Savitri Devi was truly an astounding woman — a unique philosopher and a tireless activist on behalf of Aryan Heathenism, National Socialism, animal welfare, and deep ecology. In 1958, with the publication of her magnum opus, The Lightning and the Sun, she emerged as one of the most original and influential National Socialist thinkers of the post World War II era.

She was born on the 30th of September 1905 in Lyons, France, as Maximiani Portas, the daughter of a Greek father and an English mother. The circumstances of her birth were not auspicious. She was born two and a half months premature and weighed only 900 grams... The doctor told the parents that the baby girl would most likely not survive. So, they named the newborn child Maximiani Julia, and then waited for her to die... But the Life Force was strong within her. It had something great in store...

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

Because she was of English, Greek, and also partially Italian ancestry, Maximiani described her nationality as “Indo-European.”

She was educated in France and in Greece, where she earned two Masters degrees, in philosophy and science, in the 1920s, and eventually received her Ph.D. from the University of Lyons in 1931. Her first two books were actually her doctoral dissertations: Essai-critique sur Théophile Kaïris (Critical Essay on Theophilius Kaïris) and La simplicité mathématique (Mathematical Simplicity). Maximiani also had a vast knowledge of religion and history, particularly ancient history, as well as an amazing memory, particularly for dates and names. She was also a brilliant and mesmerizing teacher who could lecture at length on countless topics without reference to notes.

Early on, Maximiani had developed strong political sympathies and antipathies. For example, at age eleven, during the First World War, she chalked an anti-Entente slogan “A bas des Alliés. Vive l’Allemagne” (“Down with the Allies, Long Live Germany”) on the Lyons railway station as a protest against the illegal Allied invasion of neutral Greece.

Ever since she was a young girl, Maximiani 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, she was determined to learn more of what she instinctively felt were the deeper realities which decide the seemingly chaotic course of world events. Thus, as a self-described “nationalist of every nation” and an Indo-European pagan revivalist, Maximiani Portas embraced National Socialism.

When Maximiani finally came of age, she opted for the Greek nationality, and spent several years in Greece. She became enamored with ancient Greek culture and as a result repudiated Christianity.

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. 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. She ultimately resolved to honor the pagan gods and fight the Judeo-Christian legacy in the West.

It was the swastika signs on the palace of Athens, built by 19th century German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, that stirred Maximiani’s first true feelings for the Aryan race. She always greatly revered the Aryans as the most youthful, strong, and beautiful race, the highest expression of nature in the historical world. Henceforth, Maximiani decided to dedicate herself to the revival of Aryan culture. But, first, she had to find out “who were the Aryans and where were they to be found in the modern world?”

She (like the Italian philosopher Julius Evola) traced the ancient Aryan cosmology to the Arctic, to Hyperborea of Thule in a line of descent to National Socialism. Maximiani also drew her impressions on Aryan origins from the work of Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Eventually, her desire to uncover the lost knowledge of the Aryans led her to India.

Maximiani Portas left for India in the early 1930s to search for the roots of Aryan civilization. She had left Europe to find the last living Aryan culture and found it in Hindu India…

The land of India fascinated her. In her opinion, India was the only country that honoured Aryan Gods and, henceforth, she “regarded India as her home”...

In 1935, while studying at Rabindranath Tagore’s Ashram in Bolpur, Bengal, (where she learned Hindi and perfected her command of Bengali) Maximiani Portas, at the suggestion of some fellow students, adopted a Hindu name. It was Savitri Devi — a tribute to the female solar deity... “Savitri” is one of the Sanskrit names of the sun, and “Devi” means goddess. It was a perfect name, since Savitri was a devotee of what she considered the primordial Aryan religion: the worship of Life and Light.

Through her passage to India — “that easternmost and southernmost home of the Aryan race” — in search of the Aryan heritage, Savitri Devi retraced the intellectual journey of many European intellectuals who had begun to seek the origins of mankind in India from the mid-eighteenth century onward.

For Savitri, Hinduism was the custodian of the Aryan and Vedic heritage down through the centuries, the very essence of India. In her opinion, Hinduism was the sole surviving example of an Indo-European paganism once common to all the Aryan nations:

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

This was the reason why she traveled to India — to experience in Hinduism the last living remnants of the Indo-European pagan religious tradition. Given the Vedic origins of Hinduism, it is unsurprising that Savitri immediately felt an instinctive affinity for the religion of India. The organic growth of religious custom and belief throughout the Indian subcontinent from its origins in the Vedas of the Aryan invaders over a period of four thousand years held great appeal for Savitri Devi. Hinduism appeared to her as a great and unreformed paganism, true to its ancient sources and untouched by the imposed monotheism and priesthoods of the Judeo-Christian plague.

Then Savitri undertook what would prove to be a lifelong study of the classic Indian texts — the Vedas and the Upanishads. From these sources, she felt that she had found the true sources of the once and future greatness of the Aryan race.

Her quest for the lost Aryan world, once wistfully admired in the dead culture of classical Greece, had at last found an object in a living culture. A golden age had become the present for her in exotic India and she could exclaim with delight:

“we like this word ‘Paganism’ applied to the Hindu cults. It is sweet to the ears of more than one of the fallen Aryans of Europe, accustomed to refer to ‘Pagan Greece’ ... as the most perfect expression of their own genius in the past.”

She regarded Hinduism as the only living Aryan heritage in the modern world and was convinced that only Hinduism could take on and oppose Judeo-Christianity. In the words of the Italian consul of Calcutta, she had become “the missionary of Aryan Heathendom.”

