Part One: Savitri Devi: The Woman Who Turned Nazism into a Religion

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
What's esoteric my Hitler isms ship that is two Hitler
starts in a row. Jesus, well it fits with this episode.
This is Behind the Bastards podcast about the worst people
in all of history. I'm Robert Evans, I'm the host
and my guest today is Jamie him one name. Now,

(00:28):
I'm the Beyonce of No Billy Wayne's the Beyonce behind
the Bastards. Yeah, you are the podcaster formerly known as
the Beyonce behind the Bastards. Yeah, they're the Beyonce of
my heart. Thank you. Yeah, there we go, Here we go. Jamie,
how are you doing today? I'm good. I'm good. I uh,

(00:50):
I think that that's true. I'm good. I have to
add I have to add it probably good. I have
to add a bag to my Spirit Airlines flight. But
that's about as as challenging as it's getting to day.
Speaking of monsters, that is the greatest monster of all
online interface. You had to like swipe your credit card
if you sneeze on a Spirit our Lines. I have

(01:15):
this friend, his name is Lenny, and he listens to
the podcast so he may hear this. And Lenny is
uh one of the one of the most experienced travelers
I know, and at one point I was taking a
flight with him in Eastern Europe to Ukraine through whizz Air,
which is one of the worst airlines I've heard. Yeah,
they're terrible. Never had the pleasure. There was a moment

(01:36):
where they started hassling us about our bags, and it
became clear that we weren't going to be able to
like fit everything like that, we were going to have
to take stuff out. And the line from him that
I'll never forget was I guess, well, I guess I'm
wearing all my pants today. I've heard multiple pairs of
fans on how if you're not going on to a
Spirit Airlines flight wearing five jackets? Like, what are you

(02:00):
even you yourself? I've been on a Spirit Airlines right
eye next to like an actively drunk person multiple times.
That's just normal, I know. But yeah, you're right, you
haven't wept. If you haven't wept and thrown things away,

(02:20):
well waiting to get in line at Spirit Airlines, have
you even have flown? We've gotten off topic, Um, very
off topic, Jamie. Yes, have you ever heard of Savitri Devi?
Oh good, oh boy, Jamie, you are in for a
motherfucking treat. I love when you don't tell me in advance. Okay, Okay, Yeah,

(02:46):
this is one I'm going to guess almost nobody listening
to has heard of. But she's one of the most
important people for understanding where we are right now in
the year um like the most the most recent headline
that ties directly to is you remember when the FBI
arrested all those members of the base, that that neo
Nazi group that's plenty to start a second Civil War
by randomly firing into a crowd in Virginia that was

(03:09):
full of armed people, that whole, that whole hullabaloo. Yeah,
well she's kind of behind all that, although she died
decades before it happened. So that's today's story. Let's do it.
So now, Jamie, we're gonna start like we start every
good day by talking about our old buddy. Shouldn't call

(03:30):
him a buddy, Adolf Hitler. It's weird because I can
call Stalin a buddy, but I feel like calling Hitler
a buddies a bridge too far. I don't know. On
this show. I feel like they are just rules that
are different. Yeah, they're they're old friends. At this point,
so Hitler was he was a secular ruler, Jamie. Um,
he was not a not a not a not a

(03:51):
like I think, I think there's a lot of misconceptions
about kind of the nature of his power and like
his regime because of all of these like History Channel
documentary is in this industry of books on Nazi occult
history and like Nazi magic and the hell Boy movies.
But like to hear it, yeah yeah, I mean they're
great movies, at least one of them is. But um,
like this idea that like, you know, the Nazis were

(04:14):
like full full of magic, right, and that Hitler like
believed all sorts of like weird cookie occult stuff about
like raising the dead and aliens and ship and it's
just not true. Um, there were some funky occult ties
to national socialism, but they were phrase oh yeah, yeah,
oh yeah, cult ties, yeah baby yeah, But they weren't

(04:38):
to Hitler. They were too like kind of like side figures.
Like the B List of the Nazis. A lot of
those guys were kind of into the occult. But like
your A listers, really we're we're pretty secular. Guy Beyonce
is the Nazi. Beyonce is I'm trying to think of
like like the Nazi Jeremy Renners, the halls. Oh, how

(04:58):
dare you speak is name in this forum? I thought
we was. We made a pact to never speak of
him again. We we never signed that contract. We never did.
It was under negotiation for a long time. Yeah, it
is still in arbitration now. The Tulist Society UH spelled

(05:20):
Thule Society like the top racks on people's jeeps? Was it? Well,
subers people suberus um. The Tolist Society was a German
occult group in the early twentieth century UH in Germany UM,
and it provided some of the early funding and leadership
for the Nazi Party. Heinrich Hitler held bizarre quasi magical
beliefs for his whole time in power, and he was
kind of into some weird He thought he was like

(05:41):
a reincarnated prince and some ship. But Hitler himself was
not at all into a cult stuff um. And the
only guy really close to him who was was Rudolf Hess,
who was his deputy and for a long time his
best friend. This is the guy he like co wrote
mind comp with like Hess and Hitler like fucking type
before Hitler ghost his his like his ghostwriter, yeah, kind

(06:04):
of like more like his his muse. Yeah. And also
the guy who was a competent typist both. I mean,
you got you gotta if your muse is also a
competent typist who says the perfect person doesn't exist, Yeah,
Rudolf hess That's what people say about Rudolph Hess is
he was the perfect person. So he was also the

(06:27):
deputy fearer for a while. Oh six six six six six. Yeah,
he was a cool dude, um, but he wasn't really
in the picture for very long. He got increasingly marginalized
after Hitler came to power in thirty three. Um, and
in nineteen forty one he kind of went bug fuck
uh and got on a plane and flew to Great
Britain while the two countries were at war. Sorry, how

(06:51):
would you define bug fuck? I would have defined bug
fuck is like independently hopping in your private plane and
fing to a country that your country is actively bombing
to try to parachute down and negotiate for peace between
your two nations without anyone asking. I would describe that

(07:12):
as pretty bug fuck. Yeah, that's that's not This is
like a new term for me, and now this is
the only like reference point I have for it, So
I'm not going to know how to how to define
bug funk moving forward. Okay, So bug funk is when
like the world is falling apart and you're like fuck
it and you and you go the funk off and

(07:33):
then you is that it kind of yeah, like it
was a kind of thing where like there was no
chance of it ever working. He did not have the
authority to to to sign a peace treaty for Germany,
uh and Britain did not have any interest in talking
with him or making peace with Germany at this point. Um.
So he basically just flew and crash landed in England

(07:54):
and got arrested and spent the rest of his life
in prison. And it was he huge embarrassment for Hitler
because this this is like his right hand man who
in the middle of the war like flies to his
enemies country to like try to negotiate without Hitler's approval.
It was it was very weird. Um And because hess
was like this occult dude into astrology and all this

(08:15):
ship and like this weird he was actually kind of
like a Buddhist, Like he's a weird dude. Um, but
because he held all these weird beliefs and he piste
off Hitler so badly. Hitler bands like all of this
weird occult ship that had cropped up around the Nazi
Party in ninety one. So yeah, so after forty one,
like really most of that stuff is illegal, Heinrich Hitler

(08:37):
gets up to a little bit of it with the
s S because he's got a castle and he he's
just a weird dude. We'll get into some of that
in a later episode. The important thing to understand is that, like, yeah,
Hitler was like a distinctly not wooy guy, Like he's
not a new age sort of dude. He's like if
you mentioned You're like if he's like the guys on Reddit,
who like if you mentioned you so much as nine

(09:00):
your zodiac sign, They're like, she's not credible, she's fun,
she's a she's lost. Yes, I love that type of person,
and I I feel confident saying that. A hundred percent
of Hitler's biographers agree he would have been extremely on Reddit.
I owe more on Reddit than anyone has ever been

(09:21):
on Red. Sure. Yeah, no, he would be the most
reddity guy of of all of them. And we have
to admit that that is very what's his signs? That's
very his sign of him. Wouldn't you say, I don't know,
he's such a Taurus, he's s Taurus. Sure, okay, continue,

(09:44):
that's I assume you're referring to the maker of really
shoddy handguns, which is I think they're Brazilian terrible guns. Okay. No,
I'm just trying to the behind the bastard's board. Not
either way of advocating the Taurust sign or the Taurist
firearms brand is not going to go well for you.

