The Lost World of Agharti- the Mystery of Vril Power

by Alec MacLellan

  What interested me first about Cutcliffe-Hyne was that he had lived in Kettlewell, only a few miles from that strange cave which I had entered. Secondly, that he had earned something of a reputation as a daring adventurer who loved exploration, and was obsessed with the legend of Lost Atlantis.* And, thirdly, that he had written a now extremely rare book called Beneath Your Very Boots (published in 1889), about an underworld kingdom which gossip in Wharfedale once maintained was based on facts he had actually uncovered.

  When I obtained a copy of the book and read it, I found that certain of the facts exactly matched my own experiences. The story recounts the adventures of a certain Anthony Haltoun in an underground world which he enters through a cave ‘in the valley of the Wharfe near to its commencement’. The entrance is ‘on the northern flank of the dale’ and the young man enters despite a stern warning from a local to ‘leave the caves alone, or else the folk who dwell in them will catch you’.

  Haltoun tells us that the passageway was definitely not that of a lead mine, ‘for the Wharfedale mines are nearly all horizontal’, while this one progressed downwards in a gradual slope. Walking along it, he is confronted by ‘a brilliant light which suddenly flashed through the gloom and displayed a party of men advancing towards me’. At their approach, the ground also begins to shake and tremble, and the startled Haltoun falls into a faint.

  When he recovers his senses, the narrator discovers that he has fallen into the hands of an underground race called the Nradas, a fair-skinned, blond-haired people who have lived in a state of harmony and peace since prehistoric times. They are opposed to war, and it was ‘their hatred of fighting which caused them, in the first instance, to seek shelter beneath the land which was glutting itself with slaughter.’ Haltoun inquires of his hosts:

  ‘ “Do I understand that there is a regular colony in this cave?” ’

  ‘ “Well, yes, partly; only for colony read nation, and for cave almost interminable labyrinth. Out habitations and the tunnels connecting them, ramify under the whole of the British Isles, and in many places under the seas besides!” ’

  The Nradas explain that they are ruled over by Radoa, ‘who is supreme both in things temporal and in things spiritual: He is at once Ruler and Deity.’ Radoa is said to be a majestic figure, dressed in a golden robe, who lives in a beautiful, cavernous city. The number of inhabitants of this subterranean metropolis ‘is a trifle over ten thousand … though there are twice as many within a ten miles circuit round it.’

  The Nradas also tell Haltoun how they took advantage of the make-up of the Earth to create their subterranean world. ‘Firstly, the crust of the earth is vesicular – i.e. full of holes, formed either by Titanic convulsion or by the water’s irresistible erosion; and, secondly, that nearly all these cavities are ventilated by invisible capillary air-shafts.’ Of the tunnels, many were naturally formed while ‘here and there a more symmetrically carved tunnel pointed to the handiwork of man.’ (Later, Haltoun comes to believe that these passageways were bored by rotary tools studded with diamonds which had been mined underground.) To illuminate their world, and also propel the vehicles which transport them through the tunnels, the Nradas have tapped ‘the earth’s internal power, abstracted through deep borings’.

  Much in Cutliffe-Hyne’s story is pure fantasy – enjoyable fantasy to be sure – but running through the whole work there is also a strong thread of authenticity, a feeling that certain of the facts are true, and others, though unsubstantiated, are based on old traditions in which authentic elements can always be found.*

  What Cutcliffe-Hyne denies his readers are any more exact details of the subterranean world than I have quoted here.

  But in his autobiography, My Joyful Life, published in 1935, he refers to this novel and a legend upon which it is based – and in so doing adds a whole new dimension to the story, and indeed set me off on the research which has ultimately resulted in this book.