Eventually settling in Calcutta, Savitri Devi quickly immersed herself in the Hindu nationalist movement that was then waging a political campaign against British colonialism, and defended Hindu tradition from all universalistic ideologies, such as Christianity, Islam, and liberal democracy.

Feeling ready to face Indian audiences, she offered her services as an anti-Christian lecturer to Srimat Swami Satyananda’s Hindu Mission, a nationalist organization with National Socialist sympathies. Soon she was touring the tribal villages and had the chiefs organize public debates between herself and the local Christian missionaries. Thoroughly familiar with the mentality and methods of her adversary, she could destroy the credit of the imported religion in the minds of the villagers, and prevent or undo many conversions.

Savitri Devi received much encouragement from a number of highly educated Hindus. During the 1930s, when India was chafing under British rule, the restrictions imposed on Indian nationalists led many to regard Soviet communism and the Third Reich with its Aryan doctrine and holy swastika sign as potent alternatives. Those who were religiously inclined even saw Stalin and Hitler as possible redeemer figures and made them the objects of bhakti devotion by displaying their photographs on the family shrine alongside the images of their personal deity, be this Vishnu, Shiva, or another god. It was with amazement and joy that Savitri Devi first observed pictures of the Führer on the household altar of Indian families.

When she asked Swami Satyananda if she might make reference to Hitler and Mein Kampf in her official lectures, he replied that Hitler was for them an incarnation of Vishnu, the god who keeps things from rushing to destruction, who keeps things back and goes against time. Satyananda repeated this view of Hitler in 1942, adding that they needed National Socialism in India.

Satyananda’s references to Hitler as an “incarnation of God” and the “Savior of the world” were in fact commonplace among high-caste Hindus. Savitri Devi encountered similar pro-Hitler attitudes among many other educated Brahmins, and even among illiterate Sudras.

This can attributed to the avatar idea — that in every powerful man there is some cosmic power that manifested itself in the god-kings and heroes of the epics and mythology. But Hitler was especially popular, for he trounced the British in the early years of the war. Also, Hitler proclaimed the superiority of the Aryan, which is how the Hindus see themselves.

In 1939 Savitri met a Bengali Brahmin, Sri Asit Krishna Mukherji, a publisher with pro-German sympathies, who made a strong impression on her. He was the editor of The New Mercury magazine. In 1940 she married Mukherji in a Hindu ceremony in Calcutta.

Also while in India Savitri Devi authored several books: in 1937 she completed L’Etang aux lotus (The Lotus Pond), recording her first impressions of India. This book combines vivid travelogues with philosophical reflections on Indian culture and tradition.

Her next book, A Warning to the Hindus (1939), is her manifesto of Hindu Nationalism. Hinduism is a radically pluralistic and tolerant religion, and this often blinds Hindus to the dangers posed by the intolerant Biblical religions and their secular offshoots, such as liberal democracy. In her book, Savitri seeks to awaken Hindus to this danger and demonstrate the necessity of cultivating a unified Hindu national consciousness that cuts across yet respects and preserves India’s myriad communal and caste distinctions. Savitri also clearly thought that such a Hindu national consciousness was a necessary condition for India’s independence. A Warning to the Hindus was translated into six Indian languages and remains in print today.

A third book, The Non-Hindu Indians and Indian Unity (1940) deals with the question of the integration of non-Hindu minorities into a Hindu nation, both in the struggle for Indian independence and in an independent India. Savitri’s plea is for Indian Muslims, Christians, and other non-Hindus to recognize that they are Indians first, i.e., products of a Hindu culture, even though they do not profess the Hindu religion.

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

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

Savitri’s major work on Akhnaton is A Son of God: The Life and Philosophy of Akhnaton, King of Egypt (1946). Originally published by the Theosophical Society, the book was republished by the Rosicrucian Order as Son of the Sun: The Life and Philosophy of Akhnaton, King of Egypt (1956).

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

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

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

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

Although Savitri Devi revered National Socialist Germany as a Holy Land for all Aryans, she never actually saw it during its glory days. Her first glimpse of the birthplace of National Socialism was in 1948 when Germany was war ravaged and all in ruins. “Now the gods had ordained that I should have a glimpse of ruins. Bitter, irony of fate,” she wrote later in one of her books.

Her mission, she explained, was to deliver a message of hope to the Germans. Thus, 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.

Not knowing any reliable printers, she had laboriously handwritten — a task that took two entire nights — hundreds of leaflets depicting the swastika and declaring:

“Men and women of Germany, in the midst of unspeakable rigours and suffering, hold fast to our glorious National Socialist faith, and resist! Defy the people, defy the powers, which work to denazify the German nation and the whole world. Nothing can destroy whatever is built on truth. We are the pure gold which can be tested in the furnace. The furnace may glow and crackle. Nothing can destroy us. One day we will rebel and triumph again. Hope and wait! Heil Hitler!”

Working with a troupe of dancers, 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.

This railway journey across Germany lasted fifteen hours and it was like a rite of initiation for her. To Savitri Devi the scattering of those leaflets across Germany took on the significance of cosmic proportions, and, as she later said, “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.”

Later that same year she repeated the operation on a larger scale. This time Savitri Devi had 6,000 of the leaflets finally professionally printed in London and again she returned to Germany.

Savitri was eventually arrested by the occupation “authorities” in February 1949. By that time she had successfully distributed 11,500 leaflets and handbills in German cities during five month’s underground activity. She was accused of breaching the law which forbade the promotion of National Socialist ideas in occupied Germany. The maximum possible penalty was the death sentence.

