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revised May and December 2003
from
BerzinArchives Website
Some were spread to win military or political support, such as the identification of Russia, Mongolia, or Japan as Shambhala. Others appeared within occult movements and mixed Buddhist ideas with concepts from other systems of belief.
Several even spawned expeditions to find the fabled land.
The other side depicted Shambhala as a land of malevolent power. Several postwar accounts of the connection between Nazism and the Occult present this interpretation. It is important not to confuse either of these distortions with Buddhism itself.
Let us trace the phenomenon.
Endowed with extrasensory powers, she traveled
the world in search of occult, secret teachings and spent many years
on the Indian subcontinent. From 1867 to 1870, she studied Tibetan
Buddhism with Indian masters, most likely from the Tibetan cultural
regions of the Indian Himalayas, during her purported stay at Tashilhunpo Monastery in
Tibet.
Further, she was able to learn only disjointed fragments of its vast teachings. In her private letters, she wrote that because the Western public at that time had little acquaintance with Tibetan Buddhism, she decided to translate and explain the basic terms with more popularly known concepts from Hinduism and the Occult.
For example, she translated three of the four island-worlds (four continents) around Mount Meru as the sunken lost islands of Hyperborea, Lemuria, and Atlantis.
Likewise, she
presented the four humanoid races mentioned in the abhidharma and
Kalachakra teachings (born from transformation, moisture and heat,
eggs, and wombs) as the races of these island-worlds. Her belief
that the esoteric teachings of all the world's religions form one
body of occult knowledge reinforced her decision to translate in
this manner and she set out to demonstrate that in her writings.
According to her posthumously
published Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett, Blavatsky's
position was that Theosophy transmitted the "secret occult teachings
of trans-Himalaya," not the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism.
Nevertheless, through her writings, the West first came to associate
Shambhala with the Occult and many subsequently confused this
connection with the actual teachings of Buddhism.
"Kiu-te" transcribes the Tibetan "rgyud-sde," meaning "tantra division," which is the title of the first section of the Kagyur, the Tibetan translations of Buddha's words. "Dzyan" transcribes the Sanskrit "dhyana" (Jap. zen), meaning mental stability.
Blavatsky was aware
that The Kalachakra Tantra was the first item in the tantra division
of the Kagyur, since she mentioned that fact in one of her notes.
She explained, however, that the seven secret folios were not
actually part of the published Kiu-te, and thus we do not find
anything similar to
The Stanzas of Dzyan in that collection.
De Kцrцs compiled the first dictionary and grammar of Tibetan in a Western language, English, in 1834. Jakov Schmidt's Tibetan-Russian Dictionary and Grammar soon followed in 1839.
Most of Blavatsky's familiarity with Kalachakra,
however, came from the chapter entitled "The Kalachakra
System" in Emil Schlagintweit's Buddhism in Tibet (1863), as
evidenced by her borrowing many passages from that book in her
works. Following her translation principle, however, she rendered Shambhala in terms of similar concepts in Hinduism and the Occult.
The Kalki, Blavatsky wrote, is,
She also claimed that Shankaracharya, the early ninth-century founder of Advaitya Vedanta,
Elsewhere, she wrote that when Lemuria sank, part of its people survived in Atlantis, while part of its elect migrated to the sacred island of "Shamballah" in the Gobi Desert.
Neither the
Kalachakra
literature nor The Vishnu Purana, however, has any mention of
Atlantis, Lemuria, Maitreya, or Sosiosh. The association of
Shambhala with them, however, continued among Blavatsky's followers.
Although he felt that
Shambhala would probably be found in the Kizilkum Desert in
Kazakhstan, the Gobi also fell within the two longitudes. Others
later would also locate it within these parameters, but either in
East Turkistan (Xinjiang, Sinkiang) or the Altai Mountains.
Moreover, she reported that in 1934 the
Ruler of Shambhala had recalled to Tibet the mahatmas who had
transmitted to Blavatsky the secret teachings.
