THE LIGHTNING AND THE SUN by SAVITRI DEVI Calcutta, Temple Press, 1958 To the god-like Individual of our times; the Man against Time; the greatest European of all times; both Sun and Lightning: ADOLF HITLER, as a tribute of unfailing love and loyalty, for ever and ever. w “The foolish disregard Me, when clad in human semblance....” The Bhagavad-Gita, IX, verse 11. P ————— ————— “Was der Tod der Elf einmal bedeuten wird, vermögen heute nur wenige zu ahnen — noch weniger kann ich darüber schreiben. Wir stehen mitten in einer grossen Zeitenwende. Was wir alle durchmachen sind ihre Geburtswehen. Alles scheint negativ — und einmal wird dann doch Neues and Grosses geboren werden....” RUDOLF HESS (From a letter to his wife, written on the 28th October, 1946, — twelve days after the hanging of the Martyrs of Nüremberg). CONTENTS PREFACE — p. ix PART I TIMELESS PERFECTION AND CYCLIC EVOLUTION CHAPTER I: The Cyclic View of History — p. 1 CHAPTER II: Time and Violence — p. 20 CHAPTER III: Men in Time, Above Time and Against Time — p. 36 PART II THE LIGHTNING: GENGHIS KHAN CHAPTER IV: The Child of Violence — p. 59 CHAPTER V: The Will to Survive — p. 63 CHAPTER VI: The Will to Conquer — p. 87 CHAPTER VII: From the Danube to the Yellow Sea — p. 108 PART III THE SUN: AKHNATON CHAPTER VIII: “The Beautiful Child of the Living Aton” — p. 129 CHAPTER IX: The Heat-and-Light-Within-the-Disk — p. 135 CHAPTER X: The Seat of Truth — p. 159 CHAPTER XI: Too Late and Too Early — p. 196 PART IV BOTH SUN AND LIGHTNING: ADOLF HITLER CHAPTER XII: The Late-born Child of Light — p. 213 CHAPTER XIII: The Struggle for Truth — p. 218 CHAPTER XIV: The World Against its Saviour — p. 269 CHAPTER XV: Gods on Earth — p. 354 PART V EPILOGUE: KALKI, THE AVENGER CHAPTER XVI: Kalki, the Avenger — p. 411ix PREFACE This book, — begun in Scotland in the spring of 1948, and written, at intervals, in Germany, between that date and 1956, — is the result of life- long meditations upon history and religions, as well as the expression of life- long aspirations, and of a scale of moral values, which was already mine before the First World War. It could be described as a personal answer to the events of 1945 and of the following years. And I know that very many people will not like it. But I have not written it for any other purpose than that of presenting a conception of history — ancient and modern — unassailable from the standpoint of eternal Truth. I have therefore endeavoured to study both men and facts in the light of that idea of the succession of Ages, from pristine Perfection to inevitable chaos, which pertains not merely to “Hinduism,” but to all forms of the One, universal Tradition, — the Hindus being, (perhaps) but those who have retained somewhat more of that Tradition than less conservative people. It may sound ironical that so intense a yearning after faithfulness to Tradition should have led me to an interpretation of historic personalities so different from that of most people who profess interest in things of the spirit. The endless future alone will tell who has understood divine Wisdom the best: those people or myself. SAVITRI DEVI Calcutta, 21st of July, 1958 PART I TIMELESS PERFECTION AND CYCLIC EVOLUTION 1 CHAPTER I THE CYCLIC VIEW OF HISTORY The idea of progress — indefinite betterment — is anything but modern. It is probably as old as man’s oldest successful attempt to improve his material surroundings and to increase, through technical skill, his capacity of attack and defence. Technical skill, for many centuries at least, has been too precious to be despised. Nay, when displayed to an extraordinary degree, it has, more than once, been hailed as something almost divine. Wondrous legends have always been woven, for instance, round such men as were said to have, by some means, been able to raise themselves, physically, above the earth, be it Etana of Erech who soared to heaven “borne upon eagle’s wings,” or the famous Icarus, unfortunate forerunner of our modern airmen, or Manco Capac’s brother, Auca, said to have been gifted with “natural” wings which finally fared hardly better than Icarus’ artificial ones.1 But apart from such incredible feats of a handful of individuals, the Ancients as a whole distinguished themselves in many material achievements. They could boast of the irrigation system in Sumeria; of the construction of pyramids revealing, both in Egypt and, centuries later, in Central America, an amazing knowledge of astronomical data; of the bath- rooms and drains in the palace of Knossos; of the invention of the war- chariot after that of the bow and arrow, and of the sand-clock after that of the sun-dial, — enough to make them dizzy with conceit and over-confident in the destiny of their respective civilisations. Yet, although they fully recognized the value of their own work in the practical field, and surely very soon conceived the possibility — and perhaps acquired the certitude — of indefinite technical progress, they never believed in progress as a whole, 1 While Icarus fell into the sea, the Peruvian hero was turned into stone on reaching the top of the hill destined to become the site of the great Temple of the Sun, in Cuzco. 2 in progress on all lines, as most of our contemporaries seem to do. From all evidence, they faithfully clung to the traditional idea of cyclic evolution and had, in addition to that, the good sense to admit that they lived (inspire of all their achievements) in anything but the beginning of the long-drawn, downward process constituting their own particular “cycle” — and ours. Whether Hindus or Greeks, Egyptians or Japanese, Chinese, Sumerians, or ancient Americans, — or even Romans, the most “modern” amongst people of Antiquity, — they all placed the “Golden Age,” the “Age of Truth,”1 the rule of Kronos or of Ra, or of any other Gods on earth — the glorious Beginning of the slow, downward unfurling of history, whatever name it be given, — far behind them in the past. And they believed that the return of a similar Age, foretold in their respective sacred texts and oral traditions, depends, not upon man’s conscious effort, but upon iron laws, inherent to the very nature of visible and