As the date of the trial approached, she was preparing herself for death. In a conversation with her lawyer, she expressed her readiness for martyrdom:

“There would be, also, the joy of the last sunrise upon my face; the joy of the preparation for the greatest act of my life; the joy of the act itself. ... Draped in my best sari — in scarlet and gold, as on my wedding day in glorious ‘40 (I hope they would not refuse me that favour) — I would walk to the place of execution singing the Horst Wessel Song. I, Savitri Devi, the ambassador of southernmost and easternmost Aryandom as well as a daughter of northern and southern Europe. And, stretching out my right arm, firm and white in the sunshine, I would die happy in a cry of love and joy, shouting for the last time, as defiance to all the anti-Nazi forces, the holy words that sum up my life-long faith “Heil Hitler!” I could not imagine for myself a more beautiful end.”

When the day of the trial arrived, Savitri Devi took the oath on the Sacred Wheel of the Sun and swiftly turned the courtroom into an auditorium for a long and impassioned speech about the eternal value of National Socialism. Her outspoken advocacy of Aryan worldview confirmed her standing to her prosecutors and judges. The sentence was three years’ imprisonment or deportation to India. Predictably, she chose imprisonment in order to prolong her mission and remain among her fellow sufferers in enemy captivity. She believed this to be her duty and destiny.

She wrote “Heil Hitler” on the prison walls, as an act of defiance, and her book describing her prison experience is titled Defiance (1950). Savitri’s example served as an inspiration to a new generation of National Socialists when a portion of the book was published in the winter of 1968 edition of the National Socialist World.

Her other book, Gold in the Furnace (1952), which she partially wrote in the prison cell in Germany, is Savitri’s dark and powerful account of her experiences in enemy-occupied Germany in 1948 and 1949.

Savitri Devi did not regard the destruction of the Third Reich as the end of National Socialism, but as a purification — as a trial by fire that would separate the base metal from the gold — as the prelude to a new beginning. Thus “Gold in the Furnace,” the phrase used in her first leaflet to typify the endurance of the Germans even in the hardest trials of their defeat and subjection, became the leitmotif and the title of her book in which she extolled the defeated Germans for their enduring loyalty to the ideals of National Socialism. (The book has been recently republished by Historical Review Press in honor of Savitri Devi’s 100th birthday.)

In 1953 Savitri again returned to Germany on a pilgrimage to, as she called it, the sacred places of National Socialism and German Heathenism. She traveled to a number of sites significant in the life of Adolf Hitler (including Hitler’s birthplace) and the National Socialist movement, as well as to German nationalist and heathen monuments.

The journey had taken place despite a decree of expulsion by the occupation “authorities.” Savitri had plenty of close calls on her German pilgrimage, stopped by customs while in possession of large quantities of her books Gold in the Furnace and Defiance.

In its concluding stages her pilgrimage embraced a wider mythical and pagan conception of the Aryan Holy Land with visits to the Hermannsdenkmal in the Teutoburger Wald and the prehistoric solar temple and rock cliffs of the Externsteine, traditionally identified as an ancient Germanic sacred site.

The culminating point of the Journey for her 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 in Greece, Egypt and India.

In the central chamber, aligned to catch the rising sun, she stood alone 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!...”

Afterwards, high up in the Chamber of the Sun, she shouted the ancient Sanskrit words in invocation of the Vedic deities: “Aum Shivayam! Aum Rudrayam!” followed by “Heil Hitler!” It was cloudy and raining at the Externsteine, but she knew the sun had risen. Her spirits soared, she could already see the swastika flag flying once again above the rocks of the sun.

After the prayers, she consecrated the books she had already published, and the manuscript to her magnum opus, The Lightning and the Sun.

This pilgrimage also resulted in a book of that name the following year but apparently not actually published until 1958.

In the 1970s, long before the organizations of PETA and the Animal Liberation Front, an elderly Savitri Devi and her Indian servant broke the law to liberate cats and dogs destined for medical experiments at the All India Institute for Medical Sciences in New Delhi.

Savitri’s other book on animals is Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess, or The True Story of a “Most Objectionable Nazi” and... half-a-dozen Cats (1965). A fictionalized autobiography focusing on her relationships with her favorite cats, this is Savitri’s best written and most eccentric book.

Savitri’s other books, not about animal welfare, are Souvenirs et reflexions d’une aryenne (Memories and Reflections of an Aryan Woman, 1976), her most comprehensive presentation of her philosophy; and And Time Rolls On: The Savitri Devi Interviews (Atlanta: Black Sun Publications, 2005), the edited transcripts of ten hours of interviews given in New Delhi in 1978, which is an ideal introduction to Savitri’s life and thought.

Savitri Devi died suddenly on October 22, 1982, at the age of 77, in England, during a brief stopover before going on a lecture tour to America.

She was a Woman against Time. She will not find fame in this Dark Age, but in the Golden Age to come.

I must give credit to the authors whose works I have shamelessly plundered and reformatted into this essay. The text is adapted mainly from two articles written by R. G. Fowler and Kerry Bolton. Also some pieces were taken from a book Hitler’s Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan, Myth and Neo-Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.

