Thoughts on Reincarnation
by Savitri Devi
A Selection from her Correspondence and Interviews
Edited by R.G. Fowler
Edited by R.G. Fowler
Illustration: The Phoenix from the Aberdeen Bestiary.
Letter to Matt Koehl, New Delhi, 27 April 1977
[Mr. Mukherji] wished to die.
“Better die than get born after 1945,” he used to say. And his one
other wish was not to get born again, but merge into “cosmic
consciousness.”
Personally, I wouldn’t mind being born
again—again being sixteen, again being twenty, and thirty! But surely I
dread being fifteen months old—and two years, and three—again.
Interview, New Delhi, November 1978
(And Time Rolls On: The Savitri Devi Interviews, pp. 121-23)
(And Time Rolls On: The Savitri Devi Interviews, pp. 121-23)
Now reincarnation is one of the only
two beliefs that unite all Hindus of any caste, from the Brahmin to the
untouchable, that is to say, the harijans.1 They call them harijans,
that is to say, “people of god.” But every creature is a person of
god. It doesn’t mean anything. They’re outcasts, the lowest outcasts,
generally the aborigines. What is a harijan? He’s either an
aborigine, or else he’s a man of any caste who has done something awful
or whose ancestors have done something awful, and was outcasted. And
when you were outcasted in India, your descendants are outcasted also,
for all times to come. From the topmost Brahmin to the lowest harijan, everybody believes in reincarnation.
That is to say, there is in every
living creature, not in every man—reincarnation is for animals and
plants also, not only for people—there is in every living creature a
visible body and more than one subtle body, and these subtle bodies
separate from the rest of the physical body at the time of death. And
they constitute what they call the ego. That ego, if it is not already
merged into the universal ego—that is to say, if a man is not what the
Hindus say “liberated”—that ego takes a new birth, in some other body,
animal or human or plant. Plants live. Even minerals have some kind of
life. There is nothing in the world that’s not absolutely soaking in
some kind of life, some kind of vibration. So the belief is not that
when you are good you are reborn in a higher social status. That’s
nonsense. You will not be born rich if you are poor. If you wish to be
rich, if you are good, you don’t become rich in the next life, not
necessarily. It might be the contrary, that the rich man is re-born as a
beggar. He is reborn in that state which will be the best for his
spiritual evolution. If it is better for his spiritual evolution for
him to be born in a very low social status, he will. And the low social
status does not mean in India a low race. There are Aryans and there
are non-Aryans. There are Brahmin beggars. And there are untouchables
who are millionaires. It has nothing to do with money. And that’s one
of the things I like the best of it. An Aryan, or supposed Aryan, say, a
Brahmin, if he is a beggar and he goes to marriage ceremony, they put
him inside at the best place, the most honorable place, with the other
Brahmins. If a multi-millionaire untouchable goes to a marriage
ceremony, he’ll be put outside with his fellow untouchables. He will not
be given a better place because he has money. Money or learning. Even
learning. Brojendranath Seal2 was a scientist, a very great scientist. He was a Seal.3 That’s a very low caste in Bengal. Seals are a very low caste. He was never given greater status.
Learning can be acquired. Money can be
acquired. Only blood cannot be acquired for the Hindu religion. And
that’s what I like in the Hindu religion. It’s the only real, living
religion compatible with National Socialism. It gives priority to what
cannot be acquired with any means. You are born with a race. You can’t
change your race whatever you do. You get reborn if you are not
perfect. That is to say, if you have not gone through all the
experiences resulting from the algebraic sum of your good and bad
deeds.
Good and bad mean nothing. Good is
what is according to the nature of your soul. And bad is what goes
against nature. That’s all. In Hinduism, you do not have to kill your
instincts. Not at all. In fact, if you go to a yogi and ask him to be
your master, he asks you some questions. Among the questions there is
this, “How strong are your instincts?” If you tell him, “I have no
instincts, very little.” He says, “That’s no good for you.” The
stronger the instincts you have, the better, because the stronger means
the more and greater energy you have. You have to take that energy
upwards. You have to transform it. Well, it’s the theory of Nietzsche.
It’s exactly the idea of Nietzsche. The superman does not have to kill
his passions. He has to canalize them for a higher purpose. Dominate
them. Not let them dominate him but dominate them. That’s a Hindu idea
too.
Now you get reborn. Unless you are
finished with the processes completely, you will get reborn. Some
people are not reborn, but they wish to be reborn for the good of
creatures. Again, not of man, but of all creatures. And they are reborn
where they want to be. They choose their race. They choose their
family in which they are getting reborn. They choose their own life
beforehand. And they get reborn. These are what the Buddhists call the Bodhisattvas and the others who are not reborn at all, they are called Arhats in the Buddhist terminology.
Now, generally when you are reborn
higher, you are reborn not higher in a social status, but higher in
race. It will take centuries and millennia for a man of a lower race to
become an Aryan. Generally an Aryan is reborn as an Aryan. Unless he
has done awful things, then he might be reborn very low. I suppose the
men who tortured Streicher, for instance, would be reborn as Negroes.
