The Lord of the World

It's hard to think of an "occult" topic, other than Atlantis or "flying saucers" or the Bermuda Triangle, that has been the subject of more irresponsible writing and spurious research than has the vexed subject of Agartha.

For obscure but seemingly inborn psychological reasons, the idea of a sort of hidden pope coordinating all the secret activities of the world from an underground kingdom in the vastness of the Himalayas has a recurring glamour.

Starting with a 19th century traveller and romancer named Louis Jacolliot, the line of such superficial commentary slides to a reductio ad absurdum in the fantasies of "pop" mystic Robert Charroux: "There are four entrances to Agartha: one between the paws of the sphinx at Gizeh, another on the Mont-Saint Michel, a third..."

         Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Even so deadly serious a purveyor of metaphysic wisdom as Helena Blavatsky waxes faintly ridiculous in her solemn revelations of supposed huddles with spooky "Eastern masters" such as Koot Hoomi of the "Great White Lodge." Ditto for her Theosophical Society followers, Annie Besant and Alice Bailey, together with an unknown legion of spin-offs among today's vendors of what has irreverently been called "kharma cola."

            Annie Besant

What is surprising, however, in view of this prolonged flood of fluff, is that there have been a number of sober and closely reasoned explorations of the curious lore, both ancient and modern, that has given rise to the Agartha mythos. By far the most important of these is "Le Roi du Monde," a 1927 study by the great French student of symbolism and ancient Aryan religions, Rene Guenon.

Guenon is not what we today might call a "user friendly" writer. All of his books are as short on colour and personalising touches as they are marked by rigorous economy and reduction to essentials. Because of this "density," they demand a rather high involvement by the reader, and fortunately the English edition of The Lord of the World has been graced with a fluent translation that is far superior to the pedestrian rendering of his magnum opus, The Reign of Quantity.

               Rene Guenon

An example of the care that has gone into this volume may be seen in the presentation of its title. Although the literal meaning of "Roi" is "king" it was felt that "lord" would better evoke the author's idea of a simultaneous spiritual and temporal authority.

For some reason, the Agartha theme has been highly stimulating to the Gallic imagination. Guenon's book takes as its starting point the two earlier works: Mission de l'Inde by a certain Saint Yves d'Alveydre, and the better known Beasts, Men and Gods, by a French academician and political writer of this century, Ferdinand Ossendowski.

Guenon always seemed able to draw upon vast - presumably initiatic - sources of profound information into the sundry arcane topics to which he turned his attentions. He appears to have set out here to amplify Saint Yves's brief early-day account, and to clarify Ossendowski's often rather superficial observations.

Both men were travellers recounting what they had been told about a mysterious centre of power reputed to exist somewhere among the deserts and mountains of Central Asia. Saint Yves concluded that this place had inherited the authority of the universal lawgiver, Manu, a "cosmic intelligence that reflects pure spiritual light and formulates the law ("Dharma") appropriate to the conditions of our world and our cycle of existence," as Guenon puts it.

However, the Lord of the World as such is not "Manu," but rather a sort of prime minister who mediates "Dharma" into the affairs of mankind. His title, Guenon informs us, is Brahmatma, "sustainer of souls in the spirit of God." Or he also may be known as Chakravarti, which in Hindi signifies "He who makes the wheel turn." As Ossendowski was told by a lama:

"The Lord of the World is in touch with the thoughts of all those who direct the destiny of mankind... He knows their intentions and their ideas. If these are pleasing to God, the Lord of the World favours them with his invisible aid. But if they are displeasing to God, He puts a check on their activities."

As for Agartha, it is a locus usually referred to as underground, or something quite specifically located in a vast network of caves. This very likely is metaphorical, since the name Agartha itself means "inaccessible" or "inviolable."

However, Ossendowski accepts the literal truth of the subterranean tradition. He reports that "a Soyot from near the Lake of Nogan Kul showed me the smoking gate that serves as the entrance," but admits elsewhere that "no one knows where this place is. One says Afghanistan, others India."

Agartha then, strictly speaking, would represent more of a condition of this supreme centre on earth than its actual location. Traditionally, the centre withdrew from accessibility about six thousand years ago, with the onset of the degenerate era of the Kali-Yuga. With this topic, Guenon begins his extraordinary symbological odyssey, taking up where the earlier writers leave off.

