Wotan : or Odin (q.v.), a principal war-god of Scandinavian religion.
... [the year in which these words were written] … we will find Wotan quite suitable as a causal hypothesis. In fact I venture the heretical suggestion that the unfathomable depths of Wotan’s character explain more of National Socialism than all reasonable factors put together.” 1095 In an earlier chapter of our story we have heard about Wotan, the one-eyed God with the green hat who rides at the head... 16. Two Poems Hitler and his God “The Children of Wotan” In the part of the globe which one may roughly call “the West”, the Christian era and its civilization were breaking up, and the West had become, since the Renaissance, a world in transition. “As the Christian view of the world loses its authority, the more menacingly will the ‘blond beast’ be heard... bombs) was taking revenge on Germany’s enemies. 1096 This elementary force line in Hitler and Nazism has been sufficiently dealt with in our story to interpret Sri Aurobindo’s poem: “The Children of Wotan (1940)”. The date, part of the title, is relevant because at that time the further complexities and the outcome of the war still lay in an uncertain future and the destiny of humanity hung in the balance ...
... Lyrical Poems from Manuscripts (Circa 1934-1947) Collected Poems The Children of Wotan Know more > 1940 "Where is the end of your armoured march, O children of Wotan? Earth shudders with fear at your tread, the death-flame laughs in your eyes." "We have seen the sign of Thor and the hammer of new creation, A seed of blood on the soil... heaven. The heart of mankind we have smitten with the whip of the sorrows seven; The Mother of God lies bleeding in our black and gold sunrise." "I hear the cry of a broken world, O children of Wotan." "Question the volcano when it burns, chide the fire and bitumen! Suffering is the food of our strength and torture the bliss of our entrails. We are pitiless, mighty and glad, the gods fear our... the thunderbolt, our acts the claws of the lion. We rejoice in the pain we create as a man in the kiss of a woman." Page 641 "Have you seen your fate in the scales of God, O children of Wotan, And the tail of the Dragon lashing the foam in far-off seas?" "We mock at God, we have silenced the mutter of priests at his altar. Our leader is master of Fate, medium of her mysteries. We have ...
... Children of Wotan (1940)', a remorselessly vivid projection of the Hell that Nazi world-dominion would come to mean. It is cast in the form of question and answer, and while it is the conscience of mankind that articulates the questions, the answers are trotted out by the Asuric Nazi hordes that are the 'Children of Wotan': "Where is the end of your armoured march, O children of Wotan? ... smitten with the whip of the sorrows seven; The Mother of God lies bleeding in our black and gold sunrise." Does the broken world raise its heart-rending cries? But the 'Children of Wotan' reck not: Page 699 "Question the volcano when it burns, chide the fire and bitumen!... We are pitiless, mighty and glad, the gods fear our laughter inhuman. Our hearts... will still feel surprised that, as early as 1939 and even earlier still,** Sri Aurobindo should have so correctly measured up the menace of the "Dwarf Napoleon" and the Fuehrer of the "Children o Wotan". And wasn't Sri Aurobindo thinking of Hitler, and of the Nazis, and of the concentration camps, and of the gas chambers, when he projected * In July 1971, we might add: "No Bangla Desh tragedy ...
... assigned to them by the charismatic Führer, that “Being of Light”. For these young men Wotan, whom others called Odin, was present again – he, the one-eyed god with the green hat, who leads the wild hunt of dead riders seen in times of upheaval, when storms are wailing or the moon makes the nights ominous. “Wotan” is from the same root as “Wut”, which means rage or fury. “We have to become the berserkers... 9. The Völkisch Movement Hitler and his God The Light of Apollo, the Frenzy of Wotan We had a look at some of the ideas which became ever more articulated in “the new romanticism” that was the völkisch movement. We met with a new German history favouring heroes whose actions and ideals seemed worthy of imitation; there was the Motherland with its natural... the style of ancient times is possible again.” 514 And René Alleau quotes the Austrian author Otto Höfler who wrote: “The most honored god of the German tribes was the lord of demonic possession … Wotan is the savage god of possession, the divine master of the ecstatic Männerbünde, the unpredictable god of war and tempest, of the runes and the dead, of rage and sorcery, of masks and human sacrifices ...
... frenzy of fury and Hitler was fuming and foaming at his mouth and decreeing the annihilation of his enemies, that Sri Aurobindo wrote "The Children of Wotan". The rhetorical question "Where is the end of your armoured march, O children of Wotan?" provokes this infernal response Page 410 from Hitler's hordes overrunning Europe and threatening to overrun the entire world: We march... cord; Dead now are pity and honour, strength only is Nature's Lord.. We build a new world-order; our bombs shout Wotan's peace. We are the javelins of Destiny, we are the children of Wotan, We are the human Titans, the supermen dreamed by the sage. A cross of the beast and demoniac with the godhead of power and will, We are born in humanity's sunset, to the Night is our... sightless couriers of the air. ... 23 In fact, during the War, the Mother seems to have used flowers as symbols of her spiritual army resisting the mad and maddening march of the "Children of Wotan". The outer flower-formations, flower-emanations, and perhaps even flower-offensives, had links with the potent spiritualdynamic actions originating from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Only on this ...
... all Western Europe in 1940 and the future of civilisation seemed very bleak indeed, Sri Aurobindo indeed the powerful The Children of Wotan, the opening lines of which may be quoted here: Where is the end of your armoured march, O children of Wotan? Earth shudders with fear at your tread, the death-flame laughs in your eyes. We have seen the sign of Thor and the hammer of... the side of the Allies. Failing in his private attempt to persuade the Congress leaders, he contented himself with exerting his spiritual action on the side of humanity and progress. The Children of Wotan is charged with power as well as prophecy, not the less Aurobindonian for being so openly 'political'. Nor is it outdated for the edge of its criticism is directed, not against the Nazi alone, but ...
