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Letter from Savitri Devi to Professor A – 7 June 1979

863 words

New Delhi
7 June 1979

Dearest Comrade,

I just found — while searching for something else — your letter of June 1976 (three years ago) with your address which I had mislaid.

How are you? How is your daughter? I should be glad to hear from you. Do you know the whereabouts of Françoise Dior? I’ve been writing to her, two or three months ago, but got no answer. The letter came back to me (being registered) with the mention: “Has left this address” — that’s all.

Did I tell you that from 1976 onwards I have been dismissed from the French School (Alliance Française) of Delhi, on account of my age and bad sight? I was operated on in October 1976 for “glaucoma” on the right eye (my former “bad” eye!!) and since have developed on the same, a “cataract” — not ripe to this day and therefore not operable, which leaves me with one eye only — the left one — my weakest eye. I read with an enormous magnifying glass, and write the same. But reading and writing are, along with my cats, my only enjoyments in life — I shall be a full 74 on the 30th of September next, i.e., in three months’ time. Next year 75: 3/4 of a century. Old enough to die.

But I would like before I die to finish my Tyrtaios the Athenian (I thank you for the papers you sent me long ago) and the new book I began this year: Ironies et paradoxes — de l’histoire et de la légende. A great part of it will be devoted to the distortions of history, both in ancient monuments, such as King Essarhaddon’s stele of Nahr-el-Kalb in Syria, and in our own days (the history of the World War especially). Legend — which should never contradict history — is also sometimes falsified. And in this connection I shall speak of Robert Ambelain’s lengthy researches laid down in his books: Jésus, ou le mortal secret des TempliersLa vie secrete de Saint PaulLes lourds secrets du Golgotha in which the whole Christian legend is shown — documents in hand — as a shameless hoax. (The hoax of the first century — as tremendous as that of the Twentieth, by Arthur Butz.)

I’ll speak also of the irony of certain facts, inter alia, that of well-known enemies of the Jews such as Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, and the Roman Emperors Titus and later Hadrian appearing when well considered as their benefactors (without meaning to be of course). It’s in Babylon, the great banking center of Antiquity (one has records of Babylonian banks that lasted eight and nine hundred years!) that the crude farmers and warriors of Israel became initiated to the handling of money on a grand scale — that which was to give power to their descendants to this day. And had Titus and later Hadrian not uprooted them from Palestine and dispersed them all over the Roman empire, there would have been no “Jewish problem” ever: the wave of Islam in early seventh century AD would have taken over the Jews as well as the Christians of the near East, and the descendants of these would now be feeling themselves “Mohammedans” for centuries (as do those of all the Christians of north Africa, Egypt [save a handful of Copts] and Syria [save a handful of Maronites]). But Titus and later Hadrian helped Jewish consciousness to survive, by sending the Jews (or most of them) out of the reach of Islam to come. Naturally they could not foretell its coming and its role.

I am now re-reading for the “n”th time the French translation of Dimitri Merejkowski’s beautiful historic novel Julien l’Apostat.

Emperor Julian is “my second great love” — the first one being Alexander the Great, and the “third one” from 1929 onwards — Adolf Hitler — My first book in English — A Warning to the Hindus — was dedicated “To the memory of divine Julian, Emperor of the Greeks and Romans, 360-363 A.D.” And Mr. Mukherji used to admire him also — saw in him like in A. Hitler, a great One who tried to crush the ugliness of a decadent “present” through the power of the everlasting values of beauty (which is the same as truth), and failed — because the world was, even 1,600 years ago, too far advanced in degeneracy, specially through race-mixing and philosophies addressed “to all men.” Even a few days before his death (on the 21st of March 1977) sometime in the middle of March, here in this room, he was reading to me what Gibbon has to say of the life of the Emperor-philosopher who died on the battlefield.

What I would like to read also is Peter and Alexis — another of Merejkowski’s books, about the struggle between old and new Russia in the 18th century, between Peter the so-called “Great” and his own son Alexis, faithful to Tradition as he found it. I have been searching for a translation of that book all my life. Asked lately Gallimard (Nouvelle revue française) who reprinted Julien, but they have not got it — unfortunately.

I was dismissed from Alliance Française without a pension, being “staff locally recruited” not “sent from France.” No more for today. I am too hot. 50 degrees centigrade in the shade.

Best regards,
Savitri Dêvi Mukherji