‘Each German family should have four to six children. Four to six children in each family are necessary for our folk to grow’.
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Tag: Genuine spirituality
I recalled above the encouragement given by the Führer to the German birth rate. The German people, at once the most gifted in the West, the most disciplined and the toughest in war, were to be the main reservoir of the future European aristocracy.
Hadn’t it already been the reservoir of the continent’s ancient aristocracy, the people from whom, along with the Franks, all the lords of medieval Europe had emerged (except for those of Scandinavian origin, who are also, by the way, Germanic)?
This reservoir had to remain inexhaustible. Now, ‘the exceptional being in a family is often the fifth, seventh, tenth or twelfth child’[1] and the limitation of births leads, in the more or less long term, to the downfall of the strongest peoples—just as it had, remarked the Führer,[2] brought about the end of the Ancient World by numerically weakening its patrician houses in favour of a plebeian population that unceasingly multiplied and provided more and more faithful followers to levelling Christianity. It was therefore necessary to honour the mothers of large families.
But it doesn’t follow that, like our friends of man, Adolf Hitler contemplated with satisfaction the idea of an Earth indefinitely exploited by an indefinitely increased population. Far from it! Even in Germany, the systematic encouragement of the birth rate and the protection of the healthy, good-bred child was coupled with a severe selection policy which, even before the seizure of power, the circulation of Mein Kampf had revealed to the public.[3] The law of the Third Reich, which was the very expression of this policy, provided for the sterilisation of the incurably ill, the sick, the deficient, and Germans of mixed non-Aryan blood—Jewish or otherwise—who were in danger of transmitting their physical or mental infirmities or their racial inferiority to their descendants. It formally prohibited, under penalty of forced labour, any marriage or extra-marital sexual relations between Jews and Germans or people of ‘related [artverwandt] blood’.[4]
Strict, as we can see for the people as a whole, it was even more so for the members of this elite corps—a true Nordic aristocracy, from all points of view—represented by the SS. They were required to marry. This was a duty to the race, and also an order from the SS Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler.[5] And they were asked to have as many children as possible. But they could only choose a wife with the permission of the SS Bureau of Races (SS Rassenamt) which examined the girl’s family tree with the utmost rigour, as well as her state of health and that of her antecedents.
And if they had to give life profusely, they also had to be lavish with their own blood on every battlefield. They were entrusted with the missions that demanded the most sustained courage, the most superhuman endurance, the most total disregard for suffering and death. It is enough to compare the losses suffered by these men on all fronts, but especially on the Eastern Front, with those of other German military units and the best foreign armies, to feel how little the life of an elite individual, and a fortiori that of any individual, counted in National Socialist Germany when it came to serving the Reich.
It is true that the birth rate was encouraged, and all the more so because the physical and psychological quality of the parents was more perfect. It was true that no pure-blooded German man or woman should try to deceive nature by using contraceptives, and thus risk depriving the race of an exceptional subject. ‘Do we know what we lose as a result of limiting births? The man who was killed before his birth is the riddle’.[6]
But, on the other hand, war, that the Führer foresaw, even ‘after victory’, would remain almost permanent on the edges of the conquered territories, as it had been on the shifting borders of the Roman Empire: war, ‘the natural state of man’[7] as he put it, took charge and would continue to take charge of limiting the number of adults, so much so that an SS family could only foresee the probability of survival… if it had at least ‘four sons’.[8]
In other words, to the dream of perpetual peace in a stunted world, where Man would have made Nature the servant of his pleasures and health, Adolf Hitler opposed the dream of permanent struggle, of ‘perpetual revolution’, both the joy and the duty of the Strong, standing alone amid universal decay. To the comfortable law of the least effort, he opposed the old Law of the Jungle: the ideal of life both overflowing and precarious; of life in danger. To the formula that a ragged, emptied, pretentious and lousy youth was soon to diffuse in the nightmarish world that followed the collapse of the Reich (‘Make love! Don’t make war!’) he supported the law of the old English aristocratic law: ‘To breed, to bleed, to lead’—procreate, shed blood, be the leaders.
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[1] Libres propos sur la Guerre et la Paix, page 74.
[2] Ibid., page 254.
[3] Mein Kamp, especially pages 279-280 of later editions (1935, 1936, etc.).
[4] Nuremberg Laws of September 1935.
[5] Order No. 65 of 31 December 1931.
[6] Words spoken by Adolf Hitler in a table talk on 19-20 August 1941.( Libres propos sur la Guerre et la Paix, page 29).
[7] Rauschning, Hitler told me (op. cit.), page 22.
[8] Libres propos, page 74.
What he reproached most of all, it seems, was the fact that Christianity alienated his followers from Nature; that it inculcated in them a contempt for the body and, above all, presented itself to them as the ‘consoling’ religion par excellence: the religion of the afflicted; of those who are ‘toiled over and burdened’ and don’t have the strength to bear their burden courageously; of those who cannot come to terms with the idea of not seeing their beloved ones again in a naïvely human Hereafter. Like Nietzsche, he found it to have a whining, servile rotundity about it, and considered Christianity inferior to even the most primitive mythologies, which at least integrate man into the cosmos—all the more inferior to a religion of Nature, ancestors, heroes and of the national State such as this Shintoism, whose origin is lost in the night of prehistory, and which his allies, the Japanese, had had the intelligence to preserve, by adapting it to their modern life.[1]
And in contrast, he liked to evoke the beauty of the attitude of his followers who, free of hope as well as fear, carried out the most dangerous tasks with detachment. ‘I have’, he said on December 13, 1941 in the presence of Dr Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Terboven and others, ‘six SS divisions composed of men who are absolutely indifferent in matters of religion. This doesn’t prevent them from going to their deaths with a serene soul’.[2]
Here, ‘indifference in matters of religion’ just means indifference to Christianity and, perhaps, to all religious exotericism; certainly not indifference to the sacred. Quite the contrary! Because what the Führer reproached Christianity, and no doubt any religion or philosophy centred on the ‘too human’, was precisely the absence in it of that true piety which consists in feeling and adoring ‘God’—the Principle of all being or non-being, the Essence of light and also of Shadow—through the splendour of the visible and tangible world; through Order and Rhythm and the unchanging Law which is its expression: the Law which melts opposites into the same unity, a reflection of unity in itself. What he reproached them for was their inability to make the sacred penetrate life, all life, as in traditional societies.
And what he wanted—and, as I shall soon try to show, the SS must have had a great role to play here—was a gradual return of the consciousness of the sacred, at various levels, in all strata of the population. Not a more or less artificial resurgence of the cult of Wotan and Thor (the Divine never assumes again, in the eyes of men, the forms it once abandoned) but a return of Germany and the Germanic world in general, to Tradition, grasped in the Nordic manner, in the spirit of the old sagas including those which, like the legend of Parsifal preserved, under Christian outward appearances, the unchanged values of the race; the imprint of eternal values in the collective soul of the race.