tangible manifestation, and all-pervading; upon cosmic laws. They believed that man’s conscious effort is but an expression of those laws at work, leading the world, willingly or unwillingly, wherever its destiny lies; in one word, that the history of man, as the history of the rest of the living, is but a detail in cosmic history without beginning nor end; a periodical outcome of the inner Necessity that binds all phenomena in Time. And just as the Ancients could accept that vision of the world’s evolution while still taking full advantage of all technical progress within their reach, so can — and so do, — to this day, thousands of men brought up within the pale of age-old cultures centred round the self-same traditional views, and also, in the very midst of the over-proud industrial cultures, a few stray individuals able to think for themselves. They contemplate the history of mankind in a similar perspective. While living, apparently, as “modern” men and women, — using electric fans and electric irons, telephones and trains, and aeroplanes, when they can afford it, — they nourish in their hearts a deep contempt for the childish conceit and bloated hopes of our age, and for the various recipes for “saving, mankind,” which zealous philosophers and politicians thrust into circulation. They know that nothing can “save mankind,” for 1 Satya Yuga, in the Sanskrit Scriptures. 3 mankind is reaching the end of its present cycle. The wave that carried it, for so mane millenniums, is about to break, with all the fury of acquired speed, and to merge once more into the depth of the unchanging Ocean of undifferentiated existence. It will rise; again, some day, with abrupt majesty, for such is the law of waves. But in the meantime nothing can be done to stop it. The unfortunate — the fools — are those men who, for some reason best known to themselves, — probably on account of their exaggerated estimation of what is to be lost in the process — would like to stop it. The privileged ones — the wise — are those few who, being fully aware of the increasing worthlessness of present-day mankind and of its much-applauded “progress,” know how little there is to be lost in the coming crash and look forward to it with joyous expectation as to the necessary condition of a new beginning — a new “Golden Age,” sunlit crest of the next long drawn downward wave upon the surface of the endless Ocean of Life. To those privileged ones — amongst whom we count ourselves, — the whole succession of “current events” appears in an entirely different perspective from that either of the desperate believers in “progress” or of those people who, though accepting the cyclic view of history and therefore considering the coming crash as unavoidable, feel sorry to see the civilisation in which they live rush towards its doom. To us, the high-resounding “isms” to which our contemporaries ask; us to give our allegiance, now, in 1948, are all equally futile: bound to be betrayed, defeated, and finally rejected by men at large, if containing anything really noble; bound to enjoy, for the time being, some sort of noisy success; if sufficiently vulgar, pretentious and soul-killing to appeal to the growing number of mechanically conditioned slaves that crawl about our planet, posing as free men; all destined to prove, ultimately, of no avail. The time-honoured religions, rapidly growing out of fashion as present-day “isms” become more and more popular, are no less futile — if not more: frameworks of organised superstition void of all true feeling of the Divine, or — among more sophisticated people — mere conventional aspects of social life, or systems of ethics (and of very elementary ethics at that) seasoned with a sprinkling of out-dated rites and symbols of which hardly anybody bothers to seek the original meaning; devices in the hands of clever 4 men in power to lull the simpletons into permanent obedience; convenient names, round which it might be easy to rally converging national aspirations or political tendencies; or just the last resort of weaklings and cranks: that is, practically, all they are — all they have been reduced to in the course of a few centuries — the lot of them. They are dead, in fact — as dead as the old cults that flourished before them, with the difference that those cults have long ceased exhaling the stench of death, while they (the so-called “living” ones) are still at the stage at which death is inseparable from corruption. None — neither Christianity nor Islam nor even Buddhism — can be expected now to “save” anything of that world they once partly conquered; none have any normal place in “modern” life, which is essentially devoid of all awareness of the eternal. There are no activities in “modern” life which are not futile, save perhaps those that aim at satisfying one’s body’s hunger: growing rice; growing wheat; gathering chestnuts from the woods or potatoes from one’s garden. And the one and only sensible policy can but be to let things take their course and to await the coming Destroyer, destined to clear the ground for the building of a new “Age of Truth”: the One Whom the Hindus name Kalki and hail as the tenth and last Incarnation of Vishnu; the Destroyer Whose advent is the condition of the preservation of Life, according to Life’s everlasting laws. We know all this will sound utter folly to those, more and more numerous, who, despite the untold horrors of our age, remain convinced that humanity is “progressing.” It will appear as cynicism even to many of those who accept our belief in cyclic evolution, which is the universal, traditional belief expressed in poetic form in all the sacred texts of the world, including the Bible. We have nothing to reply to this latter possible criticism, for it is entirely based upon an emotional attitude which is not ours. But we can try to point out the vanity of the popular belief in “progress,” be it only in order to stress the rationality and strength of the theory of cycles which forms the background of the triple study which is the subject of this book. * * * The exponents of the belief in “progress” put forth many arguments to prove — to themselves and to others — that our