|
New Dawn 109 July-August 2008 from NewDawnMagazine Website
Having just published his definitive work on the secret history of the world, called Mission des Juifs ("Mission of the Jews"), 2 he was anxious to deepen his understanding of the sacred languages which, he felt sure, concealed the ultimate mysteries.
Hebrew had already
revealed much to him; now it was time to tackle the even more
ancient language of Sanskrit, parent of all the Indo-European
tongues.
Born on December 25, 1838, he supposedly left India after the Mutiny of 1857 and set up in the French port of Le Havre as a bird-seller and professor of Oriental languages. His name may have been a pseudonym; he may have been an Afghan; some called him Prince.
But whatever his story,
the manuscripts now in the Library of the Sorbonne in Paris
show that Hardjji was a learned and punctilious teacher, and the
source of two still unsolved enigmas: the underground kingdom of
Agarttha, and its sacred language.
But his diligent pupil became more and more fascinated by Hardjji's mysterious hints, which began when he signed the very first lesson as,
Saint-Yves must have asked him what this "Great Agartthian School" was.
He might already have read in the books of the popular travel writer and historian Louis Jacolliot of an "Asgartha," supposedly a great city of the ancient Indian priest-kings, the "Brahmatras." 3
Does such a place still exist, then?
Apparently Hardjji gave him to believe so, and, what is
more, that it preserves a language and a script, known as "Vattan"
or "Vattanian," that are the primordial ones of mankind. For someone
in quest of the secret and sacred roots of language, the mention of
such things must have been unbearably exciting.
The guru obliged, writing it on the back of the lesson sheet and adding wryly:
Later he must have taught
Saint-Yves the Vattanian alphabet and the principles behind its 22
letter-forms, which Saint-Yves would correlate with the Hebrew
alphabet and with the zodiacal and planetary symbols.
With Hardjji's approval, he created a splendid manuscript in red and gold ink containing,
Did Hardjji know that Saint-Yves was writing another book, 'The Kingdom of Agarttha - A Journey into the Hollow Earth', under the influence of his Oriental studies?
It seems doubtful, but in
1886 the book was finished, typeset, and printed by his regular
publisher (Calmann Lévy).
This realm, Saint-Yves explains, was transferred underground and concealed from the surface-dwellers at the start of the Kali Yuga (the present dark age in the Hindu system of chronology), which he dates to about 3,200 BCE.
Agarttha has long enjoyed the benefits of a technology advanced far beyond our own, including gas lighting, railways, and air travel.
Its government is the ideal one of "Synarchy," which the surface races have lost ever since the schism that broke the Universal Empire in the fourth millennium BCE, and which Moses, 'Jesus', and Saint-Yves strove to restore. (This was the theme of Mission des Juifs.)
Now and then Agarttha sends emissaries to the upper world, of which it has a perfect knowledge. Not only the latest discoveries of modern man, but the whole wisdom of the ages is enshrined in its libraries, engraved on stone in Vattanian characters.
Among its secrets are those of the true relationship of body to soul, and the means to keep departed souls in communication with the living.
When our world adopts Synarchical government, the time will be ripe for Agarttha to reveal itself, to our great spiritual and practical advantage.
In order to speed this process, Saint-Yves includes in the book open letters to,
...inviting them to join
in the great project.
Dedicating the book to the Sovereign Pontiff and signing it with his own name in Vattanian characters (below image - just as Hardjji had written it out for him), he expatiates on how astounded this august dignitary will be to read the work, wondering how human eyes could have penetrated the innermost sanctuaries of his realm.
"To the Sovereign
Pontiff who wears the
Saint-Yves explains that
he is a "spontaneous initiate," bound by no oath of secrecy, and
that once the Brahatmah gets over the shock, he will admit the
wisdom of what Saint-Yves has dared to reveal.
Already in his first book, Clefs de l'Orient (1877), he was writing with the confidence of an eyewitness of the psychic phenomena accompanying birth, death, and the relation between the sexes. 5
In the present work he
seems to have extended his psychic vision, to say the least, and one
can glean from here and there an idea of his methods.
Thirdly, there is a snippet of occult gossip in a conversation with Saint-Yves recorded on August 16, 1896, by a psychical researcher, Alfred Erny: 5
Saint-Yves presumably possessed the secret of this "somnambulistic" faculty, and used it to gather the information he presents in this book.
But did he gather it, as he claims, from spying on a physical Agarttha beneath the surface of the earth? Or was it the result of his own projected fantasies or hallucinations?
Or, again, did it come from some non-physical location or state which can be accessed under certain conditions, but which then merely supports the psyche's own subjective expectations and prejudices?
We will return to these
questions at the end.
Decades later, it turned out that the printer, Lahure, had secreted another copy. 7
The late Jean Saunier,
biographer and chief authority on Saint-Yves, used this as the basis
for the complete French edition of 1981, now translated into
English.
