Savitri Devi - Incurable Decadence

Incurable Decadence

by Savitri Devi

Chapter 11 of Souveniers et réflexions d'une Aryenne
(Memories and Reflections of an Aryan Woman)

Translated by R.G. Fowler

“No longer giant, similar to the Spirits, proud and free,
And always indomitable, if not victorious;
But servile, crawling, crafty, cowardly, envious,
Frozen flesh where nothing stirs or trembles any more,
Man will swarm anew under the skies.”
—Leconte  de Lisle (“Cain,” Barbaric Poems)

“An impure air embraces the globe stripped
Of the woods that sheltered it in their sublime mantle;
The mountains, under vile feet, have lowered their summits;
The mysterious heart of the ocean is defiled.”
—Leconte de Lisle (“The Anathema,” Barbaric Poems)

The perenniality of Hitlerism as an expression of the eternal, more-than-human Tradition—in particular of the Germanic form of this Tradition—adapted to our time, does not at all, however, mean the resurgence, in the more or less near future, of the new civilization which was taking shape within the framework of the Third Reich.

As I tried to show in another study,¹ all the religious or political (or both religious and political) leaders who act against decadence, against the false values inseparable from the puerile over-estimation of “man,” fail in the long run, even when they appear to succeed—for decadence is the very direction of Time, against which no one should expect, during a cycle, to remain victorious forever.

If, despite everything, they managed to found a civilization attached by its guiding principles to some particular form of the Tradition, they achieved this at the price of certain essential compromises on the exoteric level, which ensured the permanent enthusiasm of the crowd to them, the consequence of spectacular success. A legislation based on their teaching still governs States, if not continents, centuries after their deaths. And although their work is exhausted and falls apart all the more quickly the further they pass from the promoters of “rectifications”; although, if they could “return,” they would hardly recognize their creation in what, in the course of Time, became of the civilizations they had founded, they left something visible; something pitifully ossified—sometimes even degenerate—but, at least, of historical importance.

As for the the others, whose creation against the directing tendencies of their times ends with them: that happens when the inspired leaders refuse the compromises which, more and more as the ages pass, are the indispensable conditions of success in this world. But that also happens every time such leaders live and act in a “condemned” time, i.e., in a time when no “rectification” of any size (and any duration) is possible any longer—no matter what the value and the skill of those who undertake it.

Only then is Kalki—the last of the avatars of Vishnu, or whatever name the men who are attached to the various expressions of the single Tradition like to call him—assured of “success” in a combat against the current of Time. And this success will then be total, consisting of nothing less than the absolute reversal of the values which characterize the end of a world and the birth of a world that is unknown and had been for a very a long time unthinkable. Accompanied by destruction without precedent, it will mean the end of the present cycle—the end of the Dark Age in which nothing good can arise any longer; the end of this accursed humanity, and the appearance of conditions of life and means of expression like those of every Golden Age.

The leaders who carried out, or who will carry out, some phase of the eternal fight “against Time” after the point when the last great rectification would have still been possible—after what Virgil Gheorghiu calls “the Twenty-fifth hour”—have not and could not leave anything behind them in this visible and tangible world, apart from a handful of clandestine disciples. And those do not have, and will not have, anything to hope for—save the arrival of Kalki; or the Saoshyant of the Zoroastreans, the Maitreya Buddha of the Buddhists, the glorious and militant Christ whom the Christians await at the “Second Coming”;² the Mahdi of the Muslims; the immortal Emperor of the Germans, surging forth, armed, from his enigmatic Cave at the head of his avenging Knights. He who returns for the last time during our cycle bears many names. But He is the Same, under each of them.

Yet one recognizes Him by his actions, i.e., his victory over all opposition, followed by the dazzling dawn of the following cycle: a new Satya Yuga, or Age of Truth.

The defeat in this world of a Leader who fought against universal decadence, thus against the very direction of Time, is enough to prove that this Leader, however great he was, was not Him. It could certainly well be Him in his essence: the eternal Savior, not of “man” but of the Life, “returns” innumerable times. But it was certainly not Him in the ultimate form in which He must reappear at the end of any cycle. Adolf Hitler was not Kalki—although he was the same, essentially speaking, as the ancient Rama Chandra, or the historical Krishna, or Siegfried, or the Prophet Mohammed, the Leader of a true “holy war” (i.e., of a ceaseless combat against the Forces of disintegration; against the Forces of the abyss). He was, like every great Combatant against the current of Time, a Precursor of Kalki. He was—always in his essence—the Emperor of the Cave. In him, the Emperor reappeared, intensely awakened, and armed, as he had reappeared already under the figures of various great German leaders, in particular Frederic II of Prussia, whom Adolf Hitler venerated so much. But he was not his last and definitive reappearance in this cycle.

In one case as in the other, he had awakened to the sound of the distress of his people. Carried by the enthusiasm of action, he and his faithful barons dashed a few steps out of the Cave. Then they had returned to the shade, Omniscient Ravens having told him that it was not, in spite of impressive signs, “yet the hour.” Frederic II founded the Prussian Old Lodge, thanks to which a more-than-human truth had, after him, continued to be transmitted to some generations of initiates. Adolf Hitler left his admirable Testament, in which he too exhorts the best to keep their blood pure, to resist the invasion of error and lies—of the counter-Tradition—and to wait.

He knew that the “twenty-fifth hour” had sounded—and for a long time. He had, at sixteen, as I pointed out, an anticipatory vision of his own combat, materially vain, but nevertheless wholly necessary.