(10:07):
Um um. Yeah. So now Hitler, so he's not into
the occult at all. He's not a big fan of
Christianity either. Um. He felt it was fundamentally Jewish because
Jesus was Jewish, which is, you know, not an irrational
point of view within the logic of being a Nazi. Uh.
And he worried a weakened the German people. But he

(10:28):
also respected Christianity for its ability to inculcate good values
in the German people. Uh. And the primary good value
it inculcated was making lots of babies because most Germans
were Catholic, and Catholics aren't big fans of condoms. I'm
not not sure if you're aware of that. Um No,
I know I wouldn't have aunts if it weren't for

(10:48):
this attitude, none of us would. Now. Hitler himself was
a baptized Roman Catholic all his life, he probably didn't
really believe much of anything other than that that Hitler
was a cool dude. Um, but he felt it was
important to maintain this image. Um. Now. There were some
among his followers that it was Nazism's destiny to become
the new Great German religion, but Hitler himself pushed back

(11:10):
against this, insisting in mind comp that national socialism quote
is not a religious reform, but a political reorganization of
the German people. He believed, quote, it is criminal to
try to destroy the accepted faith of the people as
long as there is nothing to replace it. And it
is possible that given enough time, Hitler would have tried
to replace Christianity with something else, but he never attempted

(11:30):
to do so. And as far as we know, the
supernatural as it's generally known, played very little role in
the Nazi regime. But and here's where the real episode starts.
In the decades since Hitler shot himself in that bunker
in ve Nazism has changed quite a lot the actual
political and historic beliefs of the original Nazis, and if
Hitler himself have been twisted and shifted into something even weirder.

(11:53):
It would be too much to say that this new
form of Nazism is more dangerous than the original, given
the tens of millions of people who died from the
original Nazism, But it's probably accurate to say that the
fact that Nazism has mutated into what we call esoteric
hitlersm um has made it better able to survive in
the era of the Internet. Now. Esoteric hitler Ism is

(12:15):
a term used to refer to a number of different
strains of postwar Nazi thought that put a bizarre religious
and occult spin on Nazi racial theories and on Hitler himself,
often seeing the man as essentially the avatar of a god.
Uh four Chan and eight Chan are in the modern age,
two of the most prolific vectors for this the spread
of this brand of nonsense. There are strains of it

(12:36):
in Brenton Terrence Manifesto and Honor's Brevick's Manifesto. And today
we're talking about the woman who invented all of this,
the single person who became the living link between the
Nazism that tried and failed to conquer Europe and the
modern Nazi movement that spawns mass shootings and attempted mass
shootings on a monthly basis today. Her name was Savitri
Devi and she was a huge piece of ship. This

(12:58):
is someone's feminism somewhere. This is some piece of ships feminism.
She is a feminist icon. Feminism is the law. Now.
This is a woman who spent her whole life living
alone with a pile of cats and changing Nazism forever. Okay,
well what if she just did the first half? You know,

(13:19):
that was not she was not willing to do just
the first She's like, okay, so I'm in a pile
of cats, that's great, what else could I do? And
that was her second idea. That's embarrassed, that was her
second idea. It does she does start first focused on
the cats and then moved straight to Nazism though. It's remarkable. Yeah.

(13:41):
So she was born Maximiani Portas on September nine five
in Lyon, France. Her mother, Julia, came from Cornwall, the
town with the thirty six dumbest name in all of England.
Her father's ancestry was a milange of various Mediterranean peoples
without access to birth control. He was mostly at Allian
in Greek. Although young Maximiani was born a French citizen,

(14:04):
she latched onto her father's Greek ancestry from the very beginning.
Some of this had to do with the fact that
Leon had a large and active Greek expat community, and
her dad was a prominent member of it. She also
nursed an early fascination with Roman history. Her name Maximiani
was actually just the female form of Maximian, the proper
first name of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. So she's up.

(14:25):
She's a big old nerd. I really have to emphasize
what a nerd she is. I feel like I've met
versions of this girl in like sophomore English classes and
they're like, actually something something, and you're like stop at
stop that, please, just like finish reading. Their eyes were
watching God, let's move on. I was the male version

(14:46):
of this for a while. I mean I took three
years of Latin because I was such a Roman history nerd. Okay, Robert.
Some of us took five years of Latin, and do
we remember a fucking thing? Of course? Not? No, no,
I not not a goddamn word. I like when I
was in high school, in junior high, in high school,
if you were like in the quote unquote advanced classes,
they would be like, let's teach them a language that

(15:06):
they can't use. Goddamn totally useless term. Did you have
to me? That's one of those. But did you have
to use that textbook that was about the Romani family?
Did you do a Romanti? Oh no, no man. I
was like fucking Killius and Quintus. I remember those names.
They were like the fucking It was like a bunch
of Pompeii people who all died at the end of

(15:28):
the book. Are everyone died at the end of our textbook? Wait?
Was it like we had? We had the Cornelia family.
It was like Cornelia and her brother Marcus, and then
they had a friend named Sextus who they sound like
fucking losers. They weren't. It was there. Your your family

(15:50):
sounds way better because our family There was like three
books in total, and the whole second book, So like
all of eighth and ninth grade they're just stuck in
a ditch. They're like in a it. Their carriage isn't
a ditch. They can't get out. They're staying at an inn.
The innkeepers yelling at them. They're stuck in a ditch.
They're stuck in a did for a whole month. And
then they go to Rome and and everything is fine.

(16:11):
It sounds like a nightmare. Second, well, yeah, nightmare, so horrible.
Maximiani would have gotten a lot. Well, no, she wouldn't have.
She would have been the most annoying person in our
Latin class. Yeah. I don't like when people are in
the Latin class and they're also like into it, and
I'm like, m, we should be learning. We didn't have
to learn to pronounce anything right. You never had to

(16:33):
speak because there was a crassical reason to speak it. Well,
no one knows either, like you've got ecclesiastical Latin, but
there's no way to know if it was exactly the
same as with the Roman spoke. So we just didn't
give a ship. It was great. Yeah, my teacher Ms.
Cook would come and she would what was the thing?
She would say. She was like, um, okay, discipuli at

(16:55):
this descipula like She's like, hello, students, let's learn Julie
is Caesar, and then we would just talk about how
the family was stuck in the ditch all day. Well,
Maximiani spent her young life stuck in that ditch, and
that ditch was called being a huge nerd for Mediterranean
classical civilizations. She was a strong willed child, which here

(17:19):
is a synonym for unspeakably arrogant and a giant pain
in the ass. She felt strongly about just about everything. Everything. Yeah,
strong willed. She was known to be utterly immovable once
she latched onto an idea. One strong opinion she developed
early was that British people were terrible, which is not inaccurate.

(17:41):
She hated her mother's English friends and the way they
prattled on about illnesses and their dying families. Harsh. That's
so harsh, Like I wish my family wasn't. She's like,
shut Jesus Christ, Yeah, we get it. She didn't like
French people very much much either, and the particular cause

(18:01):
for her hatred of the French was the French Revolution.
She read about it as a little girl in school
and was instantly furious. The Republican ideals of equality, liberty,
and fraternity disgusted her. She was punished at school for
making an obscene gesture at a plaque of the Declaration
of the Rights of Man. And again, how she's like
eight or nine. Yeah, she's like a fucking little kid

(18:22):
at this point. Yeah. The Declaration of the Rights of Man,
which small child Savitri Devi flipped off, includes such controversial
takes as people are innocent until proven guilty, people have
the right to liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression,
and people should be able to speak and write with freedom.

(18:45):
Some real hot She's okay, So she was like born
to be harmful, she was born to be a fascist.
Like she as a small child, She's like, people aren't equal?
What is this bullshit? That's so the little flipping off
to human rights? You do you do feel like we

(19:07):
should have known? We should have known. I mean, I
love flipping off old documents too, But to me, it's
the magna carta, and the magna carta knows why. The
magna carta knows what she did. Oh yeah, the Manacarta
shakes in her boots whenever you come walk. The Magna
Carta is a messy bitch, and I have no time
for it. Okay, Robert, g I can't believe you just

(19:30):
called a female document of bitch a messy. You're setting
a bad example, Robert. Feminism is document misogyny. She's she's
literally shaking right now. She's here. You didn't tell me
the magna carta was in the room to She's literally
she drove me here. Horrible. She's, well, I don't have

(19:54):
driver's license. I don't know what you want. I don't
know how much further to take this bit. So I'm
just kinda Later in life, in nineteen Savitri Devi told
an interviewer a beautiful girl is not equal to an
ugly girl. So she remained pretty consistent about her belief
in the fundamental inequality of human beings, like her whole life.
And she's getting really granular about it too. Yeah, she's

(20:17):
granular about sucking everything now. Chief motivating factor in her childhood,
I have to say, was completely understandable. She felt a deep,
powerful sense of rage at the abuse of animals by
human beings, starting at age five. Yeah, starting at age five,
she began expressing to her parents concern at the abuse
of animals she witnessed in a daily basis. She was

(20:39):
horrified by circuses, the fur trade, and the eating of meat.
While still in elementary school, she became a committed vegetarian
and eventually a vegan. Maximiani Portas was particularly disgusted by
the abuse of cats by peasants on the French countryside.
Her only real biographer, Nicolas Goodrick Clark, claims this quote
disgusted her and turned her against manned kind. And since

(21:00):
most people listening probably don't know anything about the history
of cat torture in Europe, I didn't know anything about
the history of cat torture in Europe. I'm gonna have
to talk about that now for a little while. Like
specific to this region, cat torture all of Europe, really,
but like, yeah, specifically to France. Like the French hate cats, Okay, listen,