Agvan Dorjiev (1854-1938) was a Buryat Mongol monk who studied in Lhasa and became the Master Debate Partner (Assistant Tutor) of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. In the face of British and Chinese machinations for control of Tibet, he convinced the Dalai Lama to turn to Russia for military support.
He
did this by telling him that Russia was Shambhala and Czar Nicholas
II was the reincarnation of Tsongkhapa, the founder of the Gelug
tradition. Dorjiev went on several missions to the Russian Imperial
Court, but was never able to secure any help. He was able, however,
to convince the Czar to build a Kalachakra Temple in St. Petersburg.
It was a
ritual for the long-life of the Romanov Dynasty on its 300th
anniversary. According to Albert Grьnwedel, the German explorer of
Central Asia, in Der Weg nach Shambhala (The Way to Shambhala)
(1915), Dorjiev spoke of the Romanov Dynasty as the descendants of
the rulers of Shambhala.
Mongolia, Japan, and Shambhala
Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, a German who lived in Russia, was an avid anti-Bolshevik. During the Civil War that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917, he fought in Siberia with the White Russian (Czarist) forces. With Japanese support, he successfully invaded Outer Mongolia in 1920 to free it from the Chinese.
Notorious for his cruelty, Ungern slaughtered thousands of Chinese,
collaborator Mongols, Russian Bolsheviks, and Jews, earning himself
the nickname "Mad Baron." Ungern believed that all Jews were
Bolsheviks.
He
rallied his troops by telling them that by fighting to free Mongolia
from oppression, they would be reborn in the army of Shambhala. With
the help of the Soviet Red Army, Sukhe Batur took Urga (Ulaan Baatar),
the Mongolian capital, in late 1921. The People's Republic of
Mongolia was founded in 1924.
Ossendowski related that several Mongol lamas had told him of Agharti, an underground kingdom beneath Mongolia, ruled by the King of the World. In the future, when materialism will ruin the world, a terrible war will break out. At that time, the people of Agharti will come to the surface and help end the violence. Ossendowski reported that he convinced Ungern of his story and that, subsequently, Ungern twice sent missions to seek Agharti, led by Prince Poulzig.
The missions were unsuccessful
and the Prince never returned from the second expedition.
Originally
located at Ayodhya India, it was moved to a secret location beneath
the Himalayas 1800 years before the Common Era. Its king, a
"mahatma," guards its secrets and has not revealed them, since they
would enable Antichrist forces to build powerful weapons. Once the
evil forces have been destroyed, the mahatmas will reveal their
secrets for the benefit of mankind.
If this were the case, we could trace from here the
version of the Shambhala legend that described Shambhala in an
unfavorable light.
His wife, Helena, was the translator of Blavatsky's The
Secret Doctrine into Russian. Between 1925 and 1928, he led an
expedition from India, through Tibet, to Outer Mongolia and the
Altai Mountain region in Siberia, north of East Turkistan. The
purported aim was to study plants, ethnology, and languages, and
to paint. His primary purpose, however, was to find Shambhala.
Even nowadays, Roerich's followers continue his
conviction that the Altai Mountains are a great spiritual center,
connected in some way with Shambhala.
To reach the fabled land, one
needed to perform an enormous amount of spiritual practices. In
other words, the journey to Shambhala was actually an inner quest.
This explanation, however, did not seem to deter intrepid
adventurers such as the Roerichs from trying to reach Shambhala by
merely trekking there.
Practitioners of Agni Yoga choose Buddha, Jesus, or Muhammad as a
guide for spiritual practice. Concentrating on their chosen guides,
they pray for peace while performing simple visualizations of the
purification of obstacles.
In the
flames, they visualize the fire-deity Agni, a figure clearly
borrowed from Hinduism. Roerich may have witnessed such pujas either
at the Kalachakra Temple in St. Petersburg or during his travels in
the Mongol regions and derived his idea of Agni Yoga from it.
