Traditionally, there are four entrances to Agartha: one between the paws of the sphinx at Giza, another on the Mont-Saint-Michel, a third through a crevice in the Forest of Broceliande, and the main gate at Shamballah in Tibet.
What struck me immediately about this statement was that while I knew all about two of the entrances – those thousands of miles apart in Egypt and Tibet – it was curious that the remaining two were both in the author’s native France! As he did not seek to substantiate the claim with any facts, I decided to make my own inquiries.
In both cases I was disappointed. I could find nothing other than oral traditions to support Charroux’s claim of extensive subterranean tunnels beneath the beautiful Mont-Saint-Michel and in the mystery-haunted Forest of Broceliande which might link them with the legend. But, because of the very nature of the puzzle of Agharti, I should stress that this does not mean they do not exist.
However, I did find some more concrete evidence of enormous tunnels in France in Sabine Baring-Gould’s classic work, Cliff Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe (1911). In it he describes how a church at Gapennes in Picardy, ‘perhaps one of the most ancient provinces of France’, collapsed during the night of 13 February, 1834:
At first, it was supposed that this was the result of an earthquake, but after a while the true cause was discovered. The church had been erected over a vast network of subterranean passages and tunnels, and the roofs of some of these had given way. This led to an exploration, and the plan of this subterranean world was traced as far as possible.
But Gapennes is not the only place where such passages exist throughout the province. Something like a hundred have been found, and more are every now and then coming to light. Indeed, it may safely be said that there is scarcely a village between Arras and Amiens and between Roye and the sea, between the courses of the Somme and Authie, that does not have these underground tunnels. The character of all is very much the same. To what date, or period, do they belong? Some doubtless are of extreme antiquity.
Earlier commentators than myself have suggested that these subterranean ways might just have some relationship to the ancient legend of Agharti.*
A second book then led me to the possibility that there might be similar tunnels in Germany. It was The Inner Earth by Dr M. Doreal, published privately in America in 1946 in the wake of the ‘Shaver Mystery’ which I referred to earlier. Dr Doreal claimed that there were a number of entrances to the subterranean world, including Tibet, the Gobi Desert, South America (Yucatan), North America (California), Canada, and the Harz Mountains of Germany.
In this underground kingdom, he says, live the remnants of ‘a god-race who existed on the earth before the Adamites were physical beings’. He believes that these people are tall, handsome, and live extremely long lives. ‘Moreover,’ he says, ‘they did not completely abandon the earth, but still exist in several underground centres protected by “warps” in space.’
The idea of unusual people being associated with the Harz Mountains is an intriguing one, for the area has long been believed to be a great gathering place for witches. According to legend, all the witches of Europe, male and female, flew to this mountain on special celebratory nights of the year to carry out their unholy revels. The whole district was treated with superstitious fear by the local people, and any untoward happenings were put down to the activities of the witches. It is perhaps significant that witches made a point of carrying out many of their rituals in caves far from prying eyes, though whether these stories can be linked with the underground kingdom is debatable. I find it hard to believe in the light of what I have learned about Agharti that its activities should be so misconstrued in this one place as to be seen as a form of devil worship.
So the mystery of an underground tunnel system beneath the Harz Mountains remains,* though Sabine Baring-Gould does have some more positive facts to impart about Germany. In his Cliff Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe he says that there is definite evidence of long subterranean passages running beneath Adersbach and Wickelsdorf, which lie close to the old frontiers of Bohemia and Silesia:
In the year 1866, the Prussian Army of the Elbe broke into Bohemia, when it was found that the inhabitants of a certain district had vanished with their cattle and goods, leaving behind empty houses and stables. It had been the same during the Thirty Years War, and again in the Seven Years War, when the invaders found not a living soul and contented themselves with destroying the crops and burning the villages and farms. Whither had they gone? Into the labyrinths of Adersbach and Wickelsdorf, each accessible only through a single gap. The existence of this labyrinth was unknown save to the peasants till the year 1824.