Back in Europe during the early postwar years, Savitri Devi began to write the first major statement of her philosophy, which drew together her own long-held convictions, her enthusiasm for National Socialism, and those elements of Hinduism that she regarded as the legacy of immemorial Aryan tradition. This work, entitled The Lightning and the Sun, was eventually published in Calcutta in 1958 after her return to India following thirteen years in Europe. She began writing the book in April 1948 in Edinburgh while employed as the wardrobe manager of a traveling dance company, continuing work on it during her missions and in prison in the summer of 1949. She returned to the manuscript while living at Lyons in 1951 and 1952, and then, after her pilgrimage to Germany, she completed it between 1954 and spring 1956 while staying as guest at her friend’s house, in Westphalia.

The most important inspiration from Hinduism in her philosophy is the cyclic view of history, according to which the whole of creation commences at a point of perfection, but then declines through successive stages into final decay, until everything once more regains its pristine state and the cycle begins anew. Hindu thinkers had evolved a cyclic theory of time in the Mahabharata epic and similar ideas about the cycles also appear in the Vishnu Purana, a book of legends dating from the first few centuries A.D. These ancient Indian notions of cosmology and chronology offered a perspective upon the nature of time and its influence on the created universe. The latter work describes the Puranic divisions of time in the cycle of the ages in terms of the four Yugas, or ages. The Sanskrit names for the four ages refer to their relative duration: Krita or Satya (four units), Treta (three), Dvapara (two), and Kali (one). Thus, the Krita Yuga lasts some 1,728,000 years, the Trent Yoga 1,296,000 years, the Dvapara Yuga 864,000 years, and the Kali Yuga 432,000 years. Accordingly, their sum of ten units makes up a Mahayuga equivalent to 4,320,000 years.

The Hindu chronology of the Vishnu Purana made provision for even longer periods and cycles, including a thousand Mahayugas or a Day of Brahman, also known as a Kalpa, equivalent to 4,320,000,000 years. A Year of Brahman was composed of 360 such Days and Nights (i.e., two Kalpas), and the life of Brahman was deemed to last for a hundred such years, yielding the astronomic total of 311,040,000,000,000 years. Such a figure was deemed to define the period of the universe through a complete cycle of creation, development, and collapse. But even this figure was itself just one cycle within a limitless and unending sequence of cycles. However, such large cycles all repeated the basic tenfold pattern of the four Yugas, corresponding to the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages, which determined the nature of life and society from prosperity to decay.

In the Mahabharata these ages are described in some detail. The Krita Yuga is characterized as an age in which righteousness is eternal. In this most excellent of Yugas everything had been done and nothing remained to be done. Duties did not languish, nor did the people decline. There was no buying and selling, no efforts needed to be made by men, the fruits of the earth were abundant. No disease or decline of the organs of sense arose through age, there was no malice, weeping, pride, or deceit, no contention, lassitude, hatred, cruelty, fear, affliction, jealousy, or envy. All creatures were devoted to their duties, all the castes were alike in their functions, they were devoted to one deity and used one rule and one rite. During the Treta Yuga righteousness decreased by a fourth. Men now acted with an object in view, seeking rewards for their rites and gifts, while still being devoted to their duties and their ceremonies. The decline became more marked in the Dvapara Yuga, when righteousness was diminished by two quarters. The Veda became fourfold, and with this proliferation of rules, rites, and ceremonies people no longer knew unity. Once men had fallen away from goodness, many diseases, desires, and calamities assailed them and these in turn drove men to practice austerities.

The Kali Yuga, or Iron Age, represented the cosmological and moral nadir in the Hindu cycle of ages. Only a quarter as much righteousness prevailed in comparison with the Krita Yuga. Sacred practices were neglected. Calamities, diseases, fatigue, and faults such as anger, distress, anxiety, hunger, and fear became commonplace. Political and social order collapsed, cities became violent, civilization receded. Evil was everywhere evident and triumphant. The Vishnu Purana describes many aspects of this moral and social decay in the Kali Yuga. The observance of caste and order is neglected with promiscuous intermarriage among all classes and peoples; women are unfaithful and consort with worthless men; the family and other blood ties lose their meaning; the acquisition of wealth, commerce, and money govern all men’s actions and aspirations; liberalism and moral relativism prevail so that any idol or authority is revered on the basis of popularity and individual choice. The rulers oppress and plunder the masses, who then desert the intolerable cities and settle in remote places. There they live in scarcity and want, suffering exposure, and subject to decreasing vigor and longevity. In due course, the entire race is destroyed.

Savitri Devi believed in the former existence of the Golden Age, the most recent Satya, or Krita, Yuga, which had passed away more than two million years ago. In terms reminiscent of the account in the Mahabharata, she described the social and political order on earth in that “Age of Truth” as a perfect replica of the eternal order of life:

There was, then, nothing to be changed; nothing for which to shed one’s own or other people’s blood; nothing to do but to enjoy in peace the beauty and riches of the sunlit earth, and to praise the wise Gods — the “devas” or “shining Ones” as the ancient Aryans called them — Kings of the earth in the truest sense of the word. Every man and woman, every race, every species was, then, in its place, and the whole divine hierarchy of Creation was a work of art to which and from which there was nothing to add or to take away.

The Hindu cycle of ages supplied an implacably deterministic philosophy of history, according to which each Golden Age was followed by successively less righteous ages until evil prevailed and no good could come of anything. Savitri Devi was profoundly impressed by these ancient cosmological notions, for they confirmed some of her earliest convictions. ... Inspired by her vision of the former glories of the beautiful, strong, and warlike Aryan race at the dawn of the present cycle, she could not but regard recorded history as a slow process of Aryan corruption and decline. She had no doubts that the world had long been passing through the gloomy Kali Yuga.

