Savitri Devi's life would make a great film. I’m surprised Hollywood hasn’t tried yet. Perhaps the history in it is too weird and too far outside the bland black and wife narratives they normally dish out. Devi was born in France of a Greek/Italian father and a British mother. She earned a PhD in philosophy and became enamored of Hinduism while trying to find out the origins of the mysterious Aryans which she theorized were mystical (a line of thinking I’ve heard referred to as Aryan Cosmology part of supernatural Esoteric Hitlerism). She travelled all over the Middle East and India. Eventually, she married an Indian so she could stay in India. She also took an Indian name (Her real name was Maximiani Julia Portas). Somehow, her studies of Aryans and her travels got her very interested in Nazism and she was a fanatical supporter of Hitler even going so far as to act as an axis spy and pass information she heard from British officers in India to Japanese contacts. After World War II was over, she went to Germany and attempted to help get the Nazi party going again. For this, she spent a year in jail. She was also in the vanguard of the animal rights movement writing much about it and remained a lifelong vegetarian. Her book THE IMPEACHMENT OF MAN proposes the death penalty for people who mistreat animals and end to circuses and animal experimentation.
Devi also wrote a number of other books of which THE LIGHTNING AND THE SUN is the most famous. Here she takes Oswald Spengler’s cyclical theory of life and death of civilization further arguing its non-linear construction. Her arguments are that modern society is hopelessly corrupt, materialistic, and too far removed from traditional values and the soul is more important than intellect – who is a person, not what they believe or think. She makes an interesting argument about literacy having made people dumber not smarter since all they do is choose to read tawdry paperbacks, write love letters, and accrue debt which they write checks for. The same argument could be applied to the Internet today, Facebook and Twitter included. However, that is where the similarity with Spengler ends.
Basically, the above is the setting for Devi’s theories of history which is that there are three categories of great men. She writes one chapter on each with an example. 1.) Men in Time who act as agents of destruction but who are ultimately selfish and have no greater goals. Her example is Genghis Khan . 2.) Men Above Time who are spiritual and otherworldly and don’t get too involved in the material world. Her example is the pharaoh Akhnaton who tried to make religion less important in ancient Egypt and tried to champion science (including early theories about the Solar System) 3.) Men Against Time who go against that which is the status quo rebelling against that which holds them down leading a revolution that will create a movement or a new way of thinking. This differs from the Men in Time who doesn’t care about posterity and acts only for himself. Her example of a Man Against time is Adolph Hitler and this is where she goes completely bonkers.
She views Hitler as a figure with almost supernatural powers. She basically sees him as the reincarnation of Vishnu sent here to cleanse the world. Like the more forlorn and even more mystical Julius Evola, she also believes in the Hindu scenario of Kali Yuga the last of the four seasons of life when everything becomes chaos. Her love for Hitler is spiritual and it is also passionate. Late in life Devi even wrote a book of love poems to Hitler
Rounding this out is the belief in two forces of history – lightning (meaning destruction) and sun (meaning enlightenment and evolution of the soul). She sees Genghis Kahn as lightning and Akhnaton as sun but she sees Hitler as both – destruction and a new way of thinking.
I must admit I am enjoying reading this. She writes really intensely – she is really into this! The BS mysticism and the anti-Semitism is kept to a minimum (although both are present) and she provides examples for everything she says. Also parts of these books are so nutty and so firm in its faith in its own nutty ideas that it cannot be denied. She writes clearly with a lot of exclamation marks.
Devi remained in India (where she lived with a pet king cobra) until the 1960’s when she came to the US and joined the American Nazi movement becoming friends with George Lincoln Rockwell(the Nazi leader played by Marlon Brando in Roots II). She later travelled the world and died in 1982.
I’d also like to say I have wanted to read this book for a couple decades but could never find it in a public library in the US and refused to pay money to the white supremacists websites who reprinted it. So, good for the Internet for acting as a library for obscure texts such as these.
She views Hitler as a figure with almost supernatural powers. She basically sees him as the reincarnation of Vishnu sent here to cleanse the world. Like the more forlorn and even more mystical Julius Evola, she also believes in the Hindu scenario of Kali Yuga the last of the four seasons of life when everything becomes chaos. Her love for Hitler is spiritual and it is also passionate. Late in life Devi even wrote a book of love poems to Hitler
Rounding this out is the belief in two forces of history – lightning (meaning destruction) and sun (meaning enlightenment and evolution of the soul). She sees Genghis Kahn as lightning and Akhnaton as sun but she sees Hitler as both – destruction and a new way of thinking.
I must admit I am enjoying reading this. She writes really intensely – she is really into this! The BS mysticism and the anti-Semitism is kept to a minimum (although both are present) and she provides examples for everything she says. Also parts of these books are so nutty and so firm in its faith in its own nutty ideas that it cannot be denied. She writes clearly with a lot of exclamation marks.
Devi remained in India (where she lived with a pet king cobra) until the 1960’s when she came to the US and joined the American Nazi movement becoming friends with George Lincoln Rockwell(the Nazi leader played by Marlon Brando in Roots II). She later travelled the world and died in 1982.
I’d also like to say I have wanted to read this book for a couple decades but could never find it in a public library in the US and refused to pay money to the white supremacists websites who reprinted it. So, good for the Internet for acting as a library for obscure texts such as these.
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