Guenon was profoundly steeped in the ancient Aryan literature of the Vendanta, one of whose chief tenants is that of the four ages of Yugas. These are: Krita-Yuga, Age of Bronze, and Kali-Yuga, the Age of Iron, or Dark Age.

The last terminal era of smoke, ruin and blood is under domination of the death goddess Kali, and it is marked by the final degradation and dissolution of humanity. The Hindu sages believe that the world is now approaching the very abyss of the Kali-Yuga. One of the major themes of Guenon's many books is to chart exactly how this process is coming to its dire fruition, chiefly through the spread of philosophical materialism and maniacal enshrinements of quantity over quality via modern science, technology and industry.

Only with the catastrophic end of this epoch, fast approaching in the view of Guenon, can the great cycle begin anew and Agartha and its Lord of the World reappear before mankind.

The Agartha story would remain an interesting footnote to Asian folklore were it not that the legend has so many unexpected points of contact with the chief arcana of the Western mystery tradition. It is these that Guenon, with his unique combination of immense erudition and gemlike conciseness, has brilliantly summarised within this surprisingly modest compass.

Most obvious, of course, would be the ageless theme of "inner earth" beings. This has exercised human imaginings from Orpheus in Hades through the medieval alchemists and Rosicrucians to modern enthusiasts of the "hollow earth" ideas of Richard Shaver and Raymond Bernard. The Lord of the World represents the obvious epitome, and quite possibly the real point of origin, for these.

Guenon's list of other major themes tied in one way or another to Agartha is long: the Spear of Longinus and the Holy Grail - the Arthurian legends - Monsalvat pilgrimage centre - the "Great Beast 666" - the Knights Templar - Freemasonry - Tibetan lore - the mysterious land of Tula or Thule, which was so bizarrely commemorated in the enigmatic Thule Gesellschaft (Thule Society) that gave rise to the National Socialist movement in Germany.

Indeed, the fateful swastika symbol itself, we are told, is intimately connected to the tradition as the virtual emblem of the Lord of the World:

"... This centre constitutes the fixed point known symbologically to all traditions as the "pole" or axis around which the world rotates. This combination is normally depicted as a wheel in Celtic, Chaldean, and Hindu traditions. Such is the true significance of the swastika, seen world-wide, from the Far East to the Far West, which is intrinsically the "sign of the Pole."

Guenon finds Manu and his deputy the Lord of the World reflected in the Shekinah and Metatron of Kabbalistic mysticism, the latter being similarly styled "Prince of the World," and the "celestial Pole."

However, it is the shadowy figure of Melchizedek that both connects the Judeo-Christian tradition with Agartha, and brings Guenon's work right up to the present in relation to one of today's most controversial phenomena of popular psychology.

Melchizedek, the supposed ancient king of what is now Jerusalem, appears a number of times in the Old and New Testaments.

Guenon writes:

"Melchizedek, or more precisely Melki-Tsedeq, is none other than the title used by Judeo-Christian tradition to denote the function of the "Lord of the World." We have hesitated before publishing this information which explains one of the most enigmatic passages of the Hebrew Bible, but, having decided to treat the issue of the Lord of the World, concluded it could hardly he passed over in silence..."

Melki-Tsedeq is thus both king and priest. His name means "king of justice" and he is also king of Salem, that is of "Peace," so again we find "Justice" and "Peace" the fundamental attributes pertaining to the "Lord of the World."

In the 1940's, ethereal "foo fighters" reportedly dogged Allied aircraft over Germany. An obscure aviator called, Kenneth Arnold galvanised a curiously receptive world media corps, and coined an unfortunate phrase, with his story of strange aircraft "like flying saucers" in the skies near Seattle, Washington.

Since that time, the unidentified flying object phenomenon has see-sawed in the public consciousness, with periodic waves of public sightings followed by stony denials from government and intense ridicule from a small cadre on the periphery of the scientific community. Most of these latter scoffers appear not to be true working scientists, but mainly journalists with strong ties to the aerospace industry and to government-controlled space programs.

The upshot of this often ferocious debunking process has been that only a few genuine scientific researchers have had the hardihood to delve into the extremely "messy" UFO business. One of the more perceptive of those who have is the French-born mathematician and computer researcher Jacques Vallee.