Each
tradition describes Shambhala according to its own understanding and
thus the legend of the Holy Grail, for example, is a version of the
Shambhala story. Constantine the Great, Chinggis Khan (Genghis
Khan), and Prester John are among those who have received
messages of teachings from "the Mysterious Spiritual Abode and Brotherhood in
the heart of Asia."
Trungpa wrote, however, that his idea of the Shambhala warrior had nothing to do with the Kalachakra teachings or with Shambhala itself. It was a metaphor for someone striving for self-improvement for the benefit of others.
Roerich, on the
other hand, used the term for "the
Brothers of Humanity," who will bring world peace from Shambhala.
The concept of "Kalachakra for World Peace," associated with the
Kalachakra initiations given by His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai
Lama in the West since 1981, is probably also a legacy of Roerich's
ideas.
Nothing like this,
however, is found in the Kalachakra texts. Numerous countries around
the world signed the pact, including the United States in 1935. The
symbol of three circles was later adopted as an insignia worn on
armbands by physically disabled persons indicating their need for
gentle treatment.
He also mentioned the association of Shambhala with the
underground city of Agharti (Agarthi), reached
through tunnels under the Himalayas. Its inhabitants will emerge at
the "time of purification." In her Collected Letters (1935 - 1936),
Helena Roerich pointed out that Saint-Yves d'Alveidre had mistakenly
identified Shambhala with Agharti, but they are not the same place.
Vril is the
psychokinetic power protected by the inhabitants of Thule, which the
Nazis tried to obtain for helping to strengthen their Aryan superrace. Roerich, however, never made this association.
They associated Shambhala primarily with the destructive
forces of regeneration that will do away with old outmoded ways of
thinking and will establish a new world order of peace. Thus, the
destructive force of Shambhala is ultimately benevolent. These
versions also had their roots in Theosophy.
After an initial failure, Annie Besant invited Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), an Austrian spiritualist, to reestablish it in 1902. Steiner left the society in 1909 primarily because he could not agree with Besant and C. W. Leadbetter's declaration of the sixteen-year-old Krishnamurti as the messiah.
In a series of
lectures given in Berlin and Munich in 1910 and 1911, Steiner taught
what some have labeled "a Christianized version of Theosophy."
Steiner, however, claimed that his teachings derived from his
clairvoyant reading of "the akashic records," not from Theosophy.
They do not present it, however, as a record
of all knowledge that can be tapped by psychic means.
Although Lucifer can uplift humanity to a higher plane, the Latin
scholastics had transformed him into the purely evil Satan.
In Occult Science, An Outline, Steiner characterized
Lucifer as a being of light, the bridge between Man and God,
bringing us closer to Christ. The "Children of Lucifer," then, are
all those who strive for knowledge and wisdom. Ahriman, in contrast,
leads mankind downward to its lower, material, carnal, animalistic
nature.
These invaders will follow the teachings of a line of eight prophets: Adam, Abraham, Noah, Moses, Jesus, Mani, Muhammad, and Mahdi. Historical analysis suggests that the model for these invaders were the late tenth-century Ismaili Shiite forces of Multan (present-day Pakistan), an ally of the Egyptian Fatimid Empire.
The Fatimids, with their Mahdi messiah, sought to conquer the Islamic world before the predicted apocalypse and the end the world five hundred years after Muhammad. People throughout the region lived in great fear of an invasion, including the Buddhist-Hindu-Muslim region of Afghanistan where the Kalachakra historical teachings likely developed.
The predicted conflict and
defeat of the invaders, however, was a spiritual metaphor for the
internal battle against fear and ignorance. It presented an
effective method for the terrorized people at that time to overcome
their strongly felt anxieties.
Steiner's emphasis on Maitreya and Shambhala as the real sources of
Christian reform in the future probably also reflects his dismay at
the Theosophist promotion of Krishnamurti as the new savior.
However, they do indicate methods for Hindus and Muslims to find alternative meanings of doctrines in their own religions that would allow them to form a united spiritual front with Buddhists to face the terrors of an invasion. They even point out teachings that Buddha gave which parallel some of the Hindu and Muslim assertions.