In her view early postwar Europe with its grim austerities, ruin, and exhaustion, and, above all, the defeat of Nazi Germany, the focus of her hopes for regeneration and the start of a new Satya Yuga, only served to confirm that the world had yet further to go through the era of gloom. Writing in April 1948 in Scotland, she described the decadence and banality of the modern age as characteristics of the Kali Yuga, which included selfishness, conceit, hypocrisy....

As she restlessly traveled around postwar Europe, she saw a world that was still rushing onward through the downsweep of the Kali Yuga:

There is no hope of “putting things right,” in such an age. It is, essentially, the age ... described in the Book of books — the Bhagavad Gita — as that in which “out of the corruption of women proceeds the confusion of castes; out of the confusion of castes, the loss of memory; out of lass of memory the lack of understanding; and out of this, all evils”; 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 care and of all the living, — the god-like men — are defeated, and their followers humbled and their memory slandered, while the masters of lies are hailed as “saviours”; the age in which every man and woman is in the wrong place, and the world dominated by inferior individuals, bastardised races and vicious doctrines, all pan and parcel of an order of inherent ugliness far worse than complete anarchy. [The Lightning and the Sun, p. 17f.]

Armed with the Hindu cyclic theory of time, Savitri Devi believed that “human history, far from being a steady ascension towards the better, is an increasingly hopeless process of bastardisation, emasculation and demoralisation of mankind; an inexorable ‘fall.’” [The Lightning and the Sun, p. 18.] Against the dismal cosmological background of the Kali Yuga, she developed her own doctrine of Men in Time, Men above Time, and Men against Time. These three types of historical actors represented three quite distinct responses to the bondage of time as understood in the cycle of the ages. Of the three types, Men in Time are the essential and most active agents of the Kali Yuga. Their conduct and aims typify the dark age and all its vicissitudes. Men above Time are properly at home in the perfection of the Satya Yuga, or Golden Age, and Men against Time act with ruthless violence in an attempt to restore the conditions of the Satya Yuga at the end of the Kali Yuga. By violent means, these martial heroes work to redeem the world from the thrall of the dark age and to initiate a new time cycle.

Men in Time, according to Savitri Devi, are those few strong individuals who wholeheartedly accept the iron law of history and act entirely in their own narrow self-interest. Whether in lust for personal enjoyment, in greed for gold, or in the search for honors, position, and power, this selfish drive is shameless and undisguised by such “noble” ends as the ideas of 1789 or the solidarity of the international proletariat. In seeking only their own personal ends with the utmost intelligence, unscrupulousness, and energy, these Men in Time are “the most thorough, the most mercilessly effective agents of the Death-forces on earth ... working without hesitation and without remorse in the sense of the downward process of history and, for its logical conclusion: the annihilation of man and all life.” [The Lightning and the Sun, p. 36f.]

Men in Time represent the most naked and powerful expression of egoism in the benighted era of the Kali Yuga, an age that is given over to the play of animistic individual wills striving for their materialistic gratification with no understanding of the wisdom or higher collective goals of happier ages. By seeking their own individual advantage in a constant war of wills, Men in Time drive history along that oppositional path that is the hallmark of the dark age and its decline. Their gains, profits, or victories are entirely personal; even if they bring wider fortune and prosperity, this is quite incidental to their motive of self-gratification. And all the while they are fighting and struggling and winning, the world around them is violated, thereby growing older, wearier, and less abundant until it is exhausted and reaches the end of the time cycle.

Savitri Devi regarded Genghis Khan (1157–1227) as an outstanding example of a Man in Time. The Mongol leader who rose from a fatherless outcast to the uncontested master of a vast Eurasian empire stretching from the Danube to the Yellow Sea acted only to extend his power. He followed no ideology, no other ends save survival and more power. Although an agent of the dreary Kali Yuga, he also hastened its consummation and end; Genghis Khan was thus a personification of the divine destroyer Mahakala, or Shiva, possessing the awful splendor of the great devastating forces of nature. Due to his powerful and destructive participation in the world, he represented the “lightning” in the title of her book. [The Lightning and the Sun,pp. 37-41.] But because he espoused no higher cause than his own personal gain and power, his empire scarcely survived him. Indeed, Savitri Devi attributed the later rise of European colonialism in Asia under the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British and its commercial, money-worshiping spirit to the very failure of Genghis Khan to found a more enduring state in this region. The self-seeking and destructive force of the Mongol Empire was thus linked to the rise of Jewish international finance, the great adversary of Aryan rule. [The Lightning and the Sun, p. 126.]

Men above Time are those individuals who have attained the highest enlightenment described in the Upanishads. In recognizing the fundamental unity of the divine Self (Atman) and the all-pervading God (Brahman), they represent the spiritual authority in the Sarya Yuga, or Age of Truth, in which complete perfection and righteousness prevail. In ancient India the Brahmins were the counselors and mentors of kings and warriors who were anxious to act in accordance with the commands of timeless wisdom. However, as the world proceeds through the time cycle with increasing disorder and decay, such Men above Time enjoy less and less authority. During the Kali Yuga they just seem to be unworldly mystics whose entire outlook and conduct barely equips them to survive in a world of struggle and conflict, let alone to act as guides and rulers of men. These lonely ascetics abstain from all violence and cannot change the collective conditions of mankind. At best they can offer personal salvation in breaking the time bondage of individual souls; it is not within their power to re-create the Golden Age before its due time. [The Lightning and the Sun, pp. 41-47.]