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Editor’s note: Last year I wrote: ‘Musically, I think Parsifal is Wagner’s most accomplished work. The overtures of each of the three acts, as well as the magnificent music when Gurnemanz takes Parsifal into the castle in the first act; the background music and the voices by the end of the discussion between Parsifal and Kundry in the second act, and let’s not talk about the Good Friday music in the third act, are the most glorious and spiritual I have ever listened. No wonder why Max Reger (1873-1916) confessed: “When I first heard Parsifal at Bayreuth I was fifteen. I cried for two weeks and then became a musician”.’
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He wanted to restore to the German peasant ‘the direct and mysterious apprehension of Nature, the instinctive contact, the communion with the Spirit of the Earth’. He wanted to scrape off ‘the Christian varnish’ and restore to him ‘the religion of the race’ [3] and, little by little, especially in the immense new ‘living space’ which he dreamed of conquering in the East, to remake from the mass of his people a free peasant-warrior people, as in the old days when the immemorial Odalrecht, the oldest Germanic customary law, regulated the relations of men with each other and with their chiefs.
It was from the countryside, which, he knew, still lived on, behind a vain set of Christian names and gestures, pagan beliefs from which he intended one day to evangelise those masses in the big cities: the first victims of modern life in whom, in his own words, ‘everything was dead’. (This ‘everything’ meant for him ‘the essential’: the capacity of man, and especially of the pure-blooded Aryan, to feel both his nothingness as an isolated individual and his immortality as the repository of the virtues of his race, his awareness of the sacred in everyday life.)
He wanted to restore this sense of the sacred to every German—to every Aryan—in whom it had faded or been lost over the generations through the superstitions spread by the churches as well as by an increasingly popularised false ‘science’. He knew that this was an arduous and long-term task from which one could not expect spectacular success, but whose preservation of pure blood was the sine qua non of accomplishment—because, beyond a certain degree of miscegenation (which is very quickly reached) a people is no longer the same people.
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[1] Ibid., p. 141
[2] Libres propos sur la Guerre et la Paix, translation, p. 140.
[3] H. Rauschning, Hitler m’a dit, treizième édition française, p. 71.
It is certain that the decision of the young corporal Hitler, of the 16th Bavarian infantry regiment, to ‘become a politician’ [1] —a decision taken at the announcement of the capitulation of November 1918 in the tragic circumstances of which everyone knows[2]—isn’t enough to explain the extraordinary career of the man who was one day to become the master of Germany, if not of Europe.
Moreover ‘politics’, paradoxical as it may seem, had never been for the Führer the main issue. In a talk on the night of 25 to 26 January 1942, he confessed that he had devoted himself to it ‘against his will’ and saw it as ‘only a means to an end’.[3] This ‘end’ was the mission to which I referred above. Adolf Hitler spoke of it in Mein Kampf and in many speeches, such as the one he gave on 12 March 1938 in Linz where he said, among other things: ‘If Providence once called me out of this city to lead the Reich, it was because it had a mission for me in which I believed, and for which I lived and fought’.
His confidence to act, driven by an impersonal Will, both transcendent and immanent, of which his individual will was only the expression, was pointed out by all those who approached him from near or from afar. Robert Brasillach mentioned the ‘divine mission’ with which the Führer felt invested. And Hermann Rauschning said that he ‘saw himself as a prophet whose role exceeded that of a statesman by a hundred cubits’. ‘No doubt’, he adds, ‘he takes himself quite seriously as the herald of a new humanity’.[4] This is in line with the statement of Adolf Hitler himself, also reported by Rauschning: ‘He who understands National Socialism only as a political movement knows little about it. National Socialism is more than a religion: it is the will to create the overman’.
Moreover, despite his political alliance with Mussolini’s Italy, the Führer was perfectly aware of the abyss separating his biologically based Weltanschauung from Fascism, which remained alien to the ‘stakes of the colossal struggle’ that was about to begin, that is, the meaning of his mission. ‘It is only we National Socialists and we alone’, he said, ‘who have penetrated the secret of the gigantic revolutions that are coming’.
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Editor’s note: This is so true that it reminds me of yesterday’s post on this site, in which we saw how a scholar well versed in NS fails to cross the axiological river. The greatness of the NS men is noticeable in that in the last century Himmler’s select group had already crossed it. And the main shortcoming of white nationalism on the other side of the Atlantic, eighty years later, is that they continue to resist crossing it because of Christian ethics.
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‘And that is why we are the only people, chosen by Providence, to make our mark on the coming century’.[5] In fact, few German National Socialists had penetrated this secret. But it was enough that he, Adolf Hitler, the leader and soul of Germany, had penetrated it to justify the ‘choice’ of the forces of life, for a people is in solidarity with its leader, at least when he is racially one of its sons. In other words, Germany’s priority was, in this case, a consequence of the lucidity of its Leader, of the ‘magic vision’—of the consciousness of the initiate living in the eternal Present—which, alone of all the politicians and generals of his time, he possessed.
It is in this vision that we must seek the source of the Führer’s hostility towards the modern world—both capitalist and Marxist—and its institutions. There is no need to return to the process of the superstition of equality, parliamentarianism, democracy, etc., which is nothing more than the superstition of ‘man’ applied to politics: a trial which the founder of the Third Reich made again and again, in Mein Kampf as in all his speeches, before the multitudes, as well as before the few. Adolf Hitler also attacks features of our time which, while not at the root of this superstition (which is infinitely older) nevertheless reinforces its tragic character. These are, in particular, the rapid disappearance of the sense of the sacred, the resurgence of the ‘technical spirit’, and above all perhaps the disordered proliferation of man in inverse proportion to his quality.
While knowing that they could only be, in the name of Christian anthropocentrism, his worst adversaries, Adolf Hitler was careful not to attack the churches openly, let alone ‘persecute’ them. He did so out of political skill, and also out of fear of depriving the people of an existing faith before another had penetrated deeply enough into their souls to replace it advantageously.
This didn’t prevent him from observing that the time of living Christianity was over; that the Churches represented nothing more than a ‘hollow, fragile and deceptive religious apparatus’[6] which was not even worth demolishing from the outside, since from the inside it was already crumbling of its own accord, and cracking on all sides. He didn’t believe in a resurrection of the Christian faith. In the German countryside it had always been a ‘veneer’, a ‘shell’ which had kept intact the old piety under it. And it was now a question of reviving and directing it. In the urban masses he saw nothing that revealed any awareness of the sacred. He realised that ‘where everything is dead, nothing can be relighted’.[7]
In any case, Christianity was, in his eyes as in ours, nothing but a foreign religion imposed on the Germanic peoples, and fundamentally opposed to their genius. Adolf Hitler despised those responsible men who had been able for so long to content themselves with such childishness as those that the Churches taught the masses. And he was never short of sarcasm when, before those few to whom he knew he could confess the least popular aspect of his thinking, he spoke of Christianity as ‘an invention of sick brains’.[8]
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[1] ‘Ich aber beschloss, Politiker zu werden’, Mein Kampf, ed. 1935, p. 225.
