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by Alan Baker extracted from 'Chapter 4 - Invisible Eagle - The History of Nazi Occultism' from DocStoc Website
At first sight, it might seem strange in the extreme that the architects of the Third Reich would be interested in a region that many consider to be the spiritual centre of the world; until, that is, we remember that, according to Thulean mythology, this centre was once the Aryan homeland in the Arctic, and was displaced with the fall of Atlantis around 10,800 BC.
Since then, the spiritual centre, while remaining hidden from the vast majority of humanity who are unworthy of its secrets, has nevertheless been the primary force controlling the destiny of the planet. (1) The two hidden realms of Agartha and Shambhala constitute the double source of supernatural power emanating from Tibet, and have come to occupy an important place in twentieth-century occultism and fringe science.
In this way, we may chart the course of its warping and degradation as it was fitted into the Nazi scheme of crypto-history.
It is something of a mystery-why such a desolate, forbidding place should serve as the Chinese Garden of Eden rather than more hospitable regions such as the Yangtse Valley or the province of Shantung, and Tomas speculates that the Gobi Desert may at one time have been an inland sea with accompanying fertile land. (2)
As we shall see later in this chapter, the Gobi is a prime candidate as a site for one of the ancient and unknown civilizing cultures whose wisdom has been passed down through the ages.
The Vatican archives also contain many reports made by Catholic missionaries concerning deputations from the emperors of China to the spiritual beings living in the mountains. These beings possess bodies that are visible, but which are not made of flesh and blood: they are the ‘mind-born’ gods whose bodies are composed of elementary atomic matter, which allow them to live anywhere in the Universe, even at the centers of stars.
This island has been identified by Orientalists with the Isle of Shambhala of Puranic literature, which is said to stand at the centre of a lake of nectar.
Nearly 200 years later, a Hungarian philologist named Csoma de Koros, who lived for four years from 1827-30 in a Buddhist monastery in Tibet, claimed that Chang Shambhala lay between 45° and 50° north latitude, beyond the river Syr Daria. (5)
The writer Victoria Le Page describes this wondrous realm thus:
Only the purest of heart are allowed to find this place (others, less idealistically motivated, who search for it risk an icy grave) where want, evil, violence and injustice do not exist.
The inhabitants possess both supernatural powers and a highly advanced technology; their bodies are perfect, and they devote their time to the study of the arts and sciences. The concept of the hidden spiritual centre of the world is to be found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, shamanism and other ancient traditions. In the Bon religion of pre-Buddhist Tibet, Shambhala is also called ‘Olmolungring’ and ‘Dejong’.
In Tibetan Buddhism, the Shambhalic tradition is
enshrined within
the Kalachakra texts, which are said to have been taught to
the King of Shambhala by the Buddha before being returned to India.
(7) As might be expected with such a marvelous, legend-haunted place, there has been a great deal of speculation as to the exact whereabouts of Shambhala. (It is unlikely to be found at Koros’s map coordinates.) While some esotericists believe that Shambhala is a real place with a concrete, physical presence in a secret location on Earth, others prefer to see it as existing on a higher spiritual plane, what might be called another dimension of space-time coterminous with our own. Alternatively, Shambhala might be considered as a state of mind, comparable to the terms in which some consider the Holy Grail.
As with the Grail, Shambhala maybe a state within ourselves, in which we may gain an insight into the higher spirituality inherent in the Universe, as distinct from the mundane world of base matter in which we normally exist.
L.C.W. wrote that at the age of 21 she began to attend a place she came to know as ‘Night-School’.
At night she would fly in her sleep to this place, the location of which she had no idea. Once there she would join other people in dance exercises which she later recognized as being similar to the dervish exercises taught by George Gurdjieff. After several years, she graduated to a different class, where she was taught spiritual lessons from a great book of wisdom. It was only years later, when L.C.W. began to take an interest in mystical literature, that she realized the true location of Night-School must have been Shambhala.
The base of this antenna was in the Pamirs or Tien Shan Mountains, regions which are traditionally associated with Shambhala. She was taken towards this antenna by an invisible guide, and saw that it was a pillar of energy whose branches were actually paths leading to other worlds, marked by geometrical figures such as circles, triangles and squares.
According to L.C.W., this ‘antenna’ was nothing less than a gateway to other times, other dimensions and other regions of this Universe.
