The Lost World of Agharti- the Mystery of Vril Power

by Alec MacLellan

  It is, of course, purely a matter of conjecture as to whether this ‘King on a golden throne’ might be the fabled ‘King of the World’ or whether the whole story was just a dream.

  If we turn over the pages of history a little further we find that the German legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin is also linked to the Agharti legend. Indeed, at least two modern authorities, Harold Bayley and Robert Dickhoff, believe he may actually have been a man from the subterranean world! Let me quote Dickhoff to represent the conviction of both writers:

  There is a well known story told and retold which tells of a town in Germany named Hamelin, which was plagued with rats, and of a stranger who with the sound effect of his magic pipes charmed these pests to follow him to a place where all of them were drowned. And how, after refusal to pay the pied piper his agreed reward, he again used the magic of his pipes, playing yet another tune, which charmed all the children of Hamelin to follow him. When he had his victims lured to a certain mountain there appeared a hidden passageway through which the children and piper passed, never to be seen again.

  Dickhoff then asks: ‘What knowledge had the stranger of a passage or a tunnel, and where did he actually emerge with his human cargo?’ He suggests that their destination was Agharti, and adds: ‘All similarities can not always remain coincidences!’

  In an interesting footnote to the story, Harold Bayley speculates that the piper and the children entered a passageway in the Koppenburg Mountains of Germany, though ‘whether the Koppenburg contains any tunnels I am unable to say’.

  That great discoverer Christopher Columbus, who is credited with finding the New World, also features in our legend. According to various accounts of his voyage to America, he heard stories of huge, underground passageways in the vicinity of the West Indies. These accounts were apparently given to him by the Caribs in the year 1493.

  The natives claimed that in the ancient kingdom of the female warriors, the Amazons – which was said to have been sited on Martinique – there were tunnels which ran ‘beyond the knowledge of man’. The Amazons, however, used them as places of refuge when they were attacked by enemies or pestered by over-amorous suitors. There they could hide themselves and, also, if the advances of the men persisted, they could fire their arrows at them with virtual impunity. There is no record that Columbus discovered either the origin or extent of these passageways.

  As we shall see, there is also considerable historical evidence of enormous networks of underground tunnels in both North, South and Central America, but it is not my intention to discuss the facts here, for that would preclude some of the conclusions I have reached concerning them, to which I shall come in later chapters. The same is also true across the Atlantic in Africa, Europe and Asia, which will be dealt with in turn. Suffice it to say for the moment, that the evidence concerning them strengthens the claim that the legend of Agharti was known worldwide from an early period of time.

  However, there is one other continent to which we must direct our attention here, for it was particularly from its ancient teaching and traditions that a more complete and fulsome picture of Agharti first emerged. The continent was India and, as we shall see, it was as a direct result of the research carried out here that the subterranean world changed from being just a legend – albeit a widely popular one – to the focal point of intensive study and investigation.

  As anyone with even a passing knowledge of India will know, the subcontinent is an absolute mine of ancient lore and cosmic legends, and study of its history is endlessly fascinating and colourful. Although this ‘history’ is authoritatively documented from about the sixth century BC, much that occurred in prehistoric times helped shape the Indian civilization and gave rise to the great moral philosophies which still today influence millions of people throughout the East. The oldest Indian literary ‘works’ are the hymns of the Rig-Veda, which are certainly based on much older oral traditions, and describe the invasion of Aryan tribes whose fusion with the local population between the years 1700 and 1200 BC ultimately shaped the modern nation. It is the ages before this recorded period, however, which are of greatest interest to us, for from them came the first stories of a subterranean kingdom.

  These prehistoric ages are known as pre-Vedic (that is, prior to the Rig-Veda texts) and it is the view of several authorities that in ancient times India extended over a much greater area than today. According to the great Anglo-German Orientalist Professor Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900), in his massive study Sacred Books of the East (begun in 1875 and running to fifty-one volumes), there was an Upper, Lower and a Western India. ‘In those ancient times,’ he writes, ‘countries which are now known to us by other names were all called India.’ He says that Western India was what is today Iran, and among the other countries considered part of this nation were Tibet, Mongolia and the Tartar regions of Russia.

  The Professor says that there are good reasons for suspecting that the great civilizations of the early world, those of Egypt, Greece and Rome, actually received their laws, arts and sciences from this pre-Vedic India, where once dwelt several races which preceded our own. He writes: ‘It is one of the universal traditions accepted by all the ancient people that there were many races of men anterior to our present races. Each of these was distinct from the one which preceded it; and each disappeared as the following appeared.’ Professor Muller cites an ancient Brahmin manuscript, The Code of Manu, which speaks of there having been six races prior to our own, and quotes from it: ‘And there issued from Swayambhouva, or the Being Existing Through Himself, six other Manus, each of whom gave birth to a race of men. These Manus, all powerful, of whom Swayambhouva is the first, have each, in his period, produced and directed this world composed of movable and immovable beings.’

