The Lost World of Agharti- the Mystery of Vril Power
Page 15
Yet beyond the coastal lowlands facing the Atlantic Ocean lie some of the most impenetrable jungles and hostile environments to be found anywhere – as well as perhaps the most mysterious area in the world, the Amazon basin. On the northern frontier of Brazil there also stands the cloud-capped plateau of Mount Roraima, ‘The Lost World’, immortalized in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s great novel.
It is, in truth, a mysterious country, much of it still awaiting thorough exploration, and harbouring the most amazing and controversial legends. What is already evident is that there are clear signs that an incredibly ancient civilization – at least 30,000 and possibly as much as 60,000 years old – once flourished here, and that there is much evidence that cultivated white men of an unknown race once walked the country in company with their dark-skinned brethren. There is also no denying that in the comparatively short time that Brazil has been known to the rest of the world – the first European, the Portuguese Pedro Cabral, did not reach the shore until 1500 – we have barely started to penetrate the outer realms of all this mystery. Here, though, we must try and assemble as much material as we can on the twin mysteries of the ancient white race of Brazil and the network of subterranean tunnels with which they are inextricably associated. In neither case is this a dead or dying tradition.
For example, Harold Wilkins remarks at one point in his Mysteries of Ancient South America: ‘It is probable that descendants of this white empire exist, today, in more than one part of unexplored Brazil, and among the Andean outliers, in regions rich with gold, on the confines of the Amazon’s headwaters.’ And again, later: ‘There are many stories of the existence of strange white people today – handsome bearded men and beautiful, white nude women with symmetrical Greek features – in the unknown sertão of the central Mato Grosso and the Brazilian highlands, and northwards and northwestwards in the mountains beyond the headwaters of the Amazon and its tributaries.’ Equally, in his book, The Hollow Earth, Dr Raymond Bernard, a resident in Brazil, assures us that ‘mysterious tunnels, an enigma to archaeologists, exist in great numbers under Brazil, where they open on the surface in various places. The most famous is in the Ron-candor Mountains of northwest Mato Grosso, to where Colonel Fawcett was heading when last seen.’ We shall be investigating the information on both of these topics – as well as the mystery of Colonel Fawcett – a little later in this chapter as we pursue our quest for the secret of Agharti.
Brazil has, of course, a good many legends of ancient cities now in ruins, all hidden in the vast hinterland. Many expeditions have set out to find them since the country was claimed by Portugal in 1500 and coastal colonies were established in 1532. From the very beginning, the explorers were fired by stories the natives told of lost cities where enormous hoards of gold and silver just lay awaiting discovery. The terrible climate, the hostile jungle natives and the enigmatic nature of so many of the reports doomed expedition after expedition to failure. From the earliest attempts of small bands of Portuguese fortune hunters, by way of the Brazilian bandeiristas of the eighteenth century, to the expensively equipped expedition financed by the Krupp Armament Works of Germany in the early years of this century* – as ill-fated as most of its predecessors – the ruins and vast wealth left by people long since gone from memory have proved singularly elusive. But from all this endeavour has come the information which, with the passage of time, we have been able to shape into an explanation of some of the mysteries of Brazil.
Based on the geological evidence that we have, there seems little doubt that tropical South America includes some of the most ancient land on the Earth’s surface that was never submerged by the ocean nor ground under the tremendous glaciers of the Ice Age. This has led archaeologists to speculate that this now mysterious heartland may very well have been the cradle of the Earth’s civilization from which it later spread outwards to Europe and Africa on one side, and Asia on the other. (By comparison, at this period some 60,000 years ago, our European ancestors were living in caves in the regions of what are now Pyrenean France, Cantabrian Spain and Lacustrine Switzerland.)
Being a region of such antiquity has, inevitably, caused the South American continent to be linked with that ancient and mighty lost landmass of Atlantis. And it is the belief of a number of scholars and archaeologists, myself included, that Atlantis once formed a virtual land link between its neighbour continents of Europe to the east and South America to the west. Such a belief explains the similarities in culture and relics found on either side of what is now the Atlantic ocean, and helps demonstrate how it was possible for the tunnels of South America to be linked with the subterranean passages in Europe and Asia, all ultimately converging on Agharti. Let us look at the evidence.
