There has never been a satisfactory answer to what the Sphinx actually is or was. Anyone who goes to Giza can see for himself or herself that there is something ‘wrong’ with the Sphinx. It only takes an instant. The body is gigantic and the head is just a pimple. The Egyptians never did anything like that, they were always meticulous about proportions in their art. So how is it that we have this monster with a tiny head sitting there in the sand, then?
There are several other things wrong with the Sphinx. They are:
The back is flat. Who ever saw a lion with a flat back, no big chest, and no mane?
The Sphinx is sitting in a deep hole in the ground. Why is that? Why is it not sitting somewhere high up so that it can show off?
There is a ruined temple right in front of the Sphinx, with a wall practically up against its nose, and no door in that wall. Why obstruct the view of the Sphinx from the front like that? And if the temple was for worshipping the Sphinx, why is there no access from the temple to the Sphinx, so that you can’t even get to it?
The pit in which the Sphinx sits seems to be deeply eroded, as if by flows of water. What caused all that? It looks as if water has poured down the sides. On the other hand, there are no such vertical erosion patterns on the Sphinx itself, which instead has clear horizontal erosion patterns. How can these two different patterns at right angles to each other be reconciled? And what could possibly have caused either of them?
None of this makes any sense if you think about it. Of course, many people don’t think. They just gawp and move on, their brains in neutral.
But when my wife Olivia and I first saw the Sphinx many years ago, we just stood there in astonishment and both agreed that the whole thing was wrong, wrong, wrong.
So now after many years of work, we think we have found some answers. Naturally, any new idea about anything that ‘everybody knows’ makes (1) conventionally thinking people enraged, and (2) makes anti-establishment people delighted. No prizes for guessing which side I’m on.
Let me first declare my position on what has become something of an entrenched notion amongst my fellow anti-Establishmentarians. I do not believe that the Sphinx is 12,500 years old. Nor do I believe in ‘ancient rain’.
I do believe that the Sphinx is older than conventionally believed. But I do not believe it is thousands of years older, or anything of that kind.
I do believe there is water erosion at the Sphinx site, but I do not believe it had anything to do with ‘ancient rain’, nor do I believe there was anything there to be eroded at the time any ‘ancient rain’ fell.
So what is the answer, then?
Sphinx Island & Moat
The water of the Nile in those days, at the time of inundation once a year (which no longer happens because of the Aswan dam), came right up to the edge of the Sphinx Temple, where there are even quays in front. So what I believe happened was that the water of the Nile was let into the Sphinx Pit, which I now call the Sphinx Moat, by some simple water-raising devices, led along the narrow channel between the Sphinx Temple and the Valley Temple (the two structures in front of the Sphinx), and its flow was controlled by a series of sluices and water gates. The signs of these sluices and gates, with their many bolt holes and so forth, no longer exist, because new stones and cement have been laid over them. But not to worry! I took plenty of photographs of them before they disappeared, and those are all reproduced in our book. Everyone can then see it all very clearly. The reason why the temple wall is in front of the Sphinx is to act as the fourth barrier to the water. The reason why there is no door in the wall is that it would have let the water out.
The horizontal erosion on the side of the Sphinx (where it is not covered by ‘restoration stones’) is because the Sphinx was sitting in the middle of a moat filled with water. The vertical erosion on the sides of the pit, especially the south side, is because of the continual dredging of the Moat due to the windblown sand accumulating there. Every time the Moat was dredged, water poured down in torrents onto the sides, leading to vertical erosion, accentuated by the natural cavities in the limestone bedrock.
So I think the Sphinx was, amongst other things, an island!
This immediately solves the puzzle of the evidence recorded by the fifth century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, who said that King Cheops let water in from the Nile to surround an island at Giza. Here it is!
Whose Head is on the Sphinx?
So we have got an island. Now what do we do with it? And why is King Cheops’s head the size of a pimple on the front of this large flat-backed lion, surrounded by water? What’s going on?
But wait! Who says that is King Cheops’s head? Some say it is King Chephren’s head, but if you have ever seen Chephren’s head on that huge statue in the Cairo Museum, you know they look nothing alike at all, since Chephren has a long face and the Sphinx has a round face, just for starters, and there’s plenty else that’s not the same too.