If followers of those religions were interested, they could use their own beliefs as stepping-stones for reaching the Buddhist path.
Nevertheless, the Kalachakra texts do not assert that
the Buddhist teachings contain the true meanings of Hinduism or
Islam. Nor do they in any way assert that Shambhala will be the
source of reform that will bring people back to the true doctrines
of the founders of those two religions, yet alone back to the pure
teachings of Christ.
After losing her battle with Annie Besant for leadership of the
Theosophical movement, she founded the Lucifer Trust in 1920 in the
United States. Originally calling her Trust the Tibetan Lodge, she
changed its name once more in 1922 to the Lucis Trust. Her lectures
and writings spawned the New Age movement. She called the New Age
both the Aquarian Age and the Age of Maitreya.
Reminiscent of Roerich, she took Shambhala to be
"the seat of Cosmic
Fire," which is a force for purification. Rather than conceiving of
this force as benevolent agni, however, she followed Steiner's lead
and associated it with Lucifer. Thus, she spoke of it as a source of
destructive power to eject degenerate forms of teachings and to
establish a pure New Age.
When seen as the Divine Will, however, initiates can harness it for the ultimate "Good."
A "Hierarchy" in Shambhala,
headed by Maitreya, protects the Force and, at the proper
time, will initiate the ripe into "the Mysteries of the Ages,"
"the Plan." One
wonders if her ideas inspired the Star Wars vision of "the
Force,"
as a power that can be harnessed for good or evil, and which is
guarded by a brotherhood of Jedi Warriors.
Borrowing Theosophical concepts, she said that the Shambhala Force had made its presence known twice before in history. The first time was during the Lemurian Age, heralding the individualization of mankind. The second was "during the Atlantean days of struggle between the Lords of Light and the Lords of Material Form, the Dark Forces."
Nowadays, she continued - referring
to the period between the two World Wars - it is manifesting as the
force to destroy what is undesirable and obstructive in present
world forms of government, religion, and society.
One example is the Brotherhood of the White Temple, founded in 1930 by the American spiritualist Morris Doreal (1902-1963). In Maitreya, Lord of the World, Doreal wrote that Shamballa (Shambhala) is the Great White Temple of Tibet, located 75 miles beneath the Himalayas.
Its entrance is underground, with space around it bent into a warp that leads into another universe. He described Shambhala as having two halves. The southern half is the section where adepts and great gurus live. The northern half is the land where the avatar or world teacher Maitreya lives.
In the future, Maitreya will come with the
warriors of Shambhala, who are the "light bearers of the Aquarian
Age," to conquer the dark forces of evil in the world.
He also
claimed to have received
secret initiations from Tibetan monks.
Bailey, however, only mentioned Shambhala in this connection and said nothing about Agharti. These accounts, on the other hand, purport that the masters of Shambhala refused to assist the Nazi expeditions, but the adepts of Agharti agreed and returned with them to Germany.
Moreover, they attribute the Nazi search for occult support in Tibet to the beliefs of Karl Haushofer and the Thule Society.
Haushofer was the founder of
the Vril Society in
association with the Thule Society and was a major influence on
Hitler's occult thinking. The Thule and Vril Societies combined
beliefs from various sources. Let us trace some of these beliefs
briefly, in chronological order, before we examine these postwar
studies,
The French novelist Jules Verne popularized the idea in Voyage to the Center of the Earth (1864). In 1871, the British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in The Coming Race, described a superior race, the Vril-ya, who lived beneath the earth and planned to conquer the world with vril, a psychokinetic energy. In Les Fils de Dieu (The Sons of God) (1873), the French author Louis Jacolliot linked vril with the subterranean people of Thule.
The Indian freedom advocate,
Bal Gangadhar Tilak, in The Arctic Home of the Vedas (1903),
identified the southern migration of the Thuleans with the origin of
the Aryan race. In 1908, the American author Willis George Emerson
published the novel The Smokey God, or A Voyage to the Inner World,
which described the journey of a Norwegian sailor through an opening
at the North Pole to a hidden world inside the Earth.