Savitri Devi described Men above Time as “exiles of the Golden Age in our Age of Gloom,” who live in their own inner world, while renouncing or simply forgetting the nature of the real world around them. Her chief example was Akhnaton, the Egyptian pharaoh of Aryan ancestry, whose ill-fated attempt to institute a golden-age state in the fourteenth century B.C. ended predictably in chaos and failure. Already in A Son of God (1946) she had described Akhnaton as a Man above Time “who had tried to impose his lofty ideals upon this Dark Age (both his and ours), without taking into account the fact that violence is the law of any revolution within Time, specially in the Dark Age (the Kali Yuga of the Hindus).” [Savitri Devi, A Son of God (London: Philosophical Publishing House, 1946), p. 215.] He came already thousands of years too late for his solar theocracy to have succeeded. But like the sun, his symbol, he shed the last rays of the long-forgotten Satya Yuga while the downsweep of time continued in the ancient world.

In Hindu chronology the Kali Yoga suddenly and momentously gives way at its lowest point of degradation, suffering, and evil to the opening of a new Satya, or Krita, Yuga, which begins the cycle anew. According to Savitri Devi, Men against Time play a crucial role in the struggle to restore the Golden Age as the Kali Yuga nears the completion of its term. Although possessed of the sunlike qualities and mystical ideals of the Man above Time, the Man against Time employs the practical means, ruthlessness, and violence of the Man in Time for the achievement of collective salvation and the regeneration of the world. In her scheme of things, Men against Time combine the qualities of “Lightning” and “Sun” as the real heroes of history, the builders and defenders of all new churches who devote their whole life and energy to the reshaping of tangible reality on the model of their vision of truth. These divinely inspired militant mystics are rare individuals who suddenly intervene in the downsweep of time with the promise of redemption and the return of the Golden Age. The revolutionary implications of the Man against Time are obvious. Like a fiery comet from the heavens he bursts through the gloomy pall surrounding the earth in the Kali Yuga to herald the spreading sunshine of a new order of perfection, divine justice, and righteousness.

In Savitri Devi’s opinion, the greatest Man against Time in all recorded history was Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the Germans, and the divinely appointed leader of the Aryan world in the West. His demand for German national unity in a strong new Reich in defiance of the humiliating Versailles Treaty clearly identified him as a champion of the old tribal principle against the degenerate capitalist and cosmopolitan world of the Allies. She saw his love of children and animals, his domestic modesty, vegetarianism, and abstention from alcohol as typical traits of the kindly ascetic. His ruthless use of military violence against his enemies in a resistant fallen world, identified him as the essential Man against Time.

Savitri Devi’s notion of the Man against Time is derived from the Hindu idea of the periodic descent of the Deity, typically Vishnu, in a human, superhuman, or animal form. This mediator between God and men is known as the avatara (avatar), or divine incarnation, and represents a development from the extrahuman gods of the Vedic period. The origin of the concept of avatar is obscure, and precursors have been traced to Aryan Iran in the Bahrain Yasht, a Zoroastrian text, which may even show traces of Chinese influence and mythology. However, in none of these beliefs does the concept play such an important part as it does in the post-Vedic Hindu thought of the epics and the Bhagavad Gita. Both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata describe the descent of avatar in the form of Rama and Krishna, who both reappear as the favorite incarnations of Vishnu in the Puranas, ancient legends forming a further part of popular Hindu scripture.

In the Mahabharata, Vishnu incarnates ten times successively as a swan, fish, tortoise, boar, man-lion, dwarf, Rama (twice), Krishna, and Kalki. The Bhagavad Gita (a section of the Mahabharata) tells how Krishna, posing as a charioteer, manifested as an avatar to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra during the war of the Koravas and Pandavas in 3102 B.C. Krishna’s advice to the warrior prince concerning his martial duties and divine wisdom comprise the full text of the Bhagavad Gita. Puranic avatars also catalyze the cycle of ages as the Yuga avatars: in the Facts Yuga, Vishnu appears as Rama, and as Krishna at the end of the Dvapara Yuga and the beginning of the Kali Yoga. The Kalki avatar appears as the tenth and final incarnation of Vishnu: he arrives in the form of a sword-bearing rider on a white horse to end the dark age and initiate a new golden Satya Yuga.

Savitri Devi is unquestionably the first Western writer to identify Adolf Hitler as an avatar. In a manner suggestive of bhakti devotion, she frequently quotes Krishna’s verses from the theistic Bhagavad Gita with reference to Hitler. One particular couplet appears as the motto of her book Pilgrimage and elsewhere in its pages: “When justice is crushed, when evil is triumphant, then I come back. For the protection of the good, for the destruction of evil-doers, for the establishment of the Reign of Righteousness, I am born again and again, age after age” (Bhagavad Gita, 4, verses 7-8). Her eulogy of Hitler’s life and political career in The Lightning and Sun begins with the incarnation of the divine collective Self of Aryan mankind as “the late-born child of light” in Braunau am Inn in 1889. Her description of the youth and his dawning sense of mission is based on August Kubizek’s account of their adolescent friendship in Linz and Vienna during the years 1904 to 1908. Whether enthusing over the magical power of Wagner’s music or boldly outlining plans for new cities, buildings, and monuments, Hitler is for her the true friend of his people, ever inspired by the inner vision of a healthy, beautiful, and peaceful world, a real earthly paradise reflecting cosmic perfection. [The Lightning and the Sun, pp. 215-216, 222-224.]