As a German, as an Aryan, as a man conscious of the excellence of the Aryan race, independent of the fact that he was himself an integral part, he wanted ardently to overcome the world united against him and his people. He directed of all his forces, all his genius, towards the construction of a durable superior society, a visible reflection of the cosmic order; towards the Reich of his dreams. There he strove against any hope, any reason, in an immense effort to stop at all costs the levelling, the stultification, the disfigurement of the most beautiful and most gifted variety of men; to prevent and prevent forever its reduction to the state of a mass without race and character. And he fought, with all the bitterness of an artist, against the shameless destruction of the living and beautiful natural environment, in which he saw, rightly, an increasingly obvious sign of the imminent victory of the Forces of disintegration. His irrational confidence in a salvation in extremis, thanks to “the secret weapon”; his feverish waiting, under Berlin in flames, for the arrival of “the army of General Wenck,” which for a long time had ceased to exist, recall—in a dramatic absurdity that Christians can contemplate—the attitude of Christ at Gethsemani—praying to have removed from his lips the chalice of suffering which he had, however, come to drink to the dregs.

Adolf Hitler—inasmuch as he was a combatant against Time, whose kingdom, if it belonged to the eternal, was also “of this world”—clung until the end to the illusion of a total victory and, despite everything, of an immediate rectification. He clung to them, I repeat, as a German and as a man. As an initiate, he knew that it was only an illusion; that it was “too late”—already in 1920. He had seen it, in that extraordinary night at the top of Freienberg, in 1905. And the true Leaders of the “Black Order”—in particular those of the Ahnenerbe—educated like him about the inevitable, conscious like him of the destiny of the cycle close to its end—prepared, already before 1945, the clandestine survival of the essential, beyond the collapse of National Socialist Germany.

And we who follow them and follow him, also know that there will be never be a Hitlerian civilization.

No, hope no more to see us again,
Sacred walls that could not preserve my Hector.

I remember this verse that Racine puts in the mouth of Andromache, in scene IV of the first act of his tragedy of this name. And I think that the imposing processions to the rhythm of the Horst Wessel Lied, under the folds of the red, white, and black swastika standard, and all this glory that was the Third German Reich, the core of a pan-Aryan Empire, are as irrevocably past as the splendors of glorious Troy; also “past” and also immortal, because one day Legend will recreate them, when epic poetry is again a collective need.

He who returns age after age, at the same time destroying and preserving, will again appear at the end of our cycle in order to inaugurate with the best the Golden Age of the following cycle. As I recalled in these pages, Adolf Hitler awaited Him. He said to Hans Grimm, in 1928: “I know that I am not He who must come”—i.e., the last and only completely victorious one of the Men against Time of our cycle. “I undertake only the task of the most urgent preparation (die dringlichste Vorarbeit), because no one else is there to take charge.”

One incommensurably harder than he will accomplish the final task—the task of rectification—on the ruins of a humanity that believed all was permitted because it is endowed with a brain capable of calculations, and which largely deserved its fall and its loss.

***

What does it mean to speak of the irrevocable impossibility of “rectification,” in the sense in which a devotee of the cyclic theory of History—such as, in India, the first ranks of orthodox Hindus; such as, in the West, a Rene Guénon or a Julius Evola—would understand this idea? They would say—and there it is almost a “self-evident truth”—that the continuation of the course of events and currents of thought, and of the evolution of the human and not-human world, such as we know it since there is a history, i.e., since with aid of traces and documents, we are able to construct for ourselves an idea, as non-arbitrary as possible, of the past.

We can hardly go back beyond a few millennia if we want to stick to history itself, i.e., to a more or less explainable human past. We are just able to throw a glance back a few tens of millennia, on the basis of art objects, mysteriously preserved, of which we know neither the significance nor the use, but we nevertheless admire the obvious perfection.

I saw, a few years ago, in the small museum of the chateau of Foix, a statuette of flint of such modelling and of such expression that none of the masterworks of Tangara exceeds it in beauty.³ The anonymous sculptor who left this wonder, lived, the guide told me, “some thirty thousand years ago.” What did he want to make while undoubtedly spending several years of his life to give a soul to this unimportant fragment of the hardest stone there is? Did he want to represent a divinity: to create a concrete form which helped him and others to concentrate their minds, the first step towards the “realization” of the Unthinkable? Did he want to immortalize a beloved face? To attract in a point scattered forces—and which—with a definite aim—and which?

Only the men who really live “in the eternal” and who can, through a created object, come into effective contact with its creator, who is always present for them, could say. I cannot say. But I know the profound impression that this statuette left in me: the impression of a forbidden world, separated from ours by some impenetrable veil and of a quality much higher than ours; of a world where “the average man”—the simple craftsman—was how much closer to that hidden Reality than the greatest of our relatively recent artists (without speaking, of course, of all the producers of “modern art”!).

Thirty thousand years! In perpetuity without beginning or end, it was yesterday. Certain archeologists—of whom I cannot, in my ignorance, judge the exactitude or the error of their evaluations—allot ten times this age to the enigmatic cut and carved blocks of Tiahuanaco. Granting that they speak the truth, or that they are mistaken only by a few millennia, it was still yesterday. It is, beyond a certain distance into the past, difficult to distinguish the differences. That applies already to the very short period that represents a human life. As incredible as it may seem, my oldest clear memories relate to the time when I was between one-and-a-half and two years old. I remember very well, down to the furniture, the apartment in which my parents lived at that time. I easily revive the impression that certain curios made on me, and several episodes connected with the baby carriage in which my mother perambulated me. But these memories, which go back, let us say, to 1907, appear hardly older to me than those of the first film, Quo Vadis?, that I saw in April 1912, since it was preceded by the Newsreels of which one, the most important and the only one my memory retained, was none other than the famous shipwreck of the Titanic. If I were to live several centuries, I would undoubtedly put “on the same plane” memories referring to my tenth and my fiftieth years (in the way that “pre-dynastic” Egypt and that of the Pharaoh Djoser⁴ appear to me, in the fog of time, almost contemporary).

Tiahuanaco, Bolivia

Thus all that I can say of the more or less remote milestones that scientists, specialists in prehistory, discover along the way traversed by creative men—we do not even know which—is that they evoke the whole of a past in which all that counts for me, and in particular the beauty,  strangely surpasses the present that I see around me.