In the Popul Vuh, an ancient Guatemalan manuscript whose title means ‘The Collection of Written Leaves’, and which has been described as ‘the great storehouse of Mayan and Central American legend and mythical history’, there is much talk of ‘a land in the east on the shores of the sea’. Such a location neatly fits our knowledge of the position of Atlantis. This same work tells us that it was from this land ‘that the fathers of the people had come’ and that they also endured a ‘great catastrophe’ after which the land to the east disappeared. And having said this, can these following words from the Popul Vuh be anything other than a description of the destruction of Atlantis and its effect on its neighbour?
There came a great flood, followed by a thick rain of bitumen and resin, when men ran, here and there, in despair and madness. They tried, beside themselves with terror, to climb on the roofs of houses, which crumbled and threw them to the ground. Trees they tried to ascend, which threw them far away. They sought to enter caves and grottoes and immediately they were shut in from the exterior. The earth darkened and it rained night and day. Thus was accomplished the ruin of the race of man which was given up to destruction.
Cautiously, and based on the evidence of the Popul Vuh, plus his own researches, our archaeologist Harold Wilkins draws the ties between Atlantis and South America still closer together. He writes in Mysteries of Ancient South America:
One of the South American colonies of Atlantis may, probably, have been the land called Brazil, and Brazil, indeed, was actually the ancient name of the land and borne thousands of years before the arrival at Rio de Janeiro of old Pedro Cabral, the Portuguese navigator. That occurred in AD 1500 and has given rise to the sheer legend that King Emanuel of Portugal named the land Brazil, because the dye-wood, brazil-wood (Biancaea sappan) was found there. As a matter of very curious fact, the name Brazil was known to the old Irish Kelts as Hy-Brazil.
There are also a number of traditions well known throughout South America about a group of men in long, black, flowing gowns, with white skins and golden hair, who appeared rather like missionaries just before the deluge in about 11,000 BC. The chief among these was known as Quetzalcoatl, and although later he was usually represented as being a god, he was in fact a holy man. He came, it was said, by way of a tunnel from an island to the east of Brazil.* The Marquis de Nadaillac in his Pre-Historic America (1885) is intriguing on the subject:
A singular fact in all the legends collected is the reported arrival of white and bearded strangers wearing black clothes, who have been absurdly identified as Buddhist missionaries … Of these strangers there is no certain information, all that is definitely alleged being that the chief was Quetzalcoatl or ‘the serpent covered with feathers’. The first Spanish writers chose to see in Quetzalcoatl, St Thomas, who passed from India to America. Legends about him are numerous, and their variety justifies us in supposing that imaginary or real actions of several Maya and Nahua gods were attributed to him.
Harold Wilkins, however, is in no doubt where Quetzalcoatl came from or what his purpose was: ‘He came from Atlantean Brazil on a civilising mission to barbarian and savage Central America … warning also of destruction to come.’
Mr Wilkins then goes on to describe ‘the great catastrophe that sank Atlantis, the island-continent
, into the depths of the ocean’. It was, he says, accompanied by simultaneous volcanic outbursts in America, Africa, and the chain of mountains of Central Asia, and far out in the Pacific. His description is so vivid I should like to quote it in full here:
In the land of Hy-brazil and the dead cities into which the bandeiristas were to blunder, 10,000 years later, no day could be told from night. The skies were darkened. Up from the ground swirled dense clouds of thick ash and vapours, choking and mephitic, poisoning all round. Terrific electric flashes rent the endless blackness, making it the more unearthly and darker. The maddened sea, in the mightier Maranon-Amazon gulf, rising like a thing demented, surged and roared in over the Amazon basin, dashing on the walled cities, with their massive breakwaters of stone.
