in a new light. It has a meaning, and a lofty one, too. It signifies that since the time, far-gone indeed, when God did "lay the foundation of the earth," the whole scheme of life has been steadily tending towards the creation of its supreme type: the God-conscious and therefore godlike human being -- the Son of God. It means that every individual man was born with latent possibilities of Godhead which he would generally not feel at all, or feel more or less dimly; which he would perhaps try to express, in art and life, but which the fully conscious superman alone -- the cosmic Individual, God and himself in one -- was destined to carry to their utmost realisation. And that Individual, aware of his real nature and "living in Truth"; that eternal Man in whose heart were "established" the "strength and the power" of the living Disk, was himself, the "King of the South and the North, Lord of Crowns" -- Akhnaton of Egypt, son of Amenhotep Neb-maat-ra, a very definite figure in time and space. He knew none who had, in his days or before, attained to a similar consciousness of their identity with the Soul of the Sun. And we, who have heard the names of several very ancient sages said to have realised Godhead within themselves, know not if they actually flourished before or after him, for their lives are not dated. It may be that some of them indeed preceded him in time. It may be that many more, of whom nobody has heard, preceded them. It may be also that Akhnaton was, in fact, the first man to realise "in his heart," to the full, the presence of that same hidden Energy which radiates in the Sun-disk -- that he was the forerunner, in a way, of a new species, superior to man. He is, at least, the first such one whose life can be followed step by step, with historical certitude, and dated with an approximation of but a few years. That idea that he was the culmination of an evolution which had begun with the "foundation of the world" was perhaps at the root of the public honours the young king seems to have rendered to his ancestors. We know that, among those to whom he erected shrines in his newly-founded sacred City, Akhetaton, were the great warrior-like Pharaohs of his dynasty, Thotmose the Third and Amenhotep the Second, the builders of the Egyptian empire -- staunch worshippers of the national gods, above all of Amon, to whom they consecrated the spoils of their conquests. No man could have been more alien than they to the gentle king who preached the doctrine of one nation, the earth, united in the love of one God, the Sun. And yet, they had their shrines, "each of which had its steward and its officials" in the City of the One God. Arthur Weigall tells us that it was Akhnaton's desire to show, in this manner, "the continuity of his descent from the Pharaohs of the elder days and to demonstrate his real claim to that title of ‘Son of the Sun,' which had been held by the sovereigns of Egypt ever since the Fifth Dynasty, and which was of such vital importance in the new religion." But in the light of our comments on the true meaning of that title (which the Founder of the Aton faith would have claimed anyhow, because he had every right to claim it, even apart from his royal birth), it would seem that those temples to the memory of the dead Pharaohs were erected in quite a different spirit. An unbroken filiation to royal ancestors of a "solar line" two or more millenniums old could not add much weight to the claim to divinity of one who had experienced, through his nerves, the presence in him of the Soul of the Sun. While, on the other hand, if "all men" had gradually developed their possibilities only in order that he might finally appear, in the full-bloom of his individual Godhead -- if they had all been "raised up" for him, as he says himself -- then surely his own immediate forefathers were, in a still much more direct and effective manner, responsible for his coming. Whatever might have been the gap between them and him -- between their world and his, between their gods and his -- yet it remained a fact that they and not others had given him that body in the depth of which was rooted his true solar consciousness (not that of historical or legendary connections with any particular deity, but that of vital identity with the Radiant Energy of the One Sun -- the One God). They deserved their shrines, not for justifying any dynastic claims of his, but simply for being the human progenitors that had given birth to him, the godlike Individual, the Sun in flesh and blood. One more point, however, clearly referred to in the passage quoted a few pages above from the Longer Hymn, seems to need explanation, and that is the place given by Akhnaton himself to "the Royal Wife ... Nefer-neferu-Aten Nefertiti" in the Religion of the Disk. There can be no doubt that the person here mentioned is actually the Pharaoh's consort, the beautiful young queen whose portrait-busts in the Berlin Museum are perhaps the most widely admired of all the masterpieces of Egyptian sculpture. Her titles -- "great in majesty, Lady of the Two Lands, living and young for ever and ever" -- only confirm her identity. And no explanation of any kind can be put