  In My Joyful Life, which is now a hard-to-find volume, Cutcliffe-Hyne first describes how he became interested in the mines of West Yorkshire when he was a child:

  Somehow I fancy I must be a bit of a throw-back to some cave-dwelling ancestor, because my tastes have always been a trifle troglodytical. My father was Vicar of Bierley, a big, straggling, West Riding village dotted with collieries. One of his churchwardens, with whom I was very matey, was a colliery overseer, and with him I used to descend the local pits whenever he would take me. As I ‘got’ my first corve of coal when I was ten, one may say I was entered to mining young and early. The Bierley pits were small and (looking back) pretty primitive. The old beam-engines for winding, and the shaft gear, and the furnace ventilation would have sent the present-day Government inspector into a quiet swoon. But they taught me to be impervious to giddiness and claustrophobia, and to keep an instinctive look-out for the safety of my own skin.

  This introduction to the world ‘beneath our feet’ also gave him an interest in the innumerable legends about the caves and mines of the West Riding. Later, when he was at Cambridge University, he learned rock-climbing and was President of the Clare Alpine Club, ‘the dignity being granted for jumping across the cañon which divided our chapel from Trinity Hall, depositing on the crow-steps there an empty marmalade jar, and returning home intact!’ This escapade stood him in good stead when his later life of adventure took him all over the world to places like Europe, Scandinavia, Africa, Mexico and South America and ‘up precipitous rocks as well as down deep mines and caves’.

  Cave hunting, indeed, became Cutcliffe-Hyne’s main hobby, and in his autobiography he describes exploring subterranean passages in Yorkshire, several places in Europe and Africa, and searching for a lost Inca treasure cave in Mexico. It was while engaged on these expeditions that he first heard stories of a subterranean kingdom said to be linked to all the nations of the world. ‘In South America I heard tell that there were enormous tunnels that traversed the continent, ultimately linking with this forbidden place. More curious still, there was similar talk in Europe, and even some old people in the West Riding knew the story and believed there to be entrances through their own caves. The kingdom was said to be called Agharti.’

  I read Cutcliffe-Hyne’s book absolutely fascinated. The idea of a subterranean kingdom linked to all the continents of the world by a gigantic network of passageways was an amazing, mind-boggling idea indeed. If the legend was true, then there must be a lost world beneath our own which neither time nor the activities of mankind had disturbed for generations!

  And so it was that I began my search for this lost world called Agharti and its extraordinary and ancient history, as I shall describe in the pages which follow.…

  The idea that there is a hidden world beneath the surface of our planet is a very ancient one indeed. There are innumerable folk tales and oral traditions found throughout many countries of the world speaking of subterranean people who have created a kingdom of harmony and contentment untroubled by the rest of humanity. Literature, too, can boast several works on this theme – Niels Klim’s Journey Underground by the Dane, Ludvig Baron von Holberg (1741), being perhaps the pre-eminent example – and artists and poets have also been attracted to the theme over the years.

  At first sight many of the accounts appear little more than fantasies – delightful tales of ethereal beings who hover forever on the edge of the human consciousness. But when the stories are brought together and compared, some startling similarities between them all become apparent. No matter what their origin, there is a curious and compelling thread of truth underlying them all. Nicholas Roerich, the Russian explorer, artist and savant, whom we shall be studying in some detail later in this book, has expressed this fact most convincingly in his book, Abode of Light (1947):

  Among the innumerable legends and fairy tales of various countries may be found the tales of lost tribes or subterranean dwellers. In wide and diverse directions, people are speaking of identical facts. But in correlating them you can readily see that these ar
e but chapters from the one story. At first it seems impossible that there should exist any connection between these distorted whispers, but afterwards you begin to grasp a peculiar coincidence in these manifold legends by people who are even ignorant of each other’s names.

  You recognize the same relationship in the folklore of Tibet, Mongolia, China, Turkestan, Kashmir, Persia, Altai, Siberia, the Urals, Caucasia, the Russian steppes, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, France, Germany … From the highest mountains to the deepest oceans, they tell how a holy tribe was persecuted by a tyrant and how the people, not willing to submit to cruelty, closed themselves into subterranean mountains. They even ask if you want to see the entrance of the cave through which the saintly folk fled …

  Over the years this kingdom to which the exiles fled has been given various names. If it has been considered a place of evil, then Hell, Hades or Tartarus. If – as is most generally the case – it is seen as a place of goodness and light then Shangrila, Shamballah or, most widely of all, Agharti. (I should perhaps just point out that this word Agharti can be found variously spelled as Asgartha, Agartha or Agarthi, but as it most generally appears in the first form, I have adopted that spelling throughout the book.)