In the highlands of this great Atlantis colony – the new Atlantis of old America – it was the fire from heaven and the earth below that ruined them. When the earth shook, and day turned to night, in these dead cities of the unexplored Mato Grosso, of today, there came from great and bottomless crevasses in the ground, in the paved roads, by the side of their splendid temples and palaces, volumes of deadly gases. Blinded, asphyxiated, maddened beyond human endurance, rendered insane by the appalling suddenness of the cosmic catastrophe, men and women, white-skinned, beautiful, some red-haired like Berenice the Golden, others fair and blonde as the Greek goddess Aphrodite, fled out of the cities, leaving all behind them. Parts of the cities sank into the ground, swallowed up by terrific earthquakes. Maybe great fires swept through some of the buildings; for the old bandeiristas were puzzled by the absence of the least vestige of furniture and utensils. The great palaces and temples were shaken to their foundations. Those people of Atlantis Brazil who did not manage to escape into the surrounding mountains, along the splendidly paved roads, now cracked and fissured and overwhelmed by great boulders and rocks which the appalling earthquakes and torrential deluge had toppled from the peaks into the gorges, were either burnt and calcined, or engulfed in the yawning earth. What was not incinerated was destroyed by the wild beasts and birds of prey who, for many thousands of years to come, would inhabit alone these cities of old Hy-Brazil, swept by the besom of destruction.
Wilkins, along with that other great expert on the ancient history of South America, Lewis Spence (vide his books The Problem of Atlantis, 1924, and The History of Atlantis, 1926), says that there were survivors of this terrible holocaust and that evidence of them has come to light from time to time over the intervening years. Stories of lost tribes of white people being seen in the jungles of Brazil … reports of strange, pale-skinned guardians of secret cities in Peru and Guatemala … All of them, apparently, descendants of the Atlanteans who colonized Brazil.
For example, there are a little-known race of white Indians known as Los Paria who live in a settlement called, significantly, Atlan, in the dense forests between the Rio Apure and the Orinoco. These people have an oral tradition about a cataclysm which destroyed their ancient Fatherland, in Brazil, and also a large island in the eastern ocean where dwelt ‘a rich and civilized race’ – Atlantis, no doubt!
Lewis Spence also tells us of one of the native Indian races of Brazil, the Tapuya, who he believes are the descendants of a white helot race who served the ancient Hy-Brazilian master-race, and also fled with them from the deluge which engulfed Atlantis. He writes in The Problem of Atlantis: ‘These Tapuyas are fair as the English. They have small feet and hands, delicate features of great beauty, and white, golden and auburn hair. They were skilful workers in precious stones and wore diamonds and jade ornaments.’
I have, in the previous chapter, referred to the white Indians who have been reported guarding secret cities from intruders, so I perhaps need cite only one other instance of physical evidence of the Atlantis-South America connection before moving on to the more specific question of the underground passageways in Brazil.
This interesting observation again comes from Harold Wilkins and is recorded in his Mysteries of Ancient South America:
There is a tradition current in the mystic east and, perhaps, derived from Atlanteans who quitted their great motherland before the time of the terrible cataclysm, that the central cathedral temple of old Atlantis’s capital, the hill city, ‘Sardegon’, had a dome-shaped ceiling from which flamed a magnificent central sun of blazing gold. The late inheritors of the remains of the civilization of the Atlantean imperial colony of Hy-Brazil, of South America, the Incas of Peru – Peru, as one has stated, being derived from a word (not found in the Quichua, or native Peruvian tongue) Vira, meaning the god of the sun – had a glorious sun of purest gold which shone with truly dazzling refulgence from the walls of Cuzco’s great temple of the Sun. It was there when the keels of Don Francisco Pizarro’s caravels and galleons touched the shallows of the Peruvian coast in AD 1530. The very eye-balls of the beholder were pained by its scintillations.
But when Pizarro’s conquistadores laid their bandits’ hands on this ancient civilization, as the Carian-Colloans had done before them in relation to what was left of the communities of the old, white, bearded Atlanteans of Hy-Brazil in the islands of Lake Titicaca, Peru, that glorious sun of gold vanished. For four centuries its whereabouts have remained a mystery, the close secret of one, or not more than two, of the Inca’s posterity. Be sure, that there is living today, on one of the valleys of the Peruvian cordilleras, some Peruvian, little suspected by his fellows, who knows where this sun went to ground.