At this point of my wonderings, I began to feel really uncomfortable. I generally know when something doesn’t fit. I may not know what does fit, but I more often know what does not.
And that face is neither Cheops (not that we know what he really looked like anyway, as the only likeness of him that survives is a three inch-high ivory statuette, which could be your Uncle Tony or even your Auntie Madge for that matter) nor old Chephren Long-Face. So who is it?
It was at this point that I discovered one of those forgotten sources which keep falling into my lap, and in this case it was an article written by a German archaeologist named Ludwig Borchardt long before the Sphinx was excavated, when only its head and neck were sticking above the sand. Borchardt used to go and stand there and look at it. In those days, you could look the Sphinx in the eye and he wouldn’t even flinch, in fact he smiled back. Nowadays, he’s very stuck up, with his head high above us if we stand at his feet, so you can’t make out the details of his head all that well.
Borchardt got to thinking. He noticed that the Sphinx was wearing eye-paint stripes (no comment, pharaohs have the right to do what they like as consenting adults in the privacy of their own Sphinx Pits), and he knew that those were not worn in the period known as the Old Kingdom, when Cheops and Chephren lived. He noticed the details of the stripe patterns in the strange headdress worn by the Sphinx. The face had to be that of a pharaoh, since this headdress was the sacred religious headdress of the pharaoh known as a nemes. But Borchardt, who was head of the German Institute at Cairo and therefore knew a thing or two, realised that those stripe patterns were also not used in the Old Kingdom.
He started to do some research on nemes headdresses, and he discovered that those particular stripe patterns were only used in the Middle Kingdom period, hundreds of years later than Cheops and Chephren. He wrote this all up in technical form and published it in a distinguished scholarly periodical (in German of course, but I have translated it and it appears as an appendix to our book), and concluded that the Sphinx had been carved in the Middle Kingdom Period, not in the Old Kingdom period.
But everybody laughed at poor old Borchardt. Who ever heard of such a thing? The Middle Kingdom! Borchardt must have gone crazy! And then the Sphinx was excavated in 1926, and finally completely excavated in 1936, and it was perfectly clear to everyone that the Sphinx was much older than the Middle Kingdom. But everybody forgot that Borchardt had never seen the Sphinx’s body at the time he wrote the article, he was only talking about the head.
So I have reopened the case and concluded that the head was recarved in the Middle Kingdom, just as Borchardt said, and what is more, I believe I can even identify precisely which pharaoh’s face that is. Of course, to find that out, you really need to see the book.
However, it is all very well identifying the face on the Sphinx. Some people might be satisfied just doing that. But no, it’s like watching a film noir without knowing the ending. Even if you know whodunnit, you still want to know the motive.
“Everybody knows” Herd Mentality
So what was the Sphinx before it had that guy’s face carved on it? Well, to figure that one out you have to try to figure out what the Sphinx was before that pharaoh got his chisels on it. This draws one’s attention to the flat back. “Everybody knows” that the Sphinx has the body of a lion. As soon as I hear that “everybody knows” something, I know that it must be wrong. I have a pathologically anti-herd mentality. All you have to do is tell me “everybody knows” something, and I will instantly disbelieve it. That is because crowds are always wrong. Crowds have about as much sense as a mollusc.
I started from the premise that the Sphinx was not a lion at all. Millions of people see it every year, from all over the world, and they all “know” that it is a lion. So that means that it cannot possibly be one. They “know” it is a lion because they have been told that it is a lion. The Germans were told that Hitler was their saviour and so they “knew” it, the Russians all “knew” that Stalin was like a gentle father, who would look after them. Yes, everybody, or at least everybody they knew, “knew” these things. And people also all once “knew” that the Earth was flat, and that the Sun went round the Earth. Those things were all “known.” But were they true?
If it wasn’t a lion, what was it? Well, it had to be an animal with a straight back, with no huge chest, and no mane. It also had to be an animal that crouched like that with its legs stuck out in front of it. (There is no use looking too closely at the paws, as they are completely covered in restoration stones, and have been shaped to look like “what everybody knows,” in order to re-confirm the consensus falsehood which everybody has agreed to believe in.)