  Taking the legend in its most basic form, Agharti is said to be a mysterious underground kingdom situated somewhere beneath Asia and linked to the other continents of the world by a gigantic network of tunnels. These passageways, partly natural formations and partly the handiwork of the race which created the subterranean nation, provide a means of communication between all the points, and have done so since time immemorial. According to the legend, vast lengths of the tunnels still exist today; the rest have been destroyed by cataclysms. The exact location of these passages, and the means of entry, are said to be known only to certain high initiates, and the details are most carefully guarded because the kingdom itself is a vast storehouse of secret knowledge. These manuscripts are claimed to be the works of the lost Atlantean civilization and of an even earlier people who were the first intelligent beings to inhabit the earth.

  That there are mysterious passageways beneath the earth’s surface, there is no doubt. John Michell and Robert J. M. Rickard have written in their book, Phenomena (1977):

  When we look for physical evidence to support these accounts we stumble across the greatest and most suppressed archaeological secret: the existence of vast, inexplicable tunnel systems, part artificial, part natural, beneath the surface of a great part of the earth … Baring-Gould’s Cliff Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe has amazing records of the extensive cave and tunnel structures beneath France and other countries. In Harold Bayley’s Archaic England are reports from early travellers of great tunnels stretching under much of Africa, including one beneath a river called Kaoma, ‘so lengthy that it took the caravan from sunrise to noon to pass through’. As we write, July 1976, there is news of a military-backed expedition setting off in South America with the double object of investigating the riddle of the ‘technologically impossible’ stone cities in the high mountains and exploring the vast network of mysterious tunnels, said to run throughout the entire Andes range. If we wanted to prove the existence of a living world beneath our own, we would have no difficulty in pointing to the entrances to the underworld and no lack of historical evidence of contacts between men and subterraneans.

  Michell and Rickard also make the interesting point that: ‘If we suppose, as many cranks and great men before us have supposed, that there is life in a subterranean world which occasionally interpenetrates with our own, many of our strange phenomena seem more reasonable.’

  If we turn to the doctrines of the Buddhists we can also find a number of specific facts about Agharti. According to these teachings the kingdom is located deep within the planet and inhabited by millions of gentle, peaceable people. They are ruled by a wise and incredibly powerful being known as Rigden Jyepo, ‘The King of the World’, who lives in a magnificent dwelling in the capital of Agharti called Shamballah. From here he has contact with representatives in the ‘upper world’ and is therefore able to influence the ways of ‘surface man’. ‘The King of the World’ is also said to be in direct communication with the Dalai Lama of Tibet.

  The American Buddhist, Robert Ernst Dickhoff, known as Sungma Red Lama, adds to this information in his intriguing booklet Agharta (1951):

  Agharta began some 60,000 years ago when a tribe led by a holy man disappeared underground. The inhabitants there are said to number many millions and a science superior to any found on the surface of earth directs the activities of these underground citizens in this weird kingdom.

  When speaking of Agharta one has to visualise a vast underground terminal city, being a branch of a subterranean, suboceanic network of tunnels … Most of these ancient tunnels are now covered at their openings or entrances, due to landslides caused by the deluge of long ago and to the submerging of entire continents. The few remaining ones open to the surface world are in Tibet, Siberia, Africa, South and North America, and on remote islands which were once the mountain peaks of Atlantis.

  Dr Dickhoff maintains that the antediluvian civilization which created Agharti flourished on both sides of the Atlantic, and adds:

  Tibetan Lamas are of the opinion that in America live in caves of vast proportions the survivors of a catastrophe which befell Atlantis, and that these caverns are connected by means of tunnels running clear to either of the two continents, Asia and America; also that these caverns are illuminated by a green luminescence which aids underground plant life there and lengthens human life.