(21:21):
they are assholes about cats. Yeah. Uh. Today we rightly
revere cats as our moral and intellectual superiors, and we
have organized or society around pleasing them. This is right
and good. But cats have not always been beloved in
the West. While they are considered basically wholly in Islam,
they're like ritually clean, like you can have them in
in mosques and stuff all over the place. You have

(21:43):
to wash your hands after touching them if you're gonna
go pray. There's a long Christian tradition of seeing cats
as demonic entities. Uh. And to be fair, Islam is
kind of shitty on the subject of dogs. So I
guess whatever of the big religions you pick, you're gonna
be terrible to one of the good animals. I don't
know why. Yeah, it's weird. Now. In the fifteenth century, Edward,

(22:03):
Duke of York, announced that if the devil inhabited any
living animal, it was the cat, and for centuries all
around Europe, good Christians tortured and murdered cats for almost
no reason. In Belgium, they held an event called caton Stote,
the Festival of Cats, which sounds awesome but actually just
involved drunken townsfolk throwing cats from the top of the
church onto hard cobble stones and then lighting them on fire. Yeah,

(22:29):
I hey, okay. It's always really frustrating when you hear
a story about the underclass and it's like you're playing
to stereotypes about the underclass. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm
gonna be honest. I bet the rich people got to
go up first and throw the nicest cats just to set. Yeah,
and then and then they would privately be throwing cats

(22:51):
at hard marble floors as well. My god, it's horrible.
And Catton Stot still still takes place in Epra every May,
but they use stuffed animals now, which just stop, just
just stop. It's not a good tradition. It would be
so easy to not do it. It would be so
easy they do. Do they eat the cat? Like? Do

(23:11):
they or is it just we're just killing the cats?
Not that that makes no, they're just murdering cats for
no good reason. Okay, it's fun, that is, and people
are horrible, But Jamie, you know who doesn't randomly torture
cats in Belgium? Your sponsors? That is exactly right. Sophie
vets every sponsor to make sure they do not torture

(23:33):
cats in Belgium. Yes, is that that's true? That's a lie, Robert, Okay, okay,
it is a small country, so the vetting is pretty easy.
Like you'll notice I did not say, for example, Canada. No,
you certainly just got canceled before our very eyes products.

(24:05):
We're back. Yeah, those were good ads, Jamie, good products,
after all those good ads. Are you ready to hear
more about the systematic torture of cats by generations of Europeans.
I just got a cat, Robert, this is not fair.
I love cats. Shoutout, Flee. Shout out to flee my cat.

(24:26):
He's got a big Neck's got a big neck. Shout
out to Roach, one of the side characters in the
first version of the movie with Keanu Reeves, where some
of the people are bank robbers but they also surfers.
Oh oh, oh, you're talking about the Kiana Reeves surfing

(24:49):
movie with um we've covered on. Yes, Roach. Roach is
the one who bleeds out in a plane point break.
He's a good character. We're talking about We're talking about
point Break, Yes, point Break, that's the movie classic. Yes. Now,
in France, there was a centuries old tradition of burning
hundreds of cats to death and gigantic bonfires. Louis sixteenth

(25:11):
even famously lit Paris's cat fire in Brutes such a
cat fire. Yeah, of course, who else, Jamie, who else?
This is just all news to me, Just just okay.
I'm I'm glad that this wasn't like common knowledge. I
would be horrified if I just didn't, you know, even

(25:32):
burning cats Okay, Like it doesn't surprise obviously, like you
have to assume earlier times people are more callous to
cats and dogs because them being like what they are
now is kind of a more recent development because we
have all these extra resources. But I didn't realize it
was this like cruel, This is a lot is in

(25:55):
the cat fire. That's like bad writing. M m yeah,
so the king would would. Yeah, so brule lichettes, which
I am not going to pronounce more correctly than that
because it's a horrible thing. And fuck funk. France, as
it was called um varied in a number of different ways.
Sometimes it was just massive bonfires where living cats were
tied uh together in like huge pires. Sometimes living cats

(26:19):
were tied above small fires on like a spit and
then roasted to death. Sometimes cats were set in wooden
cages and burnt to death. Uh. In some towns, people
known as Coramant's cat chasers would soak cats and fuel
light them on fire and chase them through town to
the amusement of citizens. People are so upset all the time.
I know, right, they're an oppressed species. Yes they are. Yeah,

(26:44):
I would be piste. We you should be. I'm pissed.
The charred remains of these tortured cats were taken home
as good luck charms by people. In seventeen thirty, as
revolutionary sentiments simmered and bubbled throughout French society, to Parisian
apprentice printers got fed up with their masters and abducted
their cats. They staged a massive public trial, the Great

(27:04):
Cat Massacre, as it's become known to history. Now, this
was tied more towards issues of class hatred than hatred
of cats. Um. But the cats wound up actually like,
but they end up being the escaped cats for the
whole situation exactly. And that's also the worst way to
die as as a symbol for something that has nothing
to do with you. Yeah, those cats have no understanding

(27:27):
of class theory. It's like if someone like murder me
and then they're like, well, this has something to do
with Like my opinion on the new Taylor Swift record
has nothing to do with Jamie, but I killed her
as to send a message. It would be like if
one group of aliens came to Earth and murdered you
for something they knew human beings were going to do
a hundred years in the future. Something you're completely incapable

(27:49):
of understanding or knowing about, Like just yeah, this like
it's just wild. But these apprentices felt their masters treated
the family cats better than their workers. Um. And because
they couldn't quite you know, murder their bosses. Uh, they
got a crowd together and they captured a bunch of
rich people's cats, and then they put them on trial
and sentenced them to be hung until dead. And they

(28:12):
hung just a funkload of cats to death. They made
like the owners of the cats watch. It was super
fucked up. I don't know what to do right now. Well,
what you can do right now is you can get
a little bit into the head of a sensitive young
soul like Maximiani Portas, because a lot of this stuff
was still going on in France. It wasn't at its worse,

(28:34):
but like cat torture and burning was still happening in
the countryside. And she sees this as a little girl
and is like, this is part of why she hates
those like you know, French revolutionary all use of freedom
and equality is She's like, well, clearly this is all bullshit.
Look at what they're doing to these animals, Like where's
their you know, equality and freedom and like like like
she that's kind of like where she comes at this from, right. Um. Yeah,

(28:59):
so she's deeply sympathetic to animals and particularly cats, and
basically incapable of being sympathetic to human beings. Um and yeah,
so an interesting story. I'm going to be interested in
how she galaxy brains being sympathetic towards the plight of
of of brutally murdered cats to becoming a fascist. But

(29:22):
you know, I fascism common thing for fascists, to be honest,
it's to fascism, well, you know, not committing cat murders,
but like hating people because of how garbage they are
and thinking fascism is the only way to fix something
because people just can't be allowed to live on their own. Okay,

(29:44):
I knew that. I think I thought you were saying
cats specific reasons. I'm like, well, this is a true education. Yeah. Now,
Maximiani was very good in school. She was a bright student.
She read and wrote constantly, and her very favorite writer
was a nineteenth century French poet, Charles Leconte Delisle. Uh.
And here's how Savitri's biographer describes Leconte Delisle's work in

(30:05):
the book Hitler's Priestess, which is really the only decent
biography of Savitri Devi quote Leconte Delisle's own tragic view
of the universe. His romantic colors were always tinged with
somber pessimism, strongly appealed to Maximiani. He regarded all religious
symbols as fragments of a divine truth, but the profusion
of faiths over time convinced him of the relative value
and ultimate vanity of every doctrine. Beset by a sense

(30:27):
of cosmic futility, Leconte Delisle rejected Christianity and evoked the
stoical heroism of barbarian and exotic people's and his famous
poem Psycho Poems Barbara's. He was also powerfully attracted to
Hinduism following the translation of its sacred texts in the
eighteen forties. Maximiani felt a profound sympathy with Le Conte
Delisle's view of life's fragility, the vanity of existence, and

(30:48):
the illusion of the world. His romantic poems about the
ancient Egyptians, the Scandinavians, the Celts and Hindus their proud
paganism and heroic action, yet final resignation in the face
of death and oblivion confirmed her own of version to
Christianity and helped her form her own fatalistic worldview. So
goths didn't exist in the early twentieth century, but Maximi

(31:09):
is clearly that she is a proto goth It's again,
it's just like, if there had been a hot topic
for her to uh, you know, be, a lot could
have been avoided. Imagine how many hot topic employees were
saved by that business, Yeah, a lot of them. Imagine
how many fascists we avoided by, for example, the existence

(31:32):
of Kylo Wrin fan fiction. Honestly, honestly, it's wow. That
actually hit for me. Wow, that hit that people. People
need an outlet, you know, and if you don't, this
is what happens. Right, You're just like, if you can
make it horny and palatable, you're going to prevent something bad.
This was a a young girl who desperately needed to

(31:54):
be distracted, and nothing distracted her, and that it's a
problem had blaze at a pretty clear track for you
to really, I mean, I just yeah, send me back
in time with a Jack Skellington hoodie for this woman.
Oh my god, that would have solved so many problems,
created some others. I mean, she still would have been
a deeply annoying person, but like I had a Jack

(32:18):
Skellington hoodie. But also I had never seen the movie.
I was a total poser. Oh boy, that's going to
get you canceled harder than anything else today. And then
I saw the movie and guess what, I didn't like
it very much. I watched it. It's fine, it's fine. Well,
actually I don't. I think it's maybe not so good.
Beautiful animation though, anyways, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you get

(32:39):
a judge it for its time, ah do I? Anyways,
it was no For example, the Little Toaster, I don't know, yeah, no, no,
it didn't kids up. I loved the Little Toaster. Damaged

(33:00):
me forever, really, that's why. But he was brave robber.
That's why you throw bagels, right, Robert, I don't know.
It's why I'm scared of fucking radiators. You've got to
do some exposure therapy for you. With brave old toaster.

