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

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Published Apr 30, 2024, 9:00 AM

M what esoteric my hitler ISM's ship that is two hitler starts in a row. Jesus Robert, 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.

Hi.

I just go Jamie one name.

Now.

I'm the Beyonce of No Billy Wayne's, the Beyonce of Behind the Bastards.

Yeah, you are the podcaster formerly known as the Beyonce of Behind the Bastards.

Yeah, they're the Beyonce of my heart. Thank you.

Yeah, there we go, Here we go. Oh Jamie, how are you doing today?

I'm good. I'm good.

I 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.

Yeah, you had to like swipe your credit card if you sneeze on a Spirit our Lines.

I have this friend, his name is Lenny, and he listens to the podcast, so he may hear this and Lenny is 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 plane I've heard of.

Whizz Air.

Yeah, they're terrible.

Never had the pleasure.

There was a moment 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 bore multiple pairs of pants on how if you're not going onto his Spirit Airlines flight wearing five jackets? Like what you you're you're grabbing yourself, You're I've been on a Spirit Airlines red eye next to like an actively drunk person multiple times.

Although that's just normal, I.

Know, but I think, yeah, you're right.

If you haven't wept, if you haven't wept and thrown things away while waiting to get in line at Spirit Airlines, have you even flown? We've gotten off topic, very off topic, Jamie, Yes, have you ever heard of Savitri dev No? Oh good, oh boy, Jamie, you are in for a motherfucking treat. Ooh.

I love when you don't tell me an advance.

Okay, okay, Yeah, this is one I'm gonna 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 twenty twenty, Like the most the most recent headline that ties directly to you. Remember when the FBI arrested all those members of the base, that that neo Nazi group, there's plenty to start a second Civil War by randomly firing into a crowd in Virginia that was full of armed people. Yeah, that whole, the whole hulla balloo. Yes, yeah, Well she's kinda behind all that, although she died decades before it happened. So that's today's story.

Nice, let's do it.

So now, Jamie, we're gonna start like we start every good day by talking about our loll buddy. Shouldn't call him a buddy, Adolf Hitler. Oh, it's weird because I can call Stalin a buddy, but I feel like calling Hitler a Buddy's a bridge too far.

I don't know on this show, I feel like there are just rules that are different.

Yeah, they're they're old friends at this point. So, yeah, Hitler was at he was a secular ruler, Jamie. He was not a not a not a not a. 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, in this industry of books on Nazi occult history and like Nazi magic and the hell Boy movies like to hear it, Yeah, yeah, I mean they're great movies, at least one of them is. But like this idea that like the Nazis were like full of full of magic, right, and that Hitler like believed all sorts of like weird kooky occult stuff about like raising the dead and aliens and shit, and it's just not true. 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 to Hitler. They were to 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 were pretty secular guys.

Beyonces the Nazi Beyonce is as I'm trying to think of, like.

Like the the Nazi Jeremy Renners.

Oh, how dare you speak his name in this forum?

I thought we made a pact to never speak of him again.

We never signed that contract. We never did.

It was under negotiation for a long time.

Yeah, it is still in arbitration now. The Toulliss Society spelled Thule Society like the top racks on people's jeeps? Was it? Well? Suberus people Suberus. The Tullas Society was a German ocult group in the early twentieth century in Germany, and it provided some of the early funding and leadership for the Nazi Party. Heinrich Himmler held bizarre quasi magical beliefs for his whole time in power, and he was kind of into some weird He thought he was like a reincarnated prince and some shit. Sure, but Hitler himself was not at all into occult stuff. And the only guy really close to him who was was Rudolph Hess, who was his deputy and for a long time his best friend. This is the guy he like co wrote minekompf with like Hess and Hitler are like fucking type before Hitler.

His ghost his ghost writer.

Yeah, kind 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.

Yeah.

Who says the perfect person doesn't exist?

Yeah, Rudolph has That's what people say about Rudolph Has is he was the perfect person. So he was also the deputy fearer for a while oh six. Yeah, he was a cool dude, but he wasn't really in the picture for very long. He got increasingly marginalized after Hitler came to power in thirty three, and in nineteen forty one he kind of went bug fuck and got on a plane and flew to Great Britain while the two countries were at war. Sorry sorry, sorry?

How would you define bug fuck?

I would define bug fluck is like independently hopping in your private plane and flying 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 me to. I would describe that as pretty bug fuck. Yeah, 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 gonna know how to how to define bug fuck moving forward. Okay, So bug fuck is when like the world is falling apart and you're like fuck it and you go the fuck off and then you is that.

It kind of yeah, like it was the kind of thing where like there was no chance of it ever working. He did not have the authority to sign a peace treaty for Germany, and Britain did not have any interest in talking with him or making peace with Germany at this point sick. So he basically just flew and crash landed in England and got arrested and spent the rest of his life in prison. Very much And it was a 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. And because Hess was like this occult dude into astrology and all this shit and like this weird, he was actually kind of like a Buddhist, like he's a weird dude. But because he held all these weird beliefs and he pissed off Hitler so badly, Hitler bans like all of this weird occult shit that had cropped up around the Nazi party in nineteen forty one. Okay, so yeah, so after forty one, like really most of that stuff is illegal. Heinrich Himler gets up to a little bit of it with the SS because he's got a castle and he he's just a weird dude. We'll get into some of that in the 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 a dive.

