Savitri Devi - ‘The Lightning and the Sun’

editions „Against time”, France, 2019, pp.552

This time we were less enthusiastic for that essay completed in 1958 by our beloved Savitri Devi. Begun in 1948, this essay took ten years to get written. We had only read the first chapter „The Cyclic Vision of History” of this essay which was first commercialized by Christian Bouchet and his house „Ars Magna” in 2009 with the alternative title „Eternal Perfection and Cyclic Evolution”. We had found a copy at the beautiful „Primatice” bookstore in 2010 and the same bookstore closed its doors a few years later.

Why do we say we were less enthusiastic while reading this essay? It is not for the reason that the translator Pierre Bergeron has no family link with Francis Bergeron, who had written a beautiful monograph on Saint Loup for the „Pardès” editions. Savitri Devi wrote in English despite the fact that she was French speaking. She was settled in Calcutta and she had her own „Temple Press” publishing house there. We say that for the simple reason that her subject Genghis Khan is not as strong as a model as Adolf Hitler to whom she dedicated her book: „To the divine Person of our time, the Man against time, the Greatest European of all time, both Sun and Lightning: Adolf Hitler „(op.cit. page 7).

The author expresses her admiration for the Mongolian warrior and dominator Genghis Khan through the accounts of the adventures of his soldiers in several countries in Asia or Europe but does not go into enough depth on the fact that his former colonies became Muslim with the passage of time. But, on the other hand, she deepens enough with her poetic arguments on the fact that he was also, like our idol Adolf, „against Time” since he liked „healthy violence” (op.cit. Page 57) and that „he knew how to die for „eternal values” (op.cit. 54).

We learned from her American editor Greg Johnson (alias R.G.Fowler) that Savitri Devi’s English expression was not perfect since he tells us on the introduction that the English original „contains many stylistic errors” (op.cit.page 16) and that his objective was to make „a minimum of corrections” (ibid). It is really good to know in order to self-justify our French-written expression. „I corrected the spelling and syntax errors and standardized the style of the whole” (ibid). The second important information from Greg Johnson’s introduction would be to learn the real name of Ernst Zundel, the Swiss revisionist and publisher under the Samizdat brand. His real name was Christof Friedrich. The third important information of the same introduction would be to learn that William Pierce (alias Andrew McDonald, the novelist of our favorite „Hunter”) had also made an abridged edition of the same important essay comprising half of the 552 pages and with the complicity of the New Zealander Kerry Bolton (for whom we have already written two articles) and by his former New Zealand house „Renaissance Press”.

written by Dionysos ANDRONIS