Hitler and his God

The Four Asuras

“When we say that Hitler is possessed by a vital power, it is a statement of fact, not a moral judgement. His being possessed is clear from what he does and the way he does it”, said Sri Aurobindo in January 1939. He confirmed this repeatedly: “One can say that Hitler is not a devil but that he is possessed by one.” 975 As mentioned before, Sri Aurobindo followed the events in the world closely. The Mother will even say that the war interrupted their yogic work completely, as the global situation was so critical that they could not afford to turn away from it even for a moment.

One finds indications of Sri Aurobindo’s growing concern with Nazism in his Correspondence with Nirodbaran, covering the middle 1930s. The run-up to the war and its initial stages were a daily subject of discussion with the small group of disciples gathered around him after he had broken his right thigh. He will even install a loudspeaker connected with an outside radio in his room to hear the BBC-news directly for himself. “I have not seen any other person who has followed the Asura with such extraordinary fidelity”, he said about Hitler after his invasion of France. “He never considers possibilities. Possibilities don’t matter. This is how he goes against all the generals … All through he has been guided by inspiration and he has gone ahead depending on luck … He has a most original mind because it is not his own mind.” 976

Hitler was, according to the Mother, “very conscious of being the instrument” of the asura. We read in a letter to her son André written in October 1938, after the fate of Czechoslovakia was sealed at Munich: “Speaking of recent events, you ask me whether it was ‘a dangerous bluff’ or whether we ‘narrowly escaped disaster’. To assume both at the same time would be nearer to the truth. Hitler was certainly bluffing … Tactics and diplomacy were used, but on the other hand, behind every human will there are forces in action whose origin is not human and which move consciously towards certain goals. The play of these forces is very complex and generally eludes the human consciousness. But for the sake of explanation and easy understanding, they can be divided into two main opposing tendencies: those that work for the fulfilment of the Divine Work upon earth and those that are opposed to this fulfilment … Hitler is a choice instrument of these anti-divine forces which want violence, upheavals and war, for they know that all this delays and hinders the action of the divine forces. That is why disaster was very close although no human government consciously wanted it.” 977

In one of the Mother’s recorded talks to the children of the Ashram school, she said in 1951: “Hitler communicated with a being which he considered to be the Supreme. This being came and gave him advice, it told him everything he had to do. Hitler used to retire into solitude and remain there as long as necessary to come into contact with his ‘guide’ and receive from him the inspirations which afterwards he carried out very faithfully. This being, which Hitler took for the Supreme, was quite simply an asura, the one who is called ‘the Lord of Falsehood’ in occultism, and who has proclaimed himself ‘the Lord of the Nations’. His appearance was resplendent, he could mislead anybody except those who had the real occult knowledge and could see what was there behind the appearance. He would have deceived anybody, he was really splendid.

“He generally appeared to Hitler wearing a silver cuirass and helmet; it was as if fire irradiated from his head, and there was an aura of dazzling light around him … He told Hitler everything he wanted him to do: he played with him like with a little monkey or a mouse. He had clearly decided to make Hitler commit all possible excesses till the day he would break his neck – which was what happened … Hitler was a very good medium. He had great mediumistic capacities but he lacked intelligence and discernment. That being could tell him anything whatsoever and he would swallow it all. It was he who pushed Hitler onward little by little. And he was doing this for fun, he did not take it at all seriously. For such beings humans are tiny things with which they play as cats play with mice, till they eat them up.” 978

“In his youth, [Hitler] was considered an amusing crank and nobody took any notice of him”, said Sri Aurobindo.¹ “It is the vital possession that gives him his size and greatness. Without this vital power he would be a crudely amiable fellow with some hobbies and eccentricities. It is in this kind of person, whose psychic is underdeveloped and weak, that possession is possible. There is nothing in the being that can resist the Power. In his latest photographs [in January 1939] I find that he is becoming more and more criminal and going down very fast.” It was also in those days that Sri Aurobindo remarked: “It seems strange that the destiny of the whole world should depend on one man and yet it is so, for everybody looks up to him. From one point of view there never was a time when humanity came down so low as it has now. It looks as if a small number of violent men are the arbiters of humanity and the rest of the world is ready to bow down before one man.” 979

