The Lost World of Agharti- the Mystery of Vril Power

by Alec MacLellan

  In 1873 she finally arrived in New York. Here she quickly became caught up in the public’s growing fascination with Spiritualism, and met one Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, a renowned investigator of psychic phenomena. The ageing Colonel found himself spellbound by the liberated and often outrageous young woman as well as deeply impressed by her obviously profound knowledge of the occult. Within a few months they were living together – although the Colonel insisted that there was no sexual love between them.

  The couple began holding gatherings at which all aspects of the supernatural would be discussed, and as a result of these meetings they had the idea of creating an organization to further such work. The result was the Theosophical Society, based on the word Theosophy, meaning knowledge of divine wisdom. Madame Blavatsky set herself the task of collating and setting down all the knowledge she had collected, whether at first hand or through research, for a book which would become the cornerstone of the society. The result was published in 1877 under the title of Isis Unveiled. It proved an immediate success, although it was derided in some quarters as ‘a gallimaufry of fact and fable on many subjects’.

  Among the topics which Madame Blavatsky touched upon was the secret world of Agartha. Mentioning Louis Jacolliot only in passing, she repeated the details about the subterranean kingdom and the Brahm-atma, the supreme chief of the initiates, who alone knew the secret of the mystic formula contained in the word AUM. The selfsame details, in fact, that I have already described. But because Jacolliot’s books were little known outside France – and had only been published in limited editions, as against the large print-run for the two volumes which comprised Isis Unveiled – Madame Blavatsky has subsequently often enjoyed the credit for opening Western eyes to the wonders of this strange mystery.*

  There was, however, one new piece of information that she added to the developing file of material on Agartha. In discussing the legend that the underground kingdom was supposed to be linked to the rest of the world by passageways, she reported that she had personal knowledge of one such enormously long tunnel that ran over 1,000 miles through Peru and Bolivia. She had, she said, actually acquired a plan of the tunnel while travelling in South America in 1850. Although the passageway had evidently been used by the ancient Incas as a repository for their treasure to keep it out of the avaricious hands of the Spanish Conquistadors, it appeared to her to be of a much earlier origin – perhaps even with Atlantean connections. Writing in Isis Unveiled she said:

  We had in our possession an accurate plan of the tunnel, the sepulchre, the great treasure chamber and the hidden, pivoted rock-doors. It was given to us by an old Peruvian; but if we had ever thought of profiting by the secret it would have required the cooperation of the Peruvian and Bolivian governments on an extensive scale. To say nothing of physical obstacles, no one individual or small party could undertake such an exploration without encountering the army of brigands and smugglers with which the coast is infested; and which, in fact, includes nearly the entire population. The mere task of purifying the mephitic air of the tunnel not entered for centuries would also be a serious one. There the treasure lies, and tradition says it will lie till the last vestige of Spanish rule disappears from the whole of North and South America.

  The old Peruvian who gave Madame Blavatsky the map said he had actually visited the underground labyrinth. ‘It defies the imagination,’ he told her. ‘It is like stepping into the land of Aladdin. The old magicians and the Incan priests say the tunnels were there when their people first came to America.’

  We shall be returning to this tunnel network as well as some further confirmatory evidence by Madame Blavatsky from her travels in South America later in the book.

  Despite the initial success of Isis Unveiled, and the Theosophical Society, in a short while interest in both declined, and by 1879 Madame Blavatsky and the Colonel had decided to leave America and go to India, the great fountain-head of occult wisdom. Here both they, and theosophy, were warmly welcomed, and soon Madame Blavatsky was once again gaining converts and performing various supernatural wonders to demonstrate her ‘powers’. In 1882 they purchased a large mansion on the banks of the Adyar River, near Madras, and established the headquarters of the Theosophical Society. It still flourishes there today, and among its mementoes is a copy of that ancient tunnel map the old Peruvian gave to Madame Blavatsky.