It wouldn’t astonish me at all. They would deserve it. Certainly they
do. Especially if they were Aryans. If they were Jews, not so much. If
they were Jews they would be more excusable. If they were Aryans, less
excusable.
I’m not a strong believer in anything
that I cannot either see or prove with my own strength. I just take
reincarnation as an hypothesis, a theory, if you like. But I do think
that of the many, many theories that have been put forward to explain
the unexplainable, reincarnation is the most plausible. It is at least
the one that can be the best exploited for National Socialism. I told
you of Khudiram, didn’t I?4
Telling me that he was a Shudra, and even if he was still a Shudra
under the New Order it wouldn’t matter to him because he was born in
the Shudra family because of his past sins in past lives. And he said,
“Well, whatever I am in the New Order, I believe in the New Order
because it’s true.”
True or not, I don’t know.5
But I know that if we had this kind of belief in Europe, and if a
European of more or less pure Aryan descent could think, “If I’m good
in this life, and if I stay good in future lives for another five
hundred years, I might become a German. What a lovely thing to be. Or I
might become, say, a Swede.” I wouldn’t say a Swede like certain
Swedes are today, because not all of them are perfectly Aryan in
behavior. Some of them take drugs and do I don’t know what. “But an
ideal Swede, an ideal Nordic European, I’ll become that one day.
Before I get liberated completely.” It would be a very good sort of
propaganda. It’s better propaganda than what we get in Christianity.
Heaven and hell. And of course hell, if you don’t believe in the
church.
Letter to Matt Koehl, New Delhi, 2 August 1979
A few days before he died, Mr. Mukherji told me he “regretted nothing.” He often used to say that “after 1945 it is better to die than to be born.” And that he “didn’t want to be born again.”
I would not mind being born again if I were to be one of an Aryan family, kind to animals, vegetarian (as I
have always been from childhood) and not opposed to me ideologically.
I’d like to be sixteen again—and twenty-five, and thirty. But I must
say that I would not like to be four or three—a toddler—again,
or an infant. And one has to dirty one’s napkins [diapers] before one
grows up and gets ideas. It is the way of all living creatures. And we are living creatures.
Letter to Matt Koehl, New Delhi, 1 October 1980
I don’t know whether such a thing as reincarnation exists or not, and don’t really care,
conscious as I am of the part played by the body in the life of what
they call “the soul”—whatever that be. A different body (even of the
same race—for well-versed people in knowledge of traditional sciences
say one is normally reborn within one’s own race, and most of the time within one’s own family).
All those spurious books (mostly
American) according to which one can be a Negro or a Jew or anything
else in one’s “next” (or have been it in one’s latest) birth, are just bunkum, a subtle and most pernicious propaganda in view of destroying the race consciousness of the Aryan.
With a different body I say (even of the same race or even family) one has a different conscious self, different personality. So that such “immortality” is not immortality at all—not one I can strive for at least.
No, as I wrote in the Preface of Pilgrimage twenty-seven years ago, the only immortality we National Socialists are sure of is that of the man who leaves sons behind him, sons of his own blood of course—and, I would add, of his own convictions. A NS man is not really immortal if he has one son, and that—a communist, as it can (and unfortunately does) happen. (I heard of such a case in modern Germany, alas!)
Or else, if not in his
children, a man lives in his works. The workmen who built the walls and
ramparts of the city that occupied around 8,000 BC—a hundred centuries ago—the place of Jericho, live in their work (excavated in our century). The potter who made and decorated a pot lives in the shards of his pot for all time to come.
I have no children, and the things I wrote are not
original: they are as old as Life itself. I only tried to give them an
expression connected with the problems of our times. It is the pleasure of the struggle
that kept me alive that long, in spite of many daily inconveniences;
still today I would wish to live on a year or two more—with hardly any eyesight, stiff, aching legs, all sorts of physical troubles, if I knew I would [one word is illegible] surely see “the Day of Reckoning” (der Tag der Rache) in all its terrific grandeur. And hear the victorious Aryan—at last united in a common consciousness of racial superiority—tell the world that has lied to us so long: Now we are wide-awake. Now is your choice: “Hitler or Hell!” (My own words in Gold in the Furnace, written in 1948, 1949, in the midst of the ruins of Germany.)
But I have given up hope of seeing that day. And rather than pull on and on with my ailments, I should be glad—as glad as Mr. Mukherji, my co-fighter, was, three and a half years ago—to leave for good this world of decay . . .
1 The other common belief is, presumably, the caste system itself.
2 Transcription uncertain.
3 Transcription uncertain.
4 For more on Khudiram, see “Hitlerism and the Hindu World,” 18-20 and Defiance, 498.
5 The truth of reincarnation, not of the New Order.
------------------------------------ 2 Transcription uncertain.
3 Transcription uncertain.
4 For more on Khudiram, see “Hitlerism and the Hindu World,” 18-20 and Defiance, 498.
5 The truth of reincarnation, not of the New Order.
Further Thoughts on Reincarnation
by Savitri Devi
Extracts from Defiance
Edited by R.G. Fowler
Edited by R.G. Fowler
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.”
1 Savitri Devi, born on 30 September 1905, died on 22 October 1982, less than a month after her 77th birthday.—Ed.
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