In addition to the antenna serving as a gateway for souls from Earth to travel to other times and places,
L.C.W. also maintained that the antenna could be controlled directly by the mind of the voyager, and would extend a branch or ‘pseudopod’ in response to a single thought. This branch then became a ‘trajectory of light’ along which the soul would travel; in her case, she found herself in China 30 years in the future. The spiritual being who was guiding her explained that the earth was in the process of being purified, and that a ‘great rebirth’ was about to occur.
She also witnessed the apparent falling of a cluster of ‘stars’ that represented the arrival of ‘high souls [that] were now coming down to help in the special event’. (9)
Since we have already spent some time with Madame Blavatsky, we may turn our attention to the work of the others, notably Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947), poet, artist, mystic and humanist, and perhaps the most famous and respected of the esotericists who brought news of this fabulous realm to Westerners.
Born in St Petersburg, Russia in 1874, Nicholas Roerich came from a distinguished family whose ability to trace its origins to the Vikings of the tenth century inspired his early interest in archaeology.
This interest led in turn to a lifelong fascination with art, through which, in the words of K. P. Tampy, who wrote a monograph on Roerich in 1935, he became ‘possessed of a burning desire to get at the beautiful and make use of it for his brethren’. (10)
After attending the St Petersburg Academy of Fine Art, Roerich went to Paris to continue his studies. In 1906, he won a prize for his design of a new church, and was also rewarded with the position of Director of the Academy for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Russia. However, the Russian Revolution occurred while he was on a visit to America, and he found himself unable to return to his motherland. Roerich’s profound interest in Buddhist mysticism led to his proposing an expedition in 1923 that would explore India, Mongolia and Tibet.
The Roerich Expedition of 1923-26 was made across the Gobi Desert to the Altai Mountains. It was during this expedition that Roerich’s party had a most unusual experience - one of the many experiences that seem to offer strange and puzzling connections between apparently disparate elements of the paranormal and that make it such a complex and fascinating field of human enquiry.
In the summer of 1926, Roerich had set up camp with his son, Dr George Roerich, and several Mongolian guides in the Shara-gol valley near the Humboldt Mountains between Mongolia and Tibet.
Roerich had just built a white stupa (or shrine), dedicated to Shambhala. The shrine was consecrated in August, with the ceremony witnessed by a number of invited lamas.
As the Mongolian guides shouted to one another in the utmost excitement, one of the lamas turned to Roerich and informed him that the fabulous golden orb was the sign of Shambhala, meaning that the lords of that realm approved of his mission of exploration. Later, Roerich was asked by another lama if there had been a perfume on the air. When Roerich replied that there had been, the lama told him that he was guarded by the King of Shambhala, Rigden Jye-Po, that the black vulture was his enemy, but that he was protected by a ‘Radiant form of Matter’.
The lama added that anyone who saw the radiant sphere should follow the direction in which it flew, for in that direction lay Shambhala. The exact purpose of this expedition (aside from exploration) was never made entirely clear by Roerich, but many writers on esoteric subjects have claimed that he was on a mission to return a certain sacred object to the King’s Tower at the centre of Shambhala.
According to Andrew Tomas, the sacred object was a fragment of the Chintamani stone, the great mass of which lies in the Tower. Astonishingly, the stone is said to have been brought to Earth originally by an extraterrestrial being.
The Chintamani stone is said to come from one of the star systems in the constellation of Orion, probably Sirius.
The main body of the stone is always kept in the Tower of Shambhala, although small pieces are sometimes transferred to other parts of the world during times of great change.
With regard to the present study, we can identify a powerful antecedent to the legends and rumors still extant today in the mythology of Tibet. In his 1930 book Shambhala, Roerich describes his attempts to understand the origins of underworld legends ‘to discover what memories were being cherished in the folk-memory’. (11)
In commenting on the ubiquity of subterranean legends, he notes that the more one examines them, the greater the conviction that they are all ‘but chapters from the one story’. (12) An examination of the folklores of ‘Tibet, Mongolia, China, Turkestan, Kashmir, Persia, Altai, Siberia, the Ural, Caucasia, the Russian steppes, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Germany, France’ (13) will yield tales of dwellers beneath the earth. In many places, the local people can even guide the curious traveler to cave entrances in isolated places, which are said to lead to the hidden world of the subterraneans.
However, they fell prey to marauding bands of warriors, and could only escape by leaving their fertile valley and departing into the earth to continue their civilization in subterranean realms.