Mr Baring-Gould explains that it has been impossible to trace the extent of the tunnels, nor the direction in which they lead, although there is a local tradition which says the name of one of the tunnels is ‘Southern Siberia’ because a man ‘might walk along it until he reached that snowbound region’.
In Peter Kolosimo’s book, Timeless Earth (1968), he too lists a number of tunnels which he feels are very similar to those found in South America which he considered earlier. He comments:
It is a strange fact that tunnels of this sort are to be found in almost every part of the world. Besides South America they exist in California, Virginia, Hawaii (where they apparently link the islands of the archipelago), Oceania and Asia, as well as Sweden, Czechoslovakia, the Balearics and Malta. A huge tunnel, some thirty miles of which have been explored, runs between Spain and Morocco, and many believe that this is how the ‘Barbary Apes’, which are otherwise unknown in Europe, reached Gibraltar. It has even been suggested that these Cyclopean galleries form a network connecting the most distant parts of our planet.
Time, distance and lack of precise details has prevented me establishing the truth of those new passageways cited by Kolosimo, beyond the fact that stories of them persist in oral traditions which are repeated from time to time. What the stories do add further weight to, I think, is the idea of there being ‘extensions’ to the main Agharti tunnel system.
Turning, lastly, to Great Britain, I found that there were stories of tunnel systems to be heard throughout the country – perhaps the most famous of these being the Chislehurst Caves in Kent. Although the full extent of this system is yet to be discovered – so far about thirty miles of burrowings have been located – I think it is difficult to support the idea they are associated with the Agharti legend, although considerable mystery does surround them, as W. J. Nichols, a Vice-President of the British Archaeological Society, observed a few years back:
One of the most interesting sights that these caves can show is a series of galleries, with rectangular crossings, containing many chambers of semicircular, or apsidal form, to the number of thirty or more – some having altar-tables formed in the chalk, within a point or two of true orientation. This may be accidental, but the fact remains; and the theory is supported by the discovery of an adjoining chamber, apparently intended for the officiating priest. There is an air of profound mystery pervading the place: a hundred indications suggest that it was a subterranean Stonehenge; and one is struck with a sense of wonder, and even of awe, as the light reveals the extraordinary works which surround us.
Harold Bayley, author of Archaic England, also reports on a number of passageways in the country in his chapter ‘Down Under’, and makes specific reference to Kent. ‘This county,’ he writes, ‘is curiously rich in caves which range in importance from the mysterious single Dene Hole to the amazing honeycomb of caverns which underlie Chislehurst and Blackheath.’ What I found more interesting was his brief reference to extensive tunnels and soutterrains in Yorkshire which, he said, were ‘popularly associated with a race that dwelt underground’. Some folk tales, he said, claimed that this race was none other than the fairies, but even older traditions spoke of their being ‘the ancestors of all mankind for did not all the mythologies of the world speak of caves and caverns playing a prime and elementary part in the birt
h of humanity?’ Clearly Mr Bayley was in two minds about which viewpoint to take, and as an archaeologist rather than a mythologist it is quite understandable that he left the matter there and directed himself to other topics.
For my part, the information added an extra dimension to the strange experience I had undergone in that tunnel in Yorkshire. Whether I had stumbled upon some manifestation of the Agharti network I was then, and remain today, unsure, although a statement in Charroux’s The Mysterious Unknown has made me keep my options open. ‘The initiatory centre is at Shamballah in the Himalayas,’ he says, ‘and there is a place in England, which is invulnerable, although no walls surround it.’
However, the events that summer day did initiate my search for the mysterious ‘lost world’, and through the years which followed also kept one question at the forefront of my mind: was it possible that Agharti and its inhabitants – whoever or whatever they were – might still be alive today and not merely another legend gone to dust?
I soon found that it was the vivid memory of the strange green light which gave me the first clues in this direction.
