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Hitler's Priestess

Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism
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The rarely told story of Savitri Devi—a Frenchwoman and one of Hitlers most powerful advocates

In this window onto the roots and evolution of international neo-Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke reveals the powerful impact of one of fascisms most creative minds.

Savitri Devis influence on neo-Nazism and other hybrid strains of mystical fascism has been continuous since the mid-1960s. A Frenchwoman of Greek-English birth, Devi became an admirer of German National Socialism in the late 1920s. Deeply impressed by its racial heritage and caste-system, she emigrated to India, where she developed her racial ideology, in the early 1930s. Her works have been reissued and distributed through various neo-Nazi networks and she has been lionized as a foremother of Nazi ideology. Her appeal to neo-Nazi sects lies in the very eccentricity of her thought—combining Aryan supremacism and anti-Semitism with Hinduism, social Darwinism, animal rights, and a fundamentally biocentric view of life—and has resulted in curious, yet potent alliances in radical ideology.

As one of the earliest Holocaust deniers and the first to suggest that Adolf Hitler was an avatar—a god come to earth in human form to restore the world to a golden age—Devi became a fixture in the shadowy neo-Nazi world. In Hitlers Priestess, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke examines how someone with so little tangible connection to Nazi Germany became such a powerful advocate of Hitlers misanthropy.

Hitlers Priestess illuminates the life of a woman who achieved the status of a prophetess for her penchant for redirecting authentic religious energies in the service of regenerate fascism.

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke is the author of several books on ideology and the Western esoteric tradition, including Hitler’s Priestess and Occult Roots of Nazism, which has remained in print since its publication in 1985 and has been translated into eight languages.

"An engrossing, disturbing, and important book. Well-researched and evocatively told, the strange story of Savitri Devi is a mirror of the twentieth centurys dark undercurrents and deserves to be widely read and pondered." ~Robert S. Ellwood,University of Southern California
"[A] superb study. . . . Goodrick-Clarke has done a service to sanity, even if the gullible will go on swallowing [Devis] recycled poison rather than his antidote." ~Times Literary Supplement
"An excellent, thought-provoking volume. . . . We may readily accept that Devi was a revolting creature. But it is as well that we realise that such demons in human form existed and still do exist." ~Independent
"An admirably cool-headed history of an inflammatory subject. . . . It is likely to stand as the definitive study of a subject that a lesser author would have exploited for maximum sensationalism." ~Gnosis
"[A] provoking volume." ~Bulletin of the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research, No. 10

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