(33:21):
That's why he doesn't toast his bagels. He only. I mean,
that's like the thing tragic. M's tragic. Imagine the path
we could have avoided. I know Maximiani Portis was very
political as a young girl. Um when World War One
started in nineteen fourteen, she at nine years old, knew

(33:43):
very clearly that she did not trust the entent powers
UM so like England, France, you know, Russia. Some of
this likely came from the fact that Greece's King Constantine
was very pro German and refused to get into the
war on the side of either the entent or the
central Powers UM. But the King of Greece's prime minister,
a guy named Venizelos UM which I'm probably mispronouncing, uh,

(34:05):
disagreed with the king. He was very pro British and
supported Greece getting into the war. The two fought over
this for years until in nineteen sixteen a group of
pro Venizelos army officers staged a coup against the king.
There were rumors that the untuanted back this, and those
rumors seemed credible in light of the fact that French
and British troops landed in Salonika and Athens in nineteen
fifteen and sixteen to force Greek compliance in their demands

(34:28):
from military access to the Macedonian Front so they could
better fight Austria Hungary. Um, that's a lot a history there,
but basically she's very pro Greece and wants Greased to
stay out of the war because she also likes Germany,
hates the English, hates the French, and she's piste off
because England and France back this prime minister who wants
Greased to get into the war and they also funk

(34:50):
with Greek sovereignty and stuff. She gets really angry overall.
And and how old is she at this point? Like
where where are we? Nine? Ten eleven years old? When
I imagine, did you know what was going on in
the world when you were nine or ten years old? Like?
How where were you? I was pretty I mean not
nine and eleven. Happened when I was like twelve, And

(35:10):
that was definitely like the start of me getting political.
I guess, yeah, I was. I was in World War One. Yeah,
you know. World War One's that level of thing, right
where like even a little kid is gonna like, you're
gonna pay attention to that ship. It's kind of a
big deal. You won't have a fully formed opinion, but
you'll you'll know what's going on. You'll know what's going
I guess I'm just like, it would be so bizarre

(35:30):
to me if someone was like Jamie's beliefs at eight
years old, was nine eleven? Was school got out early
that day? And and this is where I should note
that this is going to be an imperfect episode in
terms of that sort of thing, because our main source
on this is Hitler's Priestess, which is a biography that's
fairly decent but also flawed because it's mainly based on

(35:51):
Savitri Devi's own biographical writings of her recollections of her
own life. Like, there's just not a lot of information.
There's not a lot of weren't a lot of people
to go back to and like talk to about her
and as a child and stuff who were still alive
when she became relevant. I think it was written if
I could write about like what I thought I thought

(36:12):
at eight years old, I'd be like, Jamie was a
brilliant genius who had start opinions on foreign policy. Okay,
got it well. But that said, given the I don't
think we shouldn't discard all of this because if you
look at the thrust of her life, she does live
the life of someone who's always been very political I
mean yeah exactly so, um yeah. Venizelos and his men

(36:37):
took over part of Greece with the backing of Britain
and France UH, and those two countries were happy to
recognize his government while they carried out a brutal ten
month blockade of the Greek provinces that stayed loyal to
the king. And young Maximiani watched all this as she
grew into an adolescent girl. Some of her earliest memories
were news reports of protests from Athens of royalist crowds
railing against the entent and Maximiani sided with them and

(36:59):
consider of the Antons treatment of Greece to be basically criminal.
Her disgust was reinforced after the war. In the wake
of the Central powers defeat, the Ottoman Empire was broken
up and Greece was given control in the Versailles Treaty
of A city called Smyrna now Smyrna is a city
on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, which is modern day Turkey.
It was the center of a nearly three thousand year

(37:21):
old Greek community that lived on the coast of Anatolia.
Greece with some justification thought that a lot of Anatolia
ought to be part of Greece because it was culturally
and historically Greece, and the newly created nation of Turkey
did not agree. So, with the backing of the Versailles Treaty,
Greece invaded Smyrna in nineteen nineteen to make good on
the promises that you know, had been made to them

(37:42):
by the entant, and the fighting was a disaster from
the beginning. The Ottoman Empire had been defeated in the
war technically, but on the ground and actual battles their
soldiers had performed pretty well. They'd fought off a big
invasion at Gallipoli. The birth of the Turkish nation after
the fall of the Ottoman Empire was met with a
swelling of nationalist fervor in Anatolia, and this helped to
spawn a powerful insurgent Turkish movement dedicated to defeating the

(38:04):
Greek invasion m hm. SO. A truce was reached in
nineteen twenty, but like many recent truces in Turkish military history,
it was not a real truce, and around the same
time King Constantine was restored to the Greek throne. This turn,
the remaining Great powers of Europe against Greece, and even
though they promised Greece Smyrna and the Versailles Treaty in
nineteen twenty one, they basically like like, funk that ship

(38:26):
and hold all of their support. Do we know where
the where the Greeks at this time stood on cats? Uh?
You know, they're closer to the Middle East. So I'm
gonna guess more pro cat, more pro cat. Okay, Okay, yeah,
I think yeah. The further in that direction you get

(38:47):
more pro cat, less pro dog. You know, I think
that's generally fair Western They've got a lot of dogs. Yeah, yeah, dog.
Maybe they just lit cats and dogs on fire. I
don't know. I did not do that research. Okay, these
are the questions I have Robert take of relieve them.

(39:08):
So the French and Italian governments like betray Greece first,
and they signed agreements with the Turkish leader Mustapha Kamal
and to ignore the promises they had made in the
Verse I Treaty to Greece. Britain held out the longest,
but when Greece launched an offensive in Anatolia in March
of nine, all of the allies suddenly adopted a policy
of neutrality. Britain banned for their arms sales to Grease Well,

(39:30):
France was happy to allow its weapons makers to sell
straight to Turkey. The whole effort to incorporate the Greek
regions of Anatolia into the Greek nation ended in disaster
and military defeat. In nineteen twenty two, Greek forces fled
Asia Minor, and the Turkish army conducted a campaign of
extermination and ethnic cleansing on their agan coast. They massacred
some thirty thousand Christians, a mix of Greeks, Armenians and Frank's,

(39:53):
in order to ensure no Greek independence movement would ever
crop up on their coast again. This Mrner debacle. This,
this is why there's no real Greek community in Anatoly anymore,
not like there was for three thousand years prior. This
is like what she wipes out that community. Uh So,
you can see why a Greek nationalist like Maximiani Portas,

(40:14):
who is like fifteen sixteen years old then and like
really actually starting to like understand the world, is furious
about all this, and it it breeds in her a
powerful hatred of the entent powers, particularly of France and
of of England. Um. And she basically felt that like
all these fancy words they had about liberty and democracy

(40:36):
were bullshit when they couldn't even hold the basic promises
and protect the lives of tens of thousands of innocent
Greek civilians, which is very valid. Yes, yeah, yeah, Now
I'm not trying to like ignore the Turkish point of
view in this too, like Greece is not in the
right here as a country either, Like everybody's in the wrong,
although Turkey massacrest people, so I'm gonna say, maybe they're

(40:56):
more in the wrong. But this is complicated. But this
is sort of how Maximiani is very much on the
side of Greece is fucked over. And this is an
entirely like a crime committed by the Entente powers against
against Greece, and it sets up the rest of her
life in a lot of ways. Um. So other influences

(41:17):
on her developing mind, where the sight of French crowds
and leon cheering uproariously at the brutal terms of the
Treaty of Versailles when they were announced. She was horrified
when the French government stationed black Synegalese troops to occupy
the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland. Now, this is one of
those moves by France that engendered a whole shit litter
racism in Central Europe. It was a big influence on

(41:38):
a lot of early Nazi thinkers too. And obviously black
soldiers aren't he worse than white ones, but as civilians
living under military occupation, you're going to hate whatever foreign
soldiers occupy your country. And if those soldiers are the
only black people who've ever met, it wasn't a great
move on France's behalf Jesus Christ. Yeah, so I'm trying

(41:58):
to set up all of like this is like the
ship that is forming. She's twelve, fifteen, sixteen is all
this is going on like formative fucking years. Yea. Yeah.
So she hates France, she hates England, she hates black people,
she hates Turkish people, She's she loves a lot more hate.
She loves cats. This is the consistent one. Yeah. Yeah. Uh.