forward to account for this allusion to her, save that the Founder of the Aton cult wished to say that which he said, i.e., that he believed the evolution of man to have culminated in himself (the only man he knew to be God-conscious) and in her. The question is therefore: on what grounds was she, in his eyes, entitled to such an exalted position in the hierarchy of creatures that "every man who standeth on his feet" since God "did lay the foundation of the earth," had been "raised up" for her, no less than for him? In other words, of what significance was she in his Teaching, and in what light should she be looked upon by those who wish to be his followers? From all available written and pictorial evidence it appears, as we have already seen, that Akhnaton and Nefertiti loved each other dearly. If the young king had taken no "secondary wives," as had been the custom with his fathers, it was simply because, in this one queen of his and in the children her love had given him, "his heart was happy," as he himself declares in so many inscriptions. The extraordinary importance he seems here to give his consort may be just a proof of how deeply he felt all that he owed to her. From what one knows of his earnest and sensitive nature, one may infer that he understood better than any other man the supreme value both of tenderness and of pleasure. It is difficult -- and it would be perhaps indiscreet -- to attempt to say more. Akhnaton is one of those rare characters so admirably balanced and beautiful that they should be felt rather than discussed. And average imagination, which dissociates the spiritual from the physical and the emotional planes instead of comprehending them in their organic continuity, will probably always remain unable to conceive what that sacred intimacy with his queen (faintly reflected in a few attitudes upon the bas-reliefs of the time) actually meant to him, whose body and soul were in tune with each other and with the silent music of Life. The young Pharaoh knew how profoundly the woman who loved him and whom he loved was one with him. And just as he had ordered her features to be represented upon the monuments along with his, and on the same scale, so did he bring in her name and titles, along with his, in the bold statement that he was the Man for whom "all men" had been "raised up" from the beginning of the world. He could not conceive of himself apart from her. We may think that he would have been anyhow the perfect individual whom he was. But he probably believed that, without her, something vital would have been missing in his life. He had needed the warmth of love she had given him, and all the knowledge he and she had acquired together, in their love, to become complete. And therefore, in none of his highest claims did he consider himself alone. He was "he and she." In him, the perfect Individual reflected and expressed the godlike Couple, for ever one, in divine union on all planes. This is one interpretation of the meaning of the place given to Nefertiti in the above quotation. There is another. The "Lady of the Two Lands" may perhaps be considered here not only as the Wife, inseparable from Akhnaton himself -- "one flesh" with the conscious flesh of the Sun -- but also as his best disciple, the model and prototype of all those who wish to follow him. And "all men," it may be suggested were "raised up" for her in the sense that her approach to eternal truth, through the simplicity of a loving heart, corresponded to an essential stage which they all had to reach before being able to experience within themselves the immanent Soul of the Sun.
Not enough is known of Nefertiti for one to say if she was or not a disciple as "intellectual" as some others might have been -- one who could have explained the Teaching rationally, or even written philosophical comments upon it. But she certainly was one who accepted it wholeheartedly and put it at the centre of her life, both because she deeply felt its beauty and because she deeply loved its inspired Promoter. Devotion had doubtless led her to the very gates of knowledge, if not to knowledge itself. And, in stating that from the beginning of the world "all men" had been "raised up" for himself and for her, Akhnaton has perhaps simply wished to stress how far advanced in the human evolution is the real Disciple -- the devotee who gets a glimpse of ultimate truth through his (or her) absolute love for a God-conscious being and for the Sun, God's visible Face, if not for the divine impersonal Energy that resplends, though in a different manner, in both of these. Of those who had attained the higher stage of complete consciousness of their identity with the Essence of the Sun, he knew none but himself. He has said so: "Thou art in my heart and there is none who knoweth Thee save Thy Son, Nefer-kheperu-ra Ua-en-ra...." But he knew at least one whose sincerity and wholeheartedness contrasted with the lip-homages of most of his followers, the superficiality or actual indifference of many of which he was probably beginning to become aware; one who, through intense devotion, had transcended herself and was, even without having his direct knowledge of the supreme "Heat-and-light-within-the-Disk," nearer to him and nearer to It than any other. And that one was his consort -- the same individual whose love had perhaps played its part in the awakening of his own deeper consciousness. It is possible that by declaring "all men" to have been "raised up" for her as for himself, he was alluding to her devotion as typical of a true disciple's; of one, that is to say, who is on the way to attain the goal of man that he had attained. It is also possible that he simply meant that she was inseparable from himself, the God-conscious Man. But we believe that, still more probably, the two interpretations can be put forth at the same time as complementary. The former may, in a way, be the consequence of the latter in the particular case of Queen Nefertiti who was first Akhnaton's consort and then only his devout disciple. The latter, in turn, is not independent of the former, in the sense that the beautiful "Lady of the Two Lands" was perhaps such a perfect wife precisely because she was her lord's disciple and collaborator -- one with him on all planes, as we have said. And that oneness on all planes with a God-conscious Teacher is perhaps the highest stage which can be reached by all those to whom is not given, here and now, the direct experience of Godhead within life. The world is therefore "raised up" for the few who reach it, as well as for the fewer still who, like Akhnaton, go further beyond. The preceding text is excerpted from Savitri Devi's A Son of God (London, 1946), pp. 34-37, 97-101, 202-206. The title above is editorial, and Savitri's footnotes have been removed. Contemporary Egyptologists would revise some of the biographical data in this selection: (i) Nefertiti was likely in her early teens at the time of her marriage, Akhnaton several years older; (ii) it is now known that Akhnaton did indeed have a secondary wife, Kiya, the probable mother of the pharaohs Smenkhkare and Tutankhamen ("King Tut"). Kiya, who was never designated "King's Wife," Nefertiti's title, may have died in childbirth in the 12th year of Akhnaton's reign.
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1949: PROPHETESS OF THE SAUCERS (About
Savitri Devi from UFO web site)
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"Men and women of Germany! In the midst of untold hardships and suffering, hold
fast to your glorious National Socialist faith and resist! Defy our persecutors
... Nothing can destroy that which is built on truth. We are the pure gold put
to test in the furnace. Let the furnace blaze and roar. Nothing can destroy us.
One day we shall rebel and triumph again. Hope and wait. Heil Hitler!"
In 1953 Savitri returned illegally to Germany on a self-styled pilgrimage,
lasting four years, to the holy sites of National Socialism and Germanic
paganism, visiting Braunau am In, Linz (where she met Hitler's tutor),
Berchtesgarden, the Berghof, the Feldherrnhalle, and Nuremberg. She lived for
two years at Emsdetten in Westphalia at the home of an NS sympathizer, where she
wrote Pilgrimage, completed Lightning and the Sun, and added to
the stations of her pilgrimage the Hermannsdenkmal and the Externsteine, the
former a monument honoring Hermann's defeat of the Romans in A.D. 9, the latter
a reputed pagan solar temple, where she experienced a mystical revelation of
eventual Aryan victory. [Image: Atop the tallest spire of the Externsteine, the
remains (perhaps) of a pagan shrine.] 
the birth of the Child. One of the many apocryphal gospels (1) — rejected by the
Church — attributes the paternity of Jesus to a Roman soldier, distinguished for
his bravery and accordingly nicknamed “the Panther.” This gospel is cited by
Heckel in one of his studies on early Christianity. Yet accepting such evidence
would not entirely resolve the very significant question of Christ’s origins,
because we are not told who his mother Mary was. One of the canonical gospels
tells us that she was the daughter of Joachim and Anne, although Anne had passed
the age of maternity; in other words, she too must have been born miraculously,
or could perhaps have been simply a child adopted by Anne and Joachim in their
old age, which hardly clarifies matters. (2) 
A few words will make this point clear. 
The
truly great men in time -- men such as Genghis Khan -- reflect something
of his terrible majesty. The greatest men against time also -- inasmuch
as they all must possess (more or less) the qualities of character that are
specially those of the men in time; the qualities in which is rooted the
efficiency of organized violence. For Shiva is not only the destroyer; he is the
creator -- the good one; the positive one -- also to the extent all further
creation is conditioned by change and ultimately by the destruction of that
which was there before. He is -- as essence of destructive change, as time --
turned toward the future. And, on the other hand, Lord Shiva himself -- time
personified -- is also (strange as this may seem to the purely analytical mind)
above time. He is the great Yogi, whose face remains as serene as the
blue sky while his feet beat the furious rhythm of the Tandava dance, amid the
flames and smoke of a crumbling world. 