I was taught, as was everyone, that prehistoric man was “a barbarian,” of whom I would be afraid if, such as I am, I found myself, by the effect of some miracle, in his presence. I doubt it strongly, when I think of perfection of the craniums of the “Cro-Magnon race,” higher in capacity than those of the most beautiful and the most intelligent men of today. I doubt it when I remind myself of the extraordinary frescos of Lascaux or Altamira—the rigor of the design, the freshness and harmonious assemblage of the colors, the irresistible suggestion of movement—and especially when I compare them with those decadent paintings without contours, and what is more, without any relation to healthy visible or invisible reality, that the cultural authorities of Third Reich judged (with reason) appropriate exhibits for a “museum of horrors.” I doubt it when I remember that they did not find in these caves, and in others as well, any trace of blackening of the stone by any kind of smoke.

Cave paintings, Altamira, Spain

That would lead us to believe that the artists of twelve thousand years ago—or more⁵—did not work either in the light of torches or of lamps with wicks. Thus what kind of artificial illumination did they have which allowed them to decorate the walls of caves as obscure as oubliettes? Or did they have, beyond us and our predecessors of the great ages of art, the physical superiority to be able to see in the thickest darkness, to the point that they could go there to play and to work without lighting? If it were so—as some (wrongly or rightly?) supposed—the normal reaction of a spirit prizing perfection, at least before these representatives of prehistory, should be not a retrospective fear, but an admiration without reserve.

To go back beyond any time in which the men who created art and symbols surely lived, would be to give an opinion in the old controversy of the biological origins of man. Can one, without entering the field of the pure hypothesis? Can one see, in the classifiable traces of a past of a million years and more, the “proofs” of any bodily filiation between certain primates of extinct species and “man”—or certain races of men—as Robert Ardrey made on the basis of the observations of an impressive number of paleontologists? The assumption that certain “Hominid” primates of extinct species, or even living ones, were rather specimens of very old degenerated human races, wouldn’t it explain just as well, if not better, the data of experience? Men of the quite inferior races of today, whom one wrongly calls “primitive,” are, on the contrary, the ossified remnants of civilizations which, in the twilight of the past, lost any contact with the living source of their ancient wisdom. They are what the “civilized” majority of today could well become if our cycle lasted long enough to give them time. Why could not the “Hominid” primates as well be remannts of men, fallen survivors of completed cycles, rather than the representatives of human races “in gestation”? Not being myself either paleontologist or biologist, I prefer to remain apart from these discussions to which I could not bring any new valid argument. The scientific spirit prohibits one to speak about what one does not know.

To tell the truth, I know neither the age of the ruins of Tiahuanaco or of Machu Picchu, nor the secrect of the transport and erection of monoliths of hundreds of tons; nor that of painting—and of what painting!—without torches and lamps, in caves where the it is as black as a furnace or a dungeon of the Middle Ages. But I know that the human beings who painted these frescos, raised these blocks, engraved in stone a calendar more complex and more precise than our own, according to which one can give an approximate date to the civilization of Tiahuanaco, ranked above the men than I see around me—even those comrades in combat, before whom I feel so small.

They were our superiors, certainly not in the power, which all the moderns share, to obtain immediate results at will, merely by pressing buttons, but insofar as they could see, hear, smell, know directly both the visible world, near or distant, and the invisible world of Essences. They were closer than us, and the most remarkable of our predecessors of the most perfect “historical” civilizations, to this paradisiacal state that all the forms of the Tradition make, at the beginning of times, a privilege of not yet fallen man. If they were not—or were no longer—all sages, at least there lived among them proportionally many more initiates then even in our more remote Antiquity, more or less datable.

But that is not all. The visible world around them was infinitely more beautiful than what is spread out today—or was spread out already yesterday and the day before yesterday, in the vicinity of human agglomerations. It was more beautiful because there were then few men, and many animals, and trees, and immense inviolate spaces.

There is no worse enemy of the beauty of the world than the unlimited proliferation of man. There is no worse enemy of the quality of man himself than this proliferation: It is necessary—one cannot repeat it too much—to choose between “quantity” and “quality.”

The history of our cycle is—like that of any cycle—the history of an indefinitely prolonged combat between quality and quantity, until the victory of the latter: a victory complete but very short, since it coincides inevitably with the end of the cycle and the arrival of the Avenger, whom I call by his Sanskrit name: Kalki.

If I say that the heroic but practically vain attempt at “rectification” that Hitlerism represents is the last—beyond which any effort of whatever magnitude against the current of Time, is doomed to immediate failure—it is because I do not know, in the current world, any force able to stop universal decadence, in particular to pitilessly reduce the number of men while raising the quality of the survivors; none, i.e., apart from that sole champion of the Powers of Light and Life, fully victorious: Kalki. Despite all the power and all the prestige at his disposal, Adolf Hitler could not create—recreate—the conditions that were and remain essential to the blossoming of a Golden Age. He could not either supplant technology or reduce in the whole world the number of men to something on the order of a thousandth of what it is today, i.e., practically to what it was during the centuries that preceded our Dark Age.

It is possible and even probable that, victorious, he would have tried to do it, gradually. Still, it would have been necessary that his victory be complete, and on a scale not only European, but world-wide; and that there be on Earth no rival power able to thwart his work. But then he would have been Kalki Himself, and we would live today at the dawn of a new cycle. In fact, he needed technology and at least an increasingly numerous German population, to carry out, under the current conditions, his combat against the current of Time. If, like several of his great predecessors who left behind them new civilizations, he had, on the material plane, been partially successful, his work—for the sole reason that it would have been part of an epoch so near the end of the cycle—would hardly have lasted. Let us suppose that it would have deteriorated in a few years, given the sordid selfishness and stupidity of the immense majority of our contemporaries, even the better races. The most skilful cook cannot prepare an appetizing and healthy omelet with rotten eggs. As atrocious as this may seem to us, with its immediate and remote consequences, the military defeat of 1945 was still better than the rapid degeneration of a Hitlerian civilization that appeared too late: after the final end of the era of possible, even ephemeral, rectifications!

