Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism [Paperback]

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0814731112 | ISBN-13: 978-0814731116 | Publication Date: October 1, 2000

In this window onto the roots and evolution of international neo-Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke reveals the powerful impact of one of fascism's most creative minds.

Savitri Devi's influence on neo-Nazism and other hybrid strains of mystical fascism has been continuos since the mid-1960s. A Frenchwoman of Greek-English birth, Devi became an admirer of German National Socialism in the late 1920s. Deeply impressed by its racial heritage and caste-system, she emigrated to India, where she developed her racial ideology, in the early 1930s. Her works have been reissued and distributed through various neo-Nazi networks and she has been lionized as a foremother of Nazi ideology. Her appeal to neo-Nazi sects lies in the very eccentricity of her thought - combining Aryan supremacism and anti-Semitism with Hinduism, social Darwinisn, animal rights, and a fundamentally biocentric view of life - and has resulted in curious, yet potent alliances in radical ideology.

As one of the earliest Holocaust deniers and the first to suggest that Adolf Hitler was an avatar-- a god come to earth in human form to restore the world to a golden age - Devi became a fixture in the shadowy neo-Nazi world. In Hitler's Priestess, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke examines how someone with so little tangible connection to Nazi Germany became such a powerful advocate of Hitler's misanthropy.

Hitler's Priestess illuminates the life of a woman who achieved the status of a prophetess for her penchant for redirecting authentic religious energies in the service of regenerate fascism.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Goodrick-Clarke carefully outlines the life of Savitri Devi, a true believer who took Nazism beyond politics: she believed that Hitler was an avatar or god come to earth. Born Maximiani Portas to a Greek/Italian father and an English mother, Devi spent her early years in her native France and in Greece, but she was inexorably drawn to India and traveled there at 27. It was not the culture of India that drew Devi, but her belief that India represented the best of racial segregation. Once in India, she became interested in Hinduism and wed the Brahman A.K. Mukherji in a marriage of shared ideals that also happened to bolster her shaky legal status as a resident Nazi sympathizer. The couple worked on behalf of the Axis powers during the late 1930s and early '40s, with Devi claiming that Mukherji put militant nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose in contact with the Japanese authorities. But the most interesting material is on Devi's intellectual life. Sections on Devi's writings about Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaton, about animal rights, or on her belief that Hitler was an avatar, which includes a lengthy examination of the Hindu theory of cyclical history, provide understanding in ways that subsequent lists of her later travels cannot. Settling back in Calcutta in the 1960s, "the aged Aryan Hindu prophetess" became a guiding spirit of the international neo-Nazi movement. Although the writing is stiff and matter-of-fact, Goodrick-Clarke provides plenty of information and insight about this little-known but influential figure.

Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

The whole terrible Nazi experience had many oddities, and this relatively unknown woman is one of them. Born in France in 1905 as Maximiani Portas, she became a strong admirer of Hitler in the 1920s, moved to India in 1932 because of its caste system, and took a Hindu name. After the war she traveled through a devastated Europe and was a vocal apologist of the Nazis, their horrific atrocities notwithstanding. Her early writings were republished by far-right-wing publishers, and she gained new fans in the 1970s as neo-Nazism spread. Devi died in 1982, but the author writes that her combination of Hindu religion and Nordic racial ideology became "a bridge between neo-Nazism and the New Age" movements. (For more on this subject, see also Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology, New York Univ., 1992). This work will be useful for understanding the ideological background of the neo-Nazis. Suitable, but not essential, for all academic and large public libraries.?Daniel K. Blewett, Loyola Univ. Lib., Chicago
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (October 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814731112
• ISBN-13: 978-0814731116
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,286,917 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Remarkably Balanced Treatment of a Controversial Thinker, May 21, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism (Paperback)

A Jewish journalist once observed that when writing about Nazism, objectivity is regarded with suspicion and writers feel obliged to pile on the invective. Just see some of the editorial reviews above. This makes it all the more remarkable that Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has written such a balanced book on Savitri Devi, who taught that we should love all God's creatures--except Jews. Although the author makes it clear that he does not share Devi's views, he lets her speak for herself, and he actually passes silently over some of her more unattractive and fanatical statements, which would surely be insuperable barriers to otherwise open-minded readers.