  Professor Muller also tells us that at the heart of this ‘cradle of humanity’ was an island set in the middle of a great inland sea. This sea occupied what are now the salt lakes and deserts of Middle Asia to the north of the Himalayan mountain range. The island itself was apparently very beautiful, and on it dwelt the last remnants of the race which immediately preceded our own. These people were a truly remarkable species, according to the Professor:

  This race could live with equal ease in water, air, or fire, for it had an unlimited control over the elements. They were the ‘Sons of Gods’. It was they who imparted Nature’s most weird secrets to men, and revealed to them the ineffable, and now lost ‘word’. This word has travelled around the globe, and still lingers as a far-off dying echo in the hearts of some privileged men.

  Despite their absolute powers, however, these people could not prevent their eventual extinction nor the disappearance of their island ‘Shangri-la’. The suggestion is that it must have been destroyed by a holocaust of some kind.

  Perhaps, though, the most interesting piece of information to come from this research was that this lost island was joined to the mainland all around by secret tunnels!

  ‘There was no communication with the fair island by sea,’ says Professor Muller, ‘but subterranean passages known only to the chiefs communicated with it in all directions. Tradition points to many of the majestic ruins of India, Ellora, Elephanta, and the caverns of Ajunta (Chandor range), with which were connected such subterranean ways.’

  The Professor, along with a number of his successors, have wondered if this description of a lost island might be a variation on the Atlantis legend. They have pondered whether the tradition of a landmass which disappeared beneath the waters had somehow been translated by oral tradition from the Atlantic ocean onto the continent of India? As a matter of fact, it is not a theory which will bear much scrutiny.

  While Professor Muller was writing and publishing his masterwork, a French lawyer living in India had, quite independently, become fascinated with the occult traditions of India and in particular with the lore of worlds before our own. Like the Anglo-German Orientalist, he had come across references to a lost kingdom and talk of a network of subterranean passages to which i
t was joined. He determined to find out more about the legend – and decide whether or not it was just that, a legend.

  His name was Louis Jacolliot and his research was to really begin to draw back the veil on the mystery of Agharti.

  SEEKERS AFTER A LOST WORLD

  The man winding his way through the tightly packed market stalls in the Calcutta bazaar scarcely got a second look from the press of humanity all around him. The noise and stench of the place appeared not to trouble the small figure, though it was immediately evident from his rather dishevelled suit and pale features that he was not an Indian. A faded white hat partly concealed his bearded face, and the light-coloured jacket he was wearing was already stained with sweat down the back and marked with dirt on the front where the man had had to push himself through some narrow gap between the stalls or else rubbed up against a filthy, gesticulating native.

  Although foreigners were not altogether unexpected figures in the bazaar of this bustling Indian capital in the middle years of the nineteenth century, they usually conducted themselves in a rather more imperious way than this unprepossessing little man. The city was, after all, the seat of the government of British India, and with its position at the natural outlet of the River Ganges had become a great commercial and industrial centre. As one might well expect, the place was a mixture of magnificent palaces built by Indian princes, splendid administrative buildings constructed by the British Raj, and some of the most appalling slums in all of India. Even at this time, many of the fearful conditions which had been epitomized by the events of the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ a hundred years previously still persisted.

  But such memories, and the squalid atmosphere in which the stranger found himself, did not seem to disturb him in the least. Indeed, he seemed to be so deep in thought that he was quite unaware of anything going on around him.

  The man was Louis Jacolliot, a French consular official serving in the capital, but a man also passionately devoted to the pursuit and collection of arcane information. He was no comfortable library researcher, seeking for facts in the quiet, ordered confines of such seats of learning. He preferred to hunt for uncollected material, for oral traditions that might only be found among the local people. And to secure such items required him to immerse himself in all stratas of city life, from the palatial, glittering mansions of the high-caste Indians to the disease-ridden streets of the slums and bazaars where the poor of Calcutta eked out their miserable lives.

  But despite his apparent absorption in thought, Jacolliot missed little as he wandered about the bazaar. He had long ago learned to make himself unobtrusive, and this helped him win the confidence of people in a place such as this. On the reverse side of the coin, he could also conduct himself with courtesy and dignity when such was required of him. All in all, he had carefully trained his alert mind and questioning brain to the service of his burning desire for information about the ancient history of India.

  Jacolliot was driven by a simple and compelling conviction. ‘To study India,’ he maintained, ‘is to trace humanity to its sources.’ Writing in the first of the twenty-one books which he was to produce during his lifetime, La Bible dans L’Indie (1868), he showed that he had already come to the same conclusions about the influence of this mighty subcontinent on other civilizations that Professor Friedrich Muller and his contemporaries were working on. Jacolliot wrote:

  In the same way as modern society jostles antiquity at each step, as our poets have copied Homer and Virgil, Sophocles and Euripides, Plautus and Terence; as our philosophers have drawn inspiration from Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle; as our historians take Titus Livius, Sallust or Tacitus, as models; our orators, Demosthenes or Cicero; our physicians study Hippocrates, and our codes transcribe Justinian – so had Antiquity’s self also an Antiquity to study, to imitate, and to copy. What more simple and more logical? Do not peoples precede and succeed each other? Does the knowledge, painfully acquired by one nation, confine itself to its own territory, and die with the generation that produced it? Can there be any absurdity in the suggestion that the India of 6,000 years ago, brilliant, civilized, overflowing with population, impressed upon Egypt, Persia, Judea, Greece and Rome a stamp as ineffaceable, impressions as profound, as these last have impressed upon us?