Anubis – Guardian of the Necropolis
The Sphinx is crouching there at the entrance to the Necropolis like a guardian. Well, there it is! It is a guard dog! The ancient Egyptians had a god called Anubis, who was a crouching wild dog, generally referred to as a jackal (although strictly speaking there were no jackals in Egypt, and Anubis was really a wild dog species which is now extinct). Anubis was the guardian of the Necropolis, the guardian of the dead, and he was often depicted in the precise position of the Sphinx – and famously in a statue found in the Tomb of Tutankhamun as well – so that his image is familiar to almost anyone who has ever had an interest in ancient Egypt.
In Figure 1 I show the drawing I commissioned which shows how the recarved head of the Sphinx was carved out of the neck stump which remained on the Sphinx after the original statue was mutilated by the rampaging mobs who smashed up everything they could on the Giza Plateau during the period of chaos known as the First Intermediate Period, between 2200 and 2000 BCE.
It was the easiest thing in the world to knock the ears and nose off the Sphinx when the Sphinx was Anubis. You couldn’t put them back because the Sphinx was carved out of the solid bedrock, and the pieces must have been smashed to bits anyway. So the later exhibitionist pharaoh could even tell himself he was doing a pious act and ‘restoring’ the statue by flaunting himself, just as, say, Madonna helps the world, doesn’t she? Tom Cruise is also saving the world, remember? Yes, we all know that all celebrities are getting their pictures in the papers only for noble causes, and it has nothing to do with wanting people to look at them, or with such a low thing as vanity.
Speaking of movie stars, the Sphinx is now so botoxed and has had so much plastic surgery from crazy ‘restoration’ (which is all shown in great detail in our book) that he could easily get a lead part in a blockbuster. But his ‘nose job’ didn’t go so well, as it is still missing. It was hacked off in the 13th century by a fanatical imam named Sheikh Mohammed, who wished to purge Egypt of non-Islamic influences. He got as far as the nose, at least. (The story that the nose was shot off by Napoleon’s soldiers is false.)
So now we have a crouching Anubis as an island, surrounded by a little lake. And at last we have something which students of the ancient texts can suddenly recognise. For the most ancient surviving Egyptian texts, known as the Pyramid Texts, often speak of a sacred place associated with the Giza Necropolis called Jackal Lake. And here it is!
Now we are getting somewhere. It is all beginning to make sense. In our book we gather together the many ancient texts which refer to Anubis guarding the Necropolis, situated at Giza, being beside a causeway, and being very large. We also reproduce Fourth Dynasty Giza tomb reliefs showing a giant Anubis, which may be intended as actual depictions of the Sphinx.
Most people who are intrigued by Egyptian mysteries have been wondering for a long time whether there might be any secret chamber beneath the Sphinx. I have crawled around inside the Sphinx, and I describe the tunnel which exists in the rear portion of the Sphinx’s body, as well as the vertical tunnel carved out of the bedrock beneath the Sphinx’s rump, and reproduce photos of these. In Figure 2 you see a photo which Olivia took of me with my head sticking out of the Sphinx’s ass, which perhaps proves how well I know him.
Then an amazing thing happened. I came across a passage in one of the old books which I collect, in this case one published in 1715, which described a chamber beneath the Sphinx and gave an eyewitness account of it! I was astounded. The book referred to earlier accounts of this chamber, but neglected to say who had written them or when they had been published. Slight problem! How was I to find these books?
If you went into the British Library and told a librarian you needed a book published before 1715 which described a chamber beneath the Sphinx, you would be told to come back when you had the author’s name or the title of the book. All I had to go on was ‘a book mentioning the Sphinx before 1715’, so how did I do it?
That is where my special abilities come in, which enable me to obtain information which others seem not able to obtain. I am what you might call an information retrieval expert, and I do not need to know anything about the field in order to obtain its ‘concealed’ information. There is no such thing as concealed or destroyed information: it is all there in Information Space if you have access. Everyone knows about the emails which people think they have deleted from our computers, but which can be recovered by computer data recovery experts (as part of a criminal investigation, for instance). Well, there is a higher version of that, which enables all information which has ever existed in any material form to be accessed from the wholly non-material realm of Information Space.
Unfortunately, I have never met anyone who seems to be able to access this material methodically and systematically. Most human beings can access it in a feeble and flickering fashion, by means of what is called ‘intuition’ or ‘hunches’. Perhaps it is just as well that proper access to all this information is limited. After all, the purpose of our being here in the material world is to see how we cope without information. That is why people like myself find it so difficult to communicate what we know when we somehow, in a way we do not understand, acquire information from Information Space. It is mostly not intended for circulation, and maybe I should not even be doing it. When I reveal such information to people, they never believe me anyway, so I generally do not bother.