[2] Adolf Hitler, gas-gnawed, threatened with blindness, learned the news at Pasewalk Military Hospital where he had been evacuated.
[3] In the presence of Himmler, Lammers, Zeitzler—Libres Propos, (op. cit.) p. 244.
[4] Hermann Rauschning, Hitler m’a dit, 13th French edition, 1939.
[5] Ibid., p. 147.
[6] Ibid., p. 69.
[7] Ibid. p. 71.
[8] Free Remarks on War and Peace (op. cit.), p. 141.
The Tischgespräche, the Führer’s table talks with a few senior party officials, senior SS officers or foreign guests[1], are instructive in this respect. Even more instructive, perhaps, are certain reports that are hostile to Hitlerism, all the more virulent because their authors are angrier at having initially followed Adolf Hitler in the wrong direction, and at having felt themselves to be fools in retrospect—wrongly, no doubt, for it must have been very difficult to grasp the true thinking of the Master before being part of the narrow circle of people who enjoyed his confidence.
Such is, for example, the book by the former President of the Senate of the Free City of Danzig, Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Told Me which had, in its time, some notoriety since in 1939 the thirteenth French edition of it was already published: an excellent book, despite of the aggressiveness that pierces every line. The fact that Rauschning himself seems to be completely unaware of the cyclical conception of history and, in general, of the supra-human truths which are the basis of all ancient wisdom, makes the judgements he believes he is making against the Führer all the more eloquent by accusing him (without knowing it) of waging his struggle precisely in the name of these truths. Finally, nothing can shed light on certain aspects of Hitlerism like Hans Grimm’s book Warum? Woher? aber Wohin?, a work by an impartial non-Hitlerite, or the account given by Auguste Kubizek, a man with no political allegiance whatsoever, of his years of friendship with the future Führer, then aged between fifteen and nineteen, in his book Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund.[2]
The first thing that strikes one on reading these various texts is Adolf Hitler’s awareness of the speed with which everything is falling apart in our time, and of the total reversal of values that the slightest recovery would mean. It is also the very clear feeling he seems to have had that his action represented the last chance of the Aryan race as well as the last (at least theoretical) possibility of recovery, before the end of the present cycle.
This sentiment was coupled with the conviction that he himself was not ‘the last’ fighter against the forces of disintegration; not the One who would usher in the glorious ‘Golden Age’ of the next cycle. Five years before the seizure of power, the Führer said in all simplicity to Hans Grimm: ‘I know that someone must appear, and face our situation. I have been looking for this man. I have not been able to find him anywhere, and that is why I have arisen, to carry out the preparatory task, only the urgent preparatory task, for I know that I am not the One who is to come. And I also know what I lack. But the Other remains absent, and no one is there, and there is no more time to waste’.[3]
There is even reason to believe that he sensed—if not knew; I will come back to this point—the inevitability of disaster and the need for him to sacrifice himself. But just as his vision was centred on the German people but went far beyond Germany, so his defeat was to be a catastrophe on a planetary scale (which it was, indeed) and his sacrifice was to take on an unsuspected significance.
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Note of the Editor: In 1955 the notable Mexican José Vasconcelos (see my 2011 article: here) wrote a preface for Salvador Borrego’s main work, Derrota Mundial [World Defeat], in which Borrego argues that the world lost with the defeat of Germany. In 2015, on Borrego’s 100th birthday, David Duke, Ernst Zündel and Mark Weber visited him in Mexico. The four of them can be seen in this photograph; Weber appears to the far left; Zündel in the middle.
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He told Hermann Rauschning: ‘If we fail to win, we will drag half the world down with us, and no one will be able to rejoice in a victory over Germany’ and: ‘He could not otherwise accomplish his mission’, notes this author, without apparently realising the significance of such an assertion.[4]
So what was this ‘mission’, so imperious although He who knew he was in charge of it could, at times, foresee its failure? It was that of all those beings, both human and more than human—in India they are called avatars or descents of the divine Spirit in the visible and tangible world—who, from age to age, have fought against the tide of Time, for the restoration of a material order in the image of the eternal Order: that of the God Krishna, that of the Prophet Mohammed, and, in Germanic legend, truer than history: that of the hero Siegfried, like them both initiate and warrior.
Such a mission always implies the destruction of the decadent world, without which the restoration of a hierarchical society according to eternal values would be unthinkable. It therefore implies the recognition of the reign of evil, of the ‘triumph of injustice’[5] that is, what is contrary to the divine Order, at the time of the combatant—and the exaltation of combat. Undoubtedly, people who militate by violence against an already bad established order, in favour of a ‘new world’ even worse from the viewpoint of natural hierarchies, are also dissatisfied people who aren’t afraid of armed struggle. But, as I have tried to show above, it is the nature of their dream, not the methods employed for its realisation, which places them exactly opposite the fighters against time.
There are reckless, irresponsible fighters—both in the direction of temporal evolution and against it. There are millions of people of ‘goodwill’—liberals, individualists, pacifists, ‘friends of man’ of all stripes—who, mostly through sheer ignorance or laziness of mind, follow the deceptive suggestions of the agents of the Dark Forces, and contribute, with the most generous intentions in the world, to accelerating the pace of universal degeneration.
There are also people perfectly unconscious of the eternal laws of the visible as well as the subtle Universe, who militate enthusiastically for selection in battle, for the segregation of races, and, in general, for an aristocratic conception of the world, by instinct—simply out of horror of the physical and moral ugliness of men, and out of hatred of the prejudices and institutions which encourage its generalisation. Many of us are among them. Nobler than the former, since they are centred on beauty which, in its essence, merges with Truth, they are, despite everything, just as unresponsible in the strong sense of the word, because they are just as attached to the realm of impression, that is to say, to the subjective.
But it is different with leaders… all the more so with the founders of new times.
The real initiator of a subversive movement in the sense I have given above, can only be a man in possession of some degree of undeniable knowledge. But he uses it in reverse: for purposes contrary to the spirit of true hierarchies, therefore contrary to those which a wise man’s action should take. On the other hand, the founder and leader of a faith ‘against Time’—as Adolf Hitler was—can only be one of those men whom I have, in another book,[6] called ‘above Time’: a sage, an initiate in union with the Divine and simultaneously a warrior—and perhaps also a ‘politician’—ready to employ, at the level of the contingencies of the visible world, all the means he knows to be effective, and judging a means only by its effectiveness.
He can only be a man both above Time, as regards his being, and against Time, as regards his action in the world; in other words, a warrior (or a politician, or both) fighting against the order, institutions and powers of his time, with whatever weapons he can muster, with a view to an (at least temporary) ‘recovery’ of society, inspired by a Golden Age ideal: a will to bring the ‘new’ order into accord with the Eternal Order.