If you mentioned you're like if I He's like the guys on Reddit who like, if you mentioned you so much as mention your zodiac sign, they're like, she's not credible, she's fine, she's a she's lost.

Yes, I love that type of person.

And I feel confident saying that one hundred percent of Hitler's biographers agree he would have been extremely on Reddit. I oh, more on Reddit than anyone has ever been on red.

Sure.

Yeah, no, he would be the most reddity guy of all of them. And we have to admit that that is very what's his sign? That's that's very his sign of him.

Wouldn't you say, I don't know, he's such.

A Taurus He's sure?

Sure, Okay, continue, that's I assume you're referring to the maker of really shoddy handguns, uh, which is I think they're Brazilian terrible guns.

To Okay, Now, I'm just trying to on the behind the bastards board.

Now, either way, advocating the Taurus sign or the Taurus firearms brand is not going to go well for you.

Okay.

So yeah, so now Hitler, so he's not into the occult at all. He's not a big fan of Christianity either. 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, and he worried weaken the German people. But he also respected Christianity for its ability to inculcate good values in the German people, 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 sure if you're aware of that.

Ummm no, I know. I wouldn't have MS if it weren't for 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 would a cool dude, but he felt it was important to maintain this image.

Now.

There were some among his followers thought it was Nazism's destiny to become the new Great German religion, but Hitler himself pushed back against this, insisting in mind kompt 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 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 nineteen forty five, Nazism has changed quite a lot. The actual political and historic beliefs of the original Nazis and of Hitler himself have been twisted and shifted into something even weirder. It would be too much to say that this new form of Nazism is more dangerous than the original, given the tens of millions 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 Hitlerism has made it better able to survive in the era of the Internet. Now, Esoteric Hitlerism is a term used to refer to a number of different strains of post war 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. Four Chan and eight Chan are in the modern age, two of the most prolific vectors for the spread of this brand of nonsense. Sure, there are strains of it in Brenton Terrence Manifesto, and in Anders Brevik'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 shit.

This is someone's feminism somewhere. Yeah, this is some piece of shit's feminism.

She is a feminist icon.

Feministic 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 that she was not willing to do just the first She was 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. As she does start first focused on the cats and then moves straight to Nazism though, it's remarkable. Yeah. So she was born Maximiani Portas on September thirtieth, nineteen oh five in Lyon, France. Her mother, Julia, came from Cornwall, the town with the thirty sixth dumbest name in all of England. Her father's ancestry was a mi longe of various Mediterranean peoples without access to birth control. He was mostly at Italian in Greek. Although young Maximiani was born a French citizen, 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's a 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 at plea is just like finish reading.

Their eyes were watching God, Let's move on.

I was the male version 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, no, no, not a goddamn word.

Like when I was in high school, like 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 they can't use so stupid, god.

Damn totally useless term. Did you have to use me?

That's one of those did you have to use that textbook that was about the the Romani family?

Did you do Eka Romani?

Oh no, no, man, I was like fucking Kills and Quintus. I remember those names. They were like the fucking there. It was like a bunch of Pompeii people who all die at the end of the book. Everyone died at the end of our textbook.

Was it like we we have the We had the Cornelia family. It was like Cornelia and her brother Marcus, and then they had a friend named Sextus.

Who knows, they sound like fucking losers, they weren't they?

For me, there, your your family 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 ditch. Their characters in a ditch. They can't get out. They're staying at an inn. The innkeeper's yelling at them. They're stuck in a dick. They're stuck in a ditch for a whole month, and then they go to Rome and and everything is fine.

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. I'm like, we should learn.

You didn't have to learn to pronounce anything, right, You never had to speak because there was a dead.

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 what the Romans spoke. So we just didn't give a shit. It was great.

Yeah, Teacher ms Cook would come and she would what was the thing she would say, she was like, okay, dysipuarly at this dy skipuli. Like she'd be like, hello, students, let's learn Jewela Caesar, and then we would just talk about how the family was stuck in the ditch all day.

All day horrible.

Yeah.

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 is a synonym for unspeakably arrogant and a giant pain in the ass. She felt strongly about just about everything, children and everything. Yeah. Strong willed.

Yeah.

She was known to be utterly immovable once she'd latched onto an idea. One strong opinion she developed early was that British people were terrible, which is not inaccurate. She hated her mother's English friends and the way they prattled on about illnesses and their dying families.

Harsh.

God, that's so harsh.

I wish my family wasn't dying, and she's like.

Shut up, Jesus Christ, Yeah, we get it. She didn't like French people very much much either, and the particular cause 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, she's like eight or nine. Yeah, she's like a fucking little kid at this point.

That is that is so funny.

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. Wow.

Some real hot sh run out there. Yeah, geez, Okay, so she was like born.