I cannot explain how I access it. I seem to ‘see through matter’ in some way which is difficult to describe, and I see the Information behind it on the other side. Matter becomes increasingly transparent to me every day anyway, and I no longer believe in it. On only one occasion was I so desperate that I ‘raped’ Information Space. That was when our beloved dog Kim was mistakenly locked in a room with a digital security code. Because she was old and ill and needed water, and might otherwise die before I could get someone with the code to come, I ‘accessed’ the numerical code, punched it in, the door opened, and I released her. I didn’t do it instantly. I first made two or three hysterical wrong attempts and wasted precious minutes through being over-stressed. I made myself try to remain calm and then got it right. This meant that I actually had to access the whole number of several digits, none of which was known to me. Really, we are not supposed to do this sort of thing, but my dog was more important to me than protocol.
Also important to me is a Larger Dog, the Sphinx! I feel almost as affectionate towards him as I did… well, no, that would not be fair to Kim. But I also like the Dog Star. In fact, I am a sucker for dogs, I really am. I am not a cat person, even though I am a great fan of the original version of the film ‘Cat People’ (1942). Watch it sometime! See my review of it on my website.
I was eventually able to find 281 years’ worth of published eyewitness accounts of the chamber beneath the Sphinx, including detailed information about exactly where it was, its size, and the fact that it contained the remains of a wooden coffin. Because the chamber was described as having hieroglyphics on the walls, I am certain that it was what archaeologists call ‘an intruded burial’, but it must have been a royal one, as a shaft was carefully constructed and a chamber cut in one of the most important monuments in Egypt, within the sacred precincts of the royal Necropolis. The shaft was sealed with cement by Émile Baraize in 1926. A century earlier, Henry Salt also sealed some openings and passages elsewhere at the Sphinx, and was sharply criticised for it by the French Count de Forbin. All of this is described in full detail in our book. So, yes, there is a ‘secret chamber’ beneath the Sphinx. And the information in our book proves this beyond all possibility of doubt. But no, it is not original and does not date from the time of the Sphinx’s carving. Also, it is empty, so there is no gold or treasure. But if we could just read what it says on the walls!
Another thing I was able to demonstrate is that the Sphinx and the three Giza pyramids were part of a single unified design concept of the Giza Plateau. The position and size of the Sphinx is determined precisely in relation to the three pyramids, in a manner never before noticed. This is shown and explained at great length in the book, and it is not really possible to summarise that material, as it is too lengthy and detailed for a brief description. I can say, however, that it was part of a resurrection cult. In the process of explaining this in detail, I even have occasion to explain the true nature of those bizarre reliefs in a crypt at Denderah which have excited a great deal of speculation, the ones with the ‘lightbulbs’, although they are 2,500 years more recent, and their only connection is through the symbolism.
I hope everybody will get a lot out of looking through our book, and, who knows, maybe even reading it. Stranger things have happened.
Oh yes, I almost forgot: ‘Woof! Woof!’
[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 112.[/alert]
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Russia has always perceived of itself as a Eurasian country. – President V.V. Putin, November 2000
…an epochal, grandiose revolutionary admission, which, in general, changes everything. The prophecy of [French conspiratologist] Jean Parvulesco has come to pass… There will be a Eurasian millennium. – Alexandre Dugin, Russian thinker and author
The French visionary writer Jean Parvulesco’s main agent – if not hope – for world change rests with Vladimir Putin. Parvulesco argues that – whether we are aware of it or not – we find ourselves at the crossroads of “great history,” where a totally new era is about to be born.
For such a new period to begin, the old needs to die first. For Parvulesco, this is the old “democratic system” of political correctness, which he feels has now reached its limits and is no longer supportable. It has become “a permanent and total nightmare.” Many will wonder how the “new world” is to come about. The best example of what appeared to be a sudden, almost instantaneous collapse is seen in the fall of the Soviet Union, two decades ago. It illustrates that powerful empires can, from one day to the next, completely disappear, requiring a new society and structure to be built from the ground upwards.
