SAVITRI DEVI Archive

The Superman:
The Purpose of the Universe,
the Meaning of Life

by Savitri Devi

Extracts from Defiance
Edited by R.G. Fowler

Illustration: Arno Breker's "Bereitschaft" ("Readiness").

Defiance, Centennial Edition, p. 61:

“My firm conviction. . . is that the highest purpose of life is to forward the growth of a superior humanity, whose role is to rule a healthy world. No means are too ruthless that can bring us nearer to that goal.”

Defiance, Centennial Edition, p. 234:

“The divinely ordained differences, expression of the impersonal will of the Sun, can only be maintained, nay, increased, according to the highest purpose of Creation which is to evolve perfect types, if each race is maintained pure,” said I. “And that is why, knowingly or unknowingly echoing the wisdom of ages, a great German of today, a close collaborator of the Führer has written: ‘Only in pure blood does God abide’.”

Defiance, Centennial Edition, pp. 303-304:

Slowly the sky darkened; the stars appeared; night came.

I tried to ponder over the staggering distances that separated me from those mysterious suns in space; to detach myself from all that was of this earth. But somehow, I always came back to our planet.

Gazing at a bright green star that twinkled in the midst of so many others, I said to myself: “Those rays of light have perhaps travelled for years to meet my eye. For years, at the rate of 300,000 kilometres a second! How far away that makes the burning centre from which they emanate; and how small that makes the earth—my earth that bears all I love! A mere speck on the shores of limitless, fathomless space, my earth, with its wars, its religions, its songs! Still, it is only through this little earth that I can love that endless Universe. The marvel of this earth is not Pascal’s sickly ‘thinking’ Christian, who despises the majestic Universe because he believes it less precious than his silly conceited self in the eyes of his all-too-human Yiddish god; no, the highest form of life on this planet is the healthy, handsome, fearless Aryan who follows his racial logic to the bitter end; the perfect National Socialist—the one creature who collectively and consciously, lives up to a cosmic philosophy that exceeds both himself and the earth, infinitely; a philosophy in which man’s ties, man’s happiness, man’s life and death, man’s individual ‘soul’ (if he has such a thing) do not count; in which nothing counts but the creation, maintenance, and triumph of the most dynamic and harmonious type of being: of a race of men indeed ‘like unto the Gods’; of men in tune with the grandeur of starry space.”

I knew that I had exalted that superhuman ideal, that proud, hard, logical, divine Nazi philosophy, in my book, and that my book was lost. I tried to tell myself: “What does it matter, since the doctrine is eternal? Since it is the true philosophy of Life, right through starry space, for aeons and aeons? Since, if that green star of which the radiance takes several light-years to reach us has living worlds revolving around it, the mission of those worlds is the same as that of ours: namely, through love and strife, to realise the Divine in the proud consciousness of superior races, or to perish?” And I remembered my challenge to the silly Democrats in Chapter 5 of my lost book: “You cannot ‘de-Nazify’ Nature!”¹

Defiance, Centennial Edition, pp. 334-35:

[National Socialism] aimed at stemming the physical and moral decay of modern, technically “advanced” humanity by forcing it—by forcing its racial élite, at least—to live in accordance with the ultimate purpose of Nature, which is not to make individuals “happy,” nor even to make, nations “happy,” but to evolve supermankind—living godhead—out of the existing master races, first of all, out of the pure Aryan. Happiness is a bourgeois conception, definitely. It is not our concern. We want animals to be happy—and inferior men, also, to the extent their happiness does not disturb the New Order. We believe higher mankind has better things to do. The Aryan world, remoulded by us after our final triumph, will no longer think in terms of happiness like the decadent world of today. It will think in terms of duty—like the early Vedic world, the early Christian world, the early Islamic world; like the world at the time of any great new beginning. But it will, in spirit, resemble the early Vedic world far more than either the Christian or the Islamic. For the duty it will live for will not be the duty to love all men as oneself, nor to consider them all as potential brothers in faith; it will be the duty to love the integral beauty of one’s race above oneself and above all things, and to contribute to its fullest expression, at any cost, by any means, because such is the divine purpose of Nature.

Defiance, Centennial Edition, p. 342:

“It is the superior man’s business to feel happy in the service of the highest purpose of Nature which is the return to original perfection—to supermanhood. It is the business of every man to be happy to serve that purpose, directly or indirectly, from his natural place, which is the place his race gives him in the scheme of creation. And if he cannot be? Let him not be. Who cares? Time rolls on, just the same, marked by the great Individuals who have understood the true meaning of history, and striven to remould the earth according to the standards of the eternal Order, against the downward rush of decay, result of life in falsehood—the Men against Time.”

Defiance, Centennial Edition, p. 345-46:

“The ‘duty’ in the name of which the action is done must really be duty—not any fanciful ‘obligation’; not the pursuit of any personal or even human goal; it must have nothing to do with the satisfaction or happiness of individuals, no matter how many those individuals be (numbers do not count). It must be in harmony with the supreme goal of Nature, which is the birth of a god-like humanity. In other words, the only ideal in the service of which the infliction of suffering and death is justified, is the triumph or the defence of the one world-order capable of bringing forth a god-like humanity. That alone can justify anything, for that alone is, in the words of the Bhagavad-Gita, ‘the welfare of the world’.”

¹ This sentence probably appeared in the manuscript of Gold in the Furnace, but it does not appear in the published edition, in Chapter 5 or anywhere else. The closest approximation, which does appear in Chapter 5, is: “. . . they could not de-Nazify the Gods” (Gold in the Furnace, 3rd ed., p. 61).—Ed.