Now, I repeat: the texts, the facts, the whole history and atmosphere of National Socialism become fully comprehensible only if, once and for all, one admits that Adolf Hitler was such a man: the most recent manifestation, among us, of the One who returns from age to age ‘for the protection of the righteous, for the destruction of those who do evil, for the firm establishment of the order according to the nature of things’.[7]
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[1] Translated into French under the title Libres propos sur la Guerre et la Paix, by R. d’Harcourt.
[2] A (shortened) French translation was published by Gallimard.
[3] Hans Grimm, Warum? Woher? aber Wohin? published by Klosterhaus Verlag, Lippoldsberg, in 1954; page 14.
[4] Hermann Rauschning, Hitler m’a dit, 13th French edition, 1939, pages 142 & 279.
[5] Bhagawad-Gîta, IV, verse 7.
[6] The Lightning and the Sun, written from 1948 to 1956, published in Calcutta in 1958.
[7] Bhagawad-Gîta, IV, verse 8.
Last Friday, in another thread a commenter started an exchange with this comment: ‘I’ve watched it [Fight Club] over 20 times, and I think it’s a great movie to instill a stoic mentality on future white racists’.
This makes me wonder what the commenter means by ‘stoic mentality’. Has he read the section on Rome in the masthead of this site, or in William Pierce’s chapter that I have so highly recommended (both appear in The Fair Race)? It also reminds me that the gulf between me and some young visitors cannot be wider, as well as some words that the Spaniard Manu Rodríguez wrote for this site in 2013:
The circumspection (diligentia), the rigor (severitas), and self-control (continentia, and temperantia) define the solemn character (gravitas) of their actions, acquired by the industriousness (industria) and tenacity (constantia). The offspring are educated in adult models (mos maiorum). Humility (modestia) and worship (reverentia) are the virtues that should govern the relationship of the younger generation with the older.
These were the manly virtues in Republican Rome before degeneracy took over, before the Romans interbred with non-whites during the decadent Roman Empire. This also portrays the spirit of the priest of the 14 words. Those who lack these virtues cannot be priests, or even apprentice priests.
Needless to say, virtually no film this century coming out of (((Hollywood))) inspires the hard Roman ethos we need to save the Aryans from extinction. Or hasn’t the young commenter who said the above even read the masthead?
There is no shortage of opponents of Marxism. They range from those who condemn all violence and are frightened by the known episodes of ‘class struggle’ in Russia and China, to those who reproach the Communists for their atheism and materialism, to those who own some property and are afraid of losing it if they have to live under the sign of the Sickle and Hammer.
Many oppose it in the name of some political doctrine, usually embodied in a ‘party’, which, if it attacks the ‘subversive’ character of Marxism, is itself no less subversive, and for the same deep reasons. This is the case with the adherents of all democratic parties, whose common denominator is to be found in the belief in the ‘equality in law’ of all men, and hence the principle of universal suffrage, of power emanating from the majority. These people don’t realise that Communism is in its infancy in this very principle, as it was already in Christian anthropocentrism (even if it is a question of the value of human souls in the eyes of a personal God who infinitely loves all men). They don’t realise that it is and can only be so, for the reason that the majority will always be the mass—and increasingly so, in an overpopulated world.
Only those who are faithful to any adequate expression of immemorial Tradition, and in particular to any true religion or to any Weltanschauung capable of serving as a basis for a true religion—any worldview which is ultimately based on the knowledge of the eternal and on the will to make it the principle of the socio-political order—, are fundamentally opposed to Marxism.
Now, disregarding the apparent paradox of such an assertion, twenty-five years after the collapse of the Third German Reich I dare to repeat that the only properly Western doctrine which (after the very old Nordic religions which Christianity persecuted and gradually killed between the 6th and 12th centuries) fulfils this condition is Hitlerism.
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Note of the Editor: Once more, Savitri didn’t know about the apocalypse of whites that also represented, in the 4th and 5th centuries, the violent destruction of the classical world by fanatic Christians. We cannot blame her. Books like this one had not been published! More recently than Savitri’s time, even Mauricio didn’t know about the blackest page of ancient history, as he commented yesterday.
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This is the only Weltanschauung infinitely more than ‘political’ that is clearly ‘against Time’ in accordance with the eternal. It is the only worldview which, in the long run, will triumph both over Marxism and the general chaos to which it will have led the world—and this, no matter how great the material defeat of its followers may have been yesterday, and no matter how hostile millions of men may be about it today. Only a total recovery can succeed a total subversion: a glorious beginning of the cycle at a lamentable end of it.
But our opponents won’t fail to draw everyone’s attention to the eminently ‘anti-traditional’ character of more than one aspect of National Socialism, both during the Kampfzeit, before 1933, and after the seizure of power. If it is ‘subversive’ from the viewpoint of eternal values to preach the ‘class struggle’ with a view to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. But wasn’t it equally subversive to rise to power democratically thanks to universal suffrage, by relying on a succession of electoral campaigns (on the protection of young fighters, for the most part as ‘proletarian’ in their behaviour, as the Communists whose attacks they repelled during meetings and whom they overcame in street battles)? Wasn’t it to be so, to keep this power, which came from the people—the masses—and to omit the reestablishment of the old monarchy despite the last and fervent recommendation of Marshal von Hindenburg, President of the Reich?
On the other hand, didn’t several German banks[1] as well as industrial magnates[2] subsidised the NSDAP, thus making the success of the National Socialist Revolution depend, in part, on the power of money and running the risk of making it considered, despite its popular appearance, the supreme defence of the ‘capitalist’ order as it already existed—that is to say, a society extremely distant from the traditional ideal?
Finally, it may be said, how can it be denied that, even after the seizure of power the Third German Reich was far from presenting the appearance of an organism inspired from top to bottom by the vision of the cosmic hierarchy? The famous author Hans Günther himself, apparently disillusioned, wrote to me in 1970 that he had, unfortunately, seen in it ‘an ochlocracy’ rather than the aristocratic regime he had dreamed of. And one cannot categorically reject without discussion this judgement of one of the most prominent theorists of Hitler’s racism before the disaster of 1945. The judgement, while undoubtedly excessive, must, in more than one particular case, certainly express some regrettable reality.
Let’s never forget that we are approaching the end of a cycle, and that the best institutions can therefore only exceptionally have a semblance of the perfection of the past. For everywhere, and the post-war period has amply proved this, there are more and more two-legged mammals and fewer and fewer men in the strongest sense of the word. No doctrine should therefore be judged by what has been accomplished in the visible world in its name.
The doctrine is true or false depending on whether or not it is in unison with that direct knowledge of the universal and eternal which only a steadily diminishing minority of sages possesses. It is true—it cannot be repeated often enough—regardless of the victory or defeat of its followers, or so-called followers on the material plane, and regardless of their weaknesses, foolishness, or even crimes. Neither the atrocities of the Holy Inquisition, nor the scandals attached to the name of Pope Alexander VI Borgia, take anything away from the truth of the vision of the ‘intelligible world’ that a Master Eckhart, for example, or some initiated Templar, may have had through Christian symbolism. And the same is true of all doctrines.