Willy Meller, Schicksalsstunde (Hour of Destiny)

There is, in the downfall of the Third German Reich, in the horror of the last days of the Führer and his final faithful followers in the Chancellery Bunker, under the blazing inferno which Berlin had become, a grandeur worthy of the tragedies of Aeschylus or the Wagnerian Tetralogy. The combat without hope and weakness of the superhuman hero against inflexible Destiny—his destiny, and the world’s—replayed itself there, undoubtedly for the last time. The next time, it will be neither giants nor demigods, but wretched dwarves who will undergo the inevitable destruction: billions of dwarves, banal in their ugliness, without character, who will disappear before the Avenger like an anthill destroyed by a lava flow. In any case, whether or not we survive the painful childbirth of the new cycle, we will not be among these dwarves. The crucible of 1945 and especially of the post war years—the crucible, victoriously surmounted, of seductive prosperity—will have made us, some of us, what we are and remain. And in the howling of unchained power which will mark the end of all that we so cordially despise, we will greet with a shiver of exstacy the Voice of divine revenge, whose triumph will be ours—even if we must perish.

Better that, a hundred times, than participation in universal degeneration under a title that is glorious, but more and more empty of any significance! That would undoubtedly have been our lot, if the victorious Reich had survived the “twenty-fifth hour.”

***

What, then, remains to be done by those who live now, devoted body and soul to our ideal of visible (and invisible) perfection on all planes? On a worldwide scale, or even national, absolutely nothing. It is too late. The “twenty-fifth hour” has sounded for too long a time.

On the individual scale, or at least “restricted,” there remains to preserve, insofar as it is still possible, the beauty of the world: human, animal, vegetable, inanimate; all beauty; to obstinately and efficiently preserve élite minorities; dedicatedly to defend them at all costs—all noble minorities, whether they be those of the Aryans of Europe, Asia, or America, conscious of the excellence of their common race; or of those splendid large felines threatened by extinction; or of those noble trees threatened by the atrocity of being uprooted by bulldozers in order to install, on their nourishing soil, invading multitudes of mammals with two legs, less beautiful and less innocent than they. It remains to take care and resist; and to aid all beautiful minorities attacked by the agents of chaos; to resist, even if that should delay only a few decades the disappearance of the last aristocrats among men, animals, or trees. There is nothing else that one can do, if not, perhaps, to curse in one’s heart, day and night, today’s humanity (apart from very rare exceptions), and to work with all one’s efforts for its destruction. There is nothing to do if not to take responsibility for the end of this cycle, at least by wishing it unceasingly, knowing that thought—and especially directed thought—is also a force, and that the invisible governs the visible.

You who are ours—sons and fathers of the Strong and Beautiful—look around you without prejudices and passion, and say what you see! From one end of the Earth to the other, the Strong retreat before the weak armed with malicious ingenuity; the Beautiful, before the puny, the deformed, the ugly, armed with fraud; the healthy, before the sickly armed with the spoils of combat wrested away by the demons with whom they have made a pact. The giants yield ground to the dwarves, holders of divine power usurped by means of sacreligious research. All that you see more clearly than ever since the disaster of 1945.

But do not believe that it only goes back to 1945. Certainly not! The collapse of the Third German Reich and the persecution of the Religion of the Strong, which since then prevails more relentlessly than ever, are only the consequences of a desperate fight, as old as the fall of man and the end of the “Age of Truth.” They are the recent phases of gradual and inexorable loss of ground, lasting for millennia, and is only apparent since our unfruitful effort to obstruct it.

Consider the trees. Among the Strong, they are the oldest. They are our elder brothers: old kings of Creation. For millions years, they alone possessed the Earth. And how beautiful was the Earth in the time when, aside from some giant insects and the life born amidst the oceans, it nourished only them!

Franz Gerwin, Hermann-Göring-Werke, Hochöfen im Bau

The Gods know what enthusiasm seized me, at the time of my return to Germany in 1953, at the sight of the reborn industries of the Ruhr basin! In each cloud of nitrogen peroxide that erupted in burning spirals from the rebuilt factory chimnies, I greeted a new and victorious challenge to the infamous Morgenthau plan. And yet . . . an image haunts and fascinates me: that of the Ruhr basin in the epoch when the future coal which, along with iron, creates wealth today, existed “in potency” in the form of forests without end of tree-sized ferns. I think I see them, these fifty meter ferns, serried to infinity, one against another, rivals in force in their push towards the light and the sun. It grew dark between their innumerable trunks, for the canopy, always green, of their tangled leaves was thick. One humid night, heavy with the vapors arising from the warm blackish mud in which their roots plunged; one night which the wind, blowing through the gigantic fronds, filled with a harmonious wailing, or that the torrential rains filled with a dim. Everywhere one finds coal mines today, such forests then extended.

But there is, in my eyes, a more nostalgic image still. It is that of the forest of many beings, populated by variegated birds, reptiles magnificiently marked with brown, pale yellow, amber, and ebony, and of mammals of every species—in particular the felines: the most beautiful living beings—the forest of the centuries and millennia that preceded the appearance of man on our planet, and the forest of times when man, not numerous, was not yet the harmful animal that he has since become. The domain of trees then extended almost everywhere. And it was also the domain of animals. It encompassed that of the oldest civilizations, which were also most beautiful. And man, to whom the dream of “dominating Nature” and reversing its balance to his profit would then have seemed absurd and sacreligious, found normal his numerical inferiority. In one of its more suggestive poetic evocations of ancient India, Leconte de Lisle has one his characters say:

I know the narrow, mysterious paths
That lead the river to the nearby mountains.
Large tigers, striped and prowling by the hundred . . .⁶

In the hot and humid forests on the banks of the Ganges (or of the Mekong), there were tigers, leopards, and elephants. In the north of Asia and Europe, there were aurochs and wolves by the thousand, by the million. The first hunters—the first herders, rivals of predators with four legs—killed some, certainly, in order to keep for themselves the flesh of the domesticated herds. But the forest without limits left others there. The natural balance between the species was not broken yet, and was not to be for a long time. It was not yet the day when the forest—or the savanna—definitively retreated before man; where “civilization” encroached upon it without rest.