When news of the collapse of the Soviet Union appeared on television screens, the system had already imploded. It was just the public revelation of its death; the disintegration of the communist system had already occurred. According to Parvulesco, the collapse of “democratic Europe” has already taken place too, and we are now in the years between its collapse and the public acceptance of its demise – and the start of a new Europe.
For Parvulesco, the evidence of the collapse of this system is apparent in the recent political history of Italy and Germany, and to some extent that of France and Great Britain. But in each case he feels the same dire situation has transpired: an “immense empty desert,” the wasteland of “social democracy.” A local version of what he sees as a “worldwide conspiracy,” but one that has failed and will soon be sent back to the “black hole” from where it came.
Parvulesco knows what to write on the death certificate; but he also feels he knows what the New Europe will be: the “Eurasian Empire of the End Times.” He labels our timeframe an interregnum where what happened to Russia is actually evidence that dramatic political change is possible. The Soviet Union was the first domino to fall, with the others in Europe soon to follow.
Could he be right? In 1976, Parvulesco published “La ligne géopolitique de l’URSS et le ‘projet océanique fondamental’ de l’Amiral G.S. Gorchkov” (The geopolitical line of the USSR and the ‘fundamental oceanographic project’ of Admiral G.S. Gorchkov), which he labelled “political-revolutionary research.” In it he wrote that the Soviet Union would end up changing the course of history. And changing the course of history is, for Parvulesco, the only true goal politics should have.
Parvulesco therefore provides an interesting type of prophecy. Whereas most prophets predict the end of the world at a given time, his type of prophecy brings more detail about the type of change and how. As to its timeframe, it is very much like “when the time is right.”
So, what is meant to happen? Parvulesco argues that across Europe there are geopolitical groups at work – often clandestinely – laying the groundwork for the Eurasian agenda. Like the Project for a New American Century, there are other think tanks hard at work – and judging from the amount of newspaper headlines they don’t get, much more secretly – to bring about a new Eurasia. Despite their secrecy, Parvulesco was able to lay his hands on one article titled “The Imperial Eurasian Pact.” Similar to the idea put into action by the Neocons after 9/11 (an agenda that claimed to want to bring peace to the world by using the power of America’s military might), this group states that, “It is the confrontation of our imperial and catholic [universal] doctrines with the current political-historical reality […] which will see the final emergence of the catholic Great Empire which constitutes our ultimate objective, the Imperium Ultimum, the Regnum Sanctum, which should comport, in principle, three operational stages […].”
The first stage is the creation of a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, that is considered to be the axis along which this major change will occur. This axis will tie together the destiny of three nations (France, Germany and Russia).
The second stage is the integration of what was traditionally known as West and East Europe, together with Russia, Siberia, India and Japan.
The final stage involves what is termed the destruction of the “global democratic conspiracy,” led by the United States, including a revolutionary liberation of its people, after which America as a whole (North and South) will become one entity. We can only wonder whether the present drive by the US to expand NAFTA and create a North American Union are steps in this direction.
The end of the planetary superpower that is the United States is forecast to be an act of self-destruction, a continental civil war very much on par with the first Civil War. The extreme dissatisfaction within the United States, the extreme disparity between the archconservative religious community and the more liberal, means that being elected as president on a genuine agenda (rather than one of total style but no substance) is almost impossible. For Parvulesco, it will be primarily America’s Catholic, ex-European community that will lead America towards its new destiny – and cause the demise of the current “global conspiracy.” There will be a new Europe, but also a new America.
In the end change is a social process, but it often needs a symbol. Hitler became the face of World War II, Lenin – more than Marx – that of communism, etc. So who is the new face of Europe, and who is the creator of this new Eurasian Empire? For Parvulesco, that “messiah” is already here: Vladimir Putin. Even though Putin is no longer president, his influence as Russian prime minister remains virtually omnipresent.
Vladimir Putin remains the face of the New Russia, a country with a vast territory and natural resources that is able to hold Europe to ransom, energy-wise, should it ever want to.
Who is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin? This is a question that many in a non-Parvulesco universe have also asked. Seen as a pawn of the KGB’s successor, in Parvulesco’s world, Putin is the direct emanation of the secret revolutionary groups of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union. These, he believes, are trying to make their decades-long secret battle open and public, moving from a type of synarchic, behind the scenes government, into a more open type of rule.