We must therefore be careful not to impute to Hitlerism the faults, weaknesses or excesses of people with power, to any degree whatsoever, under the Third Reich or during the period of struggle (Kampfzeit) from 1920 to 1933, and especially the faults or excesses committed against the spirit of the Weltanschauung and the Führer’s dream, as there seemed to be so many. In German society, as it was under the growing influence and effective rule of the Führer during the Kampfzeit and afterwards, we must see only the Führer’s efforts to mould it according to his dream, or to prevent it from evolving against that same dream. We must try to understand what he wanted to do.
Already in the official National Socialist texts addressed to the general public—in the Twenty-five Points, which form the basis of the Party programme; and above all in Mein Kampf where the great philosophical directives of the latter are traced out even more clearly—it is visible that the Movement was directed against the most cherished ideals and the most characteristic customs of the eminently decadent society, which had grown out of the Liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Lending at interest, financial speculation, and any form of gain alien to a creative endeavour, as well as the exploitation of vice or silliness in a press, literature, cinema or theatre envisaged above all as a means of making a profit, are condemned with the utmost rigour. Moreover, the very principles of modern Western civilisation—the equality of all men and all races in law, the idea that ‘law’ is the expression of the will of the majority, and ‘nation’ the community of those who, whatever their origin, ‘want to live together’; the idea that perpetual peace in abundance, the fruit of man’s ‘victory over nature’ represents the supreme good—are attacked, ridiculed and demolished in a masterly manner.
Natural law, the law of the struggle for life, is recognised and exalted on the human level as on all other levels. And the primordial importance of race and personality—the two pillars of the new faith—is proclaimed on every page. Finally, this new faith, or rather this new conception of life (neue Audassung) for the Führer and the few, is not a question of ‘faith’ but true knowledge. It is characterised as ‘corresponding to the original meaning of things’[3] which says a lot, this ‘original meaning of things’ being none other than that which they take on in the light of Tradition.
We can therefore, without going any further, affirm that everything in the history of the National Socialist Party that doesn’t seem to coincide with the spirit of a struggle ‘against Time’ is a matter of the tactics of the struggle, not its nature or purpose. It was under the pressure of hard necessity, and only after he had failed on 9 November 1923 in his attempt to seize power by force that Adolf Hitler, released from his Landsberg prison but now deprived of all means of action, had recourse—reluctantly to be sure—to the slow and long ‘legal way’, that is to say, to the repeated appeal to the voters and the gradual conquest of a majority in the Reichstag. It is well known that his first move after taking power ‘by democratic means’ was to replace the authority of the many with that of one, namely his own at all levels; in other words, to abolish democracy: to bring the political order into line with the natural order as far as possible.
It was under the pressure of a no less compelling material necessity—that of meeting the enormous expenses involved in the struggle for power in a parliamentary system with its inevitable election campaigns—that he had to accept the help of the Hugenbergs, the Kirkdorfs, the Thyssens, Dr Schacht and later Krupp, as well as of a host of industrialists and bankers.
Without it, he couldn’t have risen to power fast enough to block the road to the most dangerous forces of subversion: the Communists. For money is, more than ever, in a world which it increasingly dominates, the ‘sinews of war’ and politics. Does this mean that the Führer was subservient to money or to those who had given him money during the Kampfzeit? Does it mean that he made any concessions to them after taking power?
Far from it! He allowed them to get rich insofar as, in so doing, they served the national economy effectively and gave the working masses what he had promised them: abundance through work insofar as, subject to his authority, they continued to help the Party, i.e. the state, in peace and war. He kept them in their place and their role—like a king and the merchant ‘caste’ in a traditional society—thus showing both his realism and wisdom.
On the other hand, the (at least partial) ‘ochlocracy’ that has so often been attributed to National Socialism was, in fact, only the inevitable corollary of Adolf Hitler’s obligation to come to power by relying, quite democratically, on the majority of the electorate. It wouldn’t have existed if the putsch of 9 November 1923 had succeeded and had given him free rein to remake Germany according to his immense dream. It wouldn’t have existed because he wouldn’t have needed the collaboration of hundreds of thousands of young people ready to do anything: to strike blows as well as to receive them, to maintain in the vicinity of his massive propaganda meetings, and in the halls themselves, an order constantly threatened by the physical attacks of the most violent and implacable elements of the Communist opposition.
To conquer Germany ‘democratically’ he had to show himself, to be heard, hundreds and hundreds of times to convey to the public his message: part of his message, at least that which would induce the masses to vote for his party. The message was irresistible but it had to be communicated. And that would have been impossible without the wolf pack, the SA[4], who ruled the streets and who, at the risk of their own lives, ensured the Führer’s silence and safety amid his audience.
Adolf Hitler loved his young beasts, madly attached to his person, eager for both violence and adoration, many of whom were former Communists who had been won over to the holy cause by the fascination of his words, his looks, his behaviour and his doctrine in which the son of a proletarian saw something more outrageous, more brutal, and therefore more exalting than Marxism.
He loved them. And he loved the latest of their supreme leaders of the Kampfzeit, under whose orders he himself had once fought in the war: Ernst Röhm, who had returned from Bolivia, from the end of the world, at his call in 1930. He willingly turned a blind eye to his deplorable morals and saw in him only the perfect soldier and genius organiser.
And yet… he resigned himself, despite everything, to having this old comrade killed, or to let him be killed—almost the only man in his entourage who was on a first-name basis with him[5]—as soon as he was convinced that the turbulence of this troop, so faithful though it was, its spirit of independence and especially the growing opposition which was emerging between it and the regular German army could only lead precisely to ochlocracy, if not to civil war; in any case, only to the weakening of Germany.
One could compare this tragic but apparently necessary purge of June 30, 1934 with the most Machiavellian settlements of accounts in history; for example, the execution without trial of Don Ramiro di Lorqua on the orders of Caesar Borgia—with this crucial difference, however: that, while the Duke of Valentino had in mind only power for himself, the Führer aimed infinitely higher. He wanted power to try, in a desperate effort, to reverse the march of Time against itself, in the name of eternal values. There was nothing personal in his struggle at any stage.
And if, despite the fervent desire of Field Marshal and Reich President von Hindenburg, he rejected any idea of restoring the monarchy, it was not out of ambition either. It was because he was aware of the vanity of such a step in terms of values and true hierarchies. The monarchy ‘by divine right’, the only normal one from the traditional point of view[6] had, for centuries already, lost all meaning and justification in Europe.
The Führer knew this. It was not a question of trying to restore a shaky order by reinstalling a parliamentary monarchy presided over (there is no other word) by William II or one of his sons. He wanted to build a new order, or rather to resurrect the oldest order: the ‘original’ order in the strongest and most durable form it could take in this century.