Any study of the mysteries of Brazil, and in particular its lost race, and ancient, ruined cities, must invariably pay some attention to the famous exploration work of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett (1867–1925), who has himself become the centre of an unexplained mystery. For he himself disappeared into the Mato Grosso in 1925 and has not been seen or heard of since.
He is of particular interest to us here, because (a) the intention of his exploration was to find ‘the cradle of Brazilian civilization’ and (b) the theory has been advanced that he did not die in the jungle but found his way into one of the subterranean passages and has remained there ever since!
The facts of Colonel Fawcett’s exploration need only be mentioned in brief, because his younger son, Brian, has, of course, edited a fine account of the events in Exploration Fawcett (1953). At the time of his last expedition, Fawcett was already well known in South America for his work delineating frontiers in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Brazil during the rubber boom. During these years he had become obsessed with the legend of a lost city somewhere in the Mato Grosso which was supposed to be inhabited by a highly civilized race of white people. (Indeed, before setting off on his expedition, he said simply: ‘I have but one object: to bare the mysteries that the jungle fastnesses of South America have concealed for so many centuries. We are encouraged in our hope of finding the ruins of an ancient, white civilisation and the degenerate offspring of a once cultivated race.’)
Fawcett was driven on by two particular facts – the first that there were known to be several incredibly old ruins in the jungles. ‘These amazing ruins of ancient cities are incomparably older than those in Egypt,’ he said. And, secondly, by the story told in a historical document unearthed in the archives in Rio de Janeiro which described the discovery of a lost civilization in the Mato Grosso in 1734. This document (which can still be seen today in the Biblioteca Nationale in Rio de Janeiro) records how a Portuguese expedition discovered a small passage in one of the mountains and, crawling through it, found the ruins of a city which had obviously been devastated by some huge upheaval. Treasure and gold coins were spilled about everywhere. The explorers were even more amazed to be confronted by two men with white skin and golden hair. As the Portuguese settled down to record their find, they dispatched a native runner back to Rio de Janeiro with news of their discovery. The explorers, however, never returned to civilization and were never heard of again. The only solution that could be offered to solve their disappearance was that they had either been detained – or killed – by the strange
white men …
Before setting off on this fateful trip with his elder son, Jack, and their companion, Raleigh Rimell, Colonel Fawcett had made an intensive study of the lore and legends of Brazil. He had heard all about cities supposed to date back 60,000 years, all about white Indians with blue eyes, and all about the fabulous hoards of treasure waiting in the ruined cities. That he suspected they might be the remnants of the ancient Atlantean race was revealed in a letter he wrote to Lewis Spence in 1924. This same letter also highlighted a growing conviction that there was a link between the ancient people of South America and those on the other side of the Atlantic – for he had noticed a similarity between inscriptions found on porticoes and pillars on certain Brazilian ruins and those he had seen thirty years before on some ancient stonework in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka)!
Fawcett wrote to Lewis Spence:
I have good reason to know that these original [white Atlantean] people still remain in a degenerate state … They use script and also llamas, an animal associated with Andean heights above 10,000 feet, but in origin a low country, hybrid animal. Their still existing remains show the use of different coloured stones in the steps leading to temple buildings and a great deal of sculpture in demi-relief.
So it was in high spirits that the Fawcett party set off for the Mato Grosso. The Colonel left his friends convinced that he knew what he was looking for and where he was going to find it – but he denied them any precise details. Only one final message was forthcoming before the three men stepped into the unknown and created the legend which still surrounds them and their fate to this day. It consisted of just a few lines from Colonel Fawcett – but lines redolent with mystery and the suggestion they were on the verge of some amazing discovery:
If there is any attempt to send an expedition after us, to discover our fate or fortune – and we expect to be right away from civilisation for two or more years – for God’s sake, stop them! England has nothing to do with this quest. It is a matter for Brazil, entirely.