For centuries, however, man was destined to remain confined within extremely restricted areas. In Antiquity, in Egypt as well as in Assyria or Mesopotamia, in Syria, in North Africa, and Southern Europe, one encountered lions within a few kilometers of the cities. All the stories of the Ancients, from the Bible to the adventures of Androcles (how recent, in comparison!) report this. They hunted this cat, alas! And that is also stated abundantly by testimonies, written or carved. Personally, I have always—I, the friend of felines—been outraged by reading the inscription which reports the success of the young Amenhotep III, who supposedly, in only one hunt, killed “one hundred and four” of these royal animals. And the famous bas reliefs of the Museum of Oxford which, with the alarming realism, the secret of which Assyrian art posseses to the highest degree, depict Assurnasirpal, and his party in tow, piercing with arrows a whole army of lions—of which some, their backs broken, twist and seem literally to howl in pain—inspire me to nothing less than a burning hatred of man.

And yet . . .  I must admit that, at the dawn of the fourteenth century BC no more than during the ninth, this primate had still not become, on the scale it was soon to become, the plague of the living world. He hunted, it is true, just like other predators. And he had the arrow, which strikes from far, instead of the honest claw and tooth, that only reach up close. But he did not exterminate whole species, as he was destined to do later, unlike any other beast of prey. The forest, the savanna without end, the desert—the space which he could not fully occupy, and in which he was not able even to make his presence felt in a more or less permanent way—remained the free if not inviolate domains of non-human life. No civilization had yet monopolized, to the profit of “man,” all the territory on which it flowered. Egypt itself—whose people were, by far, the most prolific of Antiquity—kept, in addition to its luxuriant palm plantations, its fauna of lions, crocodiles, and hippopotamuses. And, what is more, thanks to its theriomorphic representations of the Divine, and thanks especially to the pious love with which it surrounded certain animals—such as the innumerable cats, nourished and cherished by the priestesses of the Goddess Bastet⁷—it maintained with this fauna a bond of a subtler and stronger order, comparable with that which exists still today between the Hindu and the Cow, certain monkeys, and certain snakes, among other symbolic animals.

It would have seemed to a superficial observer that, in spite of hunting, in spite of sacrifices, in spite of the vast use of wood in the construction of houses and ships alike, animal species and sylvan beings could count on an indefinitely prosperous future.

However, already at that relatively remote time, man had become “the only mammal of which numerical increase does not cease.”⁸ In other words, the balance which had been maintained so long between all living species, including man, was—for a several centuries already—broken in favor of the latter.

It is at the very least curious to note that this expansion, still slow, perhaps, but from then on inexorable, of the mammal with two legs, starts, according to the estimate of researchers, “around four thousand years before the Christian era,”⁹ i.e., according to Hindu tradition, a few centuries before the beginning of the Dark Age, or Kali Yuga, in which we live. This is not astonishing. The “Kali Yuga” is, par excellence, the age of universal and irremediable decadence, or rather, the age during which irremediable decadence, unperceivable at the dawn of the cycle, when relatively slow, accelerates until becoming, at the end, vertiginous. It is the age during which one witnesses more and more the inversion of eternal values in the life of the people, and in that of the increasing majority of individuals, and the persecution, increasingly keener (and more effective, alas!), of beings who live and want to continue to live according to these values: the human élite—élites of all traditional civilizations, who originally are always biological élites—and of the animal and vegetable world as a whole.

It is the age where, contrary to the primitive order, quantity has, more and more, precedence over quality; where the Aryan worthy of this name retreats before the masses of the lower races, more and more numerous, compact, and uniformly smeared with compulsory education. It is the age also, where, in addition, the king of the animals and, with him, all the aristocrats of the jungle, retreat before the average (and less than average) man—less beautiful than them, far less than them; definitely further from the perfect archetype of his species than they are from theirs.

It is not the triumph of man in the sense in which we understand the word, of this “god-man” who is sometimes mentioned in certain remarks of Adolf Hitler, such as those Rauschning reported. This man died, most often in the uniform of the S.S, on all the battlefields of the Second World War, or in the dungeons of the victors of 1945, or hung on their gibbets. If he survives exceptionally—or if, born after the disaster, he breathes among us, adorned with youth—it is in the strictest clandestinity. He lives in a world which is not his, and which he knows will never become his, at least until the day when the sleeping Emperor—He-Who-Returns-Age-After-Age—will finally come forth from the shadows where he awaits and will remake the visible in the image of the eternal. Until this day, the superman, or at least the candidate for superhumanity, knows that he is and will remain “vanquished”—he who has no place anywhere; whose actions are in vain, heroic though they may be.

The man who reigns today—the victor of 1945 and, before him and with him, the winner in all the decisive conflicts of ideas of genuine world-importance—is the insect man. Innumerable, and more and more uniform, banal, despite all possible contortions to give himself an “original” air, and to believe it; irresistible by sole virtue of his proliferation without limits, he takes possession of the Earth at the cost of all beings that change relatively little, while he himself was degraded more and more quickly during this cycle, and particularly during the Dark Age.

