Devi (1905-82) was born Maximiani Portas in Francc, of Anglo-Greek parentage. She studied at the University of Lyons and the Sorbonne. A visit to Palestine in 1929 confirmed her loathing of Jews (there is no other way of putting it). She bccame convinced that it was time for all the Aryan nations of Europe, not just the Germans, to rid themselves of the constrictions of Judaco- Christianity. These, after all, were a relatively recent imposition, since central Europe and Scandinavia had only been Christianised in the tenth century. Devi became a passionate believer in National Socialism and a devotee of Hitler, whom she saw as a god come to earth in human shape. She spent most of the Second World War in India, but came to Germany in 1948 to pursue Nazi agitprop activities. She was arrested and imprisoned.3' Devi had long been fascinated by Akhenaten and how (in her view) he seemed to relate to the anti- Christian Utopian movements, with their glorification of Aryan sun-worship. The bibliographies and footnotes to the five books she had written on Akhenaten by 1947 show how much she had read about him, though Weigall remained a favourite source. In slightly different ways, Devi's works all explore Akhenaten's relationship with Nazi ideology, through his advocacy of sun- worship and his Aryan blood: indeed, he prefigures Hitler himself. For such unpalatable books they have deceptively innocent-sounding titles, such as A Perfect Man: Akhnaton, King of Egypt (1939); Akhnaton's Eternal Message. A Scientific Religion 3300 Years Old (1940); Joy of the Sun. The Beautiful Life of Akhnaton, King of Egypt, told to Young People (1942). In fact, it would be quite easy to miss their Fascist subtext if one were unaware of the events of Devi's own life. Her two immediately post-war books were both issued by Theosophical publishing houses, another illustration of the ease with which Theosophy could accommodate dubious racial theories. 58 In A Son of God. The Life and Philosophy of Akhnaton, King of Egypt (1946), she elaborates at length how Akhenaten's religion was a fitting one for a new, Aryan world order. Was Akhenaten himself not three-quarters Aryan? She takes pains to explain how Akhenaten's religion had nothing to do either with Christianity or with Judaism: 'both arc but puerile and barbaric tribal gods, compared with that truly universal Father-and-Mother of all life, Whom the young Pharaoh adored'.59 Devi also pays a great detail of attention to Akhenaten's love of nature and his harmonious unity with the natural world. At Amarna there were
arbours in which one could sit in the shade and admire the play of light upon the sunny surface of the waters, or watch a flight of birds in the deep blue sky. The gardens, where Akhnaton often used to come either to pray, either to sit and explain his Teaching to his favourite courtiers, or simply to be alone . . . lead the soul to praise God in the loveliest manifestations of His power and to fill the heart with love for him.4"
Following Weigall, Devi's Amarna is a prelapsarian place where nothing bad happens and everyone is treated well, including animals. She was very sentimental about animals. A vegetarian (like Hitler), she even suggested that Akhenaten banned hunting and bloodsports at Amarna bccausc he loved animals so much.
Devi's five-act drama Akhnaton. A Play (1948) is a thinly disguised allegory for the fall of Hitler, with Akhenaten as Hitler, and anticipates her own propaganda mission to Germany in 1948. It is set among a beleaguered group of Aten- worshippers in the chaos after Akhenaten's death. The heroine is a young woman fanatic called Zetut-Nefcru-Aton. She describes Akhenaten in terms of a Nietzschean Superman:
A man ten thousand years ahead of our times; a man who saw, and knew, what all the sages of this land can neither see nor know; the herald of a new mankind, further above the present one than all the wise men think themselves above the simple beasts.41
The play ends with Zetut-Neferu-Aton being led off to her death, a martyr to the Atenist cause. She exits, shouting that Akhenaten would return and his teaching be vindicated, 'never mind after how many ages'.
Devi obviously identified strongly with Zetut-Neferu-Aton, whose speeches in the play set the pattern for the rest of Devi's own life. She became a tireless apologist for Hitler and Nazism, one of the first Holocaust deniers, and an important figure in forming the ideology of the neo-Nazi underground. Her Nazi agenda becomes explicit in her later writings on Akhenaten, in contrast to the rather discreet tone of A Son of God and the allegorical play. The dedication of her 1958 Akhenaten book, The Lightning and the Sun, is shocking:
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.
The Lightning and the Sun compares Akhenaten (the sun) and Ghengis Khan (the lightning) with Hitler, who combines both cosmic forces and is thus simultaneously destructive and creative, in the same way as Hindu deities like Vishnu, the destroyer who again and again creates. Devi begins with a long tirade against freedom, equal opportunities, religious toleration, and the Nuremberg war crimes trials, which she calls an 'iniquitous condemnation, after months and months of every kind of humiliation and systematical moral torture'.42 She then sets up Akhenaten as forefather of National Socialist values. As a part-Aryan, Devi's Akhenaten inherits the best aspects of both his heritages, the royal blood of the pharaohs and that of the noble Aryan race from the North, 'predestined to give the world, along with the heroic philosophy of disinterested Action, the lure of logical thinking and scientific research the Scientific spirit'." Akhenaten's 'Scientific spirit' manifested itself in the same ways that Hitler's had done. Her Amarna even had its own Auschwitz - the workmen's village. Devi distorts Pendlebury's remarks about the security of the area, with its patrol roads and surrounding walls that were 'in no way defensive but high enough to keep people in', to make it 'a place of internment for men who had disobeyed the King (what people call today a "re-education camp" when they are polite, or a concentration camp when they are not)'.44 Images of the traditional gods found there are further evidence for this: to Devi, they show that the workmen's village was inhabited by anti-Atenists who were being 're-educated'.
It would be easy to dismiss as ridiculous and irrelevant Savitri Devi's projection of sentimentality, nature-worship and Fascist propaganda onto Akhenaten. But The Lightning and the Sun, A Son of God and some of her other works are not dusty second-hand bookshop curiosities. The Lightning and the Sun was reissued by the far-right Samisdat Publishers in Toronto in 1982, and parts of it are available electronically on the World Wide Web. A Son of God has rarely been out of print since it became volume XXV in the Rosicrucian Library series, published by the Supreme Grand Lodge of the Ancicnt Mystical Order Rosac Crucis in California, who last reprinted it in 1992.1:> If anything, A Son of God is more insidious than The Lightning and the Sun, because one can miss the nasty hook sticking out of its rather stodgy bait. In A Son of God Devi addresses many ideas currently fashionable: Green and ecological issues, humanity as the ultimate threat to nature, vegetarianism, and a syncretistic New Age religion which incorporates Egyptian and Indian mysticism. I can see how A Son of God could easily lead readers from the New Age to the neo-Nazis. Savitri Devi's works are the realisation of Freud's frightening vision of a Nazi Akhenaten. At the time of writing, when the extreme right is doing so well politically, we ignore it at our peril.