Counter-Currents
Remembering Savitri Devi:
September 30, 1905 to October 22, 1982
Greg Johnson
728 words
Savitri Devi was a philosopher, a religious thinker, and a tireless polemicist and activist for the causes of animal rights, European pagan revivalism, Hindu Nationalism, German National Socialism, and — after the Second World War — pan-European racial nationalism. She also sought to found a religion, Esoteric Hitlerism, fusing National Socialism with the Traditionalism of René Guénon and Julius Evola. All told, she was one of the most extraordinary personalities of the 20th century.
She was born Maximine Portaz born in Lyons, France on September 30, 1905. Her mother, Julia Nash was English, descending from Viking stock. (She claimed that the name Nash is derived from Ash, as in the World Ash Tree.) Her father, Maxim Portaz, was three fourths Italian from Savoy, one fourth Greek. Because of her mixed-European heritage, she identified herself simply as “European.” She also described herself as a “nationalist of all nations.”
For an account of her life and work, read R. G. Fowler’s tribute to Savitri Devi on her 100th birthday: “Woman Against Time: Remembering Savitri Devi’s 100th Birthday.” (Translations: German, French, Czech, Norwegian.)
Savitri Devi died on October 22, 1982 in Sible Hedingham, Essex, England at the home of her friend Muriel Gantry. For a sad account of her passing, see Muriel Gantry’s “The Last Days of Savitri Devi,” selected from her correspondence by R. G. Fowler.
For more information on Savitri Devi’s life, work, and influence see R. G. Fowler’s website The Savitri Devi Archive.
Counter-Currents has reprinted several works by Savitri Devi online:
- “Akhnaton on Racial Diversity,” an excerpt from The Lightning and the Sun
- “Cosmotheism in Savitri Devi,” an excerpt from Defiance
- “Feminism and National Socialism” in Greek
- “Gandhi: A Man Against Time”
- “History, Action, and the Timeless,” chapter 5 of Souvenirs et réflexions d’une Aryenne
- “Hitlerian Esotericism and the Tradition,” chapter 10 of Souvenirs et réflexions d’une Aryenne
- “Hitlerism and Hindudom” in Greek
- “The Jews and the Dark Age”
- “In Memory of May 1st, 1945,” a poem written under the pen name Clara Sharland
- “Incurable Decadence,” chapter 11 of Souvenirs et réflexions d’une Aryenne
- “National Socialism and Anti-Semitism,” an excerpt from The Lightning and the Sun
- “Paul of Tarsus, or Christianity and Jewry,” an essay from 1957. Norwegian translation here.
- “Race, Economics, and Kindness: The Ideal World,” chapter 11 of Impeachment of Man
- “Remembering Sven Hedin,” an excerpt from And Time Rolls On
- “The Religion of the Strong,” chapter 1 of Souvenirs et réflexions d’une Aryenne
Counter-Currents has also published or reprinted several works about Savitri Devi:
- Jonathan Bowden, “Savitri Devi,” Podcast, Transcript
- Paul Brundsen, “Life is Worship: Savitri Devi’s Son of the Sun.” French translation here
- R. G. Fowler, “Enemy and Exemplar: Savitri Devi on Paul of Tarsus.” Translations: German, French
- R. G. Fowler, “Woman Against Time: Remembering Savitri Devi’s 100th Birthday.” Translations: German, French, Czech, Norwegian, Portuguese
- Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Interview with Muriel Gantry, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
- Juleigh Howard-Hobson, “After the Avatar, 1945,” a sonnet
- Juleigh Howard-Hobson, “Hope and Wait”
- Alex Kurtagić, Review of Defiance
- Alex Kurtagić, Review of Gold in the Furnace
- Christopher Pankhurst reviews The Lightning and the Sun
- Robert Stark Interviews Greg Johnson on Eco-Fascism (French translation here)
- J. A. Sexton, “Savitri Devi’s Defiance and Gold in the Furnace”
- Video: “Savitri Devi: Woman Against Time”
Savitri Devi is also quite widely tagged at Counter-Currents.
Six of Savitri Devi’s books are currently in print in English and available for purchase at Counter-Currents:
- The most recent volume in the Centennial Edition of Savitri Devi’s Works is her magnum opus, The Lightning and the Sun, available in a limited, numbered hardcover edition of 200 copies as well as in paperback and Kindle.
- Forever and Ever: Devotional Poems is the first volume of her previously unpublished writings, available in a limited, numbered hardcover edition of 200 copies as well as in a paperback edition.
- For her views on animal rights, vegetarianism, and Deep Ecology, see her manifesto Impeachment of Man.
- For accounts of her clandestine propaganda activities in Occupied Germany see Gold in the Furnace: Experiences in Occupied Germany.
- On her subsequent arrest, trial, and imprisonment, see Defiance: The Prison Memoirs of Savitri Devi.
- The best introduction to Savitri Devi’s life and work is And Time Rolls On: The Savitri Devi Interviews.
Counter-Currents has now taken over publication of the Centennial Edition of Savitri Devi’s Works. The next volume, due out in 2016 is Pilgrimage, to be followed by a complete English translation of Memories and Reflections of an Aryan Woman.
12 comments
Despite some insights, here and there, in Devi’s books, there are plenty of statements that would not only make a sensible reader wince, but make them question the validity of all of this author’s other pronouncements.
What does the editor of the ‘Savitri Devi Archive’ think of crap like ‘ . . . we disapprove entirely of the custom of sacrificing a whole plant merely to decorate the entrance of a house on a festive day, or to form the basis of an arch of green leaves and flowers under which a procession is to pass.’ (‘Impeachment of Man’, p. 120) To me, this displays a serious confusion of level, to put it gently.