His
companions at arms will be the last National Socialists; the men of iron who
will have victoriously stood the test of persecution and, what is more, the test
of complete isolation in the midst of a dreary, indifferent world in which they
have no place; who are facing that world and defying it through every gesture,
every hint -- every silence -- of theirs and, more and more (in the case of the
younger ones) without even the personal memory of Adolf Hitler's great days to
sustain them. They are the ones who will, one day, make good for all that which
men against time have suffered in the course of history, like they
themselves, for the sake of eternal truth: the avenging comrades whom the five
thousand of Verden called in vain within their hearts at the moment of death,
upon the bank of the Aller River, red with blood; those whom the millions of
1945 -- the dying, the tortured, and the desperate survivors -- called in vain;
those whom all the vanquished fighters against time called in vain, in
every phase of the great cosmic struggle without beginning, against the forces
of disintegration, co-eternal with the forces of life. 
Right
before me stood the highest rock; a long, rough cylinder -- or rather, a prism
-- of stone, very slightly inclined to the left like the trunk of an enormous
tree that time had worn and human beings mutilated, without being able to
destroy it. I knew that, at the top of that rock is the sanctuary from which the
wise ones of old used to greet the Earliest Sunrise, on the morning of the
Summer Solstice Day. From below, I could see the bridge by which one accedes to
it to-day -- the bridge that now joins the highest rock, commonly called "the
second," to the next one on the left, commonly called the "third" (called so, at
least, in the one detailed archaeological study which I had, up till then, read,
concerning the Externsteine). 
One
must have seen with one's own eyes the ruins of Germany to believe the enormity
of the hatred that laid that country waste. Surely London was bombed. So were
other English and continental towns. War is war. But this bombing was something
different. What the half-dozen apologetic air raids of the Japanese on Calcutta
were to the London air raids, so were the latter, in their turn, compared with
the hellish bombing of Germany by the Allied planes, in formations of hundreds
at a time, night after night. [Image: Incinerated civilian victims of the Allied
fire bombing of Hamburg, which killed as many as 70,000 Germans.] 
One
remembers, I say, that episode of the Second World War, as one beholds the ruins
of all the German cities, the plight of men and women in the overcrowded areas
still fit to live in, and all the misery, all the bitterness, consequences of
that devilish bombing. Streams of fire, tons of phosphorus, relentlessly poured
over the people for five years, these were England's thanks to Adolf Hitler for
having shown mercy to her soldiers in his hour of victory. These were the thanks
of the United States of America for his orders not to shoot the parachutists
captured on German soil. These were the thanks of the unworthy Aryans both of
Russia and of the West to the Man who loved them, as a race, and who had dreamed
for them an era of glory and prosperity, side by side with his own people.
[Image: Bodies on the street, after Hamburg's holocaust.] 
In
1945 torn and desolate Germany, overrun by hostile armies, plundered by
rapacious occupants, insulted by a whole cowardly world, could do nothing, say
nothing, hardly think anything. Like a boxer temporarily "knocked out" in the
ring, she was stunned. Cases of mass-suicide, as well as of large-scale
deportation to Siberia were reported from the Russian-occupied areas, while
hungry, completely destitute, packed like goods in cattle wagons (or worse), the
whole German population of East Prussia, Silesia, and Sudetenland -- over 18
million people -- uprooted by the Russians and by the Czechs, poured into
western and southern Germany. All over the country arson and outrage were taking
place on a scale unheard of for centuries. [Image: Barefoot German boy scavenges
for food; Hamburg, 1946.] 