Savitri Devi was sure that Hitler had realized he was an avatar while still a youth. She found compelling proof of this in Kubizek’s account of young Adolf’s dramatic reaction to a performance of Wagner’s Rienzi they had seen together during November 1906 in Linz. Both boys were caught up in the great epic of Rienzi’s rise to become the tribune of the people of Rome and his subsequent downfall. When the performance ended, it was past midnight. Hitler, usually very talkative after an exciting opera, was silent and withdrawn. He led his friend through the cold, foggy streets up the Freinberg hill on the western side of the town. Kubizek recalled how Hitler strode on, until they reached the summit. They were no longer engulfed by the fog and the stars shone brilliantly overhead. Then Hitler began to speak, his words bursting forth with passion. Kubizek was utterly amazed. Hitherto he had always understood that Hitler wanted to become an artist, a painter, or an architect. None of that mattered now. It was as if another Self spoke through him in a state of ecstasy or complete trance. “In sublime, irresistible images, he unfolded before me his own future and that of our people. ... He now spoke of a mandate that he was one day to receive from our people, in order to lead them out of slavery, to the heights of freedom.” With perfect recall of this starry hour in a conversation with Winifried Wagner and Kubizek at Bayreuth in 1939, Hitler solemnly added “In that hour it began.” [The Lightning and the Sun, pp. 349-351.]

Savitri Devi believed that Adolf Hitler was the western Aryan counterpart of Rama and Krishna among the eastern Aryans of India. She visited Linz and Leonding on her pilgrimage of 1953 in the selfsame spirit that had drawn her in the 1930s to Ayodhya where Rama, the miraculous conqueror of South India, had lived and ruled, and to Brindaban, where Krishna, the immortal teacher of the doctrine of detached violence, had spent his early youth. Both these avatars personified to her the warlike wisdom and the territorial expansion of the hallowed race, and each of them inaugurated a new epoch in the history of the awakening of Aryan consciousness in antiquity. [Savitri Devi, Pilgrimage (Calcutta: Temple Press, 1958), p. 10f.] Just as Rama and Krishna were Yuga avatars, she so could invoke Hitler, the race savior, as the perennial avatar of the Bhagavad Gita. Sitting in the garden of Hitler’s former classmate’s in Leonding, she visualized the beloved features of her Fuhrer suddenly merging into the impersonal Essence of the many-featured One, who spoke Krishna’s words to Arjuna. She was certain that she had sought him for centuries, in life after life, until she realized that the founder of the Third Reich was indeed he — the one who comes back, whenever he should “to establish the reign of Righteousness.” [Pilgrimage, pp. 28, 31.]

Savitri Devi believed that it was impossible to understand National Socialism apart from the cyclic conception of history suggested by Hindu tradition. She considered that Hitler’s vision ultimately transcended even Germany and the Aryan race. The Nazi philosophy set at nought man’s intellectual conceit, his naive pride in “progress,” and his futile attempts to enslave nature and instead made the mysterious and unfailing impersonal wisdom of forests, oceans, and outer space the basis of a global regeneration policy for an overcrowded, overcivilized, and technically overdeveloped world at the end of the Kali Yuga. She saw Hitler embodying that eternal nature wisdom against the false science, false religion, false morality, and false political ideas of a decadent age. He made Germany’s struggle for freedom, healthy living conditions, and power part of a broader struggle for the liberation of mankind from the Kali Yuga. He made Germany, “the holy Land of the West, the Stronghold of regenerate Aryandom.” [The Lightning and the Sun, pp. 220f.]

Savitri Devi also found the faithful echo of ancient Sanskrit wisdom in the institutions and organizations of the Third Reich. Her enthusiastic description of social life in Nazi Germany dwelt on the high moral tone, new housing, and sports and leisure facilities in a sunlit world of energetic purpose. Hitler’s measures for the physical and moral protection of his predestined people were intended to foster the natural leaders of the Aryan race. His new laws for the welfare of mother and child, for the creation of ideal living conditions for workmen’s families, and for the education of a healthy, self-confident and self-reliant, proud and beautiful youth, and his Nuremberg race laws, all promoted the regeneration of the pure-blooded Germanic race and arrested the threatening tide of inferior humanity, whose rise is always the index of an advanced stage of the Kali Yuga. [The Lightning and the Sun, p. 235.]

But Savitri Devi neither ignored nor denied the dark side of Nazism. For her the SS was the supreme Nazi organization, the physical and moral elite of awakening Aryandom, the living matrix in which a new race of gods on earth was to take shape and soul. She dwelt lovingly on the harsh rigors of its discipline and on its high standards of cleanliness, presentation, and drill. Purity of blood and flawless physical perfection were the conditions of admission to the SS: prospective members were obliged to submit a family tree of exclusive Aryan-Germanic descent back to 1750, and superiors took great care in vetting the future spouse of each SS man. Savitri Devi recalled that SS men always gave their religion as gottgläubig (believer in God) rather than any denomination. This had nothing to do with Judaeo-Christian notions of universalism but embraced the idea of a natural and biological hierarchy, in which the SS would form a blood aristocracy to rule over the rest of mankind. The SS knew nothing of meekness; its watchwords were strictness and pride. The black uniforms and ominous death’s-head insignia symbolized the harsh forces “in Time” employed for the achievement of a golden age. [The Lightning and the Sun, p. 403.]

