“The entrances to the Interior Earth are to be found at the poles, as well as in the Antarctic Oases and possibly on the top of this mountain. They can be reached by travelling through the deep waters which flow beneath the ices. “In this Interior Earth are the Cities of Agharti, Shambhalla and the Caesars, inhabited by the immortal Siddhas. There the Golden Age still exists. The Discs of Light, covered in orichalcum, fly out from there. They carried our guide off to a place of safety. It is the invulnerable Paradise which our people have rediscovered, where the science of resurrection and eternal love is guarded. It is the starting point of the journey to our star.”
– NOS: Book of the Resurrection One of the world’s oldest legends tells of a vast underground network of tunnels and passageways connecting the great continents of the earth to a subterranean kingdom somewhere beneath the heart of Asia. “Among the Mongolian tribes of Inner Mongolia,” wrote the British explorer T. Wilkins, “there are traditions about tunnels and subterranean worlds which sound as fantastic as anything in modern novels. One legend – if it be that – says that the tunnels lead to a subterranean world of Antediluvian descent somewhere in a recess of Afghanistan, or in the region of the Hindu Kush. It is Shangri-la where science and the arts, never threatened by world wars, develop peacefully, among a race of vast knowledge. It is even given a name: Agharti.”
According to Theosophical tradition, the last remnants of a super-civilization which once flourished in what is now the Gobi fled below ground into two underground cities known respectively as Shambhalla and Agharti. Drawing upon the popular concepts of the Theosophists, the writings of 19th century occultists, and authentic Tibetan references to Agharti/Shamballah, some researchers place these cities not in super-bunkers hewn beneath the Himalayas, but actually inside a hollow Earth.
In their book The Morning of the Magicians, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier state:
“This idea of a hollow Earth is connected with a tradition which is to be found everywhere throughout the ages. The most ancient religious texts speak of a separate world situated underneath the Earth’s crust which was supposed to be the dwelling-place of departed spirits. When Gilgamesh, the legendary hero of the ancient Sumerian and Babylonian epics, went to visit his ancestor Utnapishtim, he descended into the bowels of the Earth; and it was there that Orpheus went to seek the soul of Euridice.
Ulysses, having reached the furthermost boundaries of the Western world, offered a sacrifice so that the spirits of the Ancients would rise up from the depths of the Earth and give him advice. Pluto was said to reign over the underworld and over the spirits of the dead. The souls of the damned went to live in caverns beneath the Earth. Venus, in some Germanic legends, was banished to the bowels of the Earth.
Dante situated his Inferno among the lowest circles. In European folk-lor! e drag ons have their habitat underground, and the Japanese believe that deep down underneath their island dwells a monster whose stirrings are the cause of earthquakes.” Search for the Inner Earth The Tibetan word ‘Agharti’ is said by some writers to mean ‘the underground kingdom placed at the centre of the Earth, where the king of the world reigns.’ In the book The Mysterious Unknown, the French journalist Robert Charroux says: “Agharti is a mysterious subterranean kingdom that is said to lie under the Himalayas and where all the Great Initiators and the Masters of the World in the present cycle are still living. Agharti is an initiatory centre…
” The greatest exponent of the subterranean kingdom of Agharti was Dr Ferdinand Ossendowski (1876-1945), a Polish academic, explorer and writer. In 1922 Ossendowski published his best selling work Beasts, Men and Gods, a chronicle of his adventures in Central Asia. As Ossendowski tells it, during his adventures in Asia he encountered the tradition of “Agharti”, a subterranean realm with millions of inhabitants ruled over by the mysterious ‘King of the World. Ossendowski says in his book: “All the people there are protected against Evil and crimes do not exist within its bournes.
Science has there developed calmly and nothing is threatened with destruction. The subterranean people have reached the highest knowledge. Now it is a large kingdom, millions of men, with ‘The King of the World’ as their ruler.
He knows all the forces of the world and reads all the souls of humankind and the great book of their destiny.” A Prophecy for this Century? The final chapter of Beasts, Men and Gods contains a quite remarkable prophecy given by the King of the World. Ossendowski claimed that it was conveyed to him by the Hutuktu of Narabanchi in 1921. According to the Lama the King of the World made the following pronouncement ‘thirty years ago’, which corresponds to 1890: More and more the people will forget their souls and care about their bodies. The greatest sin and corruption will reign on this earth. People will become as ferocious animals, thirsting for the blood and death of their brothers.
The ‘Crescent’ will grow dim and its followers will descend into beggary and ceaseless war. Its conquerors will be stricken by the sun but will not progress upward and twice they will be visited with the heaviest misfortune, which will end in insult before the eye of the other peoples. The crowns of kings, great and small, will fall…one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight….There will be a terrible battle among all the peoples.
The seas will become red…the earth and the bottom of the seas will be strewn with bones…kingdoms will be scattered…whole peoples will die…hunger, disease, crimes unknown to the law, never before seen in the world. “The enemies of God and of the Divine Spirit in man will come. Those who take the hand of another shall also perish. The forgotten and pursued shall rise and hold the attention of the whole world. There will be fogs and storms. Bare mountains shall suddenly be covered with forests. Earthquakes will come…Millions will change the fetters of slavery and humiliation for hunger, disease and death. The ancient roads will be covered with crowds wandering from one place to another.
The greatest and most beautiful cities shall perish in fire…one, two, three…Father shall rise against son, brother against brother and mother against daughter….Vice, crime and the destruction of body and soul shall follow….Families shall be scattered….Truth and love shall disappear…..From ten thousand men one shall remain; he shall be nude and mad and without force and the knowledge to build him a house and find his food….He will howl as the raging wolf, devour dead bodies, bite his own f! lesh and challenge God to fight….
All the earth will be emptied. God will turn away from it and over it there will be only night and death. “Then I shall send a people, now unknown, which shall tear out the weeds of madness and vice with a strong hand and will lead those who still remain faithful to the spirit of man in the fight against Evil. They will found a new life on the earth purified by the death of nations. In the fiftieth year only three great kingdoms will appear, which will exist happily seventy-one years. Afterwards there will be eighteen years of war and destruction. Then the peoples of Agharti will come up from their subterranean caverns to the surface of the earth.
Immediately following this ‘prophecy’ Ossendowski writes: “Afterwards, as I travelled farther through Eastern Mongolia and to Peking, I often thought: ‘And what if…? What if whole peoples of different colours, faiths and tribes should begin their migration toward the West?…. After again quoting the Tibetan Lama, Ossendowski ends his book: “Karma may have opened a new page of history! And what if the King of the World be with them? But this greatest Mystery of Mysteries keeps its own deep silence.”
Perhaps we should leave the last word on ‘Agharti’ to an associate of Ossendowski, the renowned French esotericist Rene Guenon: “Now, should its placement in a definite region be regarded as literally true, or only as symbolic, or is it both at the same time? To this question we simply reply that, for us, the geographical facts themselves and also the historical facts have, like all others, a symbolic value; which moreover evidently does not remove any of their own reality in so far as they are facts, but which confers on them, beyond this immediate reality, a superior significance.”
Almost as a belated P.S. we may add the admonition of Guenon’s secretary Whitall Perry, “nothing but frustration awaits the unwary seeker, who would do well to ponder in advance the significance of the word Agharti, for it purportedly comes from a Sanskritic root meaning ungraspable.”