(42:23):
In nineteen twenty three, a fresherly graduated Maximiani Portis left
France to attend college in Greece. She was just on
the edge of eighteen and furious with the status quo
in Europe. Without any real clear idea of how she
thought things ought to be. Instead, she did, however, know
that she was obsessed with Hellenism, which is like ancient
Greek culture. She's a she's dork. Yeah, she's a big

(42:45):
fucking joy. She's like Troy, Oh my god. She would
not shut up about the Elliot. She was a fucking you.
I find multiple translations and you're like, can you not?
She has wrong and profoundly thirsty opinions on Achilles. She's

(43:05):
like ranked gods and goddesses hot. If she'd seen the
actual movie Troy that came out like a decade ago,
she would have been furious, because there's no way Brad
Pitt was as hot as the Achilles in her mind. Beautiful. Yeah,
she believed the old Greeks had been quote a civilization
of iron, rooted in truth, a civilization with all the

(43:27):
virtues of the ancient world, none of its weaknesses, and
all the technical achievements of the modern age, without modern hypocrisy,
pettiness and moral squalor. Now this is of course wildly inaccurate. Uh.
The ancient Greeks were like unbelievably fucked up. They also
did a lot of cool shit obviously, like every other
ancient that's all ancient people do, a lot of cool shit.

(43:47):
All Aztecs amazing shit, horribly fucked up, ancient Romans, amazing ship,
Han Chinese ancient amazing ship. Horribly for everybody. Yeah. In
the Greek specific case, uh, they fucked a bunch of
little kids. They repeatedly put narcissistic idiots in charge of
their city states. They made numerous blunders that ensured their
period of military and economic might was short lived. And

(44:08):
they also created some of the most influential philosophy and
fiction and art that has ever been made in the
history of the human race. Complicated people, Um, Maximiani does
not get a complex picture of ancient Greece. It's just
the good ship. Yeah. Yeah, Um, you might say, like,
I don't know, like I want to say, her understanding

(44:29):
of Greek history was not deep. It was certainly incomplete.
Um that said pretty much only like, the only thing
Europeans would write about the ancient Greeks in that period
was wildly positive. You weren't going to get like critical
like commentary on, for example, pederasty in ancient Greece in
fucking nineteen twenty like it's you're just not going to

(44:49):
read that. Um. Yeah. So her love of Greece was
mostly focused on obsessing over their incredible art and fantasizing
about the idealized culture that she to existed there, right,
I mean this, I mean we as children all read
revisionist history about horrifying cultures. I was obsessed with ancient
Rome a lot of the same reasons, of course, because

(45:12):
you're just like, oh, it seems like the only dio
dope stuff and more cool outfits. Well, I will say
I was kind of a fucked up kid, so when
I learned about like all of the fucking crucifixions and
ship I was kind of like, hell yeah, but you're
so metal. I mean, it is pretty fucking metal metal.
We'll talk about what they did to Spartacus and his

(45:32):
friends one of these days, but it's fucking one of
like the biggest mic drop moments in the history of
torturing people to death with wood. Um. I think that's
fair to say. Thrilled to have such a hyper specific um.
So she moves to Greece. She's super happy for a while. Obviously,

(45:52):
best place in the world for this girl is fucking Grace.
At this point in time Um and the time she
spent discovering the wonders of Athens rules Um coincided with
some very important goings on in Germany. I'm gonna quote
again from the book Hitler's Priestess. Years later, she would
recall that she spent such a sunlit afternoon upon the
Acropolis on ninth October ninety three, the fateful day of

(46:15):
Hitler's push, when he and his followers had attempted a
coup against the Varian government and staged a march to
the felde Heron Hall in the center of Munich. The
police successfully broke up the march, and sixteen martyrs of
the early Nazi movement fell beneath the hail of bullets.
When details of the incident were published in the world
press the following day, there was some discussion over lunch
at the International Home Hostel, which is where she was

(46:36):
crashing at the time. Maximiani admits that she did not
yet connect Hitler with her own dream of a new
racial order based on her view of classical Greek antiquity. However,
she strongly sympathized with him as an enemy of the
Allies on account of his contempt for the Versailles Treaty
and saw a parallel between his nationalist idea of one
state for all Germans and the Magali idea among the Greeks,
which is the idea that like Greece should recoup its

(46:58):
ancient like power and like Taco for the places that
had controlled back in the day. She's a little ideal argument. Yeah.
She engaged in a heated argument in defensive Hitler with
the French managerist of the hostel. So so we've lost
arguing about Hitler's with the hostel. No, we lost her
when she's been gone for a while. Yeah, but you

(47:18):
know who won't argue in support of Hitler with a
French hostel owner in Athens. Robert the products and services
support this podcast would never ever heard us or do
something wrong. I've been saying it for years. I have
all agreed for years. Fingers crossed for a dig pill
ad right after this. But a great transition, both of you.

(47:41):
Just wonderful work. We're back. So it was during this
first visit to Greece that Maximiani Portis would have seen
the symbol for the first time that would come to
define her life and legacy. I am talking, of course,
about the swastika. Odds are good she would have encountered

(48:03):
it for the first time in the National Museum of Athens,
which hosted a huge amount of what were believed to
be Trojan artifacts, which had been uncovered by the pioneering
and controversial archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Now Schleiman was not a
professional archaeologist, which is not weird for the time. Most
of like the archaeologies of this period, or like gentlemen
adventurers who I mean get our nerds. Basically the people

(48:25):
in the people in like the Mummy movies, who are
just wearing people in Tarzan. That was the most accurate
thing about the Mummy movie, other than the way mummies
react to shotguns. They're all they're all named Clayton. Yeah yeah,
so Schlimann uh yeah. Throughout the mid eighteen hundreds had

(48:46):
been a very successful German arms merchant, trading raw materials
for the ingredients to make ammunition um and he had
nursed a deep obsession with the Iliot his entire life.
In his late middle age, he decided to take his
fortune to the Aegean and try to uncover the true
loka of the ancient city of Troy. Unlike pretty much
any like traditional archaeologists, Schlimann used the Iliad as a guide.

(49:07):
He thought this book was like basically essentially accurate um
and he followed the poem as if it had been
a work of serious historical scholarship, and shockingly enough, this
kind of worked. In eighteen seventy one, after three years
of searching, Schleiman found what was very likely to have
been the site of ancient Troy. His methods of digging
it up were brutal. He used crowbars and battering rams

(49:28):
and destroyed countless thousands of artifacts, including ironically, what a
lot of archaeologists now believe was the actual physical evidence
of Troy. He dug too far down basically because he was.
He fucked up and probably destroyed what actual Trojan relics
there were. But he doesn't find what a lot of
people think was the site of Troy. It's just other
ship was built there and he dug up the wrong

(49:49):
ship anyway. It's fucked up, Yes, yes, So his research
or his digging, despite all the ship destroyed, produced hundreds
upon hundreds upon hundred of artifacts which people at the
time believed to be Trojan and many of those artifacts,
more than eighteen hundred of them were in blasmed with
various types of swastika. And I'm gonna quote next from

(50:12):
Scientific American. He would go on to see the swastika
everywhere from Tibet to Paraguay to the Gold Coast of Africa.
And as Schliemann's exploits grew more famous and archaeological discoveries
became a way of creating a narrative of national identity,
the swastika grew more prominent. It exploded in popularity as
a symbol of good fortune, appearing on Coca Cola products,
boy Scouts and girls club materials, and even American military uniforms.

(50:36):
The Antiquities on Earth by Dr Schlieman at Troy acquire
for us a double interest, wrote British linguist Archibald says
in eighteen ninety six. They carry us back to the
later stone ages of the Aryan race. Oh dear on
Coca Cola products. Probably if that was just a product
or service advertised, But it wasn't a nutz. It's like

(50:59):
I spent some time living in in and it's the
swasticas all over the dam and it is weird. It takes.
You never really get used to it because of like
what it means to the West. It's always like there's
so many swast because around here, that is I mean,
and that is fascinating to like track the history of
a symbol and like how it affects different areas of
the world differently. That sounds extremely darring. I actually I

(51:23):
have some like tapestries that I picked up in India
that have little swastikas on them in parts, and it's
one of those things where it's like every now and then,
like they're not the same as the Nazi swasticas, but
they're close enough that people will be like, what, No,
I need to leave your home right now? Yeah, I
mean yeah, Like most people are pretty small, so most

(51:44):
people aren't getting na Nazi swastie. If I was over
your house and you said that, I would be like,
I actually, my uber is here, you know, like if
you're like, they're not nasty swas Nazi swasticas, so calm down. Yeah,
it's like that. And they offered me a Miller Lite.