Other members of the caravan called to Roerich:
The caravaneers continued:
When Roerich asked if he, too, could see such people, his companions replied:
In the region of Nijni Novgorod there is a legend of a subterranean city called Kerjenetz that sank into a lake.
In Roerich’s time, local people still held processions through the area, during which they would listen for the bells of invisible churches. Roerich’s party went on to discover four more groups of menhirs, and several tombs, taking the form of a square outlined by large stones.
To the people of the Himalayas, those who built these monuments, although now departed, are not to be found anywhere on the Earth’s surface:
Dr Ferdinand Ossendowski, whom we shall meet again in a little while, was told by lamas in Mongolia of fabulous civilizations existing before recorded history.
To Ossendowski’s astonishment, the lamas claimed that when the homelands of these civilizations in the Atlantic and Pacific were destroyed by natural cataclysms some of their inhabitants survived in previously prepared subterranean shelters, illuminated by artificial light. Andrew Tomas speculates that the Celtic legend of ‘the Lordly Ones in the hollow hills’ is a folk memory of the survivors of the destruction of the Atlantic continent. (17)
In India, legends tell of a race of beings called the Nagas. Serpent-like and extremely intelligent, the Nagas live in vast caverns illuminated by precious stones.
Although reptilian, the Nagas have human faces and are incredibly beautiful. Able to fly, they intermarried with kings and queens from the surface world, although they remain shy of surface dwellers and keep well away from all but the most spiritually advanced. Their capital city is called Bhogawati, and is said to be covered with rubies, emeralds and diamonds. (18)
Radiant figures have also been seen near this extremely cold fresh-water lake.
In fact, one of the many variations on the name, ‘Asgaard’, was first used by the French writer Ernest Renan in the 1870s. Although clearly inspired by Nordic mythology, Renan placed his Asgaard in Central Asia, while another French writer, Louis Jacolliot (1837-1890), was writing at the same time about a city of Asgartha. (19)
A magistrate in Chandernagor, India, Jacolliot wrote a number of books on the relationship between Indian mythology and Christianity. He was allegedly told the legend of Asgartha by a group of local Brahmins, who allowed him to consult various sacred texts, such as the Book of Historical Zodiacs. According to Jacolliot, Asgartha was a prehistoric ‘City of the Sun’, home of the Brahmatma, the visible manifestation of God on Earth. (20)
Asgartha existed in India in 13,300 BC, where the Brahmatma lived in an immense palace; he was invisible, and only appeared to his subjects once a year. Interestingly, Jacolliot stated that this high prehistoric culture existed long before the Aryans, who conquered Asgartha around 10,000 BC. The priests of Asgartha then managed to form an alliance with the victorious Aryan Brahmins, which resulted in the formation of the warrior caste of Kshatriyas.
About 5,000 years later, Asgartha was destroyed by the brothers Ioda and Skandah, who came from the Himalayas. Eventually driven out by the Brahmins, the brothers travelled north - and later gave their names to ‘Odin’ and ‘Scandinavia’. (21)
Ferdinand Ossendowski (1876-1945) was another early writer on the legend of Agartha. Although born in Vitebsk, Poland, he spent most of his early life in Russia, attending the University of St Petersburg. For much of the 1890s, he travelled extensively in Mongolia and Siberia, developing his interest in and knowledge of Buddhist mysticism.
He returned to Europe in 1900 and gained a doctorate in Paris in 1903, before returning to Russia and working as a chemist for the Russian Army during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. He then became president of the ‘Revolutionary Government of the Russian Far East’, before being taken prisoner by the Russian Government for his anti-Tsarist activities. (22)
After two years’ imprisonment in Siberia, he taught physics and chemistry in the Siberian town of Omsk, until the Bolshevik Revolution forced him to flee Russia with a small group of fellow White Russians. Together they travelled across Siberia and into Mongolia, and he wrote of their adventures in his best-selling book Beasts, Men and Gods (1923).
While in Mongolia, Ossendowski made the acquaintance of a fellow Russian, a priest named Tushegoun Lama who claimed to be a friend of the Dalai Lama. Tushegoun Lama told Ossendowski of the subterranean kingdom of Agartha, home of the King of the World.
Intrigued by this reference, Ossendowski asked his friend for further information on this mysterious personage.
Several months later, while continuing across Mongolia with some guides left behind by Tushegoun Lama (who had since gone his own way), Ossendowski was startled when his companions suddenly halted and dismounted from their camels, which immediately lay down.