Savitri was against killing plants needlessly. What is so bad about that?
Two things wrong, which go in opposite directions.
On the one hand, most people who follow this line of thought literally are likely not going to exhibit the sort of strength and ruthlessness required to do what needs to be done for racial survival. I remember when I was in college, a White female student crying – literally crying – in a lab class because one single fruit fly was killed by ether. What would her views on illegal immigration be, I wonder?
On the other hand, in the opposite direction, Portas can be accused of hypocrisy, because she was a fervent Hitler supporter, and Hitler had responsibility for the deaths of millions of Europeans, including children, due to the choices he made in favor of German hegemony. Killing a plant is bad. Precipitating a war resulting in mass European death is A-OK.
There is a lot of ‘needless’ killing of flowers and plants in the creation of wreaths, maypoles, and countless other traditional decorations. Such an attitude would be alien to a heathen Roman gardener or estate-holder, or to the hundreds of thousands of people in Europe who maintain heathen ways of festival and decoration as a matter of cultural habit. No one of good sense, much less one who (rightly) asserts that the virtues of heathen Europe are greater than those of Christianity, would speak of the above in a tone suitable for condemning mass industrial deforestation. And trimmed and ordered plants are in no way monstrous Anyone who has driven through a southern European countryside or seen an English garden would agree. Would Mrs Portaz have preferred a freely-growing, undisturbed and ‘natural’ thicket of blackberry bushes to a vineyard?
Another major fallacy: The ability to thrive on a vegetarian or vegan diet is not universal. It depends on the human type/temperament, caste (not meant in the purely social sense), racial tendencies, and individual factors, as well as things like age, activity level, and climate. To mandate it for all is to presume that all human beings are constitutionally the same and, ironically, to engage in the same levelling she so resolutely condemns in other realms. This stand becomes even more ridiculous if she also condemns the eating of milk products and eggs, which, as I recall, she did.
The remarks of Christian Bouchet and Terry Cooper about her are interesting, and, if they are indeed true, point to tendencies indicating a degree of mental instability.
I haven’t read everything written by Savitri Devi’s books yet, but I really liked her insightful observation that (paraphrase) “Christianity was the jew’s greatest invention for emasculating the white race.” I ran across this quote a couple weeks ago when I was reading Revilo P. Oliver’s “Populism” and “Elitism.”
And I just got Lightning and the Sun on the 29th. Thanks Counter-Currents. Her thoughts on religion, politics and history are among the best.
Wonder if we could slip a copy into a feminist reading course somehow (just kidding).
According to the Indian tradition, the jnani is on a different level of consciousness and sees Brahman everywhere. Savitri Devi was a jnani and she didn’t even flaunt it. She lived in proper India for years and even when people live Miguel Serrano and Herman Hesse passed by as tourists, Savitri Devi resided in Brahman as a pure One.
This is why Savitri Devi is hard to understand. On the level of the Ultimate, everything Is.
Did you know that she lived a few blocks away from Nisargadatta Maharaj? True.
Is there any information out there about Nisargadatta and Savitri actually meeting? I’d be very curious to know more about that. Thank you if so. . .
There’s a clip on You Tube ‘Those who knew Hitler’. A 2 minute clip produced by the beeb, of all people! The interviewees describe Hitler as a supernatural comet who burst onto the scene! Very mysterious, and coming from the BBC! There’s even a man claiming that Adolf Hitler nearly cried at the thought of bombing the British!
The world propaganda was so high in the 1970’s that the BBC can purposely insert that into their documentary knowing that it won’t even get noticed by the watchers.
There’s another You Tube clip title ‘Prabhupada Hitler’. A devotee says that Prabdupada was convinced that Hitler was an avatar!
(Interestingly, the devotee’s father was Hitler’s cook)
One more tit bit before I leave.
Franklin Merrel-Wolff wrote that Ghengis Khan was the embodiment of the Time principle.
So here we have two sages saying the same thing about the khan.
There’s a clip on You Tube ‘Those who knew Hitler’. A 2 minute clip produced by the beeb, of all people! The interviewees describe Hitler as a supernatural comet who burst onto the scene! Very mysterious, and coming from the BBC! There’s even a man claiming that Adolf Hitler nearly cried at the thought of bombing the British!
The world propaganda was so high in the 1970’s that the BBC can purposely insert that into their documentary knowing that it won’t even get noticed by the watchers.
There’s another You Tube clip title ‘Prabhupada Hitler’. A devotee says that Prabdupada was convinced that Hitler was an avatar!
(Interestingly, the devotee’s father was Hitler’s cook)
One more tit bit before I leave.
Franklin Merrel-Wolff wrote that Ghengis Khan was the embodiment of the Time principle.
So here we have two sages saying the same thing about the khan.
Very mysterious.
There is no evidence. There are the interviews (As Time Rolls On) but the interviewer wasn’t up to the task and Savitri Devi was modest. The interviewer doesn’t even ask the obvious question concerning the avatar. What a missed opportunity!
Tourists and pretenders flaunt it but Savitri Devi seems so have not been too bothered fleecing people so she stayed silent.
Interestingly, she does mention an enlightened friend residing in an Ashram!
The idea that Christianity was invented by the Jews is complete nonsense! Like two snakes fighting, the Greek mind is blended with the Hebrew mind (See Thorlief Bowman)… Indeed, the Greeks slipped in some real spirituality into Christianity and the Jews put in their two cents. Brahman is 3, so the Greeks slipped in the trinity.
Miguel Serrano and Jung professed gnosticism. The gnostic texts are more Greek than Jewish. Edward Gibbon also says this.
I’m afraid no weighty intellect is a pagan.
And Miguel Serrano was besotted by J Krishnamurti!
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