And he knew that, by the choice of those forces of life which, throughout any cycle of time, untiringly oppose the ineluctable current of dissolution, he—the eternal Siegfried, both human and more than human—held both the legitimate power in this visible world and the legitimate authority emanating from beyond: the ‘power of the two Keys’. With him at the top, the pyramid of earthly hierarchies was to gradually resume its natural position, once again depicting in miniature, first in Germany, then throughout Europe and the Aryan world: the invisible Order which the Cosmos depicts in large.
It was in the name of this grandiose vision of ideal correspondences that he rejected, with equal vigour, Marxism: a doctrine of total subversion; Parliamentarism in all its forms, always based on the same superstition of quantity; and ochlocracy, a source of disorder, and therefore of constant instability.
But the traditional character of his wisdom is to be sought even more in the few texts that give us his secret, or at least intimate, talks, his open-hearted confidences in front of a few selected people, than in his writings or speeches addressed to the general public.
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[1] The Deutsche Bank, the Commerz und Privat Bank, the Dresdener Bank, the Deutsche Credit-Gesellschaft, etc.
[2] E. Kirkdorf, Fritz Thyssen, Voegler, Otto-Wolf von Schröder, then Krupp.
[3] ‘…unsere neue Auffassung, die ganz dem Ursinn der Dinge entspricht…’ (Mein Kampf, 1935 edition, page 440).
[4] Sturmabteilungen or Storm Troops.
[5] With some of his other early collaborators, such as Gregor Strasser.
[6] The elective kingship of the ancient Germans, that of the Frankish warrior raised to the flagstaff by his peers, was also ‘of divine right’ if we admit that the ‘divine’ is none other than the pure blood of a noble race.
Maybe you could admit it, if it was about a politician. But the Leader of National Socialist Germany was something else entirely. He represented, as I have said, the most recent of the visible and tangible manifestations of Him who periodically returns to lead the struggle ‘against Time’ which has been going on, intensifying, since the end of the unthinkable Golden Age, far, far behind us, and which, at the same time, announces the next Golden Age: the blessed beginning of the next cycle.
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Editor’s note: It seems to me that here I’ll differ with Savitri (I don’t think the Golden Age existed), but for the moment I won’t enter into the discussion because I haven’t yet read The Lightning and the Sun. I’ve ordered a hard-cover copy from Counter-Currents Publishing since last month, but for some reason I haven’t received it yet. Only when I read The Lightning and the Sun, considered Savitri’s magnum opus, will I know whether I will disagree with her on this point. In the meantime, let’s stick with the book she wrote in French:
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Any action he may have taken in the direction of Time can only be fully explained in the light of his mission against Time, of his desperate effort at recovery accomplished in the present conditions of the world, that is, very close relatively speaking to the end of the present cycle. It is the action of an initiate, and therefore of a visionary (not in the sense of a victim of hallucinations but in the sense of a man capable of considering time, including the time in which he lived and the people who lived with him from the point of view of the eternal present); the action of a prophet, a realist as all true prophets are.
He saw very clearly, and it was not necessary to be an initiate or a prophet, the growing interest of the masses in the material pleasures of life, and the absurdity of any effort to distract them from it. He understood that in an age increasingly dominated by technology it cannot be otherwise. More than that, he understood that, deep down, it had never been otherwise; that only the nature of the ‘material amenities’ could change, not the tendency of the majority of people to give them enormous importance—and this for the simple reason that the masses are the masses, everywhere and always. He knew that while human races are unequally gifted, so are men within the same race, or even the same people; that, in particular, alongside the German elite which all his efforts tended to promote, there was—and always would be, even after the installation of the National Socialist ‘new order’—the masses.
In an interview reported by Hermann Rauschning (a man who has become the enemy of the Hitler faith to the very extent that he has begun to grasp at least some aspects of it and whom, therefore, we must believe whenever the words he quotes are really in the mind of the person who is supposed to have uttered them) the Führer sets forth, as early as the summer of 1932, his conception of the German social order as it must, in his eyes, emerge from the revolution he is leading. ‘There will be’, he said, ‘a class of lords from the most diverse elements, which will be recruited in the struggle and will thus find its historical justification. There will be a crowd of the various members of the Party, ranked hierarchically. It is they who will form the new middle classes. There will also be the great mass of the anonymous, the collectivity of servants, the miners ad aeternum. It doesn’t matter whether they were farm owners, workers or labourers in the former bourgeois society. The economic position and social role of the past will no longer have the slightest significance.[1]
There was, therefore, and there must have been for him, even within the good and brave German people he loved, a mass that was irreducibly ‘minor’: a sympathetic mass, to be sure, because of the good Aryan race despite its naivety from which exceptional individuals could sometimes emerge and stand out; but, on the whole, a mass nonetheless with all the mediocrity that this word suggests. It was to them that the Führer offered an increasingly standardised life, full of amenities within their reach, material amenities above all, it goes without saying: the cheap house (which could be dismantled and reassembled) whose parts, the same everywhere, would be easy to find; the radio, the typewriter, and other cheap conveniences.
One only has to remember how much of an artist he was to the core, and in particular how much he had an innate sense of everything that ‘looked good’, to imagine the secret contempt he must have felt for any uniformity from below: a pitiful caricature of unity, the principle of creative synthesis.
One only has to think of his lifestyle—his legendary frugality, in the most beautiful surroundings possible; the fact that in Vienna, for example, during the years of misery that were to mark him so deeply, he went without food to afford a place in the ‘henhouse’ and to hear and see some of Wagner’s opera—to measure the gulf that separated him from all vulgar humanity, and especially from a certain fat type of Teutonic plebeian, whose conception of happiness is schematically, but forcefully and aptly, evoked in the title of a record emanating from the satiated Germany of 1969, Sauerkraut und Bier. This type didn’t wait for 1969 to appear but was widely represented among the crowds who, between 1920 and 1945, cheered Adolf Hitler, voted for him and, especially after the seizure of power, flocked to the Party and helped to increase its membership to fourteen million.
This abyss between the Führer and the densest folk, physically and intellectually, or the most mediocre of his people didn’t prevent him from loving them. He saw, beyond their narrow-minded individuality, the beautiful children who could spring from them, blood having many mysteries. And he saw the Reich, which he was reshaping from top to bottom to make it the centre of a pan-Aryan Empire, and he knew that ‘in their place’ they were part of it.
And if, understanding their limitations and the impossibility of making them overcome them, he offered them each a comfortable material life, ‘pleasant’ in its growing uniformity—a life which he didn’t offer at all to the elite—he also offered them, in the increasingly grandiose public ceremonies, the interminable parades, the music of battle songs through the paved streets, the nightly processions by the light of real torches; the Harvest festivals; the Labour festivals; the Youth festivals; the magnificent annual Party meetings in Nuremberg for days on end with countless red flags with black swastikas on a white circle at the foot of giant pylons at the top of which the flame from the massive bronze cups, the morning to evening in the bright sunshine, and from evening to midnight under the unreal phosphorescence of the columns of light faltering from the floodlights all around.