(52:08):
They're not not would you like a Miller Light? No? Exactly.
My standard greeting people, Yeah, that's how you greet all
your guests. That's specifically how I say to hello to
the officers who pulled me over for speeding. No, I
would be and he said that, I I know, I've
gone down that Wikipedia hole at one point of just

(52:29):
like tracking the symbology the symbology of the There's criticism
of Schleiman honestly for his methods, but he's not in
any way a Nazi, Like he's just a guy who
finds a bunch of swastika is buried underground, and he's
just an unqualified archaeologist using his money in a weird way.
He's he's very controversial. Still, there are aspects of what

(52:51):
he did that a lot of people praise because he
got a lot of ship right, but he also destroyed
a huge amount of cultural antiquities. He's an interesting person.
You should read about Schleiman if you're stidn archaeology. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it seems like a lot of those gentlemen
explorers really delighted and you know, like destroying and selling
off pieces of ancient history that had nothing to do

(53:13):
with them. All of them are problematic. Yeah, I will
say Schliemann is one who comes from like a pure
place of just being really into this history. Um, but yeah,
you know they're all problematic, so hashtag yeah. Now the Swasti,

(53:35):
because he found increasingly all over the world, played directly
into a shared delusion that was spreading like a disease
among many of the era's white people, the myth of
the ancient arian. Now in actual historical terms, arian is
a term used to refer to the Indo Aryan language group.
It was never a racial classification. The terms started being

(53:55):
used because early linguists noticed strange similarities between languages like German, Romani, Punjabi, Hindu,
Urdu in Sanskrit. Well, the term Arian was initially applied
to speakers of various Indo Iranian languages. The understanding of
the word became corrupted in the late eighteen hundreds. This
occurred along the same time that colonialism started to reach
its absolute zenith, and there were a lot of white

(54:17):
folks looking for reasons to justify the fact that they
were basically plundering and enslaving the entire world. There were
also a lot of white folks looking at their increasingly
multiracial societies, which at that point, like ment Italians and Slavs,
breed with Germans and British people. And we're getting concerned
about this fact. Uh. And I'm gonna refer back to
Smithsonian Magazine again quote. The rising interest in eugenics and

(54:40):
rachel hygiene, however, led to some to corrupt Aryan into
a descriptor for an ancient master racial identity with a
clear through line to contemporary Germany. As The Washington Post
reported in a story about the rise of Nazism several
years before the start of World War Two, Arianism was
an intellectual dispute between bewhiskered scholars as to the existence
of a pure and undefiled Aryan race at once stage

(55:00):
of Earth's history. In the nineteenth century, French aristocrat Arthur
de Gobnel and others made the connection between the mythical
Arians and the Germans, who are the superior descendants of
the early people, now destined to lead the world to
greater advancement by conquering their neighbors. The findings of Schlieman's
digg in Turkey then suddenly had a deeper ideological meaning
for the nationalists. The purely Arian symbol Schliemann uncovered was

(55:22):
no longer an archaeological mystery. It was a stand in
for their superiority. German nationalist groups like the reich Schamerbund,
a nineteen twelve anti Semitic group and the Bavarian Frey
Corp paramilitary. Basically, the proud boys of the era UM
used the swastika to reflect their newly discovered identity as
the master race. Now, the reality is that swastikas appeared

(55:42):
damn near everywhere in human history. It's a common design
and a striking one, and a bunch of different groups
of people have independently figured it out over time. And
people should stop talking to you about your blanket and
actually just relaxed. They're pretty small. If you're nowadays, the
swastika is the swastika, like it's the Nazi thing unless
you're in India. Um, because the world's big. Um. But

(56:04):
back in these days, like if you're looking at like
ancient history, it's best to kind of look at the
swastica like humor that weird s doodle we all put
on our trapper keepers back in the nineties. Like no
one invented that. It just showed up everywhere. That's the
fucking swastika in prehistory. Um, It's just all over the
damn place. But of course, yeah, oh I have that blanket. Yeah.

(56:27):
It was not seen as this though, um by a
lot of people, and anthropologist Gwendoline Lake notes quote when
Heinrich Schleeman discovered swastica like decorations on pottery, flagments and
all archaeological levels at Troy, it was seen as evidence
for a racial continuity and proof that the inhabitants of
the site had been Arian all along. The link between
the swastika and Indo European origin, once forged, was impossible

(56:49):
to discard. It allowed the projection of nationalist feelings and
associations onto a universal symbol, which hints served as a
distinguishing boundary mark up between non Arian, or rather non
German and German identity. That's fascinating that, I mean, because
you can understand the logic, but it also is kind
of absurd to assume that like, oh, this symbol is

(57:11):
always surely must mean the exact same thing thousands of
years ago as it does to me today. Now. The
people then were as dumb as the people who planted
the Iowa Caucuses. Wow, that's why all this happened. Robert,
my my dog worked on the shadow app so really
watch your mouth. That is son he invested in the

(57:36):
shadow app I have to say it this all up? Yeah,
I mean, of course he kept he was talking about
shadow app for and I'm like, that can't be real.
And then I thought it was the Dog from what
was that movie with the dogs and cats that talk
and they find their family terrible. I don't know a

(57:56):
good movie Homeward Bound Homeward. Oh, I haven't seen Homeward
it found. Sonny definitely just wanted to harm people, and
he wanted to harm the discourse, and that's why he
invested in Shadow Up. That's fair. That's fair. You could
call him the Hitler of the Iowa CAUCUSUS, which many has,
but it makes me uncomfortable. Sitting in Athens, reading the

(58:21):
news of Hitler's movement in Germany and staring at ancient
swastika's on beloved Greek artifacts, things started to come together
in Maximiani Portis's mind. She moved to Greece permanently in
ninety after finishing college and renouncing her French citizenship. The
very next year, nine she went with her mother and
aunt on a trip to the Holy Land that wound
up having just as deep an impact on her developing

(58:42):
mind as the swastika. Now, Maximiani had never been very religious.
Her mother and aunt were, though, and while they failed
to inculcate a love of Christ in Maximiani, they did
succeed in making her hate Jewish people, which is not
the part of Christianity to transfer. If you're gonna pick
one of all, well, I mean there's so many different
horrible things to take away from Christianity, and that is, um,

(59:06):
that is the worst of all. She got none of
the good stuff, just the anti Semitism. Uh yeah, she um, yeah,
it's not great. It's not great. I'm starting to think
this lady maybe not so nice, not heading in a
great direction. Yeah. Now, a lot of this was tied
to the fact that Maximiani was so in love with

(59:28):
Greek culture, and she was really piste off because she
was like particularly love with like ancient Greek pagan culture,
like the old Greek gods and their myths and stuff,
and none of that stuff was very relevant other than
it's like an academic thing by this point in history,
and Christianity and Judaism were obviously hugely relevant in Europe,
and she hated this, and she blamed the Jews for

(59:49):
the fact that nobody other people weren't as into Greek
history as she was, Like, this is like the core
of it. For it was like she's in love with
like Zeus and ship and she's like, why don't people
like this as much as I do? If the Jews,
she's become a chaos nerd. No, it's great, It's not great. Yeah,
that's really bad. So her trip to the Holy Land

(01:00:11):
with her mom and aunt was a bit of a
weird one, Okay, I mean, I'm yeah. She was revolted
by the obeisance they played to Judeo Christian holy sites,
and as she touristed her way through old Jerusalem, she felt,
in her biographer's words, overwhelmed and repelled by the exotic
nature of the Jews. They're attired their customs, observances and festivals,

(01:00:32):
the strange dark men and broad brimmed hats and long
black coats hastening to prayers at the Wailing Wall. Okay,
it's interesting that Goodwin Clark portuss biographer mentions this specifically,
seeing these Jewish people and being like horrified by the
way they look in their coats and hairlocks and long
black coats. It's possible that precise moment never happened, but

(01:00:56):
it's worth noting that this moment bears a striking resemblance
to a tale Adolf Hitler told regularly about the supposed
moment that he specifically gained his hatred of Jewish people.
And here's how he wrote about that moment in mind
comp this takes place in Lynz, no, sorry, in Austria Vienna. Once,

(01:01:16):
since I was strolling through the inner city I suddenly
encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hairlocks.
Is this a jew? Was my first thought, for to
be sure, they had not looked like that in Lenz,
where he grew up. I observed the man furtively and cautiously.
But the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing
feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a
new form. Is this a German? This is like a

(01:01:39):
huge moment in like Hitler lore. It's possible that the
reason that that portis writes her own think like her
own story this way is that she's hearkening to mind Camp,
because again, she writes about this later. It's also possible
they just were similar people and had a similar moment.
If she's the primary resource for herself, she seems to

(01:02:00):
have like a fair grasp on storytelling. It makes sense
that she would pull it doesn't make sense. She's like, oh,
this is the end of Act one, where's my insighting?
She needs she wrote her own insighting incident. If it didn't, yeah,
I'll take a leaf out of you know. It's like, uh,
you know, George Lucas uh stole from from Great Japanese

