by Savitri Devi

Extracts from Defiance
Edited by R.G. Fowler

Illustration: The Phoenix from the Aberdeen Bestiary.

Defiance, Centennial Edition, p. 117:

. . . in India, I was often told I was profoundly "Western" because I had nothing of the other-worldly mysticism, and nothing of the resigned acceptance of things as we find them, that are supposed to characterise the "‘East"; also because I used to say that, even if I could, I would not wish to break away from the endless circle of births and rebirths, but would prefer to come back to earth again and again, for life is lovely, at least among the higher forms of its highest manifestations. The Indians were right. I am thoroughly European—but a European of ancient Europe, exiled in our times; an Aryan, impermeable to those Christian values that have nearly killed the soul of this continent, and therefore as foreign to most of our contemporaries as would be a resurrected daughter of the Pagan North or of Pagan Greece.

Defiance, Centennial Edition, pp. 327-28:

. . . although I am, personally, anything but sure of my soul’s destiny after death; although the theory of reincarnation is to me, at the most, a theory—an hypothesis, a possibility among many others—I smiled in anticipation of my “next birth,” somewhere in the new National Socialist Europe of my dreams. “All but a fairytale, perhaps,” thought I; “but at least, a beautiful one.” The music continued to play. And I let my imagination run riot.

“According to my horoscope, cast in India,” said I, I am to die at the age of seventy-seven.¹ Assuming that I shall at once get reborn, if rebirth there be, that would mean that, in fifty years’ time, I shall be sixteen . . . Sixteen!—I never could understand why the Hindus whose views are so varied and conflicting on so many points, all seem to agree in their desire not to get reborn if they can help it. All their religious discipline is aimed at that. While I would like nothing better than to get reborn; to be sixteen once more, to be twenty, under the New Order, then solidly established: to look back to these days that we are now living as to a heroic beginning, never having known, personally, anything else but the régime I am today fighting for; and to fulfil myself, this time on all planes, in beauty, in strength, in health: the mate of a youthful warrior devoted to our ideals, and the mother of living demigods . . .”

I suddenly stopped in my outpour of eloquence. I remembered the mental agony I had lived, in and after 1945; my remorse at the thought of my old omissions; my present anguish on account of my lost manuscript. Tears came to my eyes. “The Hindus say that every one of our lives is the consequence of our whole past,” remarked I. “Am I now suffering so that I might deserve that glorious future? And in order to deserve it more completely, am I to be told, in a few days’ time, that my precious book, my gift to my Führer’s people, will be destroyed?”

“Perhaps,” said the Dutch woman, “and perhaps not. You know anyhow that, in the invisible, nothing is ever lost.”

The door was opened. The wardress on duty told us that time was up. I walked back to my cell.

. . .

I lay upon my bed and gazed at the limpid sky, so pure, so bright, so mysteriously transparent, in which the Sun would not set for another three hours. And I thought of an endless series of increasingly beautiful dedicated lives of struggle and of creation, all in the service of the truth embodied in the holy Swastika, sign of the Sun, sign of National Socialism, sign of the regenerate, conquering, god-like Aryan Race. And I prayed with all the fervour of my heart that such should be my history, from now onwards, in centuries to come, if, contrarily to what many believe, death be not a full stop. “Immortal Gods,” thought I, “help me anyhow to deserve such a history, now, in this life—whatever be the laws of life and death, which I do not know.”