The Mongols began to pray, chanting:
Ossendowski waited until they had finished praying before asking them what was happening. One of the Mongol guides replied thus:
Later, Ossendowski met an old Tibetan, Prince Chultun Beyli, living in exile in Mongolia, who furnished him with more details of the subterranean realm of Agartha and the King of the World.
At this point, Ossendowski was approaching the Chinese border. It was his intention to take a train to Peking, from which he might find passage to the West. In the town of Urga he met an old lama, who provided him with yet more information on the King of the World.
The King’s influence on the activities of the world’s apparent leaders was profound. If their plans were pleasing before God, then the King of the World would help them to realize them; but if they displeased God, then the King would surely destroy them.
His power came from the ‘mysterious science of “Om”’, which is the name of an ancient Holyman who lived more than 300,000 years ago, the first man to know God. When Ossendowski asked him if anyone had ever seen the King of the World, the old lama replied that during the solemn holidays of the ancient Buddhism in Siam and India the King appeared five times in a ‘splendid car drawn by white elephants’. (25)
He wore a white robe and a red tiara with strings of diamonds that hid his face. When he blessed the people with a golden apple surmounted by the figure of a lamb, the,
Ossendowski then asked the lama how many people had been to Agartha.
He replied that very many had, but that they never spoke about what they had seen there. He continued that, when the Olets destroyed Lhasa, one of their detachments found its way into the outskirts of Agartha, where they learned some of the lesser mysterious sciences. This is the reason for the magical skills of the Olets and Kalmucks.
Another of Ossendowski’s informants, a lama named Turgut, told him that the capital of Agartha is surrounded by the towns of the high priests and scientists, somewhat in the way that the Potala palace of the Dalai Lama in Lhasa is surrounded by monasteries and temples.
The throne on which the King of the World sits is itself surrounded by millions of incarnated gods, the Holy Panditas. The King’s palace is surrounded by the palaces of the Goro, who possess fantastic power, and who would easily be able to incinerate the entire surface of the Earth, should humankind be unwise enough to declare war on them.
(As we shall see in Chapter Seven, the legend of the King of the World would serve as the inspiration for one of the most enduring technological myths of the twentieth century.)
The legend of Agartha was discussed at length by another writer, the self-educated Christian Hermeticist Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (1842-1909), whose marriage into money enabled him to indulge his yearning for mystical understanding. In 1885 he began to take lessons in Sanskrit from one Haji Sharif (1838-?), about whom very little is known save that he left India at the time of the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 and worked as a bird-seller at Le Havre. (27)
The manuscripts of d’Alveydre’s lessons are preserved in the library of the Sorbonne in Paris. In them, Sharif refers to the ‘Great Agarthian School’ and the ‘Holy Land of Agarttha’ (one of the many alternative spellings of the name). Sharif claimed that the original language of humanity, called Vattan or Vattanian, derived from a 22-letter alphabet.
Although he was unable physically to visit Agartha, d’Alveydre found an ingenious alternative:
His astral adventures resulted in a series of books (Mission des Souverains, Mission des Ouvriers, Mission des Juifs and Mission de l’Inde), which he published at his own expense.
Interestingly, he destroyed the entire edition of the last work, Mission de I’lnde, for fear that he had revealed too many secrets of Agartha and might be made to pay for his transgression with his life.
Only two copies survived: one that he kept himself and one that was hidden by the printer. (28)
He might well have been concerned, for Mission de I’lnde contains a detailed account of Agartha, which lies beneath the surface of the Earth somewhere in the East and is ruled over by an Ethiopian ‘Sovereign Pontiff' called the Brahmatma. The realm of Agartha was transferred underground at the beginning of the Kali-Yuga, about 3200 BC. The Agarthians possess technology that was impressive in d’Alveydre’s day, including railways and air travel.
They know everything about the surface-dwellers, and occasionally send emissaries. Agartha contains many libraries in which all the knowledge of Earth is recorded on stone tablets in Vattanian characters, including the means by which the living may communicate with the souls of the dead.
Ossendowski denied the charge vehemently, and claimed never to have heard of d’Alveydre before 1924. Rene Guenon defended Ossendowski, and claimed that there were many tales of subterranean realms told throughout Central Asia.
In fact, Guenon’s work would later be heavily criticized by his translator Marco Pallis, who called his book Le Roi du Monde (The King of the World) ‘disastrous’ in conversation with Joscelyn Godwin, on the grounds that Ossendowski’s sources were unreliable, and Guenon had allowed himself to enter the realms of the sensational. (29)
As we have seen, some writers claim that Agartha and Shambhala are physical places, cities lying miles underground with houses, palaces, streets and millions of inhabitants.