To be harmful, she was born to be a fascist. 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 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 Magna Carta shakes in her boots whenever you come walk.

The Magna Carta is a messy bitch, and I have no time for it.

That okay, Robert, I can't believe you just called a female document a.

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.

Oh no, she's in the room with you. You didn't tell me the Magna Carta was in the room today.

She's literally she drove me here.

Horrible.

She's, well, I don't want a driver's license. I don't know what you want.

I don't know how much further to take this bit, Jamie, So I'm just gonna Later in life, in nineteen seventy eight, 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, yeah, okay, she's granular about fucking everything. Her 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. Okay, 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 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 Portos was particularly disgusted by the abuse of cats by peasants on the French countryside. Her only real biographer, Nicholas Gudrich Clark, claims this quote disgusted her and turned her against mannedkind. And since 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, Jamie.

Like specific to this region, cat torture.

All of Europe, really, but like, yeah, specifically to France. Like the French fucking hate cats. Okay, they are assholes about cats. Yeah, Today we rightly revere cats as our moral and intellectual superiors, and we've organized our society around pleasing them. This is right and good, But cats have not always been beloved in the West. Well, they are considered basically holy in Islam. They're like ritually clean, Like you can have them in mosques and stuff all over the place. You have 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, 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, 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 Yepra, Belgium, they held an event called Cat and Stoate the Festival of Cats, which sounds awesome but actually just involved drunken townsfolk throwing cats from the top of the church on the hard cobblestones and then lighting them on fire.

Yeah, yep, I hate 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 on the pavement, 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 a good yeah.

And then and then they would privately be throwing cats at hard marble floors as well.

Yeah, my god, it's horrible. And cat and stoat still takes place in Yupra 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. Do they do Do they eat the cat?

Like? Do they?

Or is it just we're just killing the cats?

Not that that makes a no, No, they're just murdering cats for no good reason. Okay, it's fun. That is worse and people are horrible, But Jamie, you know who doesn't randomly torture cats in Belgium? Your sponsors exactly right now that Sophie vets every sponsor to make sure they do not torture cats in Belgium.

Yes, is that that's true? That's is a lie, Robert.

Okay, okay, it is a small country, so the vetting's pretty easy. Like you'll notice, I did not say, for example, Canada. No, you certainly did. No, I did not.

Canada just got canceled before our very eyes product.

We're back.

Yeah.

Those were good ads, good 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. Oh my god.

Shout out, Flee, shout out to flee my cat.

He's got a big neck.

He's got a big neck.

Free shout out to Roach, one of the side characters in uh the first version of the movie with Keanu Reeves, where some of the people are bank robbers but they also surfers. Oh oh oh, oh, oh oh.

You're talking about the Keanu Reeves surfing movie with with Yes, we've covered it on specle cast.

Yes. Roach. Roach is the one who bleeds out in a plane point break. He's a good character.

We're talking we're talking about point break.

Yes, point break, that's the movie a classic. Yes. Now, in France there was a centuries old tradition of burning hundreds of cats to death and gigantic bonfires. Louis the sixteenth even famously lit Paris's catfire in sixteen forty eight.

Uh, the king is such a catfire?

Yeah, of course, who else, Jamie, who else?

This is just all news to me.

Just I just yes, so news to me too. I Okay, I'm.

Glad that this wasn't like common knowledge. I would be horrified if I just didn't. You know, it've been burning cats, Okay, I.

Like it doesn't surprise like 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. Yeah, king is sitting the catfire. That's like bad writing.

Yeah, so the king would Yeah. So brulais lechats, which I am not going to pronounce more correctly than that, because it's a horrible thing. And fuck fuck France, as it was called varied in a number of different ways. Sometimes it was just massive bonfires where living cats were tied together in like huge pires. Sometimes living cats 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. In some towns, people known as quremauds cat chasers would soak cats and fuel light them on fire and chase them through town to the amusement of citizens.

Peoples are so upset all the time.

I know, right, damn they're an oppressed species.

Yes they are.

Yeah, I would be pissed.

We you should be. I'm pissed, I am. The charred remains of these tortured cats were taken home as good luck charms by people. In seventeen thirty, as revolutionary sentiment simmered and bubbled throughout French society, two Parisian apprentice printers got fed up with the masters and abducted their cats. They staged a massive public trial, the Great Cat Massacre, as it's become known to history. Now, this was tied more towards issues of class hatred than hatred of cats. But the cats wound up actually like.

Escape 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 of class theory.

It's took at someone 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 one hundred years in the future, something you're completely incapable of understanding or knowing about. Yeah, like just yeah, this, like it's just wild. But these apprentices felt their masters treated the family cats better than their workers, and because they couldn't quite you know, murder their bosses, 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 hung just a fuckload of cats to death. That is, they made like the owners of the cat's watch. It was super fucked up.

I don't know what to do right now.

Well, Eva, 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 worst, 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 and I'll use a 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 she that's kind of like where she comes at this from, right, Yeah. Yeah, So she's deep sympathetic to animals and particularly cats, and basically incapable of being sympathetic to human beings. And yeah, an interesting story.