  Another American, Dr Raymond Bernard, who is a leading researcher into the legends of underground kingdoms, has also commented on the Buddhist links with Agharti in his book, The Subterranean World (1960):

  Throughout the Buddhist world of the Far East, belief in the existence of a Subterranean World, which is given the name Agharti, is universal and is an integral part of the Buddhist faith. Another sacred word among Buddhists is Shamballah, the name of the subterranean world capital.

  Buddhist traditions state that Agharti was first colonised many thousands of years ago when a holy man led a tribe which disappeared underground. This reminds one of Noah, who was really an Atlantean, who saved a worthy group prior to the coming of the flood that submerged Atlantis. The present population of this underground kingdom are believed to possess a science superior to any found on the surface of the earth, through which they wield forces of nature we know nothing about. Their civilisation is believed to represent a continuation of the Atlantean civilisation and is many thousands of years old (Atlantis sank about 11,500 years ago) while ours is very young, only a few centuries old.

  Dr Bernard believes that there is a tunnel beneath the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, which leads to Shamballah and is constantly guarded by Lamas. He also claims that Buddhism is actually ‘an Aghartan philosophy brought to surface humanity by teachers who came up from the Subterranean World’. Dr Bernard writes:

  The various gigantic statues of Buddha do not represent the human Gautama, but rather these subterranean supermen who came up to teach and help humanity at remote times in the past. These Buddhas all taught the same universal, scientific religion as emissaries of Agharti, the subterranean Paradise, which it is the goal of all true Buddhists to reach.

  Perhaps the most remarkable claim advanced by this unusual man – whom we shall be meeting again later in this book – is the theory that the underground people travel through the tunnels in strange vehicles which occasionally emerge and appear in our skies – the phenomena known as UFOs or ‘Flying Saucers’! He says they are powered by those mysterious ‘forces of nature’ possessed by the subterranean people!

  From the specific remarks of Dr Bernard and the Buddhist Robert Dickhoff, as well as the more general traditions I have given, the reader will not find it hard to see why there is such a fascination with the legend of Agharti. But it is which details are fact and which are fiction that I have set out to determine in this book
.

  It does need to be said right away that this is not another ‘Hollow Earth’ book. In recent years there have been a number of new books – as well as reprints of the old classic titles like The Phantom of the Poles by William Reed (1906), The Smoky God; or A Voyage to the Inner World by Willis George Emerson (1908) and A Journey to the Earth’s Interior by Marshall B. Gardner (1920) – all of which seek to prove that the inside of our world is hollow and that people dwell therein. This is not a theory to which I subscribe, and it is no part of my argument in this book that planet Earth is anything other than an oblate spheroid solid to the core.* What I do believe is that it is possible for natural cavities in the ground to have been utilized along with the construction of tunnels to form a secret world just beneath our feet. How much of this still exists, whether it is peopled or not, and what is the truth of its origins is what I have attempted to discover. It is an inquiry that will take the reader back through the pages of history and into some of the darkest recesses on the Earth’s surface. The results of this inquiry have led me to a startling conclusion about the extent and route of the tunnel network and the location of Agharti itself – now believed by some authorities to be the fabled Shangri-la for which man has sought since the dawn of time.

  Hand-in-glove with the story of Agharti goes a perhaps even more mysterious subject – that of the strange force known as Vril Power, which has long been associated with the subterranean world. This amazing force is said to give almost unlimited power to anyone who possesses it – and many have wished to do so, including the most sinister and evil figure of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler. We shall be examining his role in the quest for Vril Power as well as studying the force itself during the pages which follow.

  But, first, before attempting to establish where Agharti is, whether the underground passageways exist, or even what the mysterious Vril Power might be, we must look into the history of this remarkable subterranean kingdom and the mystery which surrounds it. It is a story that takes us back over the centuries and through the records and history books of many and varied nations …