Devi's five-act drama Akhnaton. A Play (1948) is a thinly disguised allegory for the fall of Hitler, with Akhenaten as Hitler, and anticipates her own propaganda mission to Germany in 1948. It is set among a beleaguered group of Aten- worshippers in the chaos after Akhenaten's death. The heroine is a young woman fanatic called Zetut-Nefcru-Aton. She describes Akhenaten in terms of a Nietzschean Superman:
A man ten thousand years ahead of our times; a man who saw, and knew, what all the sages of this land can neither see nor know; the herald of a new mankind, further above the present one than all the wise men think themselves above the simple beasts.41
The play ends with Zetut-Neferu-Aton being led off to her death, a martyr to the Atenist cause. She exits, shouting that Akhenaten would return and his teaching be vindicated, 'never mind after how many ages'.
Devi obviously identified strongly with Zetut-Neferu-Aton, whose speeches in the play set the pattern for the rest of Devi's own life. She became a tireless apologist for Hitler and Nazism, one of the first Holocaust deniers, and an important figure in forming the ideology of the neo-Nazi underground. Her Nazi agenda becomes explicit in her later writings on Akhenaten, in contrast to the rather discreet tone of A Son of God and the allegorical play. The dedication of her 1958 Akhenaten book, The Lightning and the Sun, is shocking:
To the god-like Individual of our times; the man against Time; the greatest European of all times; both Sun and Lightning: ADOLF HITLER
as a tribute of unfailing love and loyalty, for ever and ever.
The Lightning and the Sun compares Akhenaten (the sun) and Ghengis Khan (the lightning) with Hitler, who combines both cosmic forces and is thus simultaneously destructive and creative, in the same way as Hindu deities like Vishnu, the destroyer who again and again creates. Devi begins with a long tirade against freedom, equal opportunities, religious toleration, and the Nuremberg war crimes trials, which she calls an 'iniquitous condemnation, after months and months of every kind of humiliation and systematical moral torture'.42 She then sets up Akhenaten as forefather of National Socialist values. As a part-Aryan, Devi's Akhenaten inherits the best aspects of both his heritages, the royal blood of the pharaohs and that of the noble Aryan race from the North, 'predestined to give the world, along with the heroic philosophy of disinterested Action, the lure of logical thinking and scientific research the Scientific spirit'." Akhenaten's 'Scientific spirit' manifested itself in the same ways that Hitler's had done. Her Amarna even had its own Auschwitz - the workmen's village. Devi distorts Pendlebury's remarks about the security of the area, with its patrol roads and surrounding walls that were 'in no way defensive but high enough to keep people in', to make it 'a place of internment for men who had disobeyed the King (what people call today a "re-education camp" when they are polite, or a concentration camp when they are not)'.44 Images of the traditional gods found there are further evidence for this: to Devi, they show that the workmen's village was inhabited by anti-Atenists who were being 're-educated'.
It would be easy to dismiss as ridiculous and irrelevant Savitri Devi's projection of sentimentality, nature-worship and Fascist propaganda onto Akhenaten. But The Lightning and the Sun, A Son of God and some of her other works are not dusty second-hand bookshop curiosities. The Lightning and the Sun was reissued by the far-right Samisdat Publishers in Toronto in 1982, and parts of it are available electronically on the World Wide Web. A Son of God has rarely been out of print since it became volume XXV in the Rosicrucian Library series, published by the Supreme Grand Lodge of the Ancicnt Mystical Order Rosac Crucis in California, who last reprinted it in 1992.1:> If anything, A Son of God is more insidious than The Lightning and the Sun, because one can miss the nasty hook sticking out of its rather stodgy bait. In A Son of God Devi addresses many ideas currently fashionable: Green and ecological issues, humanity as the ultimate threat to nature, vegetarianism, and a syncretistic New Age religion which incorporates Egyptian and Indian mysticism. I can see how A Son of God could easily lead readers from the New Age to the neo-Nazis. Savitri Devi's works are the realisation of Freud's frightening vision of a Nazi Akhenaten. At the time of writing, when the extreme right is doing so well politically, we ignore it at our peril.