It is still the verses of Leconte de Lisle—that nostalgic bard of all the beauties destroyed by the inexorable march of Time—that I remember when I think of “this little worm, weaker than the grass”¹⁰ of the ancient Forest, but strong because of the absolute power of his intelligence dedicated to the work of disintegration—to diabolical work (“the reverse” of the ideal order). The poet addresses himself to the Forest, which seemed to have lasted forever, and says to it :

Like a swarm of ants on a journey,
That one crushes and burns, yet still they march,
The floods will bring the king of the last days to you;
The destroyer of woods, the man with the pale face.¹¹

Words which are only too true, with this qualification that, if the “Whites” indeed were, until the middle of the twentieth century, the pitiless destroyers of the forests, like the fauna—those who massacred forty million bison in North America; and those who literally emptied North Africa and Western Asia of their lions, and India of the majority of its tigers and leopards—the “Blacks,” and the darkies of all shades, have, with a sinister enthusiasm, hastened to follow, and to continue, with the eagerness of neophytes, the war of “man” against trees and animals. They were put at the service of the “Whites”—not necessarily and not always Aryans—and have believed his lies, accepted his money, and assisted him in the work of destruction. They killed for him the elephants whose ivory he sold; hunted or trapped the big felines whose manificient pelts he coveted. And completely internalizing the anthropocentrism recently learned in his schools, and quite proud to have at least some of his technologies, they continued the butchery after he himself had begun to weary of it; even after a tardy remorse—or a late realization of the meaning of his own self-interest—had encouraged him “to protect,” henceforth, the species threatened with extinction. It is all humanity that is guilty of usurping the Earth at the expense of the forest and its former inhabitants; all, except the few individuals or groups, always in the minority, who protested against it all their lives and proved, by all that they said, wrote, or did, that they have, in this war as odious as it is old and apparently interminable, clearly took the side of the animal and the tree, against man, of whatever race.

At the root of this unlimited usurpation is, undoubtedly, technology, which is, we would well admit, an expression—the most inferior, certainly, but an expression nevertheless—of Aryan genius. Even in the Roman era, when unfortunate wild beasts were captured by the hundreds and thousands, to be sent, sonner or later, to their deaths in rhe circuses, never did the massacre of African, Aisatic (and European)¹² fauna reach the proportions it was destined to reach in our time, and already in the last century, thanks to modern methods of hunting, and in particular to firearms.

But technology in all its forms, including this one, developed only as an advantageous solution—sometimes the only possible solution—to problems of the survival of increasingly compact masses of men. It is only beyond a certain numerical limit that man, of whatever race, becomes a plague for all that lives on the earth that he inhabits, and, if he is of one of the lower races (generally, alas, the most fertile), a dangerous rival of the noblest race—a true plague, from all points of view.

The passage of the poem quoted above, reminds me of the title of a book published in France a few years ago—a cry of alarm at the idea that what will be, in a generation or two, the amplitude of human expansion on the surface of our unhappy planet: Six billion insects.

Six billion insects, i.e., six billion mammals with two legs, their practices and mentality more and more resembling termites, and…. no more, or almost no more, of the beautiful animals that decorated the Earth since the dawn of time! For man does not only kill wild beasts with his hands. There are those he condemns to death merely by removing their essential living space: the forest, savanna, even (in the case of the small half-wild beasts which are the cats), the ordinary vacant lots where their prey usually live.

Any forest, uprooted without pity by the bulldozer so that one can install on the ground it occupied a human agglomeration, certainly less beautiful than it, and generally of nearly zero cultural value, is a hymn to the glory of the eternal that disappears to make way for “cheap laughter, noises, cries of despair.”¹³ Much more: it is a habitat stolen from noble wild beasts—like squirrels, birds, reptiles, and other forms of life which perpetuated themsevels there, always in perfect balance in their relationships to others. The action which supplants the forest for the profit of man—this insatiable parasite—is a crime against the universal Mother, whose respect should be the first duty of so-called “thinking” beings. And it is almost comforting, for those who really think and are not particularly enamoured of the mammal with two legs, to see that the Mother reacts sometimes to this insult, appearing under her terrible aspect. One installs a thousand families on a levelled, weeded, asphalted site wrenched from the forest. And the following rainy season—the massacred trees no longer able to retain the water with their powerful roots—the rivers overflow, carrying away in their furious torrent ten times more people from the area and all the surrounding areas. The usurper is punished. But it teachs him nothing, alas, because he multiplies at a vertiginous rate, technology countering natural selection and preventing the elimination of the sick and weak. And he will continue to deforest, to subsit at the expense of other beings.

But the wild beasts, birds of prey, and in general the animals that live free, are not the only victims of the unlimited expansion of man. The number of domestic animals itself—except those of the species that man raises especially to kill and eat, or to exploit them in one way or another—decreases quickly. The cause of this is the accursed technology that has modifed human life in the heavily mechanized countries and removed the salutary restrictions to human proliferation provided, every few decades, by periodic epidemics.

I remember with nostalgia the beautiful cats that abounded, more than half a century ago, in the streets and houses of the good town of Lyons where I was born, and where I grew up. Rare then was the store where one did not see one of these felines sitting in the door, or comfortably stretched on the counter, or rolled in a ball in “its” basket, somewhere in a corner—well-nourished, loved, trusting, allowing itself to be caressed by the child I was. Rare was the family where one did not see one—unless they had a dog instead, also loved, cherished, happy (in general). The majority of the townsmen did not have holidays then; certainly not paid holidays. And of those who, perhaps, did have them, not all of them believed themselves obliged to pass them away from home. Or, if they did go away, at least one member of the family remained to deal with the animals; or a neighbor, who did not leave the city, or an obliging concierge, took care of them. My parents had a cat since before my birth. And also as far back as I can remember, I can see myself passing my hand with delight over silky fur, warm and purring, while a beautiful velvet head rubbed against me, and two eyes of amber, half-closed, looked upon me with a total abandonment.