I'm going to be interested in how she galaxy brains being sympathetic towards the plight of brutally murdered cats to becoming a fascist.

But you know fascist common thing for fascists to be honestism 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 it, because people just can't be allowed to live on their own.

Okay, I need to I thought you were saying cat 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 named Charles Leconte Delile. And here's how Savitri's biographer describes Lacante Delile's work in the book Hitler's Priestess, which is really the only decent biography of Savitri. Devi quote le Comte Delile's own tragic view of the universe. His romantic colors were always tinged with somber pessimism, strongly appealed to Maximiane. 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 of cosmic futility, Lecante Delile rejected Christianity and evoked the stoical heroism of barbarian and exotic peoples. In his famous poem Psycho poems Barbaras. He was also powerfully attracted to Hinduism following the translation of its sacred texts in the eighteen forties. Maximiani felt a profound sympathy with La Comte Delile's view of life's fragility, the vanity of existence, and 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 version to Christianity and helped her form her own fatalistic worldview. So Goths didn't exist in the early twentieth century, but Maximiani's clearly that.

She is a proto goth It's again, it's just like, if there had been a hot topic for her to, you know, be a lot, 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 of Kylo Rin fan fiction there.

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 be distracted, and nothing distracted her. And that, right, it was a problem.

Laye out 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. I want to create some others.

I mean, she still would have been a deeply annoying person, but like I had a Jack 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 to judge it for its time, do I. Anyways, it was no For example, the Little Toaster, I don't know aprils, Yeah, yeah, it's up. No, no, it didn't fuck kids up.

I loved the pray.

Little Toaster damaged me forever.

Really, that's why he But he was so brave, Robert, he was so brave.

Movie fucked me.

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 a brave little toaster. That's why he doesn't toast his bagels. He only throws them. That's embarrassing. I mean, that's like the thing. Tragic, tragic. Imagine the path we could have avoided.

I know. Maximiani Portis was very political as a young girl. When World War One started in nineteen fourteen, she at nine years old, knew very clearly that she did not trust the Entente powers, 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. But the King of Greece's Prime minister, a guy named Venizelos, which I'm probably mispronouncing 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 Untaunted back this, and those rumors seemed credible in light of the fact that French and British troops landed in Salonica and Athens in nineteen fifteen and sixteen to force Greek compliance in their demands from military access to the Macedonian Front so they could better fight Austria Hungary. That's a lot a history there, but basically, she's very pro Greece and wants Grecee to stay out of the war because she also likes Germany, hates the English, hates the French, and she's pissed off because England and France back this prime minister who wants Greece to get into the war, and they also fuck with Greek sovereignty and stuff. She gets really angry over all.

And how old is she at this point?

Where are we nine, ten eleven years old? The end in nineteen sixteen, when.

They imagine, did you know what was going on in the world when you were nine or ten years old? Like, how aware were you?

I was pretty I mean nine eleven happened when I was like twelve, and that was definitely like the start of me getting political. I guess, yeah, 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 kind of like, you're going to pay attention to that shit. It's kind of a big deal.

You don't have a fully formed opinion, but you'll know what's going on.

You'll know what's going I guess.

I'm just like, it would be so bizarre to me if someone was like Jamie's beliefs at eight years old, was nine to eleven?

Was school got out early that day?

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 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. Oh, if I think it was written in ninety.

Eight, if I could write about like what I thought I thought at eight years old, I'd be like, Jamie was a brilliant genius who had 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, she's sure, yeah, exactly, that's a vibe. So yeah, Venizelos and his men took over part of Greece with the backing of Britain and France, and those two countries were happy to recognize his government.

Well.

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 Whyalist crowds railing against the entent and Maximiani sided with them and can say the Aton's 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 old Greek community that lived on the coasts 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 had been made to them by the Entente, 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 and Anatolia, and this helped to spawn a powerful insurgent Turkish movement dedicated to defeating the Greek invasion. 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 were like fuck that shit and their support.

Do we know 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, So okay, yeah, I think that.

Yeah, the further in that direction, you get more pro cat, less pro dog. You know, I think that's generally fair so western. They've got a lot of dogs, Yeah.

The dog.

Maybe they just lit cats and on fire. I don't know. I did not do that research.

Okay, these are the questions I have Robert, take em or leave them.

So the French and Italian governments like betray Greece first, and they sign agreements with the Turkish leader Mustafa Camal and to ignore the promises they'd made in the Verse I Treaty to Greece. Britain held out the longest, but when Greece launched an offensive in Anatolia and March of nineteen twenty one, all of the allies suddenly adopted a policy of neutrality. Britain banned for their arm sales to Greece, well, 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 Aegean coast. They massacred some thirty thousand Christians, a mix of Greeks, Armenians and Franks in order to ensure no Greek independence movement would ever crop up on their coast. Again. Awesome, the Smyrna debacle. Yeah, this is why there's no real Greek community in Anatota anymore, not like there was for three thousand years prior. This is like what wipes out that community. Okay, yeah, so you can see why a Greek nationalist like Maximiani Portas, 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 breeds in her a powerful hatred of the Entente powers, particularly of France and of England. And she basically felt that like all these fancy words they had about liberty and democracy 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 a fair point, 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 massacres thirty thousand people. So I'm gonna say, maybe they're more in the wrong. But this is complicated. Yeah, but this 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 Greece. Simply it sets up the rest of her life in a lot of ways. Okay, So other influences on her developing mind were the sight of French crowds and Lyon 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 Rure, Germany's industrial heartland. Now, this is one of those moves by France that engendered a whole shitload of racism in Central Europe. It was a big influence on 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 we've ever met, it wasn't a great move on France's behalf Jesus Christ. Yeah, so I'm trying to set up all of like this is like the shit that like is forming. She's twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, is all this is going on like formative fucking years.