As part of its emblem, it took the swastika, a traditional symbol
for Thor, the Norse God of Thunder. In doing so, the Thule Society
followed the precedent of Guido von List who, in the late nineteenth
century, had made the swastika an emblem for the neo-Pagan movement
in Germany.
Ariosophy blended the concept of races from Theosophy with German nationalism to assert the superiority of the Aryan race as a rationale for Germany to conquer the global colonial empires of the British and the French as the rightful ruler of the inferior races.
The Thule Society embraced the
Ariosophy beliefs. It must be pointed out, however, that the
Theosophical movement never intended its teachings on races as a
justification for asserting the superiority of one race over
another, or the destined right of one race to rule the others.
This secret order
traced back to the Nazari sect of Ismaili Islam, against whom the
Crusaders had fought.
He founded the Vril Society in Berlin in 1918,
which in addition to the Thule Society creeds, also advocated
searching for vril among supernatural beings beneath the earth. The
most likely location would be in Tibet, which he saw as the
homeland
of the Aryan migrants from Thule.
Its main charge was to locate the
origins of the Aryan race, especially in Central Asia. In 1937, Himmler incorporated this bureau into the
SS (Germ. Schutzstaffel,
Protection Squad).
Whether or not they accurately
represent Nazi thought during the Third Reich, still they represent
a further popularized distortion of the Shambhala legend. Let us
examine two slightly different versions from among them.
One went to Atlantis, where they intermarried with the Lemurians who had also migrated there. Recall that Blavatsky had associated the Lemurians with Atlantis and Shambhala, and Bailey had associated both the Lemurians and Atlanteans with the Shambhala Force.
The
descendents of these impure Aryans turned to black magic and
conquest. The other branch of Aryans migrated south, passing through
North America and northern Eurasia, eventually reaching the Gobi
Desert. There, they founded Agharti, the myth of which had become
popular through the writings of Saint-Yves d'Alveidre.
The division of right-hand and left-hand paths had appeared already in Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine.
There, she wrote that at the time of the Atlanteans, humanity branched into right- and left-hand paths of knowledge, which became the germs of white and black magic. She did not associate the two paths, however, with Agharti and Shambhala. In fact, she did not mention Agharti at all in her writings.
The terms right- and left-hand paths derive from a
division within Hindu tantra. Early Western writers often
characterized left-hand tantra as a degenerate form and
misidentified it with Tibetan Buddhism and its teachings of
anuttarayoga tantra.
Membership in the latter society required ritual Japanese suicide (Jap. hara-kiri, seppuku) if one lost one's honor. Haushofer had purportedly joined the society during his early years in Japan.
The leader of the Society of Green Men was a Tibetan monk, known as "the man with green gloves," who supposedly visited Hitler frequently and held the keys of Agharti. Expeditions to Tibet followed annually, from 1926 to 1943. When the Russians entered Berlin at the end of the war, they found nearly a thousand corpses of soldiers of the Himalayan race, dressed in Nazi uniforms but without identification papers, who had committed suicide.
Haushofer
himself committed hara-kiri before he could be tried at Nüremberg in
1946.
According to this version, the Thule Society believed that two sections of Aryans turned to worship of two evil forces. Their turning to evil brought about the decline of Atlantis and, subsequently, the two groups established cave communities in mountains submerged beneath the Atlantic Ocean near Iceland.
The legend of Thule arose from them.
Note that Ravenscroft reported the reverse of Pauwels, Bergier,
and Frйre's assertions that Agharti followed the right-hand path and
Shambhala the left.
Recall that although Blavatsky had written about Lucifer and Ahriman, she did not make the two a pair and did not associate either of the two with Shambhala or Agharti.
