‘If you are familiar with so many incidents, you must be successful in your work,’ he said. ‘To know so much of Shamballah is in itself a stream of purification. Many of our people during their lives have encountered the Azaras and Kuthumpas and the snow people who serve them. Only recently have the Azaras ceased to be seen in cities. They are all gathered in the mountains. Very tall, with long hair and beards, they appear outwardly like Hindus. Once, walking along the Brahmaputra, I saw an Azara. I strove to reach him, but swiftly he turned beyond the rocks and disappeared. Yet I found no cave or cavern there – all I saw was a small crevice. Probably the man did not care to be disturbed.
‘The Kuthumpas are no longer seen now. Previously they appeared quite openly in the Tsang district and at Manasa-rowar, when the pilgrims went to holy Kailasa. Even the snow people are rarely seen now. The ordinary person, in his ignorance, mistakes them for apparitions …’
The old lama’s voice faded away and with what seemed like a weary movement he drew the folds of his red garment closer around him. Darkness had now fallen outside the monastery, and only a few small candles relieved the gloom. Roerich could see his host was tiring, and wondered how much longer he would be prepared to talk. There was, though, still one strange episode that had occurred during his journey across Asia which puzzled him and which he knew he must ask the holy man about before he departed.
‘Lama,’ he said softly, ‘not far from Ulan-Davan we saw a huge black vulture which flew low, close to our camp. He crossed the direction of something shining and beautiful, which was flying south over our camp, and which glistened in the rays of the sun.’
Even in the half-light, Roerich saw the lama’s eyes suddenly sparkle. Then the old man asked him in a voice that was almost breathless: ‘Did you sense a perfume like temple-incenses in the desert?’
Now it was Roerich’s turn to look surprised. ‘Ah – yes,’ he said slowly. ‘We did. In that stony desert, several days from any habitation, many of us became simultaneously aware of an exquisite breath of perfume. This happened several times. We never smelt such lovely perfume. It reminded me of a certain incense which a friend of mine once gave me in India – from where he obtained it, I do not know.’
When Tsa-Rinpoche spoke again he provided Nicholas Roerich with the biggest surprise of all in that evening of surprises. Indeed, afterwards the great explorer was not sure that the man’s words were not the most amazing thing he had heard during all those extraordinary years in Asia.
‘So!’ the old man went on, his voice rising. ‘You are being guarded by Shamballah! The huge black vulture is your enemy, who is eager to destroy your work, but the protecting force from Shamballah follows you in this Radiant form of Matter! This force is always near you, but you cannot always perceive it. Sometimes only, it is manifested for strengthening and directing you. It is, in truth, the greatest mystery of all about Shamballah!’
Today, as I mentioned, the late Nicholas Roerich enjoys a worldwide reputation as a philosopher and artist. Yet while so much of what he wrote and painted is easily accessible, his contribution to our knowledge of the legend of Agharti – and Shamballah in particular – is generally overlooked. Nor has it been appreciated that what Roerich actually experienced in the desert of Ulan-Davan was in all probability the mysterious force we now know as Vril Power – in operation!
Extending our gratitude to him and his fellow-explorer, Ferdinand Ossendowski, for widening our knowledge of the secret underworld kingdom, it is now surely time to examine this Vril Power in more details – and first the English writer who featured it in a unique and fascinating work of great rarity. The man was Edward George Bulwer Lytton, and his book was called The Coming Race.
THE ENIGMA OF LORD LYTTON’S SUBTERRANEAN WORLD
One of the hardest to find of all books of mysticism is a curious little volume called The Coming Race, which was published in 1871. On the title page the author’s name is given simply as ‘The Right Hon. Lord Lytton’ – a man who was, in fact, a widely popular Victorian novelist and short story writer. Indeed his historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) is still remembered today (even if it is not often read), while his much anthologized novella The Haunted and the Haunters (1859) has been described by no less an authority than H. P. Lovecraft as ‘one of the best haunted-house tales ever written’.
But The Coming Race suffers an obscurity and rarity quite out of keeping with the rest of Lord Lytton’s works. Few except the world’s major libraries possess copies of the book, and my own search for a personal edition took me several years before I finally located a curiously bound volume in a second-hand bookseller’s shop in a backstreet of London. I say curious because the binding is of a strangely-textured leather and there is no title or author embossed on the spine. I suspect I should have passed it by and left it among the other mouldering, dusty volumes except for the one word which had been scratched in ink in capital letters at the top of the spine: VRIL.
The word meant little to me at that time, but intrigued me enough to pull the book from the shelf. Imagine my delight when I opened it to the title page to find it was the much sought-after, The Coming Race. Like the two books by Ferdinand Ossendowski and Nicholas Roerich which I have discussed in the previous chapters, it was to prove a work of crucial importance in my study of the legend of Agharti.
