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Devi and the Aryan Myth

Evola’s mystical teachings were linked to a growing postwar esoteric fascism that sent its apostles throughout the world. Its high priestess was Savitri Devi. Born in France to a wealthy Greek family, Devi became involved in the spiritual circles of Nazism as a young woman. During the war, she undertook a spiritual and political mission to India to study what she imagined were sacred texts on the origins of the Aryan race. By the late 1930s, Devi had become involved in the Hindu nationalist movement, approving of the idea of Hindutva preached by V. K. Savarkar, who notoriously stated that Hindu Indians should treat Muslims like the Nazis treated Jews. Devi claimed to be attracted to Hinduism because it opened her eyes to the relative insignificance of humanity on earth. Due to this insignificance, Devi viewed all “non-Aryan” humanity as parasitic on the vital energies necessary to cultivate the spiritually evolved master race.178

Like the occult mystics that preceded her, Devi believed fervently in the “new man,” for whom violence was nothing less than a spiritual duty. She organized the geographic centers of her belief system around India and Egypt, focusing on the supposedly Aryan pharaoh, Akhenaton, as well as the teachings of Tibetan spiritual leaders who she believed served as intermediaries between modern humanity and the Lemurian root-race identified by spiritualist leader Madame Blavatsky.179 In her wide-ranging spiritual doctrine, Devi tied together a collection of scriptures in order to find the revealed knowledge of white supremacist power that could regenerate Nazism and return the sacred connection between humanity and their Hyperborean ancestors.

After World War II, Devi’s books could only make cryptic reference to her hero, Adolf Hitler, who she claims stood out among other supermen like Jesus Christ, St. Paul, Akhenaton, and Buddha as the greatest “Man against Time” in the short history of humanity.180 For Devi, Hitler’s use of the elite force, the SS, was a deployment of the worldly forces of pain and agony in the service of the universal, spiritual ideal. The SS’s death’s head (Totenkopf) symbolized this usage of worldly violence for the ascendency of the hierarchy of the blood. The rigorous, austere discipline evoked by the SS in their genocidal campaigns marked the perfection of the blood through sacred purity and order.181

      Like Himmler, who had committed suicide at the end of the war, Devi exalted animals and nature over hundreds of pages ­documenting the spiritual quality and importance of animal life. To lessen the failings of humanity, Devi encouraged vegetarianism and biocentric ethics not unlike today’s deep ecology movement. Embarking on a pilgrimage of Nazi “sacred sites” around Europe, Devi claimed to undergo the ecstasies of a mystic as she conducted solemn rituals at tombs and temples. While propagandizing the return of Nazism from India to Spain, Devi fell in with a tight-knit circle of fascist organizers, and her name was raised along with Evola as one of the preeminent spiritual leaders of neofascism.

      Francis Parker Yockey and the “World Idea”

Among the most committed followers of Evola to join Otto Strasser, Otto Remer, and Oswald Mosley at a European Social Movement conference in Naples was a Nazi from the United States named Francis Parker Yockey, who sought to link fascists into a network of militants dedicated to the overthrow of US interests in Europe. Likely acting as an agent for the Nazis during the war, Yockey somehow became established as a member of the prosecutor’s team at Nuremberg before clashing with his supposed colleagues. Published in 1949, his book Imperium would go on to heavily influence fascist thought—in particular, by encouraging a sweeping cultural turn within the fascist milieu. While Remer would delight in its pages, the Buenos Aires-based Nazi publication Der Weg heralded Imperium as the “bible of the next great European revolution.” Evola would also publish his compliments.182

      Yockey’s ideological melding of left and right would set the standard for the remainder of the century. For Yockey, socialism is “the form of an age of political Imperialism, of Authority, of historical philosophy, of superpersonal political imperative.” Capitalism belongs to the past, socialism to a future, and “[t]he only distinction between types of Socialism is between efficient and inefficient, weak and strong, timid and bold.” Like Mussolini, Yockey believed in a socialism of producers, heroic only when also nationalist.

For Yockey, European nations represent a “spiritual organism” that takes shape through a “World-Idea.” They are its essence manifested in cultural form. Such ideas are “living, breathing, pulsating…higher beings” that “utilize human beings for their purposes.”183 These higher spirits are sublimated in race, Yockey believed: “Race, in the objective sense, is the spirituo-biological community of a group…beneath is the strong, primitive beat of the cosmic rhythm in a particular stock; above is the molding, creating, driving Destiny of a High Culture.”184 So race comes to mean, for Yockey, something both biological and spiritual, which builds “strong character, self-discipline, honor, ambition, renunciation of weakness, striving after perfection, superiority, leadership.”185 Meanwhile, culture becomes the visceral actuation of a transcendent, spiritual organism—its everyday practices and rituals of reproduction, such as art, music, sports, and food, all bent on the perfection of the self and the collective. Beyond nationalism, race fulfills the “World-Idea,” which Yockey claimed to understand as tantamount to the history of colonial domination. Yet for him, white culture remained deeply threatened.186

His goal remained clear: a kind of national socialist International. “The Internationale of our times appears in a time when the Spirit of the Age has outgrown political nationalism. The Age of Absolute Politics will not tolerate petty-Stateism [sic],” proclaimed Yockey.187 Like Hitler, Yockey’s understanding of “petty-statism” returned to the critique of parliamentary democracy and even provincial forms of monarchy, leading him to seek a higher, spiritual unity in imperium. Like so many fascists, Yockey’s quest for a kind of spiritual empire brought an admiration of individualists: “Anarchism, the radical denial of the State, and of all organization whatever, is an idea of genuine political force. It is anti-political in its theory, but by its intensity it is political in the only way that politics can manifest itself, i.e., it can bring men into its service and range them against others as enemies.”188 At once, racial socialism becomes a force of imperialism and authority based on an internationalist, quasi-political theory that views itself as a step beyond the crisis of civilization toward the organic future.

After the publication of Imperium, Yockey toured Europe relentlessly with a steamer trunk full of documents and books, broadening the network of postwar fascism. For a time, he worked cordially with Mosley in England, but that ended when Mosley punched him in the face in Hyde Park.189

Yockey traversed the broadening gap between Mosley and Strasser at the time. He personally collaborated with former Strasser’s agent and Black Front cofounder, Alfred Franke-­Gricksch, who brought him into the circles of the Bruderschaft (Brotherhood), one of the more well-connected fascist networks in postwar Germany. The Bruderschaft sought to take power “through slow and methodical insinuation into governmental and party positions, under cover of such secrecy or camouflage as might be necessary for the success of the operation.”190 ­Franke-Gricksch would vanish into the Soviet Union after slipping behind the Iron Curtain, but Yockey managed to create an inner circle out of his contacts with the Bruderschaft, which he named the European Liberation Front (ELF).

According to its cofounder Anthony Gannon, “We knew there was NO chance of a mass movement succeeding in the prevailing ­political/economic situation at that time, or of the near or midterm future.”191 The ELF instead sought to “take direct action against American bases in England,” destabilizing liberal democracy and bringing about a revolution from below based on culture rather than civilization.192 The ELF’s main propaganda document, the 1948 Declaration of London (actually published in 1949 and written in Belgium), rejected NATO and US involvement in Europe while holding out hope for Russia, where “Western Culture is an instinct, an Idea.”193

      Yockey’s Satanic Brood

In the United States, several of Yockey’s followers would finance and lead the National Renaissance Party (NRP) toward a ­pseudo-left fascist position in hopes that Stalinism would ultimately lead the world to fascism. Among the riffraff involved in the formation of the NRP were

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