Tears
filled my eyes as I gazed at the deep, sparkling sky and then at the rare lights
scattered here and there in what was left of that immense city: Hamburg. The
dark infinity above reminded me of one of the many names of the immemorial
Mother Goddess, in Sanskrit, the sacred language which the Aryans once brought
to India: Shyama -- the Dark Blue One, goddess of indestructible life, goddess
of death and destruction, lover and avenger, energy of the universe. And I
recalled the words which the Mother Goddess herself is said to have addressed a
Hindu sage: "When all is lost -- when thou hast no possessions, no friends, no
hope left -- then I come, I the Mother of the world." And I remembered that, to
the Hindu mind, the universal Mother lives in every woman. In me, also, I
thought; I too have come when all is lost, when all is in ruins; when all is
dead, save the invincible Nordic soul in Hitler's people. Is that why I have
come so late? -- to speak to the German soul for fifteen hours from the corridor
of the Nord Express? We passed through a station. More leaflets flew out of the
window, written by me, thrown by me -- written and thrown by the gods through
me, I felt. We rushed through another station. I repeated the gesture. [Image:
Shyama-Kali.] 
Some
time before his accession, Prince Amenhotep, then hardly more than ten years
old, was married with all the customary pomp to a little princess of about eight
or nine, Nefertiti. 
It
is probable that the idyllic love that was to bind the prince and his consort
together all through their years began long before their actual connubial life.
If the features and more particularly the expression of the face do reveal
something of what we call the soul, then we must suppose that the two children,
heir-apparent and future queen of Egypt, had much in common. Their earliest
portraits represent them both with the same regular, oval face, slender neck and
large, dark eyes full of yearning; with already, in their gaze, a touch of
thoughtful sadness which is not of their age. A delicate, almost feminine charm
seems to have distinguished Akhnaton's person all his life. But it was balanced
in latter days, as his portraits testify, by a stamp of manly determination. In
early youth, and especially in childhood, before his struggle with the
surrounding world had actually begun, his virile qualities had not yet found
their expression; the delicate charm alone was prominent; and the newly-married
prince resembled his wife even more than he did in subsequent years. [Image:
Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (Akhnaton), reigned ca. 1353-1336 BC.] 
Many
will say that expressions of love found in official documents are not always to
be taken literally. But we believe that they should be taken so here, for they
were written at the command of one who, all through his career, lived up to his
ideal of integral truth with unfailing consistency. He, one of whose first
actions as a king was to have the tomb of his father reopened and the name of
Amon erased from therein, because he saw in it the symbol of a false religion;
he, who ended by losing an empire rather than depart from his uncompromising
sincerity of purpose, cannot be expected, in any case, to make a show of
feelings which he did not have. [Image: Akhnaton and Nefertiti.] 
Very
little, it is true, is known of the extent to which she "understood" her lord's
religion. When the king instituted Merira as high-priest of the Disk, he is
supposed to have addressed him as his "servant who hearkeneth to the Teaching"
and with "all the works of whom" he was satisfied. At least, those are the
sentences put into his mouth in the inscription on the walls of Merira's tomb.
Other courtiers similarly claim to have understood the Pharaoh's "Teaching of
Life"; to "hearken to his words," etc. We shall never know how far such
statements, even when attributed to the king himself, expressed his actual
opinion of his nobles or were merely boasts on the part of officials competing
with one another in loyal zeal. But from the little history tells us and permits
us to guess about what happened in Egypt only a few years after Akhnaton's
death, one can safely say that most of the Pharaoh's followers (including the
high-priest Merira) were not the fervent disciples that they had consistently
pretended to be during his lifetime. On the other hand, without the
protestations of faith in him and in his Teaching which one reads on the walls
of their tombs; without, indeed, any outward claim, it is possible, even
probable, that Nefertiti had imbibed more of the spirit of the Religion of the
Disk than any of them. That she was the "Royal Wife," his beloved, was perhaps a
reason, but could surely not have been a sufficient reason for the young king to
have her standing at his side and officiating with him in most if not all
the ceremonies in honour of his God, had she not shown an earnest attachment to
the new faith, and had she not grasped the essentials of it through the path of
devotion if not also through that of knowledge. And the fact that, in spite of
her being a woman, he committed to her charge the temple of the Setting Sun --
the "House-of-putting-the-Aton-to-rest" -- argues at the same time his utter
disregard for custom and his recognition of the queen's genuine zeal for his
Teaching. [Image: Relief depicting Akhnaton and Nefertiti offering to the Aton.
Meritaton, their eldest daughter, is the small figure on the left.]
Adolf
Hitler - Der letzte Avatar
Miguel Serrano
Miguel Serrano's work: C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse, Foreword and Excerpt.