All the time that I was assembling material on the subterranean world, one feature that occurred regularly in connection with it were stories that the tunnels were illuminated by strange lights, almost invariably green in colour. Both Ferdinand Ossendowski and Nicholas Roerich, who brought out of Asia the first detailed information on Agharti, made reference to this strange phenomenon, as the reader will no doubt recall.
Roerich in particular tells us that the subterranean people make use of a source of energy from below ground to replace the sun. This greenish-coloured light not only illuminates their world, but helps plants to breed and also prolongs life. Eric Norman in his more recent study also supports this view: ‘The Tibetan lamas assert that the secret tunnels and cavern cities are illuminated by an unusual green light which is favourable to crops, long life and good health.’
This same green fluorescent glow is also reported on the other side of the world in South America. Harold Wilkins tells us that it is encountered in the vicinity of mines and tunnels and is sometimes referred to by the local people as la luz del dinero, ‘the money light’. ‘These mysterious lights often appear in the dusk, or darkness,’ he says, ‘when they may trail along the ground like slithering snakes, emitting a greenish luminosity, or a queer, whitish shine. At other times, the lights may stand upright like shafts of the columns in an old Inca temple of the sun.’ Although Wilkins had heard suggestions – just as I did – that the light was caused by the emanations of gases like the British ‘Will-o’-the-Wisp’, he preferred to believe that they were caused by ‘some kind of subterranean metal’. Dr Raymond Bernard and Robert Dickhoff, for their part, have already gone on record in the earlier chapter dealing with Brazil that they believe the green glow to be the means of illumination in Agharti.
I also came across a personal experience of this light which seemed to confirm all the stories. It was reported by Peter Kolosimo in his Timeless Earth. He writes:
An explorer in the Amazon jungle is said to have found his way into an underground labyrinth illuminated ‘as though by an emerafld sun’. He retreated hastily to avoid the clutches of a monstrous spider, but before doing so saw ‘shadows like men’ moving at the end of a passage.
An experience with a certain similarity to this also happened to an English woman in the completely contrasting locality of an underground cellar, according to W. T. Stead in his Real Ghost Stories (1897). The events occurred at the end of the last century, and I quote them here without comment because they have been described by the magazine Man, Myth and Magic as a typical example of ‘the belief that a low type of subterranean being sometimes appears in astral form on the Earth’s surface’. The woman told Stead:
To my great surprise I suddenly saw a peculiar light about six feet from me. In less time than it takes me to write it, I saw this light develop into a head and face of yellowish greenish light, with a mass of matted hair above it. The face was very wide and broad, larger than ours in all respects, very large eyes of green, which, not being distinctly outlined, appeared to merge into the yellow of the cheeks; no hair whatever on the lower part of the face, and nothing to be seen below. The expression of the face was diabolically malignant, and as it gazed straight at me my horror was as intense as my wonder. I felt that such an awful thing could only be Satanic, so keeping my gaze fixed on the thing, I said to it, ‘In the name of Christ, be gone,’ and the fiendish thing faded from my sight.
My research also established that the strange rumbling noises which I had been conscious of while in the Yorkshire cave had similarly been reported in other stories about the subterranean world. In Canada, for instance, I discovered accounts by the Eskimos that they had quite often heard ‘mysterious drumming sounds’ which seemed to emanate from deep, unexplored caves. There are several such tales from Mexico, too, and William Hickling Prescott, who wrote the definitive study, History and Conquest of Mexico (1843), says that the natives told him of ‘great noises that shake the earth’ which they had experienced in the vicinity of the old tunnel networks in Palenque and elsewhere.
Harold Wilkins also came across similar sounds in Mexico, in the ruined cities on the borders of the states of Tehuantepec. He records:
Here, this Oohah, or mysterious drumming, is heard coming from afar over the environing jungle and ranges. One such dead city stands on a mesa girdled by cliffs. The region is covered with shrouded pyramids to which lead ancient roadways of massive paved blocks. In vaults of this dead city the Indians of Chiapas say there are hidden, and guarded by the ghosts of Mayan priest-rulers, ‘books’ written on gold leaves recording the history of ancient things and races of Ante-diluvian, or later Mayan times. Competent exploration is, of course, necessary, before these riddles can be solved.