I remember, too, that as I casually turned the pages of the book, it fell open to a page which appeared to have been much studied by the previous owner. The page also seemed to explain to me why that one word had been written on the spine. As I stood reading the book in that gloomy little shop – the page in question actually formed the concluding paragraphs of Chapter VII – the thought flashed into my mind that perhaps I had found the reason why this work, ostensibly a novel about a subterranean race blessed with supernormal powers, had become such a rarity. Did it contain secrets that should be suppressed? Had the author some special knowledge that even dressed up in the guise of fiction should not be made public?
These were thoughts that were never to be far from my mind in the years that followed when I began my investigation first into the life of Lord Lytton, and later into the legend of Agharti. They were to take me on a bizarre trail that would range from the dawn of time to the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler. How this link was forged I shall now explain, beginning first by quoting that fascinating page in the volume which caught my attention in the bookshop:
Then, turning to his daughter, my subterranean host said, ‘And you, Zee, will not repeat to any one what the stranger has said, or may say, to me or to you, of a world other than our own.’ Zee rose and kissed her father on the temples, saying with a smile, ‘A Gy’s tongue is wanton, but love can fetter it fast. And if, my father, you fear lest a chance word from me or yourself could expose our community to danger, by a desire to explore a world beyond us, will not a wave of the Vril, properly impelled, wash even the memory of what we have heard the stranger say out of the tablets of the brain?’
‘What is Vril? I asked.
Therewith Zee began to enter into an explanation of which I understood very little, for there is no word in any language I know which is an exact synonym for Vril. I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism, etc. These people consider that in Vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground, and which Faraday thus intimates under the more cautious term of correlation:
‘I have long held an opinion,’ says that illustrious experimentalist, ‘almost amounting to a conviction, in common, 1 believe, with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related, and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action.’
Zee asked me if, in my world, it was not known that all the faculties of the mind could be quickened to a degree unknown in the waking state, by trance or vision, in which the thoughts of one brain could be transmitted to another, and knowledge be thus rapidly interchanged. I replied, that there were among us stories told of such trance or vision, and that I had heard much and seen something of the mode in which they were artificially affected, as in mesmeric clairvoyance; but that these practices had fallen much into disuse or contempt, partly because of the gross impostures to which they had been made subservient, and partly because, even where the effects upon certain abnormal constitutions were genuinely produced, the effects, when fairly examined and analysed, were very unsatisfactory – not to be relied upon for any systematic truthfulness or any practical purpose, and rendered very mischievous to credulous persons by the superstitions they tended to produce.
Zee received my answers with much benignant attention, and said that similar instances of abuse and credulity had been familiar to their own scientific experience in the infancy of their knowledge, and while the properties of Vril were misapprehended, but that she reserved further discussion on this subject till I was more fitted to enter into it. She contented herself with adding, that it was through the agency of Vril, while I had been placed in the state of trance, that I had been made acquainted with the rudiments of their language; and that she and her father, who, alone of the family, took the pains to watch the experiment, had acquired a greater proportionate knowledge of my language than I of their own; partly because my language was much simpler than theirs, comprising far less of complex ideas; and partly because their organisation was, by hereditary culture, much more ductile and more readily capable of acquiring knowledge than mine.
At this I secretly demurred; and having had, in the course of a practical life, to sharpen my wits, whether at home or in travel, I could not allow that my cerebral organisation could possibly be duller than that of people who had lived all their lives by lamplight. However, while I was thus thinking, Zee quietly pointed her forefinger at my forehead and sent me to sleep.
Before trying to assess the importance of this strange work – and the likelihood of it containing fact presented as fiction, not to mention its far-reaching influence – it is important to know something of the man who wrote it. And the plain truth is that Edward George Earle Bulwer Lytton (1803–1873) was a man of two quite distinct personalities: prolific novelist and secret, practised occultist.
Bulwer Lytton was born into a wealthy, privileged family who took pride in their breeding and position in society. As a youngster he was, naturally enough, privately educated at home until he was old enough to go up to Cambridge. His friends were carefully chosen, his reading supervised and his responsibilities as a Lytton rigorously enforced.
Yet, despite this supervision by his parents, there is strong evidence that he was already an introverted child, drawn towards mysticism, long before his teens. In a biography, The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton, by his son the Earl of Lytton (1913) we are told that when he was only eight he announced one day to his bemused mother: ‘Mamma, are you not sometimes overcome by the sense of your own identity?’ He also persistently asked questions about the portrait of one of his ancestors that hung in the family home at Knebworth. The man was Dr John Bulwer who, his parents told him, had devoted himself to finding a way of communicating with the deaf and the dumb, and had published a treatise on his theories entitled Chirologia; Or, The Natural Language of the Hand, in 1644.
What the Lyttons were reticent about telling their son was that Dr Bulwer had spent even more of his time investigating mysticism, and was said to have made a special study of alchemy. There was even a family legend that he had found a means of prolonging life, and actually lived well into his nineties, an exceptional age for the seventeenth century. The youngster’s interest in this ancestor remained with him throughout his life, and indeed Dr John Bulwer features in the guise of Glyndon the occultist in Bulwer Lytton’s novel about a secret French occult society, Zanoni, which he wrote in 1842.