Yeah.

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 consistence one. Yeah, yeah, Jesus. In nineteen twenty three, a freshly graduated Maximiani Portos 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 dork.

Yeah, she's a big fucking joy.

She's like wait, Helen of Troy Abstin.

Oh my god. She would not shut up about the elliot.

She was a fucking you know, I've read multiple translations and you're like, can you not? OK?

She has strong and profoundly thirsty opinions on Achilles.

She's like ranked gods and goddesses hot to that.

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 virtues of the ancient world, none of its weaknesses, and all the technical achievements of the modern age, with that modern hypocrisy, pettiness, and moral squalor. Now this is, of course, wildly inaccurate. The ancient Greeks were like, unbelievably fucked up. They also did a lot of cool shit, obviously, like every other ancient bee. That's all ancient people do, a lot of cool shit. All Aztec's amazing shit, horribly fucked up, ancient Romans amazing shit, Han Chinese ancient amazing shit, horribly for everybody. Yeah, in the Greek specific case, 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 they also created some of the most influential philosophy in fiction and art that has ever been made in the history of the human race. Complicated people, Maximiani does not get a complex picture of ancient Greece. It's just the good shit. Yeah, yeah, good lord, you might say, like, I don't know, I want to say, her understanding of Greek history was not deep. It was certainly incomplete. 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, Pederasti and ancient Greece in fucking nineteen twenty, Like, you're just not going to read that. Yeah, So, her love of Greece was mostly focused on obsessing over their incredible art and fantasizing about the idealized culture that she eve it existed.

There, right.

I mean this, I mean we as children all read revisionist history about horrifying cultures.

I was obsessed with ancient Rome for a lot of the same reasons.

Of course, because you were just like, oh, it seems like they only to 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 shit, I was kind of like, hell, yeah, you're so metal. I mean it is pretty fucking metal.

You're so fucking metal.

We'll talk about what they did to Spartacus and his 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. I think that's fair to say.

Thrilled to have such a hyper specific.

So she moves to Greece. She's super happy for a while. Obviously best place in the world for this girl is fucking Grece at this point in time, and the time she spent discovering the wonders of Athens, which rules coincided with some very important goings on in Germany. And I'm going to quote again from the book Hitler's Priestess. Well years later she would recall that she spent such a sunlit afternoon upon the Acropolis on ninth October nineteen twenty three, the fateful day of Hitler's push when he and his followers had attempted a coup against the Bavarian government and staged a march to the Feldehernhall 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 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 Megali idea among the Greeks, which is the idea that Greece should recoup its ancient power and takeo for the places that had controlled back in the day. Argument Yeah, she engaged in a heated argument in defensive Hitler with the French managers of the hostel, So arguing about Hitler with a hostel, No, we lost her, she's been gone for a while. Yeah, but you know who won't argue in support of Hitler with the French hostel owner in Athens, Robert the products and services support this podcasts.

And services would never ever heard us or do something wrong. I've been saying it for years.

I have agreed for years.

Fingers crossed for a dig pill ad right after a Yeah, what a great transition, both of you. Just wonderful work.

We're back. So it was during this first visit to Greece that Maximiani Portos 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 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 Schleimann. Now, Schleimann was not a professional archaeologist, which is not weird for the time. Most of like the archaeologists of this period are like gentlemen adventurers who I mean get our nerds.

Basically the people in the people in like the Mummy movies who are just wearing chakeys exact money, and people in Tarzan.

That was the most accurate thing about the Mummy movie other than the way mummies react to shotguns.

They're all named Clayton. Yeah.

Yeah, so Shleimann Yeah. Throughout the mid eighteen hundreds had been a very successful German arms merchant, trading raw materials for the ingredients to make ammunition, and he'd nursed a deep obsession with the iliat his entire life. In his late middle age, he decided to take his fortune to the Aegean and try to uncover the true locate of the ancient city of Troy. Unlike pretty much any like traditional archaeologist, Shlemann used the Iliad as a guide. He thought this book was like basically essentially accurate, 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, Shlemann 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 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 fucked up and probably destroyed what actual Trojan relics there were. But he does find what a lot of people think was the site of Troy. It's just other shit was built there, and he dug up the wrong shit anyway, fucked up, Yes, yes, So his research or his digging, despite all the shit it destroyed, produced hundreds upon hundreds upon hun of artifacts which people at the time believed to be Trojan and many of those artifacts, more than eighteen hundred of them, were emblazoned with various types of swastika. And I'm going to quote next from Scientific American. He would go on to see the swastika everywhere from Tibet to Paraguay to the Gold Coast of Africa, and as Schleiman'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. The Antiquities on Earths by doctor Schleiman at Troy Acquire for us a double interest, wrote British linguist Archibald Sais in eighteen ninety six. They carry us back to the later stone ages of the Aryan race.

