The Lost World of Agharti- the Mystery of Vril Power

by Alec MacLellan

  It was not in this work, however, but in another published a year later entitled Le Spiritisme dans le Monde (1875) that he revealed, albeit guardedly, details of a vastly old underground kingdom which, he said, he had learned about from ‘translating every ancient palm-leaf manuscript which I had the fortune to be allowed by the Brahmins of the pagodas to see’. The most specific account he found appeared in a work called the Agrouchada Parikshai (Book of Spirits) which spoke of a subterranean paradise which flourished ‘centuries before our era’. It was presided over by the Brahm-atma, or supreme chief, the leader of the Initiates, a large body of devoted followers who were the descendants of an earlier civilization.

  This Supreme Pontiff, the Brahm-atma, was the sole possessor of a mystic formula described as ‘symbolizing all the initiatory secrets of the occult sciences’ and represented by the letters AUM which signified:

  A

  Creation

  U

  M

  Preservation

  Transformation

  According to the Agrouchada Parikshai: ‘The Brahm-atma could only expound its meaning in the presence of the initiates of the third and supreme degree.’

  Jacolliot comments:

  This unknown world, of which no human power, even now when the land above has been crushed under the Mongolian and European invasions, could force a disclosure, is known as the temple of Asgartha … Those who dwell there are possessed of great powers and have knowledge of all the world’s affairs. They can travel from one place to another by passageways which are as old as the kingdom itself.

  The locating of Asgartha under a land ‘crushed by invasions’ was Jacolliot’s typical way of putting into words his conviction – based as all his beliefs were on research and intuition – that the kingdom lay somewhere under the heartland of Asia. This also doubtless disguised his frustration at never having had the opportunity to put this theory to the test by travelling into Asia, for his later appointments in the consular service took him to the East Indies, Tahiti and then back home to France. The story of Asgartha therefore remained an enigma with him for the rest of his days. But there could be no denying the important role he had already played in making the facts public.

  One further strange event occurred to Louis Jacolliot before he left India which I think should be noted here. He had, as he said, become convinced that the people of Asgartha were descendants of a pre-Vedic civilization and were masters of secret powers. In company with an old fakir he watched a ritual in which a ‘spirit’ was raised who he believed might have been the soul of one of these people. I stress might because Jacolliot made no such claim, although at least one commentator on his work feels the possibility is strong. The event is recorded in his book Phenomenes et Manifestations (1877), in which he describes the fakirs as being ‘the only agents between the world and the Initiates, who rarely cross the thresholds of their sacred dwelling place’. The two men were seated in an ancient temple at the time, and this is how Jacolliot describes what followed:

  The fakir continuing his evocations more earnestly than ever, a cloud, opalescent and opaque, began to hover near the small brazier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed an entire human form, and I distinguished the spectre – for I cannot call it otherwise – of an old Brahmin sacrificator, kneeling near the little brazier.

  He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his body the triple cord, sign of the initiates of the priestly caste. He joined his hands above his head, as during the sacrifices, and his lips moved as if they were reciting prayers. At a given moment, he took a pinch of perfumed powder, and threw it upon the coals; it must have been a strong compound, for a thick smoke arose on the instant, and filled the two chambers.

  When it was dissipated, I perceived the spectre, which, two steps from me, was extending to me its fleshless hand; I took it in mine, making a salutation, and I was astonished to find it, although bony and hard, warm and living.

  ‘Art thou, indeed,’ said I at this moment, in a loud voice, ‘an ancient inhabitant of the earth?’

  I had not finished the question, when the word AM (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahmin, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.

  ‘Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?’ I continued.

  The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet.

  Not surprisingly, Jacolliot was amazed and puzzled by what he saw. Later he wrote:

  The only explanation that we have been able to obtain on the subject from a learned Brahmin, with whom we were on terms of the closest intimacy, was this: ‘You have studied physical nature, and you have obtained, through the laws of nature, marvellous results – steam, electricity, etc.; for twenty thousand years or more, we have studied the intellectual forces, we have discovered their laws, and we obtain, by making them act alone or in concert with matter, phenomena still more astonishing than your own.’

  If we accept the validity of what Jacolliot saw and reported – and there is no evidence to suggest that we should not – then he may well have experienced the strange force known as Vril Power – which the people of Agharti are said to possess – actually in operation! Whether or not this was the case, we shall be returning to discuss this mysterious power in detail later on.

  Brief though Louis Jacolliot’s references to Asgartha actually were – taken in the context of his wide coverage of ancient Indian history in his twenty-one volumes – they were nonetheless intriguing enough to attract the attention of two other contemporaries: each as different from him and each other as could be imagined. The first was a strange, grandiloquent French occulist named Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, and the other an extraordinary Russian lady who founded the Theosophical Society, Madame Helena Blavatsky. Both, in their particular ways, were seekers after Agharti, and made their specific contributions to the development of interest in the subject.

  Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre was an extraordinary figure who would probably have remained unknown to posterity and certainly been unable to satisfy his obsessive interest in ancient history and pseudo-science developed in his youth, but for the good fortune of marrying a wealthy lady. Born in Paris in 1842 in humble circumstances, he appears to have spent his early years in exile on the island of Jersey for some undisclosed reason, and then returned to France and settled once again in the capital city. Here he contracted a marriage to the Countess Keller – ‘a providential one,’ says a contemporary report, ‘but one which prompted a considerable amount of slander’ – and this gave him both the title Marquis and considerable wealth.

  Cushioned from the normal preoccupations of life, d’Alveydre threw himself wholeheartedly into the study of ancient texts, languages and occult sciences. To further his studies he learned Sanskrit, Hebrew and Arabic, and amassed an enormous library of books, both ancient and modern. He evidently became particularly attracted to the legend of Atlantis and conceived a theory that the white race – as distinct from the other races of whatever colour – had originated from the lost continent and that they represented the highest type of humanity. Aside from developing this racist fantasy, d’Alveydre was also an inventor and proposed a plan to feed mankind on algae from the sea, as well as constructing a machine called an Archeometer, which he said provided a key to all the sciences and religions of antiquity. According to Andre Chaleil in his Les Grands Inities de Notre Temps (1978) this was:

  an instrument formed of signs of the Zodiac, planetary signs, notes of music, colours, letters from Arabic, Hebrew and Sanskrit, and numbers, which gave measurement to the system of universal intercommunication. Thus, it allowed the individual to elaborate forms according to an idea, i.e. the poet to write poetry of the connection between letters and colours, the musician to compose a piece based o
n numbers.

  The Marquis also proposed a new socio-political system called Synarchy, which advocated that society should be regarded as a living organism like that of the human body. Defining this, he said: ‘The first function corresponds to nutrition and that is economics. The second can be defined as the will, and that is legislation and politics. Finally, the third corresponds to the spirit and that includes science and religion.’ Commenting on this, Andre Chaleil says:

  Synarchy, as Saint-Yves understands it, is the old dream of the meeting of left and right, of workers and capitalists, of scholars and priests, under the same banner and in the same spirit. It is already, in some way, the myth of the defence of the West against itself in face of the threat of Anarchy, or government without principles.

  Many of d’Alveydre’s theories certainly bewildered ordinary readers, and some even thought him mad – including his own father, who asserted: ‘Of all the lunatics I have known, my son is the most dangerous!’ For his part, the Marquis seemed to deliberately cultivate the opinion that he was an eccentric – claiming to receive many of his ideas while in a state of trance, and to dictate them to his secretary at one and the same time!

  At first glance, it is easy enough to condemn Saint-Yves d’Alveydre as a grandiloquent and megalomaniac author – as many did during his lifetime – but as others have pointed out he was a conscientious and dedicated researcher, always prepared to explore the unknown, and never afraid of expressing his opinions. It was just that his bizarre lifestyle overshadowed everything else. As Jean Saunier has remarked in his La Synarchie (1971): ‘Saint-Yves d’Alveydre was not such a strange author as one might believe. On the contrary, might he not appear to have been one of the last of the Utopians of the nineteenth century?’

  This, then, was the man who came across Louis Jacolliot’s references to Asgartha, as he waded through his books in a never-ending quest for information – in particular information which referred to ‘utopian’ societies of any kind. And what more fitting description could there be for the secret kingdom which Jacolliot described? He immediately saw it as another element to be used in developing his theory of Synarchy.

  Saint-Yves had apparently been interested in the idea of secret caves where ancient mysteries were said to be hidden ever since his day-dreaming youth, but it was the discovery of the references to an entire subterranean world which really fired his imagination. It was the starting point from which eventually came the book he titled with a typical flourish, The Mission of India in Europe and The Mahatma Question and Its Solution. It was published in 1886.

  The Mission is an extraordinary work by any standard, made all the more so because d’Alveydre claimed that much of the information in it was imparted to him by an emissary from Agartha! (The Marquis, incidentally, has the distinction of being the first writer to refer to the subterranean world by another of the names now most generally used.) According to a contemporary report, d’Alveydre said he had received a visit from a ‘mysterious envoy’, an Afghan prince named Hadji Scharif, who had been sent by the ruler of the kingdom, ‘The King of the World’. This supreme being was evidently aware of the Marquis’s interest in Agartha and was prepared to allow him to reveal some of its secrets. The rest of his information, he said, had come by way of telepathic messages from the Dalai Lama in Tibet, who also knew of the subterranean world.

  The truth of the matter is that Saint-Yves had come into contact with a Hindu Brahmin priest who had fled from his native country after a revolt and settled in France. The man had already helped him to learn Sanskrit and then offered further information when the subject of Agartha was raised. Unfortunately, the Frenchman could not resist sensationalizing both his source of information and, to a degree, his book.

  The Brahmin told d’Alveydre that Agartha was the great initiatory centre of Asia and had a population that ran into millions. It was ruled by twelve members of the ‘Supreme Initiation’ and ‘The King of the World’, who ‘directs the entire life of the planet in a discreet and unseen way’.