“Hitler was quite simply a human being, and as a human being he was very soft, very sentimental,” said the Mother. “He had the conscience of a simple workman, some said of a shoemaker – in any case of a simple workman or a little schoolmaster, something of this kind. But he was possessed … He was a medium, a very good medium. Besides, it was during spiritist séances that the possession took hold of him. It was at such times [of possession] that he was seized by those fits which were said to be epileptic. They were not epileptic: they were crises of possession … When he wanted to know something from that being, he went to his villa [on the Obersalzberg] to meditate. There he really made an intense appeal to what he called his god, his supreme god, who was the ‘Lord of the Nations’ … Of course [that being] did not appear physically. Hitler was a medium, he ‘saw’, he had a certain power of clairvoyance. And it was at such times that he had his fits … The people in his entourage knew that.” 980

Rumours of Hitler’s perplexing crises seeped through to the public and were the reason why his opponents called him the Teppichfresser, the carpet chewer. The best known example of a description of this phenomenon is the last chapter of Hermann Rauschning’s talks with Hitler, quoted in a previous chapter. The authenticity of Hitler’s crises is still disputed. There are, however, many reports of his states of utter rage, especially in conferences with his generals, when he shrieked, his face became purple and foam appeared in the corners of his mouth; therefore the disposition was certainly present.

Ambassador François-Poncet also mentions that Hitler’s entourage talked about crises he was subject to “which went from excesses of a devastating rage to the plaintive whimperings of a wounded animal … What is sure is that he was not normal; he was a morbid man, near to being demented, a personage from Dostoyevsky, one of the ‘possessed’.” 981 And there is the following passage in Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich about the days of Hitler’s meetings with Chamberlain, when the Führer was “in a highly nervous state”: “He seemed to be, as I noted in my diary that evening, on the edge of a nervous breakdown. ‘Teppichfresser!’ muttered my German companion, an editor who secretly despised the Nazis. And he explained that Hitler had been in such a maniacal mood over the Czechs the last few days that on more than one occasion he had lost control of himself completely, hurling himself to the floor and chewing the edge of the carpet. Hence the term ‘carpet eater’. The evening before, while talking with some of the party hacks at [Hotel] Dreesen, I had heard the expression applied to the Führer – in whispers, of course.” 982

“To be a successful instrument of the Asuric forces is easy, because they take all the movements of your lower nature and make use of them, so that you have no spiritual effort to make.” (Sri Aurobindo 983) “There is always somebody to receive the influence [of the demonic forces] and who then immediately thinks that he is a very superior being. For this gives people the feeling that they are really, exceptionally remarkable … This happens to ambitious people, especially to ambitious people who want power, who want to dominate others, who want to be great masters, great instructors, who want to perform miracles and acquire extraordinary powers.” (The Mother 984) Not only can opening to such a possession result in the soul’s ruin, it usually also has a devastating physical effect – as shown by the stooping, slouching and trembling Hitler during the last days in the Berlin bunker.

“Hitler opened himself to forces which carried him onward, forces of dark and destructive power. When he still thought that he had the free choice of his decisions, he had already for a long time surrendered to an influence which one might call, on good grounds and not only metaphorically, demonic magic. And instead of a man who in his upward climb freed himself step by step from the remnants of a dark past, one saw a being that became more and more possessed, at every step more tightly bound, enslaved, incapacitated, the prey of powers who had him in their grip and did not let go of him anymore … He choose the easier way, let himself go down and entrusted himself to the forces which carried him in his fall.” (Hermann Rauschning 985)

“Hitler is a sort of a mystic”, said Sri Aurobindo. “Hitler is a new type, an infra-rational mystic, representing the dark counterpart of what we are striving to arrive at: a supra-rational mysticism … He is a mystic, only a mystic of the wrong kind! He goes into solitude for his messages and waits till they come.” 986 This was the reason why Hitler asserted time and time again that “true knowledge was not to be sought in the examination of intellectual matters”, 987 and that he insisted on unconditional faith in his leadership, for which the knowledge was given to him by a hidden but very powerful and irrefutable source. Most of what is stated here in occult terms was sensed, as we have seen, by perceptive contemporaries who lacked an adequate vocabulary to formulate their perceptions. They called Hitler a shaman, a being of light, a miracle man, a superman, a messiah endowed with the powers to accomplish his world-saving mission. This was how his magic influence and his oratorical and “mesmeric” powers were explained.