  The last years of the remarkable lady’s life were darkened with scandal and accusations that she had ‘rigged’ her miracles. Indeed so persistent were the attacks alleging that she was a charlatan and a fraud, that she fled from India and went to England, where she lived out her last days producing a companion work to Isis Unveiled, again based on a mixture of personal experience and intensive research. She called this work The Secret Doctrine, and described it as a compendium of all the basic truths from which religion, philosophy and science had sprung. It was published in 1888 and also contained some more of her views about Agartha, in particular the great Brahm-atma. Referring the reader to what she had already said in Isis Unveiled concerning the secret underground kingdom of Asia and its ruler, she declared:

  He is the mysterious (to the profane – the ever invisible) yet ever present Personage about whom legends are rife in the East, especially among the Occultists and the students of the Sacred Science. It is he who holds spiritual sway over the initiated Adepts throughout the whole world. He is the Initiator. For sitting at the threshold of light, he looks into it from within the circle of darkness which he will not cross; nor will he quit his post till the last day of his life-cycle. It is under the direct, silent guidance of this Maha (Great) Guru that all the other less divine teachers and instructors of mankind became, from the first awakening of human consciousness, the guides of early Humanity. It is through these ‘Sons of Gods’ that infant humanity got its first notions of all arts and sciences, as well as of spiritual knowledge; and it is they who have laid the first foundation stone of those ancient civilisations that puzzle so sorely our modern generation of students and Scholars.

  Let those who doubt this statement explain the mystery of the extraordinary knowledge possessed by the ancients – alleged to have developed from lower and animal-like savages, the cave men of the Palaeolithic age – on any other equally reasonable grounds. Let them turn to such works as those of Vitruvius Pollio of the Augustan age, on architecture, for instance, in which all the rules of proportion are those taught anciently at initiations, if he would acquaint himself with the truly divine art, and understand the deep esoteric significance hidden in every rule and law of proportion. No man descended from a Palaeolithic cave-dweller could ever evolve such a science unaided, even in millenniums of thought and intellectual evolution. It is the pupils of those ‘Sons of Gods’ who handed their knowledge from one generation to another, to Egypt and Greece with its now lost canon of proportion. It is owing to the divine perfection of those architectural proportions that the Ancients could build those wonders of all the subsequent ages, their Pyramids, Cave-Temples, Tunnels, Cromlechs, Cairns, Altars, proving they had the powers of machinery and a knowledge of mechanics to which modern skill is like a child’s play, and which [sic] that skill refers to itself as the works of hundred-handed giants’.

  In a later section, Madame Blavatsky also confirms her earlier belief about a network of tunnels joined to Asgartha. It is a fact,’ she says, ‘known to the initiated Brahmins of India, and especially to Yogis, that there is not a cave-temple in the country but has its subterranean passages running in every direction, and that those underground caves and endless corridors have in their turn their caves and corridors.’

  But perhaps most importantly of all as far as our study is concerned, Madame Blavatsky provided a hint as to almost precisely where Agharti is located. In a footnote to her discussion of the Brahm-atma’s Initiates, she says that following a catastrophe in ages gone by: ‘The elect of this race took shelter in the “sacred island”, the fabled Shamballah, in the Gobi desert.’

  At f
irst glance, it may seem that in this rather enigmatic sentence Madame Blavatsky has merely provided the subterranean kingdom with yet another name. But in fact, as I mentioned in passing in the first chapter and will substantiate later, Shamballah is the name generally given to the capital city of Agharti, where ‘The King of the World’ is enthroned. But this error should not be allowed to obscure the fact that this extraordinary lady was the first of the historians to give us anything approaching a possible site for the mysterious underworld.