... revolution 376, 672, 707, 782 (cf227) Hitler 208, 394ff and the Iron Dictators 396 and Chamberlain 403 threat of Asuric forces 403 the Dwarf Napoleon 405 traitor Quisling 409-10 and children of Wotan 410-1 menace of Hitlerism 414 sadhaks desiring Nazi victory 414-5 missing the bus 415 fascination for 15 August 415, 441 the Japanese threat of 1942 424 discipline in Golconde 444 Cabinet Mission... The Life Heavens 386 Musa Spiritus 386 The Pilgrim of the Night 387 Urvasie 387 Uloupie 387 Chitrangada 387 Love and Death 387 The Cosmic Man 394 The Children of Wotan 396, 410-1 The Iron Dictators 396 The Dwarf Napoleon 397, 405 In the Battle 406 Perseus the Deliverer 406 Collected Poems and Plays 429 Assignation with the Night 490 Hymn ...
... prosody. Perhaps there is not a fixed prosodic theory as the Alexandrine has been left very much in the cold, not having been adopted by any of the great writers." * The Children of Wotan catches vividly the perversely religious vision and exultation that was one of the most effective elements in the cult of Nordic race and blood and steely Titanism which Hitler let loose in Germany ...
... broke up into two separate orders, one under Philipp Stauff, who had been a personal disciple of Guido von List, the other under Hermann Pohl. Pohl called his fiefdom “Germanenorden-Walvater” after Wotan (or Odin), “the Nordic All-Father or Walvater who determines the heroic death of the humans on the Walstatt , the battle field”. 46 And it is here that we meet another of the main personages in our ...
... his biographers, 696; deep interest in the war, 696ff; Hitler & Napoleon, 696-7; spiritual intervention in the war, 697, 704-5; on Quisling, 697-8; on Churchill's Government, 698; 'The Children of Wotan', 699ff, 707; on Nazi rule, 700, 707; on the resignation of the Congress ministries, 701; on ashramites' pro-Hitler feelings, 702; on Hitler as the Asura, 702-3; support to allied cause, 704; support ...
... attributes of man". In the popular imagination of the time, the Kaiser and his .warlords approximated to the Nietzschean Asuric ideal, and certainly Hitler and his Nazi hordes ("The Children of Wotan", as Sri Aurobindo calls them in his poem) were to prove total perversions of the anticipated Nordic Superman. Fully alive to these dangerous possibilities of vulgarisation and distortion of the ...
... manuscripts. Despair on the Staircase . October 1939. Three handwritten manu-scripts. The Dwarf Napoleon . 16 October 1939. Three handwritten manu-scripts. The Children of Wotan . 30 August 1940. Two handwritten manu-scripts. The Mother of God . One handwritten manuscript, undated, but in the handwriting of the mid 1940s. The End? 3 June 1945. One ...
... 601 The Blue Bird 533 The Body 617 Bride of the Fire 532 Bugles of Light 673 The Call of the Impossible 595 Charles Stewart Parnell 17 The Children of Wotan 641 A Child's Imagination 211 Chitrangada 309 Contrasts 593 Cosmic Consciousness 603 The Cosmic Dance 590 The Cosmic Man 637 The Cosmic Spirit 619 ...
... whirling maelstrom that would soon hit the world, sweeping all before it. And in the invisible, occult plane Sri Aurobindo and Mother were fighting the rising of the Dark; so that the children of Wotan do not wholly possess the world. We all harbour in us conflicting persons. In Dilipda's case, there was a constant tussle between his western educated disbelieving intellect and his ancestral Hindu ...
... fields, the German forest or glistening snow-capped peaks that were played off against the urban scene, the philistine existence of peasants was played off against metropolitan civilization, the cult of Wotan against the conveyor belt, the ways of the Northmen against present-day social structures. It was with a false inwardness that it meditated upon essentials behind shuttered windows: the plough, the ...
... of the Nordic and the Christian religions, so typical for the Germany of that time, is a most amazing feat of intellectual inconsistency, confusion or schizophrenia. “The supreme god of the Germans [Wotan] did not necessarily have to make way for the God of the Christians”, wrote Wagner, “he could even be perfectly identified with him. It was sufficient to strip him of the superficial attributes which ...
... Guido von List’s present-day Edelmenschen, or supermen. “Logapore, wodan wigiponare” was an inscription in old Germanic on a precious stone found at Nordendorf, in Bavaria, and meant: “Logapore and Wotan, give divine protection”. Babette Steininger has been identified as one of the first members of the NSDAP in Munich. 1012 “That she explicitly calls Hitler ‘my dear Armanen-brother’ can only mean ...
... Mother saw clearly and straight through the intervening mist and māyā of the propagandist falsehood. They could see right from the beginning the kind of threat Hitler and his "Children of Wotan" posed to man's future on the earth. The following passage in Savitri was quite obviously inspired by the Hitlerian horror that spread and established its hegemony over Germany: A mighty ...
... kept his NSDAP separated so trenchantly from the völkisch movement, which professed for the most part some vaguely romantic and even sentimental notions, and which was a mass of motley trends from Wotanism to nudism. To Hitler, being völkisch was a pose or a game, if not a flight from reality; being a Hitlerite, on the contrary, was a matter of imminent worldwide revolution. Hitler did not hesitate ...
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