(01:02:20):
Cinema to make Star Wars, and in a very similar fashion,
Savitri Devi stole from Adolf Hitler, the of notchrue artists,
Steele Rombert. It's what they it's what they been saying
for generations. Yeah, that is funny. I mean I feel
like that same logic of like you have to have

(01:02:40):
a story to go with your hatred. They have that
same logic on like Iron Chef, you know, like you
have they have like there has to be a story
that goes with this dish, and sometimes you're like, sometimes
it just is she just cooks some fucking food, asshole.
Sometimes you just make some food and it's bad and
it's terrible. Yeah, so, uh, Maximiani would go on to

(01:03:03):
claim that after this visit to the Holy Land, she
decided that Hitler's campaign of hate against Jewish people was
not just a matter of German concern, it was an
international crusade. She came to believe that all of the
formerly pagan nations of Europe had to throw off their
Judeo Christian heritage and like reconnect with their pagan roots.
Um And this is the first time she realizes that

(01:03:27):
sees a national socialist, and she the way she described it,
she realizes she's always been a national socialist, and so
she falls fully in love with Hitler at this point,
um And she's not a German Nazi though, And initially
the way she decides to like act on this newfound
Nazism is to basically try to revive Greek nationalism and

(01:03:50):
pagan beliefs, kind of with the structure of national socialism
over them. And so she returns to Athens and she
sets to work trying to cobble together her own Greek
version of not Seism, but focused around a religious component
that involved return to worshiping the ancient Greek pantheon. I
mean always this woman. Yeah. Uh. Now, by this point,

(01:04:11):
the ancient Greeks had become sort of the Uberman in
her own mind, and this conception was nursed by the
bits of hitler speeches that made their way over into
the press and her part of the world. By nineteen
thirty she finally read Mind Camp for the very first time,
which introduced Maximiani to Hitler's theories about the Aryan race.
His ideas about the superior race consistently undermined by the
evil Jews, jailed remarkably well with Maximiani's own beliefs about

(01:04:35):
the ancient Greeks and the Jews. She became increasingly obsessed
with the Arians and in part the idea of seeking
out the remaining evidence of their existence, and at the
time it was generally understood that India had been conquered
and ruled by the Arians. Many among the weirder Nazi
sets saw Hinduism as an example of a pure Aryan
pagan tradition uncorrupted by Judaism. They found the Hindu cast

(01:04:57):
system deeply intriguing as well for reasons that should be obvious,
and enshrined a small number of superior beings and power
over a vast number of less valuable individuals. In nineteen
thirty two, Maximiani's father died and she decided to take
this as an opportunity to travel to India to seek
out the truth of the ancient Arians. It's like a
Nazi version of Eat, Pray Love. Yeah, this is in

(01:05:21):
another world. This is a very cute movie, and she
just took every rod the same from it. It's you
remember that horrible Cameron Crow movie Elizabethtown or Orlando Blue
drive the Country with his dad's ashes and it's like,
I'm glad we had this talk. And You're like, what
the funk are you? That sounds like forty different movies, Jamie,
It's no, it's the same. It's the same. All my

(01:05:43):
elizabeth Town heads will know it's the same. Paula Dean's
in that movie. Oh God, speaking of Nazis now. Um
So Savitri decide she's gonna go to fucking India. And
she's not the only person with this idea of going
to India to seek out the Arians. In fact, the
nineteen thirty five Heinrich Hemmler's s S founded the on

(01:06:05):
a Nerby, a scientific think tank dedicated to finding evidence
of the ancient Arians, and they actually sent multiple expeditions
into India and Tibet. Maximiani went to India to find
evidence of the Arians too, but she also went there
to see firsthand evidence of a civilization founded upon what
she believed was a natural racial hierarchy. She felt that
Indian society looked how the world would appear in the

(01:06:27):
year eight thousand, after six thousand years of Nazi rule,
very specific women eight thousand. The Jonas Brothers didn't even
think that far. You know that they're huge, the Naziment
that I do not get that joke. The Jonas brothers
first single in two thousand six or maybe seven was

(01:06:51):
a song called year three thousand. They said, not much
has changed, but we live underwater. That's all they knew about.
That's a lot that age. Jamie. Well, they say that
not much has Jade noted the underwater. It's a weird

(01:07:16):
it makes no sense. Okay, saw Robert continue your podcast.
But she's thinking to a year eight thousand, eight thousand,
Kevin Jennis already has You have to give her credit.
She is eight times as ambitious as Hitler. God. Yeah,
So upon her arrival in the country, her beliefs were

(01:07:39):
seemingly confirmed when she watched a parade celebrating Rama, a
deified Aryan hero. The parade featured huge numbers of dark
skinned Indians bowing and worshiping a lighter skinned statue of Rama.
And Rama is most assuredly not white, although he is
often depicted as lighter skinned, but he is. He's definitely Indian. Um.
But it was not uncommon Europeans who were attracted to

(01:08:01):
India in this period to decide that a number of
ancient Hindu heroes and gods were in fact white. Um.
This was like a common thing. And in fact, Maximiani's
favorite poet who we talked about earlier, Laconte de Lisle,
had actually written a poem about Rama that referred to
him as Thou whose blood is pure, Thou whose body
is white, and a subduer of all the profane races. So, yeah,

(01:08:26):
everyone's a little bit of a Nazi in colonialism. That's
kind of the deal. That's kind of their thing. It's
kind of I mean that, yeah, not shocking. And if
you're if you're interested in the story of Rama, one
thing I would recommend it super accessible. There's a movie
online by Nina Paley, who's a female graphic artist who's amazing,
called Sita sings the blues. If you just google that,

(01:08:47):
it's the whole movie is free. It's one of those
beautiful pieces of animation. It's why I went to Indian
in the first places. Incredible movie. Um. And one of
the things that does really well is it has all
these scenes where like individual like myths from like Hindu
mythology are explained by like groups of people arguing about them, which,
if you actually go to India, is how you learn

(01:09:08):
about myths. Like if you talk about the myth of
Sita and Rama to like a family, everyone in the family,
you know, like like multiple different versions of the story,
and people will argue with each other. Like it's not
like Christian orthodoxy or whatever. Like it's very very complicated stuff,
but fascinating. Um. So yeah. Maximiani is convinced that this

(01:09:28):
guy's white though, um and she falls in love with
India um and eventually finds her way to an ashram
in Bengal, where she's able to live cheap and learn
Hindi and study Hindu religious traditions. She gets a job
outside of Delhi teaching English and Indian history, and she
grew more and more taken with Hinduism, until in nineteen
thirty six she adopted a Hindu name, Savitri Devi, taken

(01:09:50):
from a Hindu solar goddess. This woman is obsessed with
gods and goddess, loves gods and goddess is so much.
She's such a dork. Yeah, it's specifically sun gods and goddesses.
She's fucking obsessed with akat in two. It's weird. There
was a girl in my middle school who was like,
call me Artemis, and we were like, no, okay, no,

(01:10:11):
we did, we did and are and and if I
was also a dork, but not that kind of dork god. No,
I was just a normal, bright eyes loving dork. I'm
a big believer in calling people by whatever name they
prefer to be referred to, unless it's the name of
a god or goddess. Then I just start, I just
get furious. Yeah, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna push

(01:10:35):
that behavior. Well, she was. She was Artemis for all
of eighth grade, and then she went back to uh,
just just Alex for the rest of that. As far
as I know her life, that's fine. Yeah, yeah, any
other name really now. Early on in her time in India,
Savitri had hiked to the top of a hill and
seeing a beautiful Indian fortress, one of many such colossal

(01:10:55):
ancient relics that dot the country. She was taken by
its beauty and equally horrified a more modern Jesuit hospital
that had been constructed nearby. This was powerfully symbolic to her,
and she claimed that it cemented in her a deep
need to protect Hindu India from being infected by Judaeo
Christian taint. Starting in nineteen thirty seven, she began working
as an anti Christian preacher for Swami Satyananda's Hindu mission

(01:11:18):
in Calcutta. For two years, she criss crossed the country,
meeting with various tribal elders and arranging public debates with
Christian missionaries. And I'd like to quote now from an
article by konrad Elst, an indiologist who's analyzed this history. Quote.
Thoroughly familiar with the mentality and methods of her adversary,
she could destroy the credit of the imported religion in
the minds of the villagers and prevent or undo many conversions.