Today, in the same city, and in more and more of the others, the children who grow up in the daily company of beloved domestic animals, dogs or cats, are more and more rare. This raises the question: “What would we do with them at the time of the indispensable holidays? And what would we do with them if it is necessary to move to a building where we would not be allowed to have animals in the new apartment?” One no longer conceives of spending one’s whole life in the same house, without annual holidays, without voyages, without changes. One prefers to do without familiar animals rather than car trips. Few people give up any travel because of love for the animals they took under their protection,¹⁴ if they cannot take them along and if they cannot find anybody to pay to take care of them. On the other hand, at the time of the annual rush of holiday makers out of the cities, one meets abandoned animals in the streets, along the roads, and even in the woods (sometimes tethered to tree trunks, and destined by this fact to die slowly of thirst and hunger); animals which, in their innocence, had trusted men and had given them unconditional¹⁵ love, and that these same men had, for a time, seemed to love: that they had nourished and cherished—and which they have, finally, ejected with a kick from their car, to go away, with a light heart, without responsibilities, without “embarrassment,” to enjoy their leave; in fact, they never had loved.

If there is an immanent Justice, it is to be wished that such people perish of hunger and of thirst, abandoned, disavowed by all those in whose affections they believed, on some desert island or at the bottom of a dungeon. They, sometimes, are punished in an unexpected way, such as the man and woman whose punishment the Journal of the Animal Protective Society of Lyons reported without, however, publishing their names. Parents of a small boy of six, they had, in spite of the tears and supplications of this child, pushed out the door of their car the dog who had given them all his love, then had set out again at top speed, had arrived at their vacation resort, had settled into their hotel, and had gone to sleep without remorse. But serene Justice was watching over them. The following day, the two unworthy beings found their only son dead, in a pool of blood: he had opened his veins with the “Gilette” of his father. On the night table they found, written in the child’s hand, some words: his verdict against them and all those who resemble them; to remember, day and night, the rest of their lives: “Papa and mamma are monsters. I cannot live with monsters!”

This act of heroism of a very young child could not, alas, return the unfortunate animal to the lost hearth. But it retains a symbolic value. It proclaims, in its tragic simplicity, that, in this world of the Dark Age almost at its end, where all belongs to man, and where man belongs more and more to the Forces of the abyss, it is better to die than to be born. It is connected, in its essence, and in spite of the entirely different circumstances that caused it, with all the glorious suicides motivated by an intense dislike of one’s surroundings, at one time still respected if not admired; with the abrupt revelation that the true villainy, that all villainy—in particular, all treason—is  cowardice. It is connected with all similar acts of heroism—suicides or, sometimes, murders demanding even more despair even than suicide—moved by the awareness that the inevitable future, consequence of the present, can only be a hell.

I think, in particular, of the words that the sublime Magda Goebbels addressed to the aviatrix Hanna Reitsch, a few days before giving her six children a sleeping draught and then the poison that would spare them the horror of the post-war world: “They believe in Führer and Reich,” she said. “When those are no more, they have no place at all in the world. May Heaven give me the strength to kill them!”

In the world of which the Führer had dreamed, cowardice—and especially cowardice among people of the Aryan race—would have become unthinkable. The little boy whose death I related would there have been at home, because he only asked to live among people as noble as him (and undoubtedly as his ancestors). He would surely have sensed, in the Defender of eternal values—like him a friend of animals, and above all dogs—a leader worthy of his total allegiance. But the last attempt at rectification had failed, fifteen years before his birth. The world today, the post-war world, appeared to him in the person of his abominable parents. Because it is not only those who believed and still believe “in Führer and Reich,” but all “good and brave” characters, all the Aryans worthy of the name, who have no place there, and whom one meets there—as one might expect—less and less.

***

What is more, the old bonds of affection that so often used to bind a man with his horse, or his ox—his faithful companion in work—exist less and less. The French peasant, of whose attachment to his oxen Pierre Dupont sang not so long ago,¹⁶ now uses a tractor. The European peasant preceded, or follows, in this “progress.” The plowman of the “underdeveloped” countries will follow him sooner or later, thanks to the technical assistance of the U.S.A. or the Soviet Union, and intensive propaganda. The ox will be less and less used . . . unless as an animal to be butchered. The horse also—alas!

Admittedly, the “good old days” allowed many cruelties. I remember clearly the indignation (and the hatred of man) that rose in me, as a child, at the sight of the brutality of certain carters, in the town as well as in the countryside. And venerable Antiquity—including Egyptian Antiquity, the most gentle, with that of India—left us some examples of scenes which do not have anything to envy in those which, between 1910 and 1920, caused, along with my impotent anger, the intervention, verbal and often also legal of my mother. Among other images of everyday life which cover the walls of an Egyptian tomb of the twenty-third century before Jesus Christ, there is one of a man beating an unlucky ass which, its long ears flattened back, its large eyes full of terror, seems to beg him. The twenty-eighth century BC: it was already the Dark Age, in spite of the science that made possible, among the elite, the still very recent construction of the Pyramids of Giza.

Donkeys on threshing floor, after a fifth dynasty tomb relief from Sakkara

Above I referred to the hunts of Antiquity and the bloody games of the Roman circuses, along with the vivisection (that I know of) practiced in the sixth century before the Christian era, under the inclination of the “scientific curiosity” of certain Greeks. And the world did not go, as a whole, throughout this cycle (like the whole cycle) from bad to worse. One could, apart from the great misery of the asses and the dogs in the countries of the East, and in particular in the Moslem countries—misery which lasts today—evoke the horrible treatment inflicted upon cats, and especially black cats, in Western Europe, from the Middle Ages until eighteenth or even nineteenth century—long practiced abominations without names,¹⁷ of which the effect in the invisible was, perhaps, to make the continent collectively responsible, unworthy of all “rectification” during this cycle—in particular, unworthy of Hitlerism, which could have delayed, for a few decades, the degeneration. One could also point out the recrudescence of vivisection which coincides with the revival of the interest in experimental sciences in the sixteenth, and especially the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and since.

