When Ossendowski asked him if anyone had ever seen the King of the World, the old lama replied that during the solemn holidays of the ancient Buddhism in Siam and India the King appeared five times in a ‘splendid car drawn by white elephants’. (25) He wore a white robe and a red tiara with strings of diamonds that hid his face. When he blessed the people with a golden apple surmounted by the figure of a lamb, the ‘blind received their sight, the dumb spoke, the deaf heard, the crippled freely moved and the dead arose, wherever the eyes of the “King of the World” rested’. (26)
Ossendowski then asked the lama how many people had been to Agartha. He replied that very many had, but that they never spoke about what they had seen there. He continued that, when the Olets destroyed Lhasa, one of their detachments found its way into the outskirts of Agartha, where they learned some of the lesser mysterious sciences. This is the reason for the magical skills of the Olets and Kalmucks.
Another of Ossendowski’s informants, a lama named Turgut, told him that the capital of Agartha is surrounded by the towns of the high priests and scientists, somewhat in the way that the Potala palace of the Dalai Lama in Lhasa is surrounded by monasteries and temples. The throne on which the King of the World sits is itself surrounded by millions of incarnated gods, the Holy Panditas. The King’s palace is surrounded by the palaces of the Goro, who possess fantastic power, and who would easily be able to incinerate the entire surface of the Earth, should humankind be unwise enough to declare war on them. (As we shall see in Chapter Seven, the legend of the King of the World would serve as the inspiration for one of the most enduring technological myths of the twentieth century.)
The legend of Agartha was discussed at length by another writer, the self-educated Christian Hermeticist Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (1842–1909), whose marriage into money enabled him to indulge his yearning for mystical understanding. In 1885 he began to take lessons in Sanskrit from one Haji Sharif (1838-?), about whom very little is known save that he left India at the time of the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 and worked as a bird-seller at Le Havre. (27) The manuscripts of d’Alveydre’s lessons are preserved in the library of the Sorbonne in Paris. In them, Sharif refers to the ‘Great Agarthian School’ and the ‘Holy Land of Agarttha’ (one of the many alternative spellings of the name).
Sharif claimed that the original language of humanity, called Vattan or Vattanian, derived from a 22-letter alphabet. Although he was unable physically to visit Agartha, d’Alveydre found an ingenious alternative: through disengaging his astral body, he was able to visit the fabulous realm in spirit form (see pages 108–110). His astral adventures resulted in a series of books (Mission des Souverains, Mission des Ouvriers, Mission des Juifs and Mission de l’Inde), which he published at his own expense. Interestingly, he destroyed the entire edition of the last work, Mission de I’lnde, for fear that he had revealed too many secrets of Agartha and might be made to pay for his transgression with his life. Only two copies survived: one that he kept himself and one that was hidden by the printer. (28)
He might well have been concerned, for Mission de I’lnde contains a detailed account of Agartha, which lies beneath the surface of the Earth somewhere in the East and is ruled over by an Ethiopian ‘Sovereign Pontiff called the Brahmatma. The realm of Agartha was transferred underground at the beginning of the Kali-Yuga, about 3200 BC. The Agarthians possess technology that was impressive in d’Alveydre’s day, including railways and air travel. They know everything about the surface-dwellers, and occasionally send emissaries. Agartha contains many libraries in which all the knowledge of Earth is recorded on stone tablets in Vattanian characters, including the means by which the living may communicate with the souls of the dead.
D’Alveydre states that, although many millions of students have tried to possess the secrets of Agartha, very few have ever succeeded in getting further than the outer circles of the realm.