Wilkins also cites another interesting case about a stone city further south in the mountain wilderness of South-Western Darien:
Old legend says this stone city (called Dahyba) had a secret subterranean temple at the bottom of a cavern, where strange rites of the underworld were performed. No smoke without fire in these legends of mysterious America! A native whisper in Darien says these rites are by no means extinct, nor the subterraneans, today!
Disturbances heard in the vicinity of ancient stoneworks in Peru are also believed to signify ‘ancient rituals of subterranean dwellers’ according to what Dr John James Von Tschudi, the German geographer, learned during his explorations of the country, and recorded in his book, Peruvian Antiquities (1854). Another German explorer, Von Humboldt, who actually heard the noises when in the vicinity of the ‘dead city’ near Trujillo in Northern Peru in 1820, later theorized that the sound – rather like that of galloping horses – might be caused by changes in temperature or underground waters. This idea has not been supported by subsequent research, however, and the mystery sounds remain unsolved.
In Asia, as Ossendowski reported, mysterious noises carried on the winds and accompanied by the ground trembling are believed to herald some activity of ‘The King of the World’, and bring both the human and animal worlds to a standstill.
There are other examples of sounds emanating from the vicinity of the subterranean network in Africa, India and certain parts of Russia, but I have no wish to labour the point further. I think the case for the appearance of green lights and mysterious sounds in these passages is now clearly established. But this still does not prove that the kind of enormously long tunnels we are talking about could exist. When we consider the extreme difficulties in creating such underground ways even today, with all the modern equipment at our disposal, it seems almost inconceivable that people from a much earlier time than our own could have possessed the necessary skills and equipment. Yet there are experts who are quite convinced they did.
There seems little doubt that such a system would need to take advantage of cavities in the rocks below the Earth’s surface, and scientific evidence proves that such c
avities do exist.* As I noted earlier, the Earth consists of a molten core, and outside it, two main layers. Of these, the one nearer the core is subject to heat and pressure which put the rock in a state of ‘flowage’, while in the upper, cooler zone ‘fracture’ can occur.
The possibility of such subterranean cavities has been the subject of some study by Professor Frank D. Adams of Montreal, who has shown by actual experiment that they might well exist in granite to a depth of at least eleven miles. His findings have been supported by a mathematician, Louis V. King, who has calculated that, at normal temperature, a cavity could exist at depths down to between 17·2 and 20·9 miles.
With the availability of these cavities, and the Earth faults to follow from one to the next, the ancient tunnellers had their first requirements. But what about the technology of their mining?
I think Robert Charroux has found an important clue when he tells us about Eupalinos, who constructed a tunnel in ancient times on the island of Samos:
The works were begun simultaneously from both ends. The tunnel is 1,000 yards long, it is absolutely straight and the two teams met each other exactly according to plan. The French and Italian engineers who tunnelled under Mont Blanc had at their disposal electronic measuring devices, radar, magnetic detectors and ultrasonic equipment. Eupalinos, as far as we know, did not even have the use of a compass.
Should we doubt such a feat of technical engineering, Charroux reminds us:
Equally astounding from the technical point of view are the basalt sculptures of unknown age discovered in 1939 in the heart of the Mexican jungle – five enormous heads, recalling the well-known monuments of Easter Island – and other prodigious works of statuary found in the Andes, Asia and Oceania.
The indefatigable Erich Von Daniken, who, as I reported earlier, investigated the tunnel system in Ecuador, has no doubt as to how the passageways were built. Describing his experience in The Gold of the Gods (1972), which continues his theory that extraterrestrial beings once lived on Earth, he says they were constructed by a kind of thermal drill. This is the centrepiece of his argument:
The Lost World of Agharti- the Mystery of Vril Power Page 23