  The old Hindu also revealed that there were supposed to be several entrances to the kingdom, all carefully hidden from view, and only those surface dwellers who were specially chosen were ever allowed to find one and enter. The subterranean people had their own language, Vattan, a form of speech unknown to linguists and scholars. They had also created a ‘secret archive of humanity’ into which they placed ‘the most perfect machines and specimens of beings and animals which have disappeared; all this forming the potential safeguard of humanity, spiritually and politically’. Finally, there were vast underground libraries with volumes dating back for thousands of years. (What a thought that must have been to a bookworm like d’Alveydre!)

  In discussing the information he had gleaned, the Marquis reached the not altogether surprising conclusion, for him, that Agartha was actually governed by a Synarchic society, and he described its constitution thus:

  Thousands of dwija and yogi united in God from the great circle. Moving towards the centre of the circle we find five thousand pundits, their number corresponding to the hermetic roots of the Vedic language. Then come the twelve members of the ‘Supreme Initiation’ and the Brahm-ata, the ‘support of the soul in the spirit of God’. The whole of Agartha is a faithful image of the Eternal World throughout Creation.

  (As a footnote to this argument, d’Alveydre also makes the remarkable claim that India discovered the ancient art of yoga through its contact with the subterranean kingdom!)

  Prayer also played an important part in the life of the underground dwellers, according to the Marquis:

  At the hours of prayer, during the ceremony of the Cosmic Mysteries, although the sacred hierograms are only whispered in the vast underground cupola, strange phenomena take place on the surface of the Earth and the Heavens. Travellers and convoys even a long way off stop, with both men and beasts anxiously listening.

  (This is an intriguing as well as important comment, and one that the reader will find significant when we come to the chapter dealing with the experiences of the Russian explorer, Ferdinand Ossendowski, as well as the final section which discusses the association of Agharti with the aerial phenomena known as ‘Flying Saucers’.)

  Saint-Yves says that it is from Agartha that such ‘divine envoys’ as Orpheus, Moses, Jesus and many others have come ‘when humanity requires them’. And he concludes: ‘Supported by the history of the world, I have demonstrated that Synarchy, government by trinitarian arbitration, drawn from the depths of the initiation of Moses and Jesus, is the promise of the Israelites as it is ours.’

  Such are the relevant facts which the Marquis recounts in his Mission of India in Europe. But according to Andre Chaleil, no sooner was the book published, ‘than Saint-Yves d’Alveydre had it destroyed’. Although some copies escaped, the question as to why the rest were subjected to this fate after all the effort that had gone into them remains a mystery. Chaleil admits that no one knows the real answer, but wonders: ‘Had he seen, with the second sight that he claimed to possess, places which ought to remain unknown? Had he misused the secret information he had been given, which he was then obliged to efface completely?’

  What we do know for a fact is that just as the book was to be published another Indian came to Paris looking for the Marquis. This mysterious figure, about whom very little is known, according to the occult authority Paul Chacornac is said to have been angry with Saint-Yves because he had used the information passed on to him ‘not as traditional information to be received and assimilated, but as elements destined to be integrated into his personal system’. The man said that ‘The King of the World’ looked with displeasure on any denigrating of Agartha by association with Synarchy.

  Whether this visit played any part in the Marquis’s decision to destroy his work we shall never know. He never spoke about the matter again in the years up to his death in 1910. Indeed, he never wrote another word about Agartha, and retreated into virtual obscurity. Today his name rarely appears
as anything other than a footnote in occult history – and then usually in derisory terms.

  The third writer to put news of the subterranean kingdom before the general public in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), and it is a fact that although she is claimed in some quarters to have been the person who actually revealed Agarthi to the world, she initially did little more than embroider on the information that had already been made available by Louis Jacolliot. She was, though, a remarkable woman and arguably the founder of modern occultism.

  Born the daughter of a Russian colonel, she was married at seventeen to the Vice-Governor of the Province of Erivan in the Ukraine, Nikifor Blavatsky, but after a few weeks of marriage she ran away, noting in her diary: ‘Love is a nightmare – a vile dream. Woman finds her true happiness in acquiring supernatural powers.’ She was evidently also driven by a belief that she had formulated as a teenager and which she expressed thus:

  There have always existed wise men who have all the knowledge of the world. They have total command over the forces of nature and make themselves known only to those persons who are deemed worthy of knowing and seeing them. A person must also believe in them before they see them.’

  For the rest of her life, Madame Blavatsky pursued these ‘Masters of Wisdom’, as she called them, across the face of the Earth.

  Her first destination after running away was Europe, where for some years she lived a precarious, Bohemian existence, dressing in outlandish clothes, smoking hashish and interesting herself in all aspects of the occult. This interest grew into an obsession and she set off on a number of journeys about which the details are scant and often confusing. According to those who became her followers, Madame Blavatsky travelled in almost every country of the world. She was said to have gone to Egypt, where she conducted a midnight ritual in the Great Pyramid of Cheops to raise the spirit of a long dead Egyptian priest. Then in India she immersed herself in the magical practices of the Hindu priests, and followed this with a trip to Tibet where, disguised in men’s clothing, she secured entry to a number of the isolated monasteries of the lamas. A two-year stint in South America also brought her into contact with many of the ancient mysteries of that continent.