The Ancient Philosophy Of The Swastika

The National Socialist conception of man and life is anything but “new.” Its first exponents on this earth were probably the oldest seers of mankind, and the principles on which it is based are as ancient as life itself. Only the National Socialist movement is new. Not merely new, but unique of its kind. It is, in the whole evolution of the West, the sole systematic attempt to build a state—nay, to organize a continent—upon the frank acknowledgement of the everlasting laws that rule the growth of races and the creation of culture; the one rational effort to put a stop to the decay of a superior race and to the subsequent confusion. It is the movement “against Time” par excellence—the movement against the age-old downward trend of history—conscious of the one way out of the evils and ugliness of our degenerate epoch, back to the joy and glory of every great beginning, and boldly urging along that way the noblest people of the West.

But precisely in order to appreciate all its novelty, and all its beauty, one should bear in mind the eternity of the philosophy that lies behind it; of what I call the philosophy of the Swastika.

This is not the philosophy of any man. It is, in the clear consciousness of the really great Ones who are capable of feeling it—from the oldest Aryan lawgivers of Vedic and post-Vedic India, down to Adolf Hitler today—the wisdom of the Cosmos, the philosophy of the Sun, Father-and-Mother of the earth.

For man is but a part of the Cosmos—”a solar product,” as a brilliant English author put it! He cannot, with impunity, set up laws for himself, against those unwritten, everlasting laws that govern life as a whole. In particular, he cannot disregard the laws that regulate the art of breeding and the evolution of races, and expect to escape the consequences which automatically follow, sooner or later, that “sin against the will of the Creator” and which are “physical and moral degeneracy.”

The Christian philosophy—nay, the philosophy of all those international religions whose adherent “any person” can become, on a level of equality with all other adherents—puts stress upon the mind, the “soul,” the “immaterial” side of man (supposed to be everlasting and all-precious) at the expense of that transient thing: the body. It forgets that, as the one vehicle of transmission of life, the body also partakes of divine everlastingness; that it is not merely the “temple of the Holy Ghost,” but the creator of that consciousness which is the Holy Ghost, in the individual, in the individual’s progeny, in the race at large.

The oldest religions in the world—none of which were “international,” but all of which applied to the folk in the midst of whom they sprang the one, super-human wisdom—stressed the primary importance of the physical side of man; the holiness of the act of life; the duties and the responsibilities of the body not only towards the individual “soul” of which it may be considered as an instrument of development, but towards past and future generations; towards the race, that is to say, towards the Cosmos, of which the race is a part. They upheld the private cult of each man’s ancestors and the public cult of each folk’s heroes, and forbade objectionable marriages as a sin against the dead and against the unborn—against Life eternal. They admitted as a matter of course the fundamental inequality of human beings, rooted in imponderable causes; the inequality of human races, and the absolute differentiation of the sexes.

We have not copied the Ancients. No living thing is ever a “copy.” And the National Socialist movement, if anything, is living; nay, is, in spite of the temporary triumph of its enemies, the one real force of life and resurrection in the half-dead world of today. No, we have not copied the Ancients. But we have, under the inspiration of that god among men—Adolf Hitler—become once more aware of the wisdom of all times without which life is bound to decay; of the wisdom, to the gradual forgetting of which is to be traced, from the dawn of history onwards, the increasing degeneracy of mankind and, in particular, the decline of the Aryan nations. We have become once more conscious of the fact that “only in pure blood does God abide.” And from the man-made religion and man-centered morality that had dominated Western consciousness for the last fifteen hundred years at least, we have come back to a life-centered religious outlook, to a morality based upon the inequality of rights and the diversity of duties among both individuals and races, and to a political conception proclaiming the right and the duty of the superior races—and of the superior personalities in every race—to rule. And we have set out to make this world first a safe place for the best for the racial élite of mankind—and then a safe place for all the living, under the protection of the best.

-excerpted from “Gold in the Furnace” by Savitri Devi (1952)