(01:11:40):
There was a sharp contradiction between her own racist and
anti egalitarian convictions and the reformist and egalitarian program of
the Hindu mission. To the Hindu mission, Hinduism was a
value to in itself. To Savitri Devi, it was but
an instrument of her imagined Aryan race. In her years
as a preacher, she kept her non Hindu preoccupations to herself,
but in her memoirs uh she declared that she conceived

(01:12:02):
of her reconversion mission as an exercise and deception. From
the racist arian viewpoint, it was necessary to give the
most backward and degenerate Aborigines a false Hindu consciousness. She wrote.
This is one of the major areas where you'll run
into disputes about Savitri Devi. The common view on her
legacy is spoiler that she proposed a synthesis between Hinduism

(01:12:22):
and Nazism, and aspects of this are true, But it
would be more accurate to say that she found Hinduism
a useful tool for advancing Nazism. Um and I'm gonna
quote again from else essay. In contrast with the Hindu nationalists,
but in tune with Indian Marxists and Castists, she believed
that the concept nation and a program of nationalism could
not apply to India. In nineteen thirty eight, she used

(01:12:44):
the slogan make every Hindu and Indian nationalist, and every
Indian nationalist to Hindu. Now, this seems to be something
not legitimately yeah, and she didn't really believe it. In
her autobiography years later, she expressed the belief that nationalism
could only exist within members of the same race, and
she thought that all the different casts in India were
different races. And we're getting into the weeds here too much.

(01:13:05):
But it's important to understand for what comes next that
Sabitri Devi advocated for Hindu nationalism, but not because she
believed strongly in it, because she saw it as a
useful tool for harming the British Empire in advancing Nazism
main goal. So she's merely co opting it for her
own sinister purposes. It's a little more complicated than that,
because she also loves it, like she's She's takes on

(01:13:28):
a lot of Hindu beliefs. It's this is a weird
story and there's no like, super simple answer to it.
But it's not as simple as she just becomes Hindu
and also Nazi. Like it's weirder than that too. No
one edited this out I need people to know what

(01:13:48):
what I've been forced to endure. You just like literally
did that into the microphone. Literally it was hard. I
had to. I'm sorry. I can see Robert right now.
And he wiped his nose on the mic and he
was lit it and then licked it. You licked it.
All of this gets edited out now. Many Hindu nationalists

(01:14:12):
were very bullish about the Nazis because Great Britain owned
India and ruled it as a brutal colonial oppressor, and
they figured, you know, the enemy of my enemy, right. Uh.
Not all of them felt this way. There were a
lot of Hindu nationalists who were against the Nazis because
they were like, well, but their Nazis, um, so again
paying everybody with the same brush. Yeah, But Savitri got

(01:14:34):
along very well with the set of Hindu nationalists who
are like, yeah, the Nazi seemed good, um. And she's
particularly taken with Dr Asit Krishna Mukherji, when, of India's
few actual committed Nazis in nineteen thirty seven and thirty eight,
Mukerji started to publish a bi monthly pro Nazi magazine,
The New Mercury. Savitri met him in early nineteen thirty eight.

(01:14:56):
And they didn't instantly fall in love, um, but she
fell in love with like his mind. She was probably bisexual, um,
but certainly wasn't interested in Mukerji in any way. But
she falls in love with like this guy's Nazism. Basically
they're that kind of so they're in God, that's so,
I mean, it's not gad, that's bleak because it's like, yeah,

(01:15:21):
I mean, if you're going to marry a Nazi and
they're you're not even attracted to them, no excuse, no
excuse you, but you know what I mean. She has
a little bit of an excuse, but we're getting to it.
So you are cutting love lady, all kinds of slack, Robert.
I'm just explaining her. Do you have a crop? Now?

(01:15:42):
She so, she she doesn't. They don't get together right away.
She loves his understanding of Nazi ideology, and particularly his
emphasis on the mythst of the Old arians U and
Mukerji was like obsessed with the Thule Society of the
tool of society, and it acquired a lot of their
occult writing. So he's like that kind of nerd, and
Mukerji seems to like genuinely appreciate Savitri's ideas and the

(01:16:02):
fact that she was just as much of a nerd
for Nazism as he was, but he was baffled by
her insistence on staying in India while Nazi Germany like
rose to the heights of its power in early nineteen
thirty nine, He asked her, what have you been doing
in India all these years, with your ideas and your potentialities,
wasting your time and energy. Go back to Europe, where
duty calls you. Go and help the rebirth of Aryan Heathendom,

(01:16:23):
where there are still Arians strong and wide awake. Go
to him who was truly life and resurrection, the leader
of the Third Reich. Go at once. Next year will
be too late. And he was kind of right about that,
but he was convinced that she could do Yeah, yeah,
I'm like, well historically okay, yeah. Savitri, though, was convinced
that she could do more for the cause of Nazism

(01:16:45):
in India than in Germany. She'd become close with members
of the rush Tria Swam Savik Song or RSS, an
India Hindu nationalist movement that were very similar to the Nazis.
The founder or One of the founders, be Hedgwar, formed
the group to defend Hindu society from daily onslaughts by outsiders,
and he included Muslim Indians as members of that group.

(01:17:08):
Like all fascist organizations, the RSS had a uniform khaki shorts,
a white shirt and a black cap. RSS members met
daily to train with bamboo beatsticks called lathis and to
learn about Hindutva Hindu nationalism. In nineteen thirty nine, Savitri
wrote a warning to the Hindus. The books Forward was
written by G. D. Savarkar brothers to one of the

(01:17:29):
co founders of the r s S and, according to
an article by South Asian affairs analyst Peter Friedrick, quote
DEVII advanced VD Savarkar's thesis of Hindutva that India is
a Hindu nation of Hindu people and only for Hindu people.
She claimed that Hindu society is India itself, called Hinduism
the national religion of India and suggested that Hindu should
tell non Hindus, we represent India, not you. Therefore India

(01:17:52):
is ours, not yours. She urged Hindus to recover, along
with their national consciousness, their military virtues of old to
rebecome a military race. The method, she said, should be
the organization of the young men and pledge bound military
like batches with Hindu nationalism as their only ideal. And
here's where I pause to note that the current Prime

(01:18:12):
Minister of India, Narindra Modi, is a member of the RSS.
A warning to Hindus is still considered to be a
deeply influential text within the Hindu nationalist movement and the RSS.
Moody probably read it as a child and a list
of his crimes. And the thousands of murders and mosque
bombings and beatings carried out by Hindu nationalists against Indian
Muslims would go beyond the scope of this episode, but

(01:18:33):
it is worth noting that the current authoritarian lurched by India,
the world's largest democracy, owes at least a decent amount
to the work of Savitri Devi. So that's cool. You're
in love with her? Are? Oh my god? I mean
it is a sign of where this is going that
I kind of glossed over the fact that she played
a role in the establishment of what's starting to become

(01:18:55):
a fascist dictatorship in India. We just have so much
the ground to cover. We have so much to cover.
We don't have time for the fascist dictatorship today. We
have some time, but yeah, okay, okay, well we'll make time.
We'll make time for the fashion. In nineteen forty Britain
and Germany went to war. Savitri's extremist beliefs were well
known at this point, and she was forced to marry

(01:19:16):
Mukerjee in order to stay in the country. So that's
why they get married. It's a it's basically a green
card thing. Yeah, got it. She described it as a
sexless marriage, primarily to allow her to stay in the country,
and she did what she could for Nazism while in India,
spying on British military positions for the access and facilitating
communication between sub hos Chandra Bose, leader of the National
Indian Army of pro Axis Group, and the Japanese government.

(01:19:39):
In a different world, these contributions might have played a
role in a Japanese invasion of India, but World War
Two went the way it did, and Hitler eventually shot
himself at a bunker to avoid capture. Familiar Vitree learned
of his death through an overheard conversation from two Muslim
men on the Marabar Coast. She was inconsolable for days
over the death of her hero and the end of
the belief system she had dedicated her life to championing,

(01:20:02):
but mcare she told her not to worry. This was
merely part of the cycle of ages, and the dark
age brought on by Hitler's defeat would someday end, And likewise, Jamie,
one of this episode must now end, but this dark
age will continue on Thursday with part two of the
story of Savitri Devon. No, okay, how you doing, Jamie.

(01:20:27):
I'm look, I'm just unclenching. That's important for the next
two minutes, and then we can talk about it again.
Always be clenching. Yeah, go plug your plug doubles. First,
Oh right, uh leave that in. I want people to
know that I had And also leave in Robert blowing

(01:20:49):
his nose on the mic. Then Chris, leave that in.
You can edit out. It's going to be horrible, Chris.
You can edit out the part where Robert is like
young Delicious after licking his own not off the mic,
but everything else should probably stay in. I feel like
this is legally abuse. You could probably report me to
h R. Could be fun. Could be fine. My Twitter

(01:21:12):
is Jamie Loft. This help on my Instagram is at
Jamie christ Superstar and I'm touring for the better part
of February. You can go to my website Jamie lofts
is Innocent dot com to find out where yeah yeah,
and you can find Sophie on Twitter finding her at

(01:21:35):
Why Underscore Sophie Underscore Why, And that's it. That's all
you can find of us online, which you're on Behind
the Bastards dot com, including the full free text of
Hitler's Priestess if you want to read this book. Um,
the episodes over go stop the French from murdering cats? Yes, great,

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: Savitri Devi: The Woman Who Turned Nazism into a Religion