After a series of books examining the UFO phenomenon from a mechanistic perspective, Vallee's thinking, like that of virtually all serious UFO students, appears to have evolved in the direction of pondering less the troubled reality of the "saucers" and more the effect that their appearances - and allied cultism - seem to be having on the public.

In his study, called Messengers of Deception, Vallee makes telling observations on how damaging the long siege of UFO hijinks has been to the public's formerly unquestioning faith in rationalism and its self-chosen priesthood, the scientific community.

There is much independent evidence that something like this is happening, and on a far broader scale than Marilyn Ferguson has examined the spectrum of opinion-molding esoteric cultism in the Western World. Her work indicates a broad decline in popular regard for the basic positivist-rationalist credo.

The implications of this for the present "pluto-technocratic" world order are serious indeed. But more to our purposes is what Ferguson reveals (and does not reveal) about the comparatively small number of guiding personalities at the top of the far-flung "Aquarian" pyramid. We are left wondering - From whom do they get their marching orders?

For Vallee, however, this is a side issue. The greater part of his unusual book if taken up with a subject that is clearly of huge perplexity to the author, because he found it interwoven with UFO matters worldwide. Eventually, it even began involving itself in his own life.

It is both a cult phenomenon, expressed in a maze of grouplets of unstable people that come and go, and beyond this, a more elusive and seemingly international coordinating centre of some kind. Its name, Vallee tells us, is the Order of Melchizedek.

His research reveals earlier Melchizedek traces in the now obsolete Roman Catholic Tridentine Mass, in the senior priesthood of the Mormon Church, and in rituals of certain elite sects of Freemasons. Vallee is let to speculate on the connections, if any.

Rene Guenon was mainly known in his day as a student of Oriental religions and of traditional philosophies. However, future readers will come to value still more his incredibly deep insights into the cosmic art of symbolism. In his Apercu sur l'Initiation, Guenon has written:

"The true basis of symbolism is, as we have said, the correspondence linking together all orders of reality, binding them one to the other, and consequently extending from the natural order as a whole to the supernatural order. By virtue of this correspondence, the whole of Nature is but a symbol."

Vallee shows an unconscious drift in this same direction that also is visible in the work of many other scientists now in this day of the "Tao of Physics" when a researcher like Murray Gell-Mann can win a Nobel Prize for applying concepts like "charm" to the increasingly bewildering vagaries of so-called subatomic particles.

Vallee's major field is computer information theory, and by the end of Messengers of Deception, he concludes that what the UFO phenomenon and its allied Melchizedekian sects really signify is, not visits by interplanetary astronauts, but a maddeningly subtle sort of "reality game" that is being played from somewhere unknown as a "control system" (his words) over the attitudes of large groups of diverse people.

The ultimate question, Vallee opines, comes down to the real nature of energy and information:

"I have always been struck...by the fact that energy and information are one and the same thing under two different aspects. Our physics professors teach us this; yet they never draw the consequences..."

If energy and information are related, why do we only have one physics, the physics of energy? Where is the physics of information? Is the old theory of Magic relevant here? Are the writings of Paracelsus with his concept of "signatures," an important source of information?

His implied answer: Yes.

To all of which, Guenon probably would have given one of those inimitable Gallic shrugs as if to say "what has taken you so long?," then parenthetically suggesting the more precise word symbolism for Vallee's information.

Practically everyone who has looked into the role of clandestine control groups behind the scenes of everyday political and social "reality" eventually has arrived at the question: Is there some central authority above the diverse Trilateralists, Zionists, Freemasons, KGB/CIAS, central banks, multinational cartels, and other furtive power blocs at work shaping our world?

Is there, to address the issue raised by this book, a living, breathing Lord of the World? Ferdinand Ossendowski had no doubt of it, recounting reports that the Brahmatma had visited Buddhist festivals in Siam and India in recent times, displaying the emblem of a golden apple surmounted by a lamb.

Unfortunately, Guenon does not categorically answer this key question himself. He appears to wish to leave us with the more implicit image of the Lord of the World as a sort of vast, panhistorical construct of diverse symbol textures.

But perhaps, as Jacques Vallee's trend of thought would suggest, there really might be some place in the world at which idea and energy inter-convert. That may be as close as we in this troubled era, with our rigidly linear mental habits, can approach to the ramparts of long-hidden Agartha.

From Arctogaia magazine 

"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."

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-civilisation 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."

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."

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."