Savitri Devi

Defiance is Savitri Devi's vivid and impassioned memoir of her arrest, trial, and imprisonment on the charge of distributing National Socialist propaganda in Occupied Germany in 1949. Sentenced to three years imprisonment, Savitri Devi was released early at the request of the government of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.Defiance is Savitri Devi's most readable book. It is not primarily a work of philosophy or history, but a gripping first-person narrative that often reads like a novel. Defiance does, however, contain Savitri Devi's most profound and moving philosophical meditation, "The Way of Absolute Detachment," in which she uses the teachings of the Bhagavad-Gita to console herself before the prospect of the destruction of her writings and to explain the proper Aryan view of the relationship between duty and practical consequences.Reading Defiance, one quickly understands why the Allies imprisoned Savitri Devi and, once she was behind bars, tried to keep her away from the other "political" inmates: her spirit of defiance is contagious.For years, Defiance was almost impossible to find. Published in a tiny edition by Savitri Devi's husband A. K. Mukherji in Calcutta in 1951, it was distributed privately by the authoress to her friends and comrades. A second edition was published in 2008 by the Savitri Devi Archive. This third edition reprints the second with a few corrections.

The Lightning and the Sun is Savitri Devi's magnum opus and one of the founding texts of post-World War II National Socialism. Written in Europe from 1948 to 1956 and published in India in 1958, The Lightning and the Sun sets forth a unique and stunning synthesis of National Socialism with the cyclical Traditionalist philosophy of history and Hindu mythology. Savitri Devi's goal was to create a new National Socialist religion. She aspired to be the Saint Paul to Hitler's Jesus. Paul of Tarsus took Jesus, who was a religious prophet and a failed political revolutionary, and turned him into a divine incarnation, creating a religion which served as the vehicle for the triumph of Jewish values over Rome. Savitri Devi sought to transform Adolf Hitler, who was also both a prophetic figure and a failed political revolutionary, into a divine incarnation-an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu-hoping to create a religion that would serve as the vehicle for the triumph of National Socialism over egalitarian modernity. In spite of its near-legendary status, The Lightning and the Sun is a notoriously hard to find book. The first edition consisted of only 1,000 copies and is quite rare. The 1979 Samisdat reprint is long out of print and also quite rare. The most readily available edition is William Pierce's dramatically abridged version, which cuts two thirds of the text and was not authorized or checked by Savitri Devi. The Savitri Devi Archive's new edition of The Lightning and the Sun reprints the complete and unabridged first edition and corrects its many typographical errors. It also updates the citations, adds a number of explanatory notes, includes a helpful Editor's Foreword, and provides a detailed index. With this new edition, which is edited and manufactured to the highest academic press standards, The Lightning and the Sun has finally found a worthy embodiment. About the Authoress Savitri Devi (1905-1982) is one of the most original and influential National Socialist thinkers of the post-World War II era. Born Maximine Julia Portaz in Lyons, France, she was of English, Greek, and Italian ancestry and described her national¬ity as "Indo-European." She earned Master's degrees in philosophy and chemistry and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Lyons. Her books include A Warning to the Hindus (1939), L'Etang aux lotus (The Lotus Pond) (1940), A Son of God: The Life and Philosophy of Akhnaton, King of Egypt (1946), later republished as Son of the Sun (1956), Akhnaton: A Play (1948), Gold in the Furnace: Experiences in Post-War Germany (1952), Defiance: The Prison Memoirs of Savitri Devi (1958), Pilgrimage (1958), Impeachment of Man (1959), Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess (1965), Souvenirs et r flexions d'une Aryenne (Memories and Reflections of an Aryan Woman) (1976), And Time Rolls On: The Savitri Devi Interviews (2005), and Forever and Ever: Devotional Poems (2012).