  What remains a mystery is why no one immediately followed up the hint to try and establish its truth or otherwise. No doubt the infamy which surrounded the lady’s last years, and her death in 1891 shortly after the publication of The Secret Doctrine, played an important part in this state of affairs. But it is a fact that almost a quarter of a century was to pass before the subject of Agharti again came to public attention through the experiences of another Russian exile. And when it did, the clue to its location was to prove not so far off the mark as Madame Blavatsky’s detractors had claimed all her other ideas and conclusions had been …

  * In an analysis of Isis Unveiled, the American Orientalist William Emmette Coleman found that over 2,000 passages had been copied from other books ‘without proper credit’, and that Madame Blavatsky had cited 1,300 books of which she had only read 100. He concluded: ‘By this means many readers of Isis have been misled into thinking Madame Blavatsky an enormous reader, possessed of vast erudition; while the fact is her reading was very limited, and her ignorance was profound in all branches of knowledge.’ In his list of books which she plagiarized, he mentions extensive quotations from Ennemoser’s History of Magic and The Gnostics and their Remains by C. W. King, as well as ‘seventeen passages from Jacolliot’s Bible in India’.

  THE STRANGE QUEST OF

  FERDINAND OSSENDOWSKI

  Until the start of the twentieth century, the legend of Agharti remained very much … a legend. The old stories of a secret underground kingdom persisted in certain corners of the world, but evidence to support the claims remained as elusive as ever. Indeed, it might well have been expected that in the rational and materialistic new century, such a story would finally be confined to the realms of fantasy: a colourful tradition to be ranked alongside other ancient mysteries such as the lost continents of Atlantis and Mu.

  But such a supposition did not allow for the remarkable discoveries of two intrepid explorers who in the 1920s went into the vastness of Asia and there unearthed evidence about Agharti which far exceeded that of any previous reports. Their accounts, indeed, became the cornerstone of our present knowledge of the secret kingdom.

  Strangely, neither man knew the other; certainly they never met, nor did they ever read each other’s books. Yet, both were of Russian extraction, both were men of courage and wisdom, and neither was easily convinced of falsehoods or taken in by wild stories. One made his discoveries about Agharti while fleeing for his life from the terror of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; the other came shortly after from self-imposed exile in America, seeking to penetrate the mysteries of Tibet – that remote and mysterious kingdom deep in the Himalayas into which few Westerners have ever penetrated. Their names were Ferdinand Ossendowski and Nicholas Roerich, and it is their major contributions to our story which we shall consider next.

  Ferdinand Ossendowski was a remarkable man by any standards, and it is somewhat difficult to explain why he is so sadly neglected today, his name recorded in so few reference works, and his books forgotten and of the utmost rarity. As we shall see, this is in stark contrast to his fellow explorer of the Agharti legend, Nicholas Roerich.

  Ossendowski was born in Vitebsk in 1876. From his childhood he demonstrated a passionate love for his native Siberia, in particular its history and wildlife. During schooldays he proved to be an intelligent and alert scholar, showing a great aptitude for both geography and geology. Naturally enough this led to his entering on a career in mining, and by the beginning of the new century he was widely regarded as one of the leading experts on gold mining in Siberia. He was also something of a rebel and an idealist. By 1905 he had become noticeably disillusioned by the Tsar’s central government in Moscow, which seemed to him to be paying scant regard to the needs of his beloved Siberia. He therefore became involved in an attempt to obtain partition for Siberia from the rest of Russia, serving as a leading member of a group who called themselves the Far Eastern Revolutionary Government, with their headquarters in the town of Harbin.

  It was a passionate, but ill-conceived attempt at defying the Tsar’s might and was quickly squashed. Ossendowski, along with thirty-seven others, was arrested and put on trial. Although friends offered to help Ossendowski himself to escape, he preferred to stand trial with his friends and was summarily sentenced to death for treason. However, following powerful appeals on his behalf, plus his undoubted use to the government because of his mining knowledge, this sentence was commuted to two years imprisonment. He returned to normal life in September 1907, a harder but wiser man from his gruelling experience in a Siberian prison.