He offered them, I say, in all this, as well as in his radio speeches, and above all in the magnetism of his presence: an atmosphere such as no people had yet had the privilege of experiencing. The less intuitive, the less artistic, the densest people were subjected to this magical atmosphere which lifted them despite of themselves, above themselves; which transformed them little by little, without their knowledge, by the mere fact of the almost daily intoxication which it poured upon them: the intoxication of beauty; vertigo of strength; repeated contact with the very egregore of Germany which possessed them, pulling them out of their insignificance and returning them for a moment to what was eternal in them, the bewitching rhythm of the ‘Sieg! Heil!’ from five hundred thousand chests.
They were under this spell, and as long as they remained ‘under the spell’ they were great—greater than all peoples; greater than the men, Germans or foreign visitors, who, individually more refined, more intelligent, better than each of them, remained, for some reason or other insensitive to this spell in the strongest sense of the word. For they participated in the divine power which emanated from Him who called them to battle against the sinister Forces of decadence. They were encompassed in the beauty of His dream. And it is enough to remember the imposing solemnities of the Third Reich, if one has seen any, or to read a description of them in person (for example, Robert Brasillach’s description of the Party Congress in Nuremberg in September 1935 in his novel The Seven Colours), or just to look at good photographs of them in the few surviving albums of the period, to realise how beautiful they were—beautiful and popular—and how different they were from the official celebrations, even with military parades, of other countries under other regimes.
Unlike the organised displays of collective patriotic fervour that the governments of the ‘free world’ periodically (though increasingly rarely) regale their citizens with, there were no weary faces, no dull faces, no signs of reluctant participation or boredom. And, unlike the parallel collective demonstrations of the communist world there was nothing vulgar about them. There were no monstrous, oversized daguerrotypes of the dictator, or some ‘people’s father’ ideologue, living or dead, posted on the surrounding buildings or marching with the political, military and paramilitary formations, brandished high above their ranks; none of these heterogeneous bands daubed with demagogic slogans; nothing, I repeat, absolutely nothing of the pasteboard paraphernalia of the delirious proletarian.
There is more. These extraordinary solemnities of National Socialist Germany were beautiful in the sense that works of art of cosmic significance are beautiful. Not only was there a profusion of the immemorial swastika on the folds of the red, white and black banners (themselves symbolic colours), on the immense banners, on the men’s armbands, on the granite of the stands from the top of which the Führer was communing with his people.
It was a metaphysical symbol and not a mere image recalling such and such human activities, or ideas to the measure of man; but the gestures that were performed there, the words that were repeated there, unchanging on every occasion: symbolic, liturgical. Let us think, among other things, of the consecration of the new flags that Adolf Hitler put, one by one, in contact with the old ‘Blood Standard’: all charged with the magnetism of the dead of November 9, or of the ritual dialogue of the Führer with the leaders and young recruits of the peasant formations of the Arbeitsdienst, standing in perfect order before him, armed with their shovels like soldiers with their rifles: ‘Are you ready to fertilize the holy German land?’ – ‘Yes; we are ready’.
These solemnities were themselves symbolic: gigantic sacred dramas, mysteries where the attitude, the word, the creative rhythm and the silence in which the hundreds of thousands communed with the Centre of their collective being evoked: the hidden meaning, the eternal meaning of the New Order.
Only He who returns from age to age could, amid the reign of excessive technology—and mind-numbing standardisation—delight the working masses, and make them participate in such mysteries; transfigure them, infuse them if only for a few brief years—even the densest human specimens among them!—the enthusiasm of the regenerate.
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[1] H. Rauschning, Hitler Told Me translated from the German by A. Lehmanu 13th edition, Paris 1939, page 61.
In short, it is the ‘species’ (in other passages it is the ‘race’), that is to say, the most permanent, impersonal and essential aspect of the ‘people’ itself, that counts for the leader of the Third German Reich.
The people—his beloved German people—were to expand to the East, to colonise with the plough the immense spaces conquered by the war, build there a culture he wanted to be unprecedented; and this, not because they were ‘his’ people, but because they represented, in his mind, the nursery par excellence of a collective superhumanity; because, considered objectively, they were distinguished by qualities of health, of physical beauty, of a character of conscience, of hard work, of honesty, courage and loyalty; of intelligence both practical and speculative and of aesthetic sense: qualities which made them the ideal type of ‘the species’: the historical human closest to the ‘Idea of Man’ in the Platonic sense of the word.
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Editor’s Note: But apparently, according to this recent comment, those Germans are already gone. See my forthcoming entry on this subject right after I post the present one. Savitri continues:
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Because the Führer felt that he could, and indeed in our time was the only one who could have done it, he laid the foundations of a ‘Great Reich’ which would have been much more than a political entity. In the centuries that would have followed a National Socialist German victory, it was to gradually found a new, healthy and beautiful civilisation faithful to the fundamental laws of life (in contrast to modern society which denies them, or at least tries to thwart them): a peculiar civilisation within the Dark Ages into which we are plunged but centred, unlike that of Europe today, on the ceaseless struggle against the Forces of disintegration; against all softening and all uglification, against ‘the direction of history’ which is only decadence.
And it was to be up to this grandiose task that he had to practise the politics of the overflowing life; encourage the birth rate, certainly, but also not oppose natural selection; eliminate without hesitation the crazy, the weak, the mongrels and to ensure the survival of the best.
The elite of the best, the natural aristocracy, necessarily constituting a minority (and this, more and more as the Dark Ages progressed), was necessary to exalt the large family, to honour spectacularly the most fertile mothers, to do everything for the healthy, good-bred child, so that this minority would still be large enough to provide the framework for an indefinitely conquering organisation, as well as the creative core: the giants of art and thought of a superior culture.
The Führer repeatedly emphasised his plan to incorporate the Nordic elites—Scandinavian, Dutch, Danish, etc. into the Great Reich which he wanted to build, and sought the collaboration of Aryans (not necessarily ‘Nordics’) throughout the world. This alone would show how his racist philosophy and war aims transcended Germany, while retaining their roots there. And he would, if he had had the power to do so—that is, if he had won the war—have extended to all the Aryan elite of the earth his policy of encouraging fertility.
Two facts prove abundantly that for him these were quite different from projects ‘in the direction of Time’. The number of births was planned only because, without it, quality—already scarce, today, even among the superior races—risked becoming even scarcer: children destined to become men of exceptional value are not necessarily among the two or three first-born of their family.[1] We know what the race loses when an adult, or even a promising youth, dies. We don’t ‘know what we may be depriving the race of every time we prevent a child from being conceived, or remove it before it is born’.
On the other hand, the natural equilibrium between man and his environment was to be ensured not by any limitation of births (or pregnancies), but by the abolition of any intervention tending to encourage the survival of the weak or the ill-constituted by the quasi-permanent state of war on the ever-expanding frontiers of the Great Aryan Reich, and by the attraction which any activity that was both useful or simply beautiful and dangerous would have exercised on the young.