Moreover, Blavatsky explained that
although Latin scholastics had transformed Lucifer into a purely
evil Satan, Lucifer had the power both to destroy and to create. He
represented the light-bearing presence in everyone's minds that
could uplift people from animalism and bring about a positive
transformation to a higher plane of existence.
Moreover, Steiner associated Lucifer with Shambhala, not Agharti and, in fact, like Blavatsky and Bailey, did not mention Agharti at all.
In addition,
none of the three occult authors described Shambhala as located
underground. Only the Roerichs had associated Shambhala with the
underground city of Agharti, but had clarified that the two were
different and never asserted that Shambhala was underground.
They were supposed to convince the masters there to enlist the aid of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers to further the Nazi cause, especially for creating an Aryan superrace. The adepts of Shambhala refused to help. As followers of the Ahrimanic Oracle, they were concerned only with furthering materialism. Moreover, Shambhala had already affiliated itself with certain lodges in Britain and the United States.
This was perhaps a reference to Doreal, whose Brotherhood of
the White Temple in America was the first major occult movement
to
assert Shambhala as an underground city. Moreover, this account also
fits well with Haushofer's disdain for Western materialistic
science, which he called "Jewish-Marxist-Liberal Science," in favor
of "Nordic-Nationalistic Science."
Joined by members of
the Green Dragon Society of Japan, they set up occult schools in
Berlin and elsewhere. Note that Pauwels and Bergier asserted that
colonies of not only Tibetans, but also Hindus were present in
Berlin and Munich from 1926, not 1929.
Recall that
Himmler did not establish the Ahnenerbe, but rather incorporated it
into the SS in 1937.
It is also difficult to ascertain whether Haushofer tried and succeeded in influencing Hitler and official Nazi institutions, such as the Ahnenerbe, to send expeditions to Tibet to secure aid from the two supposedly subterranean lands - or even if the Thule Society itself sent such expeditions.
The only mission to Tibet officially sanctioned by the Ahnenerbe
- the Third Tibetan Expedition (1938-1939) of Ernst Schдffer
- clearly had a different, though equally occult agenda.
Its primary purpose was to measure the skulls of Tibetans to
determine if they were the source of the Aryans and an intermediary
race between the Aryans and the Japanese.
Let us leave aside, for the moment, the question of whether the Thule Society and the Ahnenerbe actually sent missions to Tibet seeking aid from Shambhala and Agharti.
However, let us assume, also
for the moment, that Haushofer actually did combine the legends of
Shambhala and Agharti with the Thule Society's beliefs and that the
resulting mélange did represent the Nazi occult position. If this
were the case, then a possible theory to explain the claim that
Shambhala rejected the Nazi's approach, while Agharti accepted it
would be as follows.
Thus, in their eyes, Shambhala was a dark, negative force that supported purely materialistic "Jewish-Marxist-Liberal Science."
With his anti-Communist bias, Hitler signed the Anti-Commintern Pact with Japan in November 1936, in which both countries declared their mutual hostility toward the spread of international Communism.
Both
agreed that they would not sign any political treaties with the
Soviet Union. Nevertheless, to avoid a European war on two fronts,
Hitler signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact with Stalin in August 1939. He
broke this pact, however, in September 1941, when the Nazi forces
invaded the Soviet Union.
Shambhala refused (Hitler placed the blame on the Soviet Union for why he broke the pact). Hitler then turned to and received support from Agharti.
(Ungern, an earlier
anti-Semitic anti-Bolshevik German, had also sought help from
Agharti, but had failed to locate the fabled land. Thus, Ungern had
failed in his mission. Since Hitler's expeditions had found
Agharti-Asgaard and received its help, the Nazis would surely
succeed.)
In Der Weg nach Shambhala (The Way to Shambhala) (1915), the German
explorer of Central Asia, Albert Grьnwedel, reported that
Dorjiev
had identified the Romanov Dynasty as the descendants of the rulers
of Shambhala.
Helena Roerich referred to both Marx and Lenin as
mahatmas
and claimed that emissaries of the Himalayan mahatmas had even met
with Marx in England and Lenin in Switzerland. The mahatmas
supported the Communist ideals of universal brotherhood.