Oh dear on Coca Cola products, Robert, what if that was just a product or serviced advertised?

But it wasn't a naz It's like I I spent some time living in Indias and it's fucking their's swastikas 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 swastikas around here.

That is I mean, even 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 jarring.

I actually I 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 swastikas, but they're close enough that people will be like, what's up.

No, I need to leave your home right now?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're like most people.

Swasticas are pretty small. Most people aren'tetting enough the.

Blanket Nazi Nazi swastikas.

See 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 swastikas, so calm down.

Yeah, it's like that.

Uh, and they offer me a Miller lt. They're not Nazis. Would you like a Miller light?

No, exactly, No, 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 pull me over for speeding.

No, no, I would be interestedd I.

I know I've gone down that Wikipedia hole at one point of just like tracking the symbology, the symbology of the it's it goes back.

So Shleman. There's criticism of Sleman 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 he did that a lot of people praise because he he got a lot of shit right, but he also destroyed a huge amount of cultural antiquities. He's an interesting person. You should read about Shlemans in archaeology. Okay, 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 with them.

All of them are problematic. Yeah, I will say Schleiman is one who comes from like a purer place of just being really into this history. But yeah, you know they're all problematic, so hashtig problem. Yeah. Now, the swastikas he found increasingly all over the world played directly into a shared delusion that was spreading like a disease among many of the eras white people. The myth of the ancient Aryan. Now, in actual historical terms, Aryan is a term used to refer to the Indo Aryan language group. It was never a racial classification. The term started being used because early linguists noticed strange similarities between languages like German, Romani, Punjabi, Hindu, Urdu in Sanskrit. Well, the term Aryan 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 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 multi racial societies, which at that point, like meant Italians and Slavs breed with Germans and British people, and were getting concerned about this fact. And I'm going to refer back to Smithsonian Magazine again quote. The rising interest in eugenics and 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 one time stage of Earth's history. In the nineteenth century, French aristocrat Arthur de Gobinho and others made the connection between the mythical Aryans 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 Schleiman's dig in Turkey then suddenly had a deeper ideological meaning. For the nationalists. The purely Aryan symbol Shleiman uncovered was no longer an archaeological mystery. It was a stand in for their superiority. German nationalist groups like the reich Schammerbund, a nineteen twelve anti Semitic group, and the Bavarian Freikorp paramilitary basically the proud Boys of the era, used the swastika to reflect their newly discovered identity. As the master race. Now, the reality is that swastikas appeared 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 relax.

They're pretty small.

Nowadays. The swastika is the swastika, like it's the Nazi thing unless you're in India, because the world's big. But back in these days, like if you're looking at like ancient history, it's best to kind of look at the swastika the 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. It's just all over the damn place. But of course, yeah, uh oh, I have that blanket. It was not seen as this though by a lot of people, and anthropologist Gwendoline Lake notes quote when Heinrich Schlimann discovered swastikaike 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 Aryan all along. The link between the swastika and Indo European origin, once forged, was impossible to discard. It allowed the projection of nationalist feelings and associations onto a universal symbol, which hint served as a distinguishing boundary marker between non Aryan, or rather not 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 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 dog worked on the Shadow app so really wash your mouth.

That is sunny.

Sony invested in the Shadow app.

I have to say it this all this math adds 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 probably thought.

It was the dog from uh uh, what was that movie with the dogs and cat that talk and they find their family terrible. I don't know a good movie Homeward Bound, Homeward.

Oh, I haven't seen Home found Sonny definitely just wanted to harm people, and he wanted to harm the discourse, and that's why he invested in shadow app That's fair.

That's fair. You could call him the Hitler of the Iowa caucases, which a lot of people.

Many have, but it makes me uncomfortable.

Sitting in Athens, reading the news of Hitler's movement in Germany and staring at ancient swastikas on beloved Greek artifacts, things started to come together in Maximiani Portos's mind. She moved to Greece permanently in nineteen twenty eight, after finishing college and renouncing her French citizenship. The very next year, nineteen twenty 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 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 all.

I mean, there's so.

Many different horrible things to take away from Christianity, and that is.

That is the worst of all.

Yeah.

Yeah, she got none of the good stuff, just the anti Semitism. Uh okay, yeah, 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 Greek culture and she was really pissed off because she was like particularly in 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 the fact that nobody other people weren't as into Greek history as she was, Like this is like the core of it for her. It was like she's in love with like Zeus and shit, and she's like, why don't people like this as much I do. It's the Jews.

She's become a chaos nerd.

No, it's not great.

Yeah, that's really bad.

