Online Encyclopedia
Savitri Devi
Savitri Devi (September 30, 1905 - October 22, 1982) was a Franco-Greek woman who became enamored with Hinduism and National Socialism, linking the 'Aryan invasion theory' to Adolf Hitler, and proclaiming him an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. Her writings exerted a decisive influence over post-war National Socialism and esoteric Hitlerism.
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Biography
Born Maximiani Portas in Lyon, France, daughter of a Greek/Lombard Italian father and an English mother.
Early Impressions
Portas formed her political sympathies and antipathies early on. From childhood throughout her life she was a passionate advocate for animal rights, thus coloring her impression of the practitioners of Kosher slaughter. Her earliest political affiliations were for Greek nationalism. Thus, during the First World War, she was outraged by the Entente's invasion of neutral Greece, especially after the Allied outrage over the German invasion of neutral Belgium.
Education and Activism
She studied philosophy and logic. In early 1928, she renounced French citizenship and acquired Greek nationality. Joining a pilgrimage to Palestine during Lent in 1929, Portas realized she was, and had always been, a National Socialist. In 1932 she traveled to India in search of a living pagan culture. She volunteered at the Hindu Mission and wrote A Warning to the Hindus to offer support for Hindu nationalism and independence, and rally resistance to the spread of Christianity and especially Islam in India.
Pro-Axis Agitation
In 1940 she married Asit Krishna Mukherji, a Bengali Brahmin with National Socialist convictions who edited the pro-German newspaper New Mercury. Together they gathered information from British servicemen to pass on to the Japanese.
Arrest and Pilgrimage
After the war she traveled to Europe in late 1945 (as the wife of an Indian she got a British passport). First to England, making contacts, visited her mother in France, Iceland where she witnessed the eruption of Mount Hekla , back to England, then to Sweden where she met with Sven Hedin.
On June 15, 1948, she took the Nord-Express from Stockholm to Germany, where she distributed many thousands handwritten leaflets encouraging the “Men and women of Germany” to “hold fast to our glorious National Socialist faith, and resist!” She penned her experience in Gold in the Furnace
Arrested for posting bills, she was tried (in Düsseldorf on April 5, 1949), for the promotion of Nationial Socialist ideas on German territory subject to the Allied Control Commision , and sentenced to two years imprisonment. She served eight months in Werl prison, where she befriended her fellow Nazi and SS prisoners, (recounted in Defiance) before being released and expelled to France.
In April of 1953 she began a pilgrimage, as she called it, of National Socialist holy sites (bypassing the blacklist, on her reentry of Germany, by obtaining a Greek passport in her maiden name). She flew from Athens to Rome then traveled by rail over the Brenner Pass into "Greater Germany", which she regarded as "[t]he spirtual home of all racially conscious modern Aryans".
Death
She died in Sible Hedingham , Censored page, England at the house of her friend's Muriel Gantry, while en route to lecture in America. Her ashes were sent to the American Nazi Party shrine in Arlington.
Legacy
Savitri Devi has come to be seen as "the mother of 'Esoteric Hitlerism'", which was founded by the Chilean writer and diplomat Miguel Serrano, [1] http://www.geocities.com/integral_tradition/devi.html and as pioneering its links to the occult, Green, and New Age movements.
Works
| Year | Title | ISBN | Summary |
| 1935 | Essai critique sur Theophile Kaïris | First doctoral thesis, on the life and thought of the Greek educator and philosopher Theophile Kaïris . | |
| 1935 | La simplicite mathematique | 500-page main thesis on the nature of simplicity in mathematics. It included a discussion of Léon Brunschvicq, and drew upon the work of George Boole, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russel, Henri Poincare, and Alfred North Whitehead. | |
| 1940 (written 1935-6) | L'Etang aux lotus | Poems about India. | |
| 1936 | A Warning to the Hindus | ISBN 8185002401 | Written to rally support for Hindu nationalism and independence, and rally resistance to the spread of Christianity and Islam. |
| 1940 | The Non-Hindu Indians and Indian Unity | India must fortget social prejudice and communal hatred to create the political unity to achieve independence. | |
| 1946 | Son of the Sun : The Life and Philosophy of Akhnaton, King of Egypt | ISBN 0912057955 and ISBN 0912057173 | |
| 1950 | Defiance | Autobiographical account of her propaganda mission, arrest, trial, and imprisonment. | |
| 1953 (written 1948-9) | Gold in the Furnace | Conditions in postwar Germany. | |
| 1958 (written 1953-4) | Pilgrimage | Account of her pilgrimage to various National Socialist holy sites. | |
| 1958 (written 1948-56) | The Lightning and the Sun | ISBN 0937944149 | Opus Magnum presenting her philosophy of cyclic history. |
| 1959 (written in 1945) | Impeachment of Man | ISBN 0939482339 | Animal rights and ecology. |
| 1976 (written 1968-71) | Souvenirs et reflexions d’une aryenne | Memoir |
References
- Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, 1998, ISBN 0814731112 and ISBN 0814731104
- Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (Chap. 5 in particular) by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, 2001, ISBN 0814731554
External links
- A collection of writings by and about Savitri Devi http://library.flawlesslogic.com/1d.htm
- Biographical sketch http://www.religionandnature.com/encyclopedia/samples/Devi_Savitri.htm
- Priestess of Hitlerism: Savitri Devi http://www.geocities.com/integral_tradition/devi.html by Kerry Bolton
- "And Time Rolls On . . ." http://www.faem.com/devi/devipoem.htm a poem by Savitri Devi
- Gold in the Furnace (Excerpts from chapters 3-4) http://www.faem.com/devi/goldfurn.htm by Savitri Devi
- The Cyclic View of History--article by Savitri Devi originally published in Volkfenew Dawn, 1948 http://feastofhateandfear.com/archives/savitri_03.html
Related topics
Shiva, Hertha Ehlert , Camillo Giuriati , Anschluss, Leonding, Linz, Braunau am Inn, Berchtesgaden, the Berghof, Obersalzberg , Munich, the Feldherrnhalle, Koenigsplatz , Nuremberg, Hermannsdenkmal, Teutoburger Wald, Externsteine, Klara Hitler, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, World Union of National Socialists , George Lincoln Rockwell, Colin Jordan, Otto Skorzeny, ODESSA, Miguel Serrano, William Pierce, Matt Koehl, Ernst Zündel, Franco Freda , Claudio Mutti , David Myatt, Kerry Bolton , Subhas Chandra Bose, Ben Klassen, William Pierce, Oswald Mosley, Richard Butler