Warning against the influence of this temple and an alliance
of the Soviet Union, Mongolia, and Tibet, Unkrig ended his
article with the Latin quote, "Domine, libera nos a Tartaris (God save us
from the Tartars)." This fit in well with Haushofer's Geopolitics
and his recommendation for Germany to conquer living space in
Central Asia, the homeland of the Aryan race.
It introduced Agharti as a source of power that Baron von Ungern-Sternberg sought for support in his battle against the Mongolian Communist leader Sukhe Batur, who was rallying his troops with stories of Shambhala.
Recall that
the Thule Society identified Agharti with Asgaard, the home of the
Aryan Norse gods.
In later years, Hitler continued the persecution of Anthroposophists, Theosophists, Freemasons, and Rosicrucians. Various scholars ascribe this policy to Hitler's wish to eliminate any occult rivals to his rule.
Steiner, for example,
had commissioned the German translation of Bulwer-Lytton's novel on
vril, The Coming Race, under the more explicit German title
Vril,
oder einer Menschheit der Zukunft (Vril, or the Race of the Future).
Moreover, since Steiner and Anthroposophy spoke of Shambhala as the
land of the future messiah and benevolence, it makes sense that the
Thule Society and Hitler would describe it in the opposite manner,
as a land of malevolence.
David-Neel had spent many years studying and traveling in
Tibet and she reported that adepts there had extraphysical powers
that allowed them to defy gravity and run at superhuman speed.
Consequently, fantasy about Tibet as the land of mysterious magical
powers grew wildly.
In it, he too described supernatural powers that Tibetan adepts possessed. In his second book, Finsternis ьber Tibet (Darkness over Tibet) (1937), he described his being led to an underground city in the "Valley of Mystery," where an "Occult Fraternity" channeled spiritual energy to gain power. Its ruler was the sorcerer Prince Mani Rimpotsche. Although this "Prince of Light" pretended to be a benevolent ruler, he actually was the head of a malevolent cult, a "Prince of Darkness."
Illion never mentioned Shambhala, but his popular works
would also have added weight to the Nazi occult assertion of
Shambhala as a land of malevolent magic.
Still, it seems
highly unlikely that official Nazi institutions, such as the Ahnenerbe, had Shambhala and Agharti on their agendas, even on their
hidden agendas. Let us examine the evidence that would support that
conclusion.
Although Hitler clearly
advocated the Thule Society's beliefs, he disavowed any connection
with established occult movements. He did not want to leave open the
possibility for rivalry to come from any quarter.
Several others were translated into German from English, such as My Life as an Explorer (1926) (Germ. Mein Leben als Entdecker, 1928) and A Conquest of Tibet (1934) (Germ. Eroberungszьge in Tibet, 1941).
Moreover, in Ossendowski und die Wahrheit (Ossendowski and the
Truth) (1925), Hedin debunked Ossendowski's claim that Mongolian
lamas had told him about Agharti. In it, he exposed Agharti as a
fantasy appropriated from Saint-Yves d'Alveidre's 1886 novel.
The clearest evidence
of his influence on the Ahnenerbe is the fact that, in 1943, its
Tibet Institut (Tibet Institute) was renamed the Sven Hedin Institut
fьr Innerasien und Expeditione (Sven Hedin Institute for Inner Asia
and Expeditions).
Nor did
he associate this knowledge with Shambhala or Agharti.
If that were the case, then since the Ahnenerbe unofficially was associated with the Thule Society, there would have been no need for it to send an expedition to Tibet to measure the skulls of Tibetans. They could have made these measurements in Germany.
Thus, the assertion that the Thule Society
sponsored annual journeys to Tibet from 1926 to 1942 also seems
highly questionable.
The unspoken implication is that the Russians found the corpses of the Tibetan-Agharti adepts who were assisting the Nazi cause and that, like Haushofer, they committed ritual suicide.