  It was from the standpoint of this conviction that Jacolliot carried out much of his research, and the facts which he garnered and presented in his subsequent twenty works further underlined his words. What remains puzzling to this day is why he should be so sadly neglected and little quoted. For we need be in no doubt of his importance, as his ‘disciples’ Pauwels and Bergier have stated in their book, The Morning of the Magicians (1960) – although they themselves devote less than a page to him! They state:

  Jacolliot wrote some quite important prophetic Works, comparable, if not superior to those of Jules Verne. He also left several books dealing with the great secrets of the human race. A great many occult writers, prophets and miracle workers have borrowed from his writings which, completely neglected in France, are well known in Russia.

  Madame Helena Blavatsky, the Russian emigree who, as we shall see later in this chapter, borrowed freely and often without credit from Jacolliot, also appreciated his importance, although she was guarded in her praise of him! Writing in her I sis Unveiled (1877) she says:

  His [jacolliot’s] twenty or more volumes on Oriental subjects are indeed a curious conglomerate of truth and fiction. They contain a vast deal of fact about Indian traditions, philosophy and chronology, with most just views courageously expressed. But it seems as if the philosopher were constantly being overlaid by the romanticist. It is as though two men were united in their authorship – one careful, serious, erudite, scholarly, the other a sensational and sensual French romancer, who judges of facts not as they are but as he imagines them. His translations from Manu are admirable; his controversial ability marked; his views of priestly morals unfair, and in the case of the Buddhists, positively slanderous. But in all the series of volumes there is not a line of dull reading; he has the eye of the artist, the pen of the poet of nature.

  Louis Jacolliot was born at Charolles in Saone-et-Loire in 1837, the son of a small-town lawyer. Although he received only a perfunctory education, his overwhelming desire to learn and his capacity for hard work earned him a place in the French Civil Service, and ultimately a career in the consular division. His brief biographical details as given in Larousse indicate that he served for a number of years in India during the Second Empire, was then Chief Justice of Chandernagor and afterwards held the same post in Tahiti. He returned to France in 1874 and devoted the rest of his life to writing, dying at the comparatively young age of fifty-three at his home in Saint-Thibaut-les-Vignes in 1890.

  Such facts disguise the full-blooded nature of the man during his time in India, particularly because, by his own account, he witnessed numerous occult rituals and ceremonies, made intensive study of the mystical powers of the fakirs, was initiated into several secret societies, and unearthed a whole host of ancient documents and records which threw new light on the prehistory of India. He was never slow to take himself out among the native population, despite the dangers into which this occasionally ran him, and he was rewarded with much of the information which so enlivens his books, including the important Occult Science in India (1884), one of the few works to be translated into English. In a later book, L’Indie Brahmanique (1887), he even confessed: ‘We have seen things such as one does not describe for fear of making readers doubt one’s intelligence … but still we have seen them.’

  Jacolliot’s research also took him beyond the confines of Calcutta, and we have records of him in Southern India, at Pondicherry, and more importantly travelling in the nearby Carnatic region, where he had several discussions about the ancient history of India with a number of old Brahmins in their temples at Villenoor and Chelambrum. It was these holy men – whom he called ‘revered masters’ – who apparently first told him of a subterranean kingdom
somewhere to the north of India.

  This story tied up with whispered tales he had heard in the bazaars of Calcutta about an underground world which was supposed to be located to the north, beyond the Himalayas. He had heard reports, too, of a network of tunnels which were said to stretch from the Ganges underneath the great mountain range and on to a secret destination. Here was said to live the greatest holy man of all with his followers.

  It was from this oral information, augmented with further research which he carried out among ancient Sanskrit records in Calcutta, that he was able to commit to paper the first important modern account we possess about the subterranean world he called Asgartha, but which we now know to be Agharti.

  This research also strengthened Jacolliot’s belief in ancient civilizations flourishing in prehistoric times, as he wrote in his later book, Histoire des Vierges (1879):

  One of the most ancient legends of India, preserved in the temples by oral and written tradition, relates that several hundred thousand years ago there existed an immense continent which was destroyed by geological upheaval. According to the Brahmins, this country had attained a high civilization, and the peninsula of Hindustan, enlarged by the displacement of the waters, at the time of the grand cataclysm, has but continued the chain of the primitive traditions born in this place. The Indo-Hellenic tradition, preserved by the most intelligent population which emigrated from the plains of India, equally relates to the existence of a continent and a people lost in antiquity.

  From this Jacolliot concluded:

  Whatever there may be in these traditions and whatever may have been the place where a civilization more ancient than that of Rome, of Greece, of Egypt and of India was developed, it is certain that this civilization did exist, and it is highly important for science to recover its traces, however feeble and fugitive they may be.