The New Temple Of The Soul

Herr A looked at me intently and spoke: “The public cult of Life and sunshine, as you have dreamed it,” said he, “will flourish here in Germany, the cradle and the stronghold of National Socialism—during your lifetime and mine. One day, somewhere on the edge of this very forest, men will behold the temple of the new Soul. I have planned it; and I shall build it after we are free once more; after ‘he’ comes back; in other words, after the new soul awakens in earnest and takes consciousness of itself.”

He was silent for a while, and spoke again. (“Was it he, Herr A, or was it more than he? Was it the consciousness of the future, was it reborn Germany speaking to me through him?” I thought.)

“The new Aryan soul that will pray and sing and dream in the temple of Life, is now slowly taking shape,” he said; “the collective soul that will uphold the Religion of Life and Light, the one religion that can minister to the aspirations of man in a permanent National Socialist State. I shall describe to you the temple as I have conceived it. I have hardly ever spoken of this to anybody. But you will understand me, I am sure.”

“I hope so.”

And he unfolded before me his beautiful dream. He described to me a splendid structure of granite, against a hill, in the midst of the woods. He evoked, before my eyes, the altar of the Sun—a huge cubic monolith bearing the holy Swastika, the Sign of the Sun, in the center of a broad open platform, reached by a monumental staircase from within the temple, and upon which fire, lit directly from the sun rays through a convergent glass or crystal, would burn day and night—and the stately services to which the warrior-like sound of trumpets would call the population, not at ten or eleven o’clock, but at sunrise and sunset, on ordinary Sundays, and on the great festive days of the Sun—the equinoxes and the solstices—natural, regular landmarks in cosmic life, and on the great national anniversaries, landmarks in the history of the race, days on which the people have taken consciousness of their greatness in some great action.

***

But Herr A spoke once more. “The time was not ripe, then,” said he. “It is not ripe now. But it will soon be. It will be, when the German people have walked to the end along the way of blood and tears, and learnt to value that which so many of them considered lightly.” “And what did they consider lightly?” I asked.

“Hitler’s words, Hitler’s love, Hitler’s spirit,” replied Herr A. “They are only now beginning to realize what a man lived in their midst; lived for them alone.”

“But would not the public cult of Life, as you understand it so well, would not your ‘German temple’ as you planned it in your mind, have helped them to realize all that?”

“No. The new soul must slowly emerge out of unconsciousness before it can express itself in a public cult. It must emerge out of new dwellings, new schools, new factories, new centers of physical training, new life. The ever-burning high altar of the Sun, bearing the sacred Sign both of Life and of National Socialism, can only be the culmination of the future city in which the new life will be an everyday reality, accepted as a matter of course. We were gradually building that splendid new life, when the vile Jew stirred up the whole world against us, and forced war upon us.”

And he described some of the features of the world that would have been if National Socialist Germany had not been defeated in 1945—of the world that will come into being tomorrow, one day, never mind when, if, with the help of the invisible forces that govern all things, we succeed in imposing our will upon men.

I was beaming with elation. “You have described,” said I to Herr A, “that which, all my life, I have dreamed and longed for, thought impossible, and regretted never to see: modern civilization at its best, modern industry in all its efficiency, in all its power, in all its grandeur; modern life with all its comforts and, along with that, the eternal Heathendom of the Aryans; the religion of living—physical and supra-physical—perfection, of ‘God residing in pure blood’ to repeat the words of Himmler; the religion of the Swastika which is the religion of the Sun; efficiency and inspiration; iron discipline coupled with enthusiasm; work, a parade; life, a manly hymn; military schools and up-to-date dwellings in the midst of trees; blast furnaces and Sun temples. That is the super-civilization according to my heart. That is, that always was my conception of true National Socialism applied in practice. And to think that I had to come to defeated, downtrodden, martyred Germany, to find at last someone to express the same dream even better than I ever have!”

“But could not that have happened without all this misery?”

“Only through the experience of disaster and oppression, through years of martyrdom, could Germany grow to realize to the full the greatness of her Savior and of all He stands for, and prepare herself to follow Him in absolute faith. She cheered Him, formerly, in the sunshine of victory, and her devotion was skin deep. Where are they now, those millions, whose lifted arms and joyous faces can be seen in the pictures of 1933 and 1935? Where are they? But now, the increasing thousands who long to shout ‘Heil Hitler’ from the bottom of the abyss, although they are not allowed to do so, mean it, with all their hearts. They will adore the holy Swastika, symbol of Life, in the Sun temples of the future. They will build the new world—the Golden Age world—which Hitler wanted.”

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