Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth and Neo-Nazism

Devi was more or less completely insane, especially her wacky ideas about Hitler being an incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu but if your smart enough to weed out the psychosis she did write some good stuff. Her anti-monotheism, ecological and animal rights stuff in particular is very good. So much about her reflects how nutty and contradictry she was. For example she was obsessed with Nazism and Aryan racial purity but she married a man of Indian ancestry. She had a genius level IQ and a phd in [...]

Maximiani Portas was her first name.She believed India should be receptive to Nazism; she had found an island named Rameswaram, imbued in the Aryan culture, and whose festival, in 1935 , Devi attended. She believed also in a "pan-Aryan" doctrine, and Hinduism as an Aryan legacy. In Palestine she had taken the decision to honor the pagan gods, and fight the western Judeo-Christian tradition. She kept her beliefs, and her writings, till the end, despite the Nazi Germany defeat. And horror, I would [...]

When I first read this book in 1998, it was like a revelation, as I was introduced to many figures and ideas that I had never heard of previously. Looking back on it now, however, I realize that it is a very flawed book, and the definitive book on Savitri Devi remains to be written. Still, until that book is written, this one still offers a decent introduction and overview of the subject of Savitri and "esoteric Hitlerism" more generally, by the author of the classic "Occult Roots of Nazism."

Nazi cat lady!

Boring.

An inspirational, well-researched book. Introducing Savitri Devi's rich, active and interesting life, her journeys across Europe and Asia, and her political contacts with well-and less-known fascist/nazi/nationalist activists as well as non-political friendships. As crazy as she obviously was, she was also a very intelligent, brilliant thinker, straighforward and true to the cause, whatever it was. She could only be an example of not giving up, fighting for beliefs and causes, and religious devo [...]

This is the single most authoritative books on one of the single most interesting women of the 20th century. Goodrick Clarke is by no means an apologist for Savitri Devi or her ideas but he is still able to express her ideas in a lucid and straight forward way. His writing style in this book was equally as good as the very readable "the occult roots of Nazism" and its sequel "Black sun", but I found "Hitlers priestess" to be the most personal and readable of anything Goodrick Clarke has written [...]

Fantastic. I've been looking for this sort of history for a while, and the author addresses pretty much every question/problem I had easy to read, fascinating, and the general points that he makes about the lasting influence of Savitri Devi's 'misanthropic environmentalism' on ideas like primitivism or Deep Ecology is something I've been thinking about for a while. For me this was the perfect book at just the right time.

Despite the sensationalist title, a fascinating and scholarly look at one of the great crackpots of the 20th c.

She's a fascinating subject, and this book is as complete as we'll ever get on her. Unfortunately, when read for pleasure and not for research, the attention to detail seems overly cumulative.