Let us examine the historical facts,
supplementing them with information gained from interviews with Kalmyks living in Munich Germany who had participated in many of the
events described below.
Eventually, however, those who remained in Russia were
accepted, especially since they were excellent soldiers. During the
Napoleanic Wars (1812-1815), for example, the Russian Army had a Kalmyk regiment. Over the next century,
Kalmyk soldiers were
prominent in divisions throughout the Czarist Army.
The Germans, in fact, took interest in the Kalmyks. As early as 1804, Benjamin Bergmann published a four volume work on their language and religion, entitled Nomadische Streifereien unter der Kalmьken in den Jahre 1802 und 1804 (Nomadic Migrations among the Kalmyks in the Year 1802 and 1804).
Sven Hedin passed through Kalmykia on one of his early
expeditions to Dzungaria and expressed great admiration for its
people.
A much
larger number left with Deniken, with the majority settling in
Belgrade Serbia and smaller numbers in Sofia Bulgaria and in Paris
and Lyon France. The Kalmyk refugees in Belgrade built a Buddhist
temple there in 1929. The Communists severely punished the Kalmyks
who remained behind, beheading ten thousand.
The Nazis wished to win the Kalmyks to the German side against the Russians and never sent any of those under their rule to concentration camps.
Thus,
Goebbels organized this nucleus into a committee to free the Kalmyks
from the Communist regime. In this connection, he helped them print
a Kalmyk language newspaper and used them to broadcast radio news in
Kalmyk directed toward Kalmykia.
A number of Belgrade Kalmyks also participated in the invasion, having joined the German army after the Nazi occupation of Serbia in April 1941. The people of Kalmykia greeted the German army with butter and milk, the traditional offering to welcome guests, as liberators from Stalin's oppressive rule. The Germans said they would dismantle the collectives and would divide and privatize the land.
They allowed the Kalmyks to
practice Buddhism once more. In response, the Kalmyks exhumed the
religious texts they had buried for safekeeping and built a
makeshift temporary temple. In November and December 1942, however,
the Red Army retook Kalmykia and destroyed everything the people had
rebuilt.
At the end of 1944, the Kalmyk cavalry
troops that survived in Russia, together with their families,
retreated with the German army. About two thousand went to Selesia
Poland and fifteen hundred to Zagreb Croatia, where they were
reorganized to fight against the partisans.
Although
several Kalmyk monks performed Tibetan Buddhist rituals in the
Kalmyk barracks and homes in Nazi-held territory, they prayed for
peace and the welfare of all beings. No Tibetans were among them and
they did not conduct "occult" ceremonies for a Nazi victory, as some
postwar occult accounts report.
Tito handed those left in
Serbia over to the Soviets, who promptly deported them to Siberia.
For example, a 1939
German expedition to Antarctica, led by Captain Alfred Ritscher,
mapped one-fifth of the continent, claimed it for Germany, and named
it
Neu-Schwabenland. Further Nazi expeditions to Antarctica and
naval activity in the South Atlantic continued until the end of the
war.
De Souza's student, O. C. Hugenin, popularized
his mentor's theory in From the Subterranean World to the Sky:
Flying Saucers (1957). R. W. Bernard, in his 1964 book The Hollow
Earth, had the flying saucers from Shambhala in Agharti under the
Earth come out through secret tunnels under the Himalayas in Tibet.
There they hid
their secret weapon, UFOs. Zьndel is also
infamous as the most outspoken proponent of the view that the
Holocaust never happened.
Although Raudrachakrin represents the deep awareness of
voidness with the subtlest level of mental activity and the stone
horse represents the subtlest level of energy-wind on which this
awareness rides, some have interpreted the image as a flying saucer
coming from Shambhala.
Distorting the original legend and interpolating ideas of fancy, they have incorporated the myth into their writings to serve their own agendas. It is an injustice to Buddhism to attribute these distortions to the original intent of the Kalachakra teachings.
Continuing research will disentangle more of the truth
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