Savitri Devi regarded the SS attitude toward war as the living expression of that ancient Aryan wisdom of detached violence necessary to overcome the dark age. Rigorous selection and training guaranteed the SS man’s complete self-mastery and military skill. However, National Socialism was pitted against all the forces of darkness and decay in a fallen world, and this great cosmic battle required terrible deeds on the part of its elite military vanguard. Savitri Devi saw the SS as the living enactment of the ancient Aryan warrior code described in the Bhagavad Gita: “Perform without attachment that action which is duty, desiring nothing but the welfare of Creation” (Bhagavad Gita, 3, verses 19, 25). And again, “Taking as equal pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat, gird thyself for battle” (Bhagavad Gita, 2, verse 38).

Savitri Devi saw the Jews as the embodiment of the Kali Yuga. Her broad surveys of ancient history often touched on the rise of the Semites, initially in the overthrow of the Mitanni by the Assyrians and the migration of the Hebrews into Palestine during Akhnaton’s reign. While the Aryans were refining the caste system in India and their western cousins were first settling as Teutons and Mycenaean Greeks in Europe, the Jews, she believed, were elaborating a cunning strategy for world dominion. Strictly adhering to their own tribal identity, the Jews encouraged racial mixing, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, and skepticism among all other peoples to promote their disintegration and downfall. Scattered by the Romans in the first century A.D., the Jews entered Europe in the early Middle Ages and became in due course the ferment of its nations. During the modern period the atomistic self-seeking individualism of money capitalism served their purposes as much as Marxism, another Jewish doctrine intended for Gentile consumption, which cynically preached international raceless brotherhood. [The Lightning and the Sun, pp. 204f., 246-249.]

According to Savitri Devi, the Jew is the expression of the downsweep of the time cycle, and whose purpose is the dissolution of all races, all nations, all communities, and ultimately all life upon the planet. From the fourth century B.C. onward until the time of Philo, she argued, hellenized Jews had begun blending their cabbalistic notions with Greek ideas to create that religion of man opposed to all other living creatures. This exaltation of man over nature led, either through capitalism or communism, to a general bastardization of the whole human species and its exponential proliferation as producers and consumers at the expense of all other creatures in “a reign of quantity” characterized by money, rational calculation, and the growth of human numbers. However, such philosophical falsehood was matched by its ecological folly. Mankind would simply create one vast international slum in which he completed the exhaustion and destruction of nature itself. In her account the Jews are thus the epitome of the death forces in the era of gloom.” [The Lightning and the Sun, pp. 251, 265, 362f.]

Savitri Devi regarded Hitler as an avatar like Rama and Krishna, the most widely remembered Aryan heroes of anent India, who also knew that the end of the Kali Yuga can be achieved only by responding to the decay of the dark age with yet greater violence. [The Lightning and the Sun, p. 256.] She glorified Hitler for his avataric intervention against the forces of death and disintegration in a battle for the future of the universe. At the mass meetings and rallies of the 1920s and 1930s “he spoke with the wild eloquence of emergency, knowing that the struggle he was about to start had to take place then or never.” [The Lightning and the Sun, p. 244.] He knew that his German people and the whole Aryan race “were threatened in their existence by the agents of the Death-powers; cornered; and that their definitive downfall and disappearance would mean the definitive downfall of higher organised Life upon this planet, with no hope of resurrection.” [The Lightning and the Sun, p. 258.]

The Yuga avatar was a harbinger of the apocalypse and the onset of the next age. The Hindu mythology of the Puranas foretold the advent of Kalki, the tenth and final avatar of Vishnu as the divine incarnation who will end the Kali Yuga and initiate a new Krita Yuga.

When the close of the Kali age shall be nigh, a portion of that divine being who exists of his own spiritual nature in the character of Brahma, and who is the beginning end the end, and who comprehends all things, shall descend upon earth: he will be firm in the family of Vishnuyasas, an eminent Brahman of Sambhala village as Kalki, endowed with the eight superhuman faculties. ... He will destroy all whose minds are devoted to iniquity. He will then reestablish righteousness upon earth; and the minds of those who live at the end of the Kali age shall be awakened, and shall be as pellucid as crystal. The men who are thus changed by virtue of that peculiar time shall be as the seeds of human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita age, or age of purity.

Savitri Devi devoted the final part of The Lightning and the Sun to the coming of Kalki and the end of the age of gloom.

Did Savitri Devi believe Adolf Hitler was Kalki? She almost certainly did during the heyday of the Third Reich and the first half of the Second World War. As Hitler’s avataric battle escalated into a global conflict with the declaration of war against the Soviet Union followed by the United States, she shuddered at his colossal challenge to the combined dark age forces of Jewry, Marxism, and international capitalism. However, by late 1944 even she could no longer have expected an Axis victory; it was clear that Hitler had not ended the Kali Yuga. It was only certain that Kalki would come and even if Hitler himself did not return, Kalki would combine the qualities of the Krishna avatar on the Kurukshetra battlefield in the Bhagavad Gita with those of Adolf Hitler and of all Men against Time who come back to reestablish the reign of righteousness.

In the meantime, she believed that Hitler had offered himself in sacrifice, for the fulfillment of the highest purpose of Creation: the survival of a superior mankind. Krishna’s words appeared as the second motto of Pilgrimage: “I am the Oblation; I am the Sacrifice...” (Bhagavad Gita IX, 16). Savitri Devi fondly imagined that Hitler would survive in songs and symbols: “The Lords of the new Time-cycle, men of his own blood and faith, will render him divine honours, through rites full of meaning and full of potency, in the cool shade of the endless re-grown forests, on the beaches, or upon the inviolate mountain-peaks, facing the rising sun.” [The Lightning and the Sun, pp. 431f.] For Savitri Devi the place of Adolf Hitler in the future Aryan pantheon was quite secure.