In hindsight, then, it is easy to see how the young man became fascinated with the supernatural, and why he would have become interested in mesmerism while he was at college, and pursued his interest in the occult when he made a ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe in 1825.
Two years later, however, Bulwer Lytton contracted an ill-advised marriage and was promptly cut off from any form of financial support by his mother. Forced to face the practicalities of life, he turned to writing to support himself and his wife, and began producing the string of historical novels which made him popular with Victorian readers. But the pressures of this work, plus his wife’s extravagance, doomed the marriage, and in 1836 the couple separated.
It was not until two years later, on his mother’s death, and his accession to the baronetcy, that Bulwer Lytton could return to his secret passion for mysticism. He buried himself in research into all aspects of magic and divination and also joined the Rosicrucians, a mystical order who claimed to possess important and arcane wisdom that had been transmitted down through their members. The organization was believed to have been founded by a seventeenth-century German mystic, Christian Rosenkreuz (literally translated as ‘Rosy Cross’), who had allegedly penetrated a ‘secret chamber’ beneath the ground and there found a library of books full of secret knowledge. In his definitive study Histoire de la Rose-Croix (1923), Serge Hutin tells us:
The Rosicrucian Brethren were credited with possession of the following secrets: the transmutation of metals, the prolongation of life, knowledge of what is happening in distant places and the application of occult sciences to the discovery of even the most deeply hidden objects … They represented a group of human beings who had reached a higher state than the mass of humanity.
While in their book The Morning of the Magicians (1960), Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier suggest that ‘the Rosicrucians were the heirs of civilisations that have disappeared.’
Although there is much that is disputed about the Rosicrucians, Bulwer Lytton was evidently passionately interested in the order’s history and its store of ancient wisdom. Just how much of this he assimilated will probably never be known, or to what extent he attempted to carry out their secret magical rituals – though we do know he tried to evoke some elemental spirits on the roof of a London building one summer night in 1853. (His power as an adept of arcane sciences has, to my mind, been more than substantiated in C. N. Stewart’s Bulwer Lytton as Occultist, published in 1927.)
Bulwer Lytton’s skill at astrology and his powers of telekinesis, however, are not in dispute. He used this hard-won knowledge to compile the most accurate predictions for people and gave remarkable demonstrations of being able to move objects from a distance – displays that startled all those who witnessed them. These achievements were not without their cost, however, for he became increasingly eccentric towards the end of his life, morbidly afraid of being left on his own and terrified of being buried alive. Years before his death he had written specific instructions about certain tests that were to be carried out on his corpse to ensure he was neither in a state of trance or in a coma.
It was in all probability this eccentricity which weighed in the mind of obituary writers when they recorded his death in 1873. To strait-laced Victorians such behaviour was undoubtedly the direct result of dabbling in the occult and writing strange books about the supernatural. His death notices expressed the conviction that it wou
ld be for his historical novels and romances that he would be remembered. In fact, they could not have been more wrong.
But, these facts established, how do his odd life and its debatable achievements help us get at the truth about whether The Coming Race is fact or fiction?
Aside from the evidence in the book itself, there are also two important statements Bulwer Lytton himself made. As I mentioned, the secret knowledge possessed by the Rosicrucians was believed to have been obtained from somewhere ‘below ground’. Our author clearly accepted this to be true, for he confided to his friend and fellow member Hargrave Jennings in 1854: ‘So Rosenkreuz found his wisdom in a secret chamber. So will we all. There is much to be learned from the substrata of our planet.’
Bulwer Lytton also believed in the power of the pentacle as a means of communication. Writing in his book A Strange Story (1861), he is clearly expressing a personal conviction when he says: ‘The pentacle itself has an intelligible meaning, it belongs to the only universal language of symbol, in which all races that think – around, and above and below us – can establish communion of thought’ (my italics). If Bulwer Lytton did not actually find a way to the underground world he describes in The Coming Race – and there is no evidence that he did – might he not have learned something of it through access to ancient knowledge, his mystical powers and the use of his favoured pentacle?
There can be no denying the enigma which surrounds his work and its author. But is it unreasonable to suggest that there are elements in the book that are true – or at the very least close to the truth and merely embellished in a way that one might expect the member of a secret organization to do in order to protect those truths? Others before me have thought so, and some do today – vide Nadine Smyth, who asked in her article, ‘UFOs and the Mystery of Agharti’ published in the magazine Prediction in January 1979: ‘Is the story of Agharti merely based upon Bulwer Lytton’s imaginative novel? Or is the reverse the case, that Lytton presented under the guise of fiction a version of certain occult facts?’ Dr Raymond Bernard goes further in his book The Hollow Earth (1969) when he says: ‘Lytton was a Rosicrucian and probably based his novel on occult information concerning existing subterranean cities.’
The Lost World of Agharti- the Mystery of Vril Power Page 9