Whereas some conspiracy theorists claim the CIA and various secret societies like Skull & Bones are the real puppet masters of American politics, Parvulesco says the situation in the Soviet Union was not much different. Ruled for a long time by secret powerbrokers whose agents are now stepping out into the open taking the course of Russian politics into the direction they have been trying to steer it from behind the veil for a number of decades.
Unlike in the US where the “conspiracy” is often faceless, Parvulesco lists two people as Russia’s master conspirators. One was the chief of the Soviet security service (GRU) and one time Commander in Chief of the former Warsaw Pact, General S.M. Stemenko (died 1976), the other was Marshall N.V. Ogarkov, a former head of the Soviet military. Marshall Ogarkov, who died in 1994, is rumoured to have been behind a failed coup attempt which in turn led to a kind of counter-conspiracy that brought Mikhail Gorbachev to power.
Parvulesco is convinced that if this counter-conspiracy had not succeeded, the end of the Soviet Union would have occurred several years earlier, with a transition from the Soviet Union to the New Russia that would have been much harsher. Indeed, it underlines that years before the actual demise of the Soviet Union, the regime was comatose, ready for the taking, just like – in Parvulesco’s eyes – Western Europe (and the United States of America) is now.
Parvulesco is not alone in his assessment of these two men. French intelligence expert Pierre de Villemarest who wrote the history of the GRU, labelled “the Soviet’s most secret service,” says Gen. Sergei Matveevich Stemenko was “one of the first geopoliticians of the Soviet Union, perhaps even the first.” Though de Villemarest calls Stemenko a Soviet, he considered himself to be truly a “Great Russian.” “For this caste,“ writes de Villemarest, “the Soviet Union was an Empire that was called to dominate the Eurasian continent, not only from the Ural to Brest, but also from the Ural to Mongolia, from Central Asia to the Mediterranean.”
The “dream” of Russia à la Stemenko may be seen as merely returning back to the days when Russia was a true empire, before the days of the Bolshevic Revolution. But for Parvulesco, that in itself is part of a larger, and most intriguing puzzle – a mission.
[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 111.[/alert]
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Vladimir Putin was the subject of an article in the Sept-Oct 2001 issue of New Dawn that prophetically discussed the symbolic significance of his ascension to power and the important role he was destined to play in the future of not only Russia, but the world.
Raymond Abellio and Jean Parvulesco are two prominent French esotericists who have visualised and tried to implement a roadmap for what Europe – and the Western world as a whole – should become. It is a future where the real role of the Priory of Sion comes into its own.
Raymond Abellio claimed that the Flemish occultist S.U. Zanne, pseudonym of Auguste Van de Kerckhove (1838-1923), was amongst the greatest initiates of the modern era. But hardly anyone knows who he is. Some have placed Abellio in the same category – he too is a great unknown for most. And those that have looked at Abellio largely conclude that he was a French fascist politician with an interest in esotericism.
Was he? Part of the problem is that Abellio’s writings – like that of so many alchemists – need a key. So much of their material is coded text, and Abellio himself used to laugh that most people’s keys “only opened their own doors” – not his. Who was he really, and what were his true political aims?
Raymond Abellio is the pseudonym of Georges Soulès (1907-1986), who rose to fame in France during World War II when he became the secretary general of the MSR (Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire) in 1942. The invitation to join the organisation had come from none other than Eugène Schueller, owner of the cosmetics giant L’Oréal. As the British researcher Guy Patton, author of Masters of Deception, points out: “This group had evolved out of the sinister Comité Secret d’Action Revolutionaire (CSAR), also known as the Cagoule. Soules was now to become acquainted with Eugène Deloncle, head of the political wing, dedicated to secret, direct, and violent action.”
Later, Patton adds: “So here we have a Socialist turned Fascist, deeply involved in political movements, who actively collaborated with the Vichy government. In the course of his political activities, he was to work closely with Eugène Deloncle, who […] was closely acquainted with a fellow engineer, François Plantard, and whose niece married [French President François] Mitterrand’s brother, Robert.”
