Hitlerian Esotericism and the Tradition
Savitri Devi
Savitri Devi
The other institution developed around an apparently genuine sage. However it tended, already during his life, to descend to the level of an enterprise of very skilful and very lucrative exploitation. Indeed, it bought one after the other all the houses of Pondicherry that were for sale, so that it included in 1960, apart from the center where some disciples dedicated themselves to meditation, many workshops for pottery, joinery, weaving, etc, etc. ... whose products were -- and are still to -- day-sold for profit; co-educational schools, with sports classes; a university, provided with richly equipped laboratories.
This prosperity is, I am told, due mainly to the business genius of the "Mother" of the ashram -- a woman of Jewish origin, the widow of a Jew, then of a Frenchman* -- and the son that she had with her first husband. Members of the organization, full at the same time with zeal and practical direction and enjoying the confidence of these two people, are also, perhaps, persons in charge, each one following his talents. In any event, in the reception hall, where there are many photographs of the late guru and the "Mother" for sale -- large and small, for all budgets -- one is impressed by the business-like atmosphere of the place, an impression that is specified and intensified during a visit of the workshops. And one recalls, by contrast, the spiritual energy that emerges from certain writings of Aurobindo Ghosh: his Commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, his Divine Life or his Synthesis of Yogas. There is the feeling of a deep rift between this more than flourishing organization which covers two thirds of a city of more than one hundred thousand inhabitants, and the wise one who lived there in the most complete isolation -- invisible to the crowd and even to his disciples, except for a few hours a year.
[*Mr. Paul Richard, her first husband, was called Alfassa. The "Mother," still alive when these pages were written, died since then -- in 1973 -- at 95 years of age.]
However, there is a fact which seems to me eloquent, and it is this: in the midst of this traditional civilization that is still that of India, it is precisely from these organizations -- the most secular, the most "modern," in a word the most anti-traditionalist -- that the gestures, writings, and declarations hostile to Hitlerism came.
Aurobindo Ghosh himself did not, to my knowledge, ever express a judgment "pro" or "contra" any of the great figures or the great political (or more-than-political) faiths of our time. He had definitively left action -- and what action!* -- for contemplation, and it was confined to the spiritual domain. But at the end of 1939 -- or was it 1940? -- the newspapers of Calcutta published that the "Ashram of Pondicherry" had made the colonial Government of India a gift of ten million pounds sterling "to help the British war effort." Mr. de Saint-Hilaire, known as Pavitra, secretary of the Ashram, whom I questioned on this point in 1960, answered me that he "could not say to me" if information collected and published twenty years earlier in the press of Calcutta was exact. But he told me that "that could well be," considering that Hitlerism went, according to him (and undoubtedly also according to more than one person having some influence in the ashram), "against the direction of human evolution." (Against evolution? And how! Nothing could be truer! But far from being a reason to fight it, it would be, on the contrary, a reason to support it. Universal decline is a sign, more and more visible, that our cycle advances rapidly towards its end. Any combat against it, all "return to the eternal principles," necessarily goes "against the direction of human evolution." It is a phase of the perpetual fight against the current of Time. But this is, I repeat it, I insist on it, a reason -- the imperative reason -- to exalt rather than to condemn it.)
[*He had, at the beginning of the century, played a leading role in the anti-British "terrorist" movement of Bengal.]
This prosperity is, I am told, due mainly to the business genius of the "Mother" of the ashram -- a woman of Jewish origin, the widow of a Jew, then of a Frenchman* -- and the son that she had with her first husband. Members of the organization, full at the same time with zeal and practical direction and enjoying the confidence of these two people, are also, perhaps, persons in charge, each one following his talents. In any event, in the reception hall, where there are many photographs of the late guru and the "Mother" for sale -- large and small, for all budgets -- one is impressed by the business-like atmosphere of the place, an impression that is specified and intensified during a visit of the workshops. And one recalls, by contrast, the spiritual energy that emerges from certain writings of Aurobindo Ghosh: his Commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, his Divine Life or his Synthesis of Yogas. There is the feeling of a deep rift between this more than flourishing organization which covers two thirds of a city of more than one hundred thousand inhabitants, and the wise one who lived there in the most complete isolation -- invisible to the crowd and even to his disciples, except for a few hours a year.
[*Mr. Paul Richard, her first husband, was called Alfassa. The "Mother," still alive when these pages were written, died since then -- in 1973 -- at 95 years of age.]
However, there is a fact which seems to me eloquent, and it is this: in the midst of this traditional civilization that is still that of India, it is precisely from these organizations -- the most secular, the most "modern," in a word the most anti-traditionalist -- that the gestures, writings, and declarations hostile to Hitlerism came.
Aurobindo Ghosh himself did not, to my knowledge, ever express a judgment "pro" or "contra" any of the great figures or the great political (or more-than-political) faiths of our time. He had definitively left action -- and what action!* -- for contemplation, and it was confined to the spiritual domain. But at the end of 1939 -- or was it 1940? -- the newspapers of Calcutta published that the "Ashram of Pondicherry" had made the colonial Government of India a gift of ten million pounds sterling "to help the British war effort." Mr. de Saint-Hilaire, known as Pavitra, secretary of the Ashram, whom I questioned on this point in 1960, answered me that he "could not say to me" if information collected and published twenty years earlier in the press of Calcutta was exact. But he told me that "that could well be," considering that Hitlerism went, according to him (and undoubtedly also according to more than one person having some influence in the ashram), "against the direction of human evolution." (Against evolution? And how! Nothing could be truer! But far from being a reason to fight it, it would be, on the contrary, a reason to support it. Universal decline is a sign, more and more visible, that our cycle advances rapidly towards its end. Any combat against it, all "return to the eternal principles," necessarily goes "against the direction of human evolution." It is a phase of the perpetual fight against the current of Time. But this is, I repeat it, I insist on it, a reason -- the imperative reason -- to exalt rather than to condemn it.)
[*He had, at the beginning of the century, played a leading role in the anti-British "terrorist" movement of Bengal.]
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