So her trip to the Holy Land with her mom and aunt was a bit of a weird one. No, okay, I mean 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, they're customs, observances and festivals. The strange dark men in broad brimmed hats and blong black coats hastening to prayers at the Wailing Wall. Okay, it's interesting that Goodwin Clark Portis's biographer mentions this specifically, seeing these Jewish people and being like horrified by the way they look in their coats and hair locks and long black coats. It's possible that precise moment never happened, but 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 Mine comp. This takes place in Lintz, No, sorry, in Austria, maybe his boy Vienna. Once, as I was strolling through the inner city, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a jew was my first thought, for to be sure they had not looked like that in Linz, 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? So this is like a huge moment in like Hitler lore. It's possible that the reason that Portis writes her own thing, like her own story this way is that she's hearkening to mine comp, because again she writes about this later. It's also possible they just were similar people and had a similar Momentpholks.

If she's the primary resource for herself and seems to 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 inciting she needs she wrote her own inciting incident.

If it didn't, yeah, I'll take a leaf out of you know. It's like, uh, you know, George Lucas stole from from great Japanese cinema to make Star Wars, and in a very similar fashion, Savitri DEVII stole from Adolf Hitler the causawa of.

Not tr true artists Steel Robert. It's what they it's what they open saying for generations. Yeah, that is funny.

I mean I feel like that same logic of like you have to have a story to go with your hatred. They have that same logic on like Iron Chef, you know, like they be like, there has to be a story that goes with this dish.

And sometimes you're like, sometimes it just is.

She just cooked some fucking food, asshole. Sometimes you just make some food and it's bad and it's terrible.

Yeah.

So Maximiani would go on to 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 Judaeo Christian heritage and like reconnect with their pagan roots. And this is the first time she realizes that she's a national socialist, and she the way she described that, she realizes she's always been a national socialist. And so she falls fully in love with Hitler at this point. And she's not a German Nazi though, And initially the way she decides to act on this newfound Nazism is to basically try to revive Greek nationalism and 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 Nazism, but focused around a religious component that involved a return to worshiping the ancient Greek pantheon.

I mean always with this woman.

Yeah. Now, by this point, the ancient Greeks had become sort of the Uberminsch in her own mind, and this conception was nursed by the bits of Hitler speeches that made their way over into the press in 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 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 Aryans. Many among the weirder Nazi sets saw Hinduism as an example of a pure Ariyan pagan tradition uncorrupted by Judaism. They found the Hindu cast system deeply intriguing as well, for reasons that should be obvious, and enshrining 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 another world. This is a very cute movie, and she just took every the same from it. It's you remember that horrible Cameron Crow movie Elizabethtown or Orlando Blue Drivers as the Country with.

His Dad's ashes, and is like, I'm glad we had this talk. And You're like, what the fuck are you?

It sounds like forty different movies, Jamie, It's no, it's the same.

It's the same. Oh my elizabeth townheads Well, no, it's the same. Paula Deane's in that movie.

Cursed, Oh God, speaking of Nazis. Now. So Savitri decides she's gonna go to fucking India, and she's not the only person this idea of going to India to seek out the Arians. In fact, in nineteen thirty five, Heinrich Himmler's SS founded the annan 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 year eight thousand, after six thousand years of Nazi rule, very specifically then eight thousand.

The Jonahs Brothers didn't even think that far, you know.

But they're huge, The Nazi Jokers brothers are.

Huge in the year never shut up enjoying this moment that.

I do not get that joke.

The Jonahs brothers first single in two thousand and six or maybe seven was 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 of change, Jamie.

Well, they say.

That not much has changed a thousand, not much has changed.

I've been.

Also live under water.

It's a weird it makes no sense. Okay, sorry, Robert continued your podcast.

But she's thinking that a year eight thousand, eight thousand, think even Kevin John she 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 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 definitely Indian. But it was not uncommon for Europeans who were attracted to India in this period to decide that a number of ancient Hindu heroes and gods were in fact white. This was like a common thing, and in fact, Maximiani's favorite poet who we talked about earlier, Lecante Delisle, 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, 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, yeah, not shocking.

And if you're interested in the story of Rama. One thing I would recommend that's super accessible. There's a movie online by Nina Paley, who's a female graphic artist who's amazing, called Sida Sings the Blues. If you just google that, it's the whole movie's free. It's one of those beautiful pieces of animation. It's why I went to Indian in the first places. An incredible movie.

Oh wow.

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 about myths. Like if you talk about the myth of Sida and Rama to like a family, everyone in the family, you like get 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. So yeah. Maximiani is convinced that this guy's white, though, and she falls in love with India and eventually finds her way to an ashram in Bengal, where she's able to live cheap and learn Hindu 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 from a Hindu solar goddess. This woman is obsessed with some gods and goddess.

Loves gods and goddess is so much. She's such a dork.

Yeah, it's specifically sun gods and goddess is. She's fucking obsessed with Aknaton too. It's weird.