  In the years which followed, Ossendowski devoted himself to his mining studies, serving as Professor of Geology at universities in Petrograd and Omsk, as well as writing extensively on gold and platinum mining for Russian and Polish journals. During the period of the First World War, he was sent as a member of a ‘special investigating mission’ to Mongolia which, it has been suggested, was a front for certain spying activities on the government’s behalf!

  In 1920, with the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ossendowski’s life took its most dramatic turn. As a well-known figure in Russian life, a member of the bourgeoisie, and a suspected government collaborator, he was a natural target for the Reds, and he was high on the list of wanted men when the revolutionaries overran Siberia. But he did not wait a second time for imprisonment and the possibility of death, fleeing instead into the wilds of Siberia and heading for Mongolia. Although he had no clear plan as to where he might go, he sensed that China would probably have to be his ultimate destination once he had crossed the great wilderness of Mongolia.

  Lewis Stanton Palen, who later collaborated with Ossendowski on a book called Man and Mystery in Asia (1924), explains that the Red soldiers at first pursued their quarry with relentless fervour, but suddenly abandoned the chase when they believed Ossendowski to be dead. A mangled skeleton which had been savaged by wolves was found in the forest of Yenisey and had on it the passport of a Dr Ferdinand Ossendowski. Says Palen: ‘As he was so well known and so badly wanted by the Bolshevik rulers, great rejoicing followed the discovery of his documents and the news of the death of so well known an enemy of Bolshevism was spread through all the Red Organs in Siberia and Russia.’

  But, in truth, Ossendowski was not dead; he had cleverly outwitted his pursuers. Palen explains:

  In a struggle with a party of Bolsheviks in the forest, Dr Ossendowski in defence of his own life made a Commissioner pay the price the latter would have exacted from this fugitive man of education: and, being in need of documents more useful and less compromising than those in his own name, he simply removed the Commissioner’s papers from his pocket and left his own undesirable ones in their place.

  Although Ossendowski was now free from pursuit, he knew there was no going back to Siberia. With great determination and skill he made his way into Mongolia – narrowly escaping death at the hands of a band of marauding hunghutze or bandits – until he fell into the company of a remarkable fellow-Russian, a priest named Tushegoun Lama, who had also fled from the Red Revolution. He was a fascinating figure who went everywhere with a big Colt pistol stuck in his blue sash and could claim personal friendship with the Dalai Lama, then the supreme ruler of Tibet.

  In the months that followed, a great bond of friendship grew up between these two exiles, and each came to admire the other. In was from Tushegoun Lama that Ossendowski was to hear the first hints about Agarthi and be inspired to investigate the stories and ultimately
produce the first detailed modern report on the subterranean kingdom, thereby helping to substantiate the truths in the ancient legend. He called this report, Beasts, Men and Gods (1923), and it is now a rare and much sought-after volume.

  In telling us about his host, Ossendowski wrote in his book:

  Tushegoun Lama! How many extraordinary tales I had heard about him. He is a Russian Kalmuck, who because of his propaganda work for the independence of the Kalmuck people made the acquaintance of many Russian prisons under the Czar and, for the same cause, added to the list under the Bolsheviki. He escaped to Mongolia and at once attained to great influence among the Mongols. It was no wonder, for he was a close friend and pupil of the Dalai Lama in Lhasa, amongst the most learned of the Lama, a famous thaumaturgist and doctor. His influence was irresistible, based as it was on his great control of mysterious science. Everyone who disobeyed his orders perished. Such a one never knew the day or hour when, in his yurta or beside his galloping horse on the plains, the strange and powerful friend of the Lama would appear. The stroke of a knife, a bullet or strong fingers strangling the neck like a vice accomplished the justice of the plans of this miracle worker.

  During their journeying, Tushegoun Lama told Ossendowski something of the almost miraculous powers of the Tibetan priests, and the Dalai Lama in particular – powers, he said, the foreigners could scarcely begin to appreciate. Then, he went on: ‘But there also exists a still more powerful and more holy man … The King of the World in Agharti.’