Others maintain that they are altogether more rarefied places, existing on some other level of reality but apparently coterminous with our physical world.
With regard to their exact location, Childress offers a short summary of their many possible locations:
Adding to this confusion is the frequently made assertion that the two power centers are opposed to each other, with Agartha seen as following the right-hand path of goodness and light, and Shambhala following the left-hand path of evil and darkness (a dichotomy also expressed as spirituality versus materialism).
There is, needless to say, an opposing view that holds that Agartha is a place of evil and Shambhala the abode of goodness. There have been a number of rumors concerning practitioners of black magic operating in Tibet and referring to themselves as the Shambhala or the Agarthi. (31)
Although apparently outlawed by Tibetan Buddhists, they are said to continue their activities in secret. One writer who claimed to have encountered them was a German named Theodore Illion who spent the mid-1930s travelling through Tibet.
In his book Darkness Over Tibet (1937), he describes how he discovered a deep shaft in the countryside. Wishing to gauge its depth, he dropped several stones into it and waited for them to strike the bottom; he was rewarded only with silence. He was told by an initiate that the shaft was ‘immeasurably deep’ and that only the highest initiates knew where it ended.
His companion added:
Illion claimed to have gained access to a subterranean city inhabited by monks, whom he later found to be ‘black yogis’ planning to control the world through telepathy and astral projection.
When he discovered that the food he was being given contained human flesh, he decided to make a break for it and fled across Tibet with several of the monks after him. After several weeks on the run, he managed to escape from Tibet and returned to the West with his bizarre and frightening tale. (33)
The schism between Shambhala and Agartha is described by Rene Guenon, who relates in Le Roi du Monde how the ancient civilization in the Gobi Desert was all but destroyed by a natural cataclysm, and the ‘Sons of Intelligences of Beyond’ retreated to the caverns beneath the Himalayas and re-established their civilization.
There followed the formation of two groups:
Guenon claimed (as would Illion several years later) that the denizens of the subterranean world sought to influence the lives and actions of the surface dwellers through various occult means, including telepathic hypnosis and mediumship.
Childress finds it intriguing that Hitler sent expeditions to Tibet in the late 1930s, soon after the publication of Illion’s book Darkness Over Tibet, and suggests that their true objective was to make contact with the occult groups. (34)
While the victorious Russians were picking their way through the ruins of Berlin (and, according to some, discovering the bodies of several Tibetan monks, as we saw in Chapter Three), it is claimed by the crypto-historians that Hitler was flying out of the city’s Tempelhof Airfield to a rendezvous with the U-boat (possibly U-977) that would take him either to Argentina or Antarctica.
There is, however, a variation on this theme that has the Fuhrer escaping to Tibet to be hidden by those whose alliance he had sought.
According to an article in the May 1950 issue of the pro-Nazi Tempo Der Welt, that magazine’s publisher, Karl Heinz Kaerner, claimed to have met with Martin Bormann in Morocco the previous year. If the story is to be believed (which would be extremely unwise), Bormann informed Kaerner that Hitler was alive in a Tibetan monastery, and that one day he would be back in power in Germany!
In addressing the question of whether such black magicians really lived (or still live) in Tibet, Childress reminds us that in her book Initiations and Initiates in Tibet, the French writer, explorer and authority on Tibetan mysticism Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) describes an encounter with a man who could hypnotize and kill from a distance.
Nicholas Roerich also mentions the occultists of the ancient Bon
religion, who were at war with the Buddhists of Tibet. As Childress notes:
In contrast to the Valley of the Immortals in the Kun Lun Mountains, the cave communities with their incredible sights were part illusion, say Illion and Ravenscroft.
At the Valley of the Immortals, perhaps there really were ancient artifacts of a time gone by watched over by Ancient Masters. Yet, it is unlikely that any person not chosen specifically by those who are the caretakers of this repository would be allowed inside. Nor would those who had entered (such as possibly Nicholas Roerich) ever reveal the location or what they had seen there. (35)
As is so often the case in the field of occultism, the way is left open to those who are quite content to rely on spurious sources and hearsay in their creation of a tantalizing but incredible vision of history.
One of the most famous of these crypto-historians is Trevor Ravenscroft, and it is to his claims that we now must turn.
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