I have only two objections to this book. First, the author does not adequately discuss Devi's deep philosophical debt to Nietzsche, who provides the framework for her interpretations of Akhnaton and Hinduism and makes possible their synthesis with National Socialism. Second, he never really captures Devi's unique and powerful personality--with its wild extremes of sentimentality and savagery, cold logic and enthusiastic rapture, love of cats and hatred for most human beings--which is stamped on all of her writings. It is her personality as much as her ideas that contributes to the haunting effect that she has on so many readers.

Devi has already influenced the world we live in today--far more for her work on behalf of Hindu nationalism than National Socialism. This influence will only increase as global capitalism continues to ravage the natural world and homogenize the cultural world, thereby drawing new people to the deep-ecological rejection of anthropocentrism and to the politics of difference. This is a wonderful book. Read it, and the world will seem a richer and stranger place.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Savitri Devi: Hindu Nationalism and Esoteric Hitlerism, July 17, 2003

By 

zonaras (Jimbo's House of Pie) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism (Paperback)

_Savitri Devi_ by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke is an extremely bizarre read on one of the more mystical figures in the neo-Nazi movement. Devi was born Maximiani Portas of Greek and English heritage in the south of France, and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics. She grew up feeling disillusioned with Western liberalism, and set out to India in the 1920's to study India's caste system as an example of racial segregation and the Hindu scriptures, in particular the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, which she considered the most ancient examples of Aryan wisdom. She found India, the world's last Aryan pagan nation, to be a place poor but with an unbroken spirit, especially among the high caste Brahmins. She also viewed it as being under cultural assault by British colonization and its growing Muslim population. She joined the ant-British, anti-Muslim Hindu Mission (to spread Hinduism) and the Hindu Nationalist movement in India (groups which were to the right of Gandhi and favored militancy) which was under the leadership of V. D. Savarkar. Devi married a Brahmin, Asit Krishna Mukherji, who was well traveled in Europe and published a racialist and pro-Nazi magazine under the auspices of the German Consulate in India. Following the defeat of Germany in WWII, Devi went on three Nazi propaganda missions in Germany and even spent time in prison for subversive activities. During this time and the 1950s and 60s, Devi made contact with well known British and American neo-Nazis, among whom were George Lincoln Rockwell, Colin Jordan and John Tyndall. She also became aquainted with ex-Nazis such as the ace Hans Ulrich-Rudel and Leon Degrelle and others who had fled Germany and set up a networks in Spain, Latin America and the Middle East. She returned to India in 1971 and corresponded with Holocaust revisionist Ernst Zundel and the South American Nazi occultist Miguel Serrano. Devi published a number of books popular among the far-right and and also far-left environmentalist groups: _The Impeachment of Man_ (an argument for animal rights against a human-centered outlook), _A Warning to the Hindus_ (some of the aims of the Hindu Nationalist movement), _Pilgrimage_ (her reflections on her visit to post-WWII Germany), _Son of the Son_ (a study of Akhnaton who initiated the solar cult in Egypt, which Devi considered to be a forerunner of Nazism), and _The Lightning and the Sun_. _The Lightning and the Sun_ is Devi's most notorious book, in which she argues that Hitler is an incarnation of the god Vishnu the
Preserver, a "Man Against Time" who intervened and fought against the process of decay in today's modern world, which is known as the Kali Yuga of the Hindus. Thus Savitri Devi managed to provide a theological justification for outright Hitler-worship in the context of an Aryan/pagan revival. Altogether, this is an even-handed book on a highly controversial and eccentric woman.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT WORK OF SCHOLARSHIP!!!, August 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism (Hardcover)

An excellant well researched piece of scholarship! It combines academic detail with a clear writing style. Devi's life and work is a case where fact is stranger[and more fascinating] than fact. From her highly educated background [A PhD from Lyon University] to her association with American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell to her founding of the Green Movement, Goodrick-Clarke takes you on the "Magical Mystery Tour" of Devi's strange life. A must read. WELL DONE DR GOODRICK-CLARKE!!!