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by Kerry Bolton
Originally from http://www.geocities.com/integral_tradition/devi.html
Savitri Devi might be considered the mother of “Esoteric Hitlerism”; the myth of the Immortal Hitler arising from the ruins and death of the Reich to redeem a fallen Aryandom. Savitri Devi has been described by Chilean author and diplomat Miguel Serrano as “the greatest fighter after Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess and Joseph Goebbels.” Moreover she was the first to discover the secret and spiritual power behind Hitlerism.
She was born Maximiani Portas, 30 Sept. 1905 in Lyons, France, of Greek and English parents. There she studied chemistry and gained a doctorate in Letters. Traveling widely in Europe and Asia, mastering 7 languages, including Bengali, her desire to uncover the lost knowledge of the Aryans led her to India in 1932. She took the name Savitri Devi in honor of the Indo-Aryan Sun goddess, and married a brahmin Sri Asit Krishna Mukherji, who was editor of a pro-Axis Magazine, The New Mercury.
Regarding NS as the practical manifestation of Aryan cosmology as it continued in Hinduism, she worked with pro-Axis and independence movements in India during the war.
In a 1980 article “Hitlerism & the Hindu World,” published in The National Socialist, Savitri explained the basis of Esoteric Hitlerism and related some of her experiences with the Hindus during the war. Quoting Ramana Maharshi, “one of the greatest spiritual personalities of modern India,” the sage’s reply to a question on Hitler was that “He is a gnani”. This Devi explains is a sage, one who is fully conscious through personal experience “of the eternal truths that express the Essence of the Universe.”
Included in this ancient Aryan cosmic law as the Hindus had maintained it was a belief in the inequality of creatures including races.
Savitri Devi(like Julius Evola) traces the ancient Aryan cosmology to the Arctic, to Hyperborea of Thule in a line of descent from the Thule Society to National Socialism.
“Well did von Sebottendorff, founder of the famous Thule Society owe a lot to his visits to India and his contacts with the Hindus conscious of their Hyperborean traditions.” Savitri Devi naturally saw great significance in Hitler’s choice of the swastika as the symbol of NS, “the visible link between Hitler and orthodox Hinduism.”
In 1948 she traveled to war ravaged Europe, to Germany on her way from Sweden and England. This was the first time she visited the birthplace of Hitlerism.
“Now the gods had ordained that I should have a glimpse of ruins. Bitter, irony of fate,” she wrote in her Gold in the Furnace.
In Sweden she met various Swedish NS, including the famous explorer Sven Hedin. Her mission, she explained to Hedin and the younger comrades, was to deliver a message of hope to the Germans. Not knowing any reliable printers, she had handwritten hundreds of leaflets depicting the swastika and declaring:
“Men and women of Germany! In the midst of untold hardships and suffering, hold fast to your glorious NS 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 destroy us. One day we shall rise. And triumph again! Hope and wait! Heil Hitler!”
Working with a troupe of dancers and a Jewish manager, dressed in a sari and adorned with swastika earrings, she threw these leaflets from the trains as she crossed ravaged Germany, the leaflets wrapped in with little gifts of coffee, sugar or butter.
To Savitri Devi the scattering of those leaflets across Germany took on the significance of cosmic proportions, “written and thrown by the gods through me.” About to cross the border into Belgium she began to sing a Hindu hymn to Shiva, “the Creator and Destroyer.”
In London Savitri Devi had 6,000 of the leaflets professionally printed and returned to Germany. Over the course of a year she was arrested several times and detained in France. She wrote Gold in the Furnace in a cell in Germany in 1949.
In 1953 Savitri Devi returned to Germany on a pilgrimage to the holy places of NS and German Heathenism. This pilgrimage resulted in a book of that name the following year but apparently not actually published until 1958. The journey had taken place despite a decree of expulsion by the Occupation Authorities.
However, for Savitri Devi the Hitler Faith was a practical one, “an essentially earthly one that has nothing to do with those metaphysical problems that worry people for whom our living world is not sufficient.” Savitri was not concerned with a personal god or with questions of an afterlife, but with the worship of things that can be seen and felt in daily life, and the godhead which she believed existed within the Aryan, impelling it towards higher evolution.
This is the “Order and Rhythm” inherent in Life, part of the Cosmic Dance with a cyclic interaction of birth, death, creation, destruction, love, hate; polarities engaged in a cosmic “impersonal struggle” reflected in the laws of nature. All forms of life were to be esteemed in their right place, faith with the Aryan at the apex. Those opposing the cosmic order were to be fought with “detached violence,” the Hindu conception of which is contained in the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita.
Savitri Devi had plenty of close calls on her German pilgrimage, stopped by customs with large quantities of her book Gold in the Furnace and Defiance. The culminating point of the Journey was to stand amidst the row of 100 feet high rocks that formed the sanctuary of the primal Germanic sun cult, Externsteine, “the Rocks of the Sun,” where the solstices had been again celebrated under Hitler and where the Hitler Youth had been initiated; a monument more splendid than the sun monuments she had seen at Greece, Egypt and India.
In the central chamber, aligned to catch the rising sun, she stood with her arm outstretched in salute towards the sun. Then she recited a prayer to the impersonal cosmic god she believed had incarnated Hitler as a modern Avatar: “Lord of the unseen forces, whom I do not know and cannot grasp, whose majesty I adore in the eternal order of nature and in the heroic beauty of my comrades’ lives — they manifestations — help us, National Socialists, to keep thy truth within our hearts, and to bring into being, one day, our Führer’s real New Order, earthly reflection of merciless cosmic harmony!...”
After an oath, she consecrated the books she had already published, and the MS to her magnum opus, The Lightening & the Sun.
The Lighting & the Sun was begun in Scotland in 1948, written at intervals in Germany, and completed in 1956. The book was written to present a conception of history — ancient AND modern — unassailable from the standpoint of ETERNAL Truth. The principal figures used to illustrate the cyclic conception of history are Akhenaton, Genghis and Hitler. They are placed in the context of a succession of “Ages.” Within Kali Yuga (Age of Darkness) Akhenaton was the “Man Above Time,” symbolized as the sun, the pharaoh who wished to return man to a long-lost olden Age, a visionary pushing against the tide of his own Age but without the practicality to realize his vision.
The “Man in Time” exemplified by Genghis is a destructive force devoid of idealism, symbolized by — the lightning, acting in accord with the nature of his Age.
In Hitler Savitri Devi found the “Man Against Time” combining idealism with force, both lightning and sun, waging war against the forces of the Age on a practical level; the Avatar of Kalki the Avenger who comes at the end of every Age. However, because Hitler was fighting against the cyclic tides of this Age his battle was foredoomed. Savitri Devi therefore believed it was the dharmic duty of Hitlerites to keep alive the flame of NS through the Kali Yuga as the basis for a New Order which Hitler had himself prophesied in 1928, seeing himself as but a herald: “I am not he; but while nobody comes forward to prepare the way for him, I do so.”
The companions at arms of the future Avatar would be the “last NS” of iron will, tested through persecution, “avenging comrades.”
Savitri spent much of her life in India teaching English at a French school for young women. During the last years of her life she lived, blind, amidst poverty, with several dozen cats. She was always a champion of animal welfare, as explicated in her last book Impeachment of Man, seeing in the animal welfare legislation enacted in NS Germany the embodiment of cosmic law.
Savitri died suddenly on a visit to England on 22 October 1982. She was cremated and her ashes sent to the HQ of the NS movement “New Order,” deposited at a shrine in Arlington, Virginia. Presumably they now rest at the organization’s subsequent HQ at Milwaukee.