Ill fortune has willed that this infamy—which in the last century and nowadays grew to alarming proportions among people rotten with anthropocentrism, Christian as well as rationalist—has spread, at precisely the same time as this anthropocentric attitude, in all the countries politically or morally colonized (or in both manners) by the European Occident, or the American, i.e., practically encompassing the whole earth.

To cite only one example, but one of great significance, the Indian Government—democratic and humane, as it must be in a world dominated by the victors of 1945—in the last few years, encouraged the export of thousands of monkeys, knowing full well that they would be subjected to criminal experiments (which it regarded, undoubtedly, as “creditable” because made “in the interest of science,” therefore of “man”).

And even on Indian soil, since the aforementioned “independence” of the country, as in the time of the English, various research centers exist and multiply, in particular for research against cancer, in the laboratories of which the same horrors take place as in those of Paris, London, Chicago, or Moscow. And in the large cities, stray dogs, considered “useless” by the neophytes of anthropocentrism, die in atrocious suffering, systematically poisoned with strychnine, as I saw some dying in Greece in 1970.¹⁸ (And what to say of the treatment of the dogs of Constantinople, the most brutally collected in the world—with the lasso; with pincers—and thrown on a deserted island in the Sea of Marmara to die of hunger and thirst, by order of the “Young Turk” government a few months after its accession to power, in 1908?¹⁹).

However, despite all these horrors and many more, there still existed, a few decades ago, a very powerful bond between a number of human beings and their domestic animals: dogs or cats (in Western Europe, at the beginning of this century); war and race horses; plow oxen and buffaloes. The attachment of the Arab to his horse or his camel was proverbial. The progressive mechanization of the world is today breaking this bond, in all lands.

On my return to India in 1971, it was for me a great joy to see again, in the countryside flooded by monsoon rains, so many good, large buffaloes, well nourished, plunged with delight to the muzzle in the innumerable ponds, and ruminating peacefully.

Water buffalo in their element, near the Jal Mahal, Jaipur

There were, and still are, thousands. But until when? Until—like horses and oxen elsewhere—tractors replace them. And the tractors will replace them without fail, if increasingly vast extents of fertile ground must be—in India as everywhere—stripped of their forests to nourish a soaring population—doubling every thirty years.

The proliferation of man is, as I have repeated, the root of the mechanization of life—an unthinkable process, because perfectly superfluous, in a population as thin as it still was a few millennia ago. In addition, medical technology, put in the service of rampant anthropocentrism,  contributes more and more to the proliferation of man while acting against natural selection. It is a vicious circle, which is necessary to break at all costs. We were and we are, we, the Aryan racists, enthusiasts of Adolf Hitler, the only human beings to seriously want to break it by again giving free reign to the salvation of natural selection. But the “twenty-fifth hour” having apparently already sounded many years, if not centuries, before 1933, we could not keep power and win the war.

And the process of gradual degradation of man, at the same time as the extermination of the noblest animals and the destruction of the forests—the process of the desecration and disfigurement of the Earth—continue. It can only continue, in view of the mental attitude of the men currently in power.

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¹. In The Lightning and the Sun, a book completed at the beginning of 1956, and published in Calcutta in 1958.

² The “Deutera Parousia”of which the Greek Orthodox Church speaks.

³ Tanagra is an ancient Greek city state in Bœotia noted for the beauty of the terra cotta statuettes, primarily of women and children, found in its tombs—Ed.

⁴ “The great king of the IIIrd Dynasty” (H. R. Hall, Ancient History of the Near East, 9th edition). 

⁵ Paintings of the caves of Lascaux date from the “Middle Magdalenian” period (Larousse). [The Magdalenian culture spanned roughly from 16,000 to 9,500 BC, and the Middle Magdalenian period commenced around 12,500 BC.—Ed.]

⁶ Leconte de Lisle, “Çunacépa” (Ancient Poems).

⁷ These cats were mummified after their deaths. Hundreds of thousands have been founded in the necropolises where they had been deposited.

⁸ “ . . . der einzige Säuger, der sich in ständiger Vermehrung befindet ”(Tier, vol. 11, no. 5, p. 44. Article: “Die Überbevölkerung droht als nahe Weltkatastrophe” [“Overpopulation threatens the Next World-Catastrophe”]).

⁹ “Die Überbevölkerung droht als nahe Weltkatastrophe,” p. 44.

¹⁰ Leconte de Lisle, “The Virgin Forest” (Barbaric Poems).

¹¹ Leconte de Lisle, “The Virgin Forest.”

¹² . . . and American. It is impossible, here, not to refer to the massacre of the seals—in particular of baby seals—so atrocious that a number of our contemporaries themselves have become indignant.

¹³ Leconte de Lisle, “The Virgin Forest.”

¹⁴ I, however, know of some who did it.

¹⁵ One discovered, few years ago, several thousands of dogs thus given up in the forest of Fontainebleau.

¹⁶ One remembers the well-known song: “I have two large oxen in my stable, two large white oxen, marked with red . . . “  

¹⁷ See the books of Doctor Fernand Méry, Sa Majesté le Chat (His Majesty the Cat) and Le Chat (The Cat), in which it is recalled that unfortunate animals known as “diabolic” were “crucified, skinned alive, thrown howling into blazing infernos.”

¹⁸ Today, in 1976, the dogs of Delhi without collar and tag are electrocuted—or sent to the All India Institue of Medical Sciences to serve as objects of experimentation. This year the municipality has in this way removed more than thirty thousand.

¹⁹ It is interesting to recall that the three principal members of the “Young Turk” government—Enver Pasha, Talat Pasha, and Essad Pasha—were in origin three Jews whose families had been “converted” to Islam.