A not-so-short review of Savitri Devi's "The Lightning and the Sun" (1958)

(Reposted from Goodreads. Originally posted on Feb. 29, 2024.)

This is, in a word, a "gross" book.

It is gross in every sense of the word: it's overlong, bloated, and preachy; it is guilty of extreme generalizations, of hyperbolic claims, and of grave delusions; and it is repulsive, exuding offense from every line. The one star I give to this book are given because it is technically competent in organization and citation, and because it is at least internally coherent; its content, in itself, is worthy of no such praise.

One might forget that Savitri Devi is a furiously fanatical Nazi if she weren't so obsessed with demonstrating her whole-hearted, body-and-soul religious devotion to Adolf Hitler and his National Socialism at least once in every paragraph of this book. Indeed, much of her language is a somewhat less obscurantist pastiche of classical New Age esoterica and Hindu jargon, and it is evident to the reader that she has real conviction in and knowledge of both of these cosmological systems. She is clearly interested in learning, to an extent, and intelligent, as she makes various symbolic connections between mythohistorical figures, literature, religion, and psychoanalysis; indeed, much of her text reads disturbingly close to what Jung might produce in one of his more unhinged hermetica.

Nevertheless, no true value can be found in her pseudo-historical analysis other than a historiographical image of the contemporary Esoteric Hitlerist. From the tales of supposed "great men" --- tales obviously influenced, in large part, by the laughable "archeology" and "history" produced by Himmler's Anenherbe --- and the annals of the Bhagavat Gita, Devi tries to construct a grand epic of humanity's Messiahs (plural), who come and go in different bodies in a great Hegelian dialectic "beyond" and "against" Time. In this bastardized Universalist reading of "Paganism" --- referring to all non-Jewish or Christian religions, both of which she despises for many of the same reasons Nietzschean anti-Christians often did and do --- the ancient gods of old religions are the ur-souls of "great men," fighting to liberate "true" humanity (the Aryan race of Hyperborea and Atlantis) from the "corruption" spread by such villains as... the Jew. Indeed, to Devi, National Socialism is not an ideology of the 20th Century, rooted in the corporatist and nationalist writings of romanticist France, Germany, and Italy, but indeed a sort of Prisca Theologia inherited from the earliest days of humanity. As such, Adolf Hitler is not only a human politician, but a prophet and a "savior" whom she compares with Muhammad and explicitly identifies as an incarnation of Vishnu.

Indeed, much of the length of this anti-Bible is spent worshipping Hitler and the soil upon which he trod. Over tens of pages, Devi almost entirely copies the content of contemporary biographies of the Führer, drooling over the propagandistic parables of his supposed childhood and teenage years, and then lamenting the lack of even more minute detail about life prior to becoming his political persona. These moments of purposeless adoration, bordering on obsessive fixation, riddle the book, bloating its length and creating extreme discomfort in the reader. These passages are not helped by her tendency to entirely dismiss Hitler or his party of any moral responsibility for their unambiguous evildoing (often utilizing whataboutism or baseless accusation as a deflection), or just dismissing their evildoing outright.

In the end, one can only be astounded at the infinite irony of a French Greek woman positioning herself as the mouthpiece of not only ideological, but wholesale spiritual and cosmological National Socialism. A woman --- a class of person deeply oppressed in the German State of Hitler's NSDAP --- and a mixed-ethnicity half-French half-Greek, neither of which are contained in the salvation plan to which she devotes hundreds of pages of masturbatory worship, and indeed one of which (French) she openly disparages multiple times throughout.

Devi, like Himmler, and ultimately like Nietzsche, does not shy at any moment from denigrating Christianity as the Bolshevist, slave-mentality faith of sheep herded by the so-called Eternal Jew; this religion of lies and weakness is contrasted with the ancient, solar, Hyperborean National Socialist system, led by its conqueror-hero-Messiah. And yet, she is incapable of seeing that she is herself a sheep, incapable of anything but blind devotion to a totalitarian religion led by a pathetic political prophet. In the end, after hundreds of pages of propping him up as a living god and emissary of humanity's next Golden Age, Savitri Devi fails to accept the reality that her Messiah failed, and that his religion has effectively died, much like that of Mani or of Mithras or of many others. 'Oh, actually he isn't the REAL deal; just a portent of the real deal," she says, finishing her tractate with an anemic call to action for her co-religionists to never abandon hope and patiently wait on the second coming of their antichrist.

I have read many books written by extremists; indeed, as the study of extremism is my field of choice, I would be hard-pressed not to. However, I must say that I have never quite read a political book so utterly devoid of value or interest since, perhaps, my first tryst with Ayn Rand's dreadful and bloated propaganda pieces for her own political religion. Even Julius Evola and his genuinely diabolical books provide more brainfood than this rot. Read only if you are dead-convinced that you want to learn about Esoteric Nazism from one of its creators; all other readers probably have nothing to gain from listening to this sad woman proselytize for a man who perhaps only did not treat her like dirt because she was too useful and too geographically distant from him.