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 | | Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke ISBN-10: 9780814731109 ISBN-10: 0-8147-3110-4 ISBN-13: 9780814731109 ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-3110-9 Hardcover 1998-05-01 NYU Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description "[A] superb study. . . . Goodrick-Clarke has done a service to sanity, even if the gullible will go on swallowing [Devi's] recycled poison rather than his antidote." --Times Literary Supplement "An excellent, thought-provoking volume. . . . We may readily accept that Devi was a revolting creature. But it is as well that we realise that such demons in human form existed and still do exist." "An admirably cool-headed history of an inflammatory subject. . . . It is likely to stand as the definitive study of a subject that a lesser author would have exploited for maximum sensationalism." "An engrossing, disturbing, and important book. Well-researched and evocatively told, the strange story of Savitri Devi is a mirror of the twentieth century's dark undercurrents and deserves to be widely read and pondered." "[A] provoking volume." 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. | ||
Reviews | ||
No longer the only Savitri Devi biography This is the first biography of Savitri Devi. For a long time, it was the only biography. Thus I recommended it in spite of the author's dry style and evident distaste for his subject. But HITLER'S PRIESTESS is no longer the only game in town. Most of its biographical information is drawn from ten hours of interviews taped by Savitri Devi in New Delhi in 1978. These interviews have now been transcribed as And Time Rolls On: The Savitri Devi Interviews. The interviews are mostly autobiographical, but Savitri Devi also discusses her ideas on religion, history, National Socialism, and contemporary society. They are lively and entertaining reading. It is interesting to check HITLER'S PRIESTESS against the original. Some, however, might wish to skip the copy and go directly to the original. For me, the primary interest of HITLER'S PRIESTESS now lies in its summaries of Savitri's books, its account of her last four years, after the 1978 interviews, and the connections it draws between Savitri's ideas and their historical context and influence. | ||
Devi was nuts but wrote some good stuff and lived an interesting life Devi was more or less completely insane, especially her wacky ideas about Hitler being an incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu but if your smart enough to weed out the psychosis she did write some good stuff. Her anti-monotheism, ecological and animal rights stuff in particular is very good. So much about her reflects how nutty and contradictry she was. For example she was obsessed with Nazism and Aryan racial purity but she married a man of Indian ancestry. She had a genius level IQ and a phd in a hard science but had her strange ideas about Hitler being a Hindu God. This book is worth reading because, whether you like her or not, she did live an interesting life. For what it was worth at least she was an original thinker. | ||
An unecessary book, but great if you're really into the subject Since this book has been well reviewed by others, I'll refrain from writing much about the content of the book. I've started to notice a tendency from the author to repeat himself a LOT in his books. Large parts of the various chapters are word for word taken from other places. My point is that if you buy the "Black Sun" book by the same author, you'll get everything about Devi you need to know in a condensed form, AND you get some bonus chapters. That being said, I did enjoy the book, but that is because I'm into the subject at hand, but I don't think most people will need to read a whole book about her, the chapter in "Black Sun" is quite enough, and the words are exactly the same, so. All in all, recommended but unecessary. | ||
not worth the paper it's printed on! The back cover claims this book to be a study, but information is only given and not analyzed or "studied", the information given, if concerning Savitri Devi (SD) is taken directly from her own books or does only very indirectly, around many corners, concern her. The author keeps calling her pagan beliefs "amoral" (of course they are, i.e. not fitting Christianity), SD's religious beliefs are portraied as only serving political ends, and the last chapter is a general, rough summary of all the bad things that various left/green/right/ufo/new age/satanist etc. groups have perpetrated, or tried to, over the last 30 years. Conclusion: Information given can easily be obtained freely by using an internet search enginge, and money spent on this book is lost money. | ||
Savitri Devi: Hindu Nationalism and Esoteric Hitlerism _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. | ||