Like Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote of the Vril-ya in his fictional work The Coming Race (discussed in the previous chapter), d’Alveydre speaks of the Agartthians as being superior to humanity in every respect, the true rulers of the world. A certain amount of controversy arose when Ossendowski published his Beasts, Men and Gods: it displayed such similarities to d’Alveydre’s work that he was accused by some of plagiarism only imperfectly masked by an alteration in the spelling of Agartha. Ossendowski denied the charge vehemently, and claimed never to have heard of d’Alveydre before 1924. Rene Guenon defended Ossendowski, and claimed that there were many tales of subterranean realms told throughout Central Asia. In fact, Guenon’s work would later be heavily criticised by his translator Marco Pallis, who called his book Le Roi du Monde (The King of the World) ‘disastrous’ in conversation with Joscelyn Godwin, on the grounds that Ossendowski’s sources were unreliable, and Guenon had allowed himself to enter the realms of the sensational. (29)
The legends surrounding the realms of Agartha and Shambhala are confusing to say the least, and their frequently contradictory nature does nothing to help in an understanding of their possible influence on the hideous philosophy of the Third Reich. As we have seen, some writers claim that Agartha and Shambhala are physical places, cities lying miles underground with houses, palaces, streets and millions of inhabitants. Others maintain that they are altogether more rarefied places, existing on some other level of reality but apparently coterminous with our physical world. With regard to their exact location, Childress offers a short summary of their many possible locations: ‘Shambhala is sometimes said to be north of Lhasa, possibly in the Gobi Desert, and other times it is said to be somewhere in Mongolia, or else in northern Tibet, possibly in the Changtang Highlands. Agharta is said to be south of Lhasa, perhaps near the Shigatse Monastery, or even in Northeast Nepal beneath Mount Kanchenjunga. Occasionally it is said to be in Sri Lanka. Both have been located inside the hollow earth [see Chapter Seven].’ (30)
Adding to this confusion is the frequently made assertion that the two power centres are opposed to each other, with Agartha seen as following the right-hand path of goodness and light, and Shambhala following the left- hand path of evil and darkness (a dichotomy also expressed as spirituality versus materialism). There is, needless to say, an opposing view that holds that Agartha is a place of evil and Shambhala the abode of goodness.
There have been a number of rumours concerning practitioners of black magic operating in Tibet and referring to themselves as the Shambhala or the Agarthi. (31) Although apparently outlawed by Tibetan Buddhists, they are said to continue their activities in secret. One writer who claimed to have encountered them was a German named Theodore Illion who spent the mid-1930s travelling through Tibet. In his book Darkness Over Tibet (1937), he describes how he discovered a deep shaft in the countryside. Wishing to gauge its depth, he dropped several stones into it and waited for them to strike the bottom; he was rewarded only with silence. He was told by an initiate that the shaft was ‘immeasurably deep’ and that only the highest initiates knew where it ended. His companion added: ‘Anyone who would find out where it leads to and what it is used for would have to die.’ (32)
Illion claimed to have gained access to a subterranean city inhabited by monks, whom he later found to be ‘black yogis’ planning to control the world through telepathy and astral projection. When he discovered that the food he was being given contained human flesh, he decided to make a break for it and fled across Tibet with several of the monks after him. After several weeks on the run, he managed to escape from Tibet and returned to the West with his bizarre and frightening tale. (33)
There have also been persistent rumours that the Nazi interest in Tibet (itself a documented historical fact) was actually inspired by a desire to contact the black adepts of Shambhala and/or Agartha and to enlist their aid in the conquest of the world (see Chapter Three). One of the most vocal proponents of this idea was the British occult writer Trevor Ravenscroft, whose claims we shall examine in greater detail in the next chapter. The schism between Shambhala and Agartha is described by Rene Guenon, who relates in Le Roi du Monde how the ancient civilisation in the Gobi Desert was all but destroyed by a natural cataclysm, and the ‘Sons of Intelligences of Beyond’ retreated to the caverns beneath the Himalayas and re-established their civilisation. There followed the formation of two groups: the Agarthi, who followed the way of spirituality, and the Shambhalists, who followed the way of violence and materialism.
Guenon claimed (as would Illion several years later) that the denizens of the subterranean world sought to influence the lives and actions of the surface dwellers through various occult means, including telepathic hypnosis and mediumship. Childress finds it intriguing that Hitler sent expeditions to Tibet in the late 1930s, soon after the publication of Illion’s book Darkness Over Tibet, and suggests that their true objective was to make contact with the occult groups. (34)
This crypto-historical scenario continues with Hitler making the acquaintance of a mysterious Tibetan monk who told him that Germany could conquer the world by forging an alliance with the ‘Lords of Creation’. While the victorious Russians were picking their way through the ruins of Berlin (and, according to some, discovering the bodies of several Tibetan monks, as we saw in Chapter Three), it is claimed by the crypto-historians that Hitler was