The Aryan world, dominated to some extent by regenerated Germany, was to be a world of the Strong; a world where, at least, their scale of values was to express the collective ethics. There, one had to cultivate a love of life and hard and beautiful action, contempt for human suffering and death; banish from it the preoccupation with ‘happiness’, the search for consoling illusions, the fear of the unknown and all kinds of weaknesses, pettinesses, futilities inseparable from decadent civilizations. It was to be a milieu capable of engendering and promoting a more-than-human aristocracy: the complete antithesis of the stultifying reign of anthropocentric materialism, either of the Communists or the ‘consumer societies’.
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[1] Libres propos sur la guerre et la paix, translation by R. d’Harcourt, p. 74.
Chapter VII
Technical development
and ‘fight against time’
‘What a sun, warming the already old world
shall ripen the glorious labours again
who shone in the hands of virile nations?’
Leconte de Lisle (L’Anathème’, Poèmes Barbares)
It should be noted that the Churches, which theoretically should be the custodians of all that Christianity may contain in terms of eternal truth, [1] have only opposed scholars when the latter’s discoveries tended to cast doubt on, or openly contradicted, the letter of the Bible. (Everyone knows Galileo’s disputes with the Holy Office about the movement of the Earth.)
But there was never, to my knowledge, any question of their protesting against what seems to me to be the stumbling block to any unselfish research of the laws of matter or life; namely, against the invention of techniques designed to thwart natural purpose—what I shall call techniques of decadence. Nor did they denounce and condemn categorically, because of their inherently odious character, certain methods of scientific investigation such as all forms of vivisection.
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Editor’s Note: They don’t mind tormenting animals because they are Neanderthals; that is to say, they belong to an inferior psychoclass to ours: just as the pre-Columbian Amerinds belonged to an inferior psychoclass to that of the Spaniards. Is this passage from my Day of Wrath remembered (in the chapter ‘Sahagún’s exclamation’)?:
I don’t believe that there is a heart so hard that when listening to such inhuman cruelty, and more than bestial and devilish such as the one described above, doesn’t get touched and moved by the tears and horror and is appalled; and certainly it is lamentable and horrible to see that our human nature has come to such baseness and opprobrium that [Aztec] parents kill and eat their children, without thinking they were doing anything wrong.
Like Sahagún, the priestess and the priest of the four words (‘eliminate all unnecessary suffering’) throw our hands up in horror when the man of today torments defenceless creatures, to the point of precognizing the appearance of a Kalki who avenges them (and us). Savitri continues:
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They could not, given the anthropocentrism inherent in their very doctrine. I recalled above that the vision that the esoteric teaching of Christianity opened to its Western initiates in the Middle Ages did not go beyond ‘Being’. But no exoteric form of Christianity has ever gone beyond ‘man’. Each of them affirms and emphasises the ‘apartness’ of that being, privileged whatever his individual worth (or lack of it) whatever his race or state of health. Each one proclaims concern for his own best interest, and the help it offers him in the search for his ‘happiness’ in the hereafter, certainly, but already in this lower world. Each of them is concerned only for him, ‘man’, always man, contrary even to the ‘exoterisms’ of Indo-European origin (Hinduism; Buddhism) which insist on the duties of their followers ‘towards all beings’.
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Editor’s Note: Remember my post from exactly a month ago: This very Catholic painter asked me at a family dinner: “¿Por qué los animales todavía existen?” (‘Why do animals still exist?’).
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It is, I think, precisely to this intrinsic anthropocentrism that Christianity owes the short duration of its positive role in the West insofar as, despite all the horror attached to the history of its expansion, a certain positive role can be attributed to it. Once weakened and death, the influence of its true spiritual elite—that which, until perhaps the 14th or 15th century, was still attached to Tradition—nothing was easier for the European than to move from Christian anthropocentrism to that of the rationalists, theists or atheists; to replace the concern for the individual salvation of human ‘souls’, all considered infinitely precious, by that of the ‘happiness of all men’ at the expense of other beings and the beauty of the earth, due to the proliferation of the techniques of hygiene, comfort and enjoyment within the reach of the masses.
Nothing was easier for him than to continue to profess his anthropocentrism by merely giving it a different justification, namely, by moving from the notion of ‘man’, a privileged creature because he was ‘created in the image of God’—and, what is more, of an eminently personal ‘god’—to that of ‘man’: the measure of all things and the centre of the world because he’s ‘rational’, that is to say, capable of conceiving general ideas and using them in reasoning; capable of discursive intelligence hence of ‘science’ in the current sense of the word.
The concept of ‘man’ indeed underwent some deterioration in the process. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has shown, the human individual, deprived of the character of ‘creature in the image of God’ that Christianity conferred on him, finally becomes a number within a pure quantity and a number that has less and less importance in itself. Understandably, everyone is sacrificed ‘to the majority’. But we no longer understand why ‘the majority’, or even a collectivity of ‘a few’, would sacrifice themselves or even bother for another one.
Saint-Exupéry sees the survival of a Christian mentality in the fact that in Europe, even today, hundreds of miners will risk their lives to try to pull one of them out of the hole where he lies trapped under the debris of an explosion. He predicts that we are gradually moving towards a world where this attitude, which still seems so natural to all of us, will no longer be conceivable.
Perhaps it is no longer conceivable in communist China. And it should be noted that, even in the West where it is still conceivable, the majorities are less and less inclined to impose simple inconveniences on themselves to spare one or two individuals, not of course of death but discomfort and even real physical suffering. The man who is most irritated by certain music, and who isn’t sufficiently spiritually developed to isolate himself from it by his asceticism, is forced to endure, in the buses, and sometimes even in the trains or planes, the common radio or the transistor of another traveller if the majority of passengers tolerate it or even more so enjoy it. They are not asked for their opinion.
One can, if one wishes, with Saint-Exupéry, prefer Christian anthropocentrism to that of the atheistic rationalists, fervent of experimental sciences, technical progress and the civilisation of well-being.
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Editor’s Note: This is true, and the best way to show it is to compare the most famous television series introducing the West: Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969), Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973) and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980). Obviously, the series by Christian Clark has its problems, but at least he transmits the spirit of the Aryan through art. Bronowski and Sagan on the other hand present civilisation from the point of view of science and technology: something that betrays the essence of the Aryan and his notion of the numinous.
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It is a matter of taste. But I find it impossible not to be struck by the internal logic that leads, without a solution of continuity, from the first to the second and from the latter to Marxist anthropocentrism for which man—himself a pure ‘product of his economic environment’—taken en masse is everything; taken individually, worth only what his function in the increasingly complicated machinery of production, distribution and use of material goods for the benefit of the greatest number. It seems to me impossible not to be struck by the character quite other than revolutionary and of Jacobinism at the end of the 18th century; and Marxism (and Leninism), both in the 19th and in the 20th.
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[1] Offered to the faithful through the symbolism of sacred stories and liturgy.