For instance, he mentions Agarttha and names its three rulers in his epic poem of 1890, Jeanne d'Arc victorieuse.
In his conversations with Erny in 1896, he stated outright that there exists a secret "Superior University" with a "High Priest" who is currently an Ethiopian, and other details just as they appear in this book.
Finally, he mentions Agarttha in veiled terms in L'Archéomètre, the major work of his last years.
But in 1922, a Polish "scientist" named Ferdinand Ossendowski (1876-1945) published a sensational travel and adventure book. 8
It told of his flight through Central Asia in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.
While in Mongolia, he heard tell,
...and many other things that corroborate Saint-Yves.
The book ended on a dramatic note of prophecy from one of Ossendowski's informants:
The prophecy was attributed to the King of the World when he appeared before the lamas in 1890.
The King had then
predicted that there would be 50 years of strife and misery, 71
years of happiness under three great kingdoms, then an 18-year war,
before the appearance of the Agarthians. 9
At first Ossendowski denied this indignantly.
When he was introduced to the esotericist René Guénon (1886-1951), he said that if it were not for the evidence of the daily journal he had kept, and of certain objects he had brought back, he would have thought that he had dreamed parts of this story, adding:
Back in 1908, the young Guénon had taken part in automatic writing séances in which Agartthian matters had come up, though whether through the questioners or the channeled entity is now unclear. 11
Now his interest was
rekindled, and in 1925 he wrote about the striking parallels between
'Saint-Yves' Agarttha' and the 'Agharti of Ossendowki',
whose sincerity, according to Guénon, there was no reason to doubt.
12
In his most controversial book, Le Roi du Monde (The King of the World), he announced:
Unfortunately Guénon does
not support his claim to privileged access by telling us what these
sources are, nor what degree of similitude is meant by "stories of
this kind."
So Guénon at the very least did not deny a geographical Agarttha.
To his way of thinking,
if one were found to exist beneath the surface of the earth, it
would only corroborate the superior reality of the symbolic one.
One of the latter, now very old, had been the head lama of a monastery at the time of Ossendowski's visit there.
He testified that the latter's stories of the King of the World and of Agarttha bore no relation to any authentic legend or doctrine whatsoever, and that Ossendowski's command of the Mongolian language had not been nearly sufficient to understand what he claimed to have heard.
Pallis's Hindu friends, similarly, disclaimed any Sanskrit source for Agarttha.
The inevitable conclusion
was that the credulous Guénon had been misled by Saint-Yves'
fantasy, and that promoting belief in Agarttha in Le Roi
du Monde had been a foolish mistake.
He confessed to this hard-boiled audience that Beasts, Men and Gods was not "scientific" but "exclusively a literary work," and stated the same in a letter to the Royal Geographical Society. 16
Never mind:
Often confused or
contrasted with
Shambhala, the spiritual city of
Tibetan Buddhism, it became a recurrent theme of popular occult
writers. 17
Louis Jacolliot was led to place it in the past, as the ancient Brahmanic capital.
For Hardjji Scharipf it
was a living initiatic school with its own secret script. Until a
reputable scholar comes forward with data on the myth of Agarttha,
and especially on the Vattanian alphabet, 18 my
working hypothesis is that these were part of a mythology belonging
to a restricted and obscure Indian school, which has only surfaced
to Western notice on these two occasions.
He therefore decided to use his gift for astral travel to explore Agarttha further, and was rewarded by visions of an underground utopia and its Sovereign Pontiff, the spiritual Lord of the World.
What is the source, and the ontological status, of such visions...?
But the incidental circumstances of such a place vary, according to the visitor's own cultural conditioning and expectations.
Some find themselves, for example, in what they believe to be the Alexandrian Library, or in Atlantis, i.e., a place of the past. To others, it seems current and contemporary, though preferably in an inaccessible location like the Himalayas.
The décor is a trivial matter, of course, in comparison to the philosophical truths to be discovered there, but the glamour of it sometimes overwhelms the traveler.
Then his attention fixates on irrelevant details, and an inflated sense of self-importance may result.
Thus Saint-Yves,
convinced that he has penetrated to the realm of the world's
spiritual ruler, writes about four-eyed tortoises, two-tongued men,
levitating yogis, and ends up addressing pompous letters to Queen,
Emperor, and Pope.
The result is a classic case of the occupational hazard of occultists:
Yet there is a grandeur to this book.
Its vivid and elegant prose lift it far above the tedious wordiness of visionary and channeled writing.
In sheer weirdness of imagination it rivals the fantasy fiction of H.P. Lovecraft or Jorge Luis Borges, while in deadpan seriousness and titanic self-confidence it compares to prophetic works like the Book of Ezekiel or the various Apocalypses.
And it reminds us that
the earth is a very strange place, with many unexplored corners,
many enigmas, and many surprises in store for us surface-dwellers.
Footnotes
|