There was a girl in my middle school who was like, call me Artemis and we're like, no, okay, no, no, we did, we did, and our and if. I was also a dork, but not that kind of dork god, No, no, no, I was just a normal, white, 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 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 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 seen a beautiful Indian fortress, one of many such colossal ancient relics that dot the country. She was taken by its beauty and equally horrified by 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 Judeo Christian taint. Starting in nineteen thirty seven, she began working as an anti Christian preacher for Swami Satyananda's Hindu Mission 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 Conrad 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. There was a sharp contradiction between her own racist and anti egalitarian convictions and the reformist in a galitarian program of the Hindu Mission. To the Hindu Mission, Hinduism was a value 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 she declared that she conceived of her reconversion mission as an exercise and deception from the racist Aryan 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 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. And I'm going to quote again from Else's 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 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, thought that all the different casts in India were different races. And we're getting into the weeds here too much. But it's important to understand for what comes next that Saviitri 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 and advancing Nazism. Okay, it's her 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 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 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 like, linked it and then licked it.

You licked Robert Evan, You licked it.

All of this gets edited out now. Many Hindu nationalists 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. 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 they're Nazis, so again, I can't paint everybody with the same brush. Yeah, but Savitri got along very well with the set of Hindu nationalists who are like, yeah, the Nazi seemed good. And she's particularly taken with doctor Asit Krishna Mukshi, one of India's few actual committed Nazis. In nineteen thirty seven and thirty eight, Mukarshi started to publish a bi monthly pro Nazi magazine, The New Mercury. Savitri met him in early nineteen thirty eight and they didn't instantly fall in love, but she fell in love with like his mind. She was probably bisexual, but certainly wasn't interested in Mukershi in any way. But she falls in love with like this guy's Nazism. Basically, they're that kind of so they're an god. That's so, I mean, yeah, it's not great.

That's bleak because it's like, yeah, I mean, if you're gonna marry a Nanzi and you're not even attracted to them, no excuse, no excuse way, but you know what I mean, she.

Has a little bit of an excuse. But we're getting to it.

So you are cutting this lady all kinds of slack, Robert.

I'm just explaining her, Do you have a crime?

Now?

So she doesn't. They don't get together right away. She loves his understanding of Nazi ideology, and particularly his emphasis on the myths of the Old Arians, and Mukershi was like obsessed with the Fule society the tool of society, and it acquired a lot of their occult writing. So he's like that kind of nerdy, and Mukershi seems to like genuinely appreciate Savitri's ideas and the 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, where there are still Rians strong and wide awake. Go to him who is 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 sat who 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 in India than in Germany. She'd become close with members of the Rashtriya Swaamsavik Song or rss AD, a Hindu nationalist movement that were very similar to the Nazis. The founder or one of the founders, ab Hedjwar, formed the group to defend Hindu society from daily onslaughts by outsiders and he included Muslim Indians as members of that group. 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 beat sticks called lafi's and to learn about Hindutva Hindu nationalism. In nineteen thirty nine, Savitri wrote a warning to the Hindus. The book's forward was written by G. D. Savarkar, brother to one of the co founders of the RSS, and according to an article by South Asian affairs analyst Peter Friedrich, quote Devi advanced V. D. Savarkar's thesis of Hindutfa 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 is ours not yours. Shears 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 in pledge bound military like batches with Hindu nationalism as their only ideal. And here's where I pause to note that the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra 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. Mody probably read it as a child and a list of his crimes in the thousands of murders and moss bombings and beatings carried out by Hindu nationalists against Indian Muslims would go beyond the scope of this episode, but it is worth noting that the current authoritarian lurch 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?

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 a fascist dictatorship in India.

Uh huh.

We just have so much to cover, We have so much to cover.

We don't have time for the fascist dictatorship today. We have some time, but we have Okay, Okay, well, we'll make time. We'll make time for the fascist.

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 Mukershi in order to stay in the country. So that's why they get married. It's basically a green card thing. Yeah, got it. She described it as a secless 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 Axis and facilitating communication between Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the National Indian Army, a pro Axis group, and the Japanese government. 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 in a bunker to avoid capture.

I'm familiar.

Vitry 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 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. Okay, but this dark age we'll continue on Thursday with part two of the story of Savitri Devin. No, Okay, how you doing, Jamie.

Okay, I'm just unclenching.

That's important for the next two minutes.

And then we got to talk about it again.

I got it.

Abka always be clenching. Yeah, go plug your pluggables first.

Oh right, Uh, leave that in. I want people to know that. Yeah, overshare had to pee, and also leave in Robert blowing his nose on the mic.

Then Chris, you can edit out horrible.

Chris, you can edit out the part where Robert is.

Like young Delicious after licking his own it's not off the mic, but everything else should probably stay in.

I feel like this is legally abused.

You could probably report me to HR. Could be fun, could be fun.

My Twitter is Jamie Loftus help man 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 loftus is Innocent dot com to find out where yay yeah.

And you can find Sophie on Twitter yeh, finding her at Why Underscore Sophie Underscore Why. And that's it. That's all you can find of us online, which are on Behind the Bastards dot com, including the full free text of Hitler's Priestess If you want to read this book. The episode's over. Go stop the French from murdering cats. Yes, great,

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