Though never confirmed, it is claimed that Abellio was involved with Bélisane publishing, founded in 1973. Bélisane published several books on Rennes-le-Château, the village so intimately connected with the Priory of Sion. In his book Arktos, Joscelyn Godwin refers to Raymond Abellio as another ‘Bélisane’ pseudonym. For Guy Patton, Abellio is part of a network that tried to create a New Europe, ruled by a priest-king, whereby various modern myths, like the Priory of Sion, are meant to provide the modern Westerner with a longing of sacred traditions and rule, very much like the myths of King Arthur that gave a surreal dimension to European politics in medieval times.
Abellio’s political views have therefore been described as very utopian, and he has been suspected of synarchist leanings – the belief that the real leaders of the world are hidden from view, politicians being merely their puppets. But in truth, Abellio had a well-defined vision for social change. When the battle lines of the Cold War were drawn after World War II, he tried to find the best of both camps and hoped he could unite them. Why? To create a type of Eurasian Empire, stretching from the Atlantic to Japan, an idea later taken up by the novelist and theoreticist, his friend Jean Parvulesco.
French Esotericist Jean Parvulesco
“Parvu” is largely responsible for acquainting at least some with the visions of Abellio – though whether it was the real Abellio or a character created by Parvulesco remains open to debate. Guy Patton sums up Abellio’s view as being “typical of an extreme right-wing esotericism, the aim of which is to ‘renew the tradition of the West’. He wanted to replace the famous Republican slogan, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, with ‘Prayer, War, Work’, to represent a new society built on an absolute hierarchy led by a king-priest.”
The implication, however, is that several of the people involved were not truly devoted to esoteric spirituality and merely used it as a mask for making money, acquiring more power, and pushing an extreme right wing agenda. Though that is the case for some of those involved, within the mix of powerful and/or money-hungry people most agreed that Abellio was truly a ‘spiritual’ man. And it was Professor Pierre de Combas who is credited with Abellio’s transformation from politician Georges Soulès into the visionary Abellio (the Pyrenean Apollo), making him not merely a “man of power,” but also a “man of knowledge” – an initiate?
To understand his vision, we need to acknowledge that Abellio’s system, as mentioned, needs a key, and without a key there is no understanding – hence, no doubt, why he is often misunderstood. Secondly, his system is complex and difficult to summarise in a few words and is best described by listing some examples.
He wanted to “de-occultise” the occult (e.g. his book “The End of Esotericism,” 1973), whereby he hoped this would help science. His knowledge of science – acquired as a polytechnic student – meant that he could build bridges between the two subjects, for example between the 64 hexagrams of the Yi-Ching and 64 codons of DNA, or the correspondences between the numbers of the Hebrew alphabet and the polygons that could be inscribed in a circle.
The most famous of his works is “The Absolute Structure” (1965) which led to him being regarded as an heir to phenomenological philosopher Husserl. Such topics, of course, hardly make for bestsellers, but are the type of study one expects from a genuine alchemist.
His drive for an “absolute structure” is a vital ingredient in his idea of the “Assumption of Europe,” i.e. what he sees as the destiny of Europe: “the Occident appears to us not to be only as an interval separating the opposing masses of the East and the West, but is the most advanced carrier of the dialectic of the present time.” Abellio did not believe in the subject-object duality that continues to drive most politicians into fear-mongering and the other usual tactics employed by their ilk, but instead preferred a more complex model, centred on Conscience (the zero point), which evolved along the base towards Quantity (science) and upwards to Quality (knowledge), which gave him a six-armed cross. This is the “hypercubic” cross, to use Salvador Dali’s words, a man who also spoke of the “Assumption of Europe” in some of his paintings. The “hypercubic cross” allowed Abellio to express all ontological and spiritual problems in dynamic terms – and it is clear that he used complex wording, making his thinking difficult to understand, which is no doubt why he is easily misunderstood, was thought to be writing mumbo-jumbo, or simply neglected.
First of all, to get our heads around his terminology, we need to know that the Bible was one of Abellio’s most often consulted books and he described the stages of the evolution of a civilisation in Christian terms: birth, baptism, communion, etc. This is why he said that the next stage in Europe’s development mimicked Assumption, which is specifically linked with the Virgin Mary – the Saint deemed to play a pivotal part in Europe’s future. She is, of course, a supernatural being who is said to have appeared on numerous occasions to counsel Christian Europe on which direction to take, such as in the politically charged “secrets” of Fatima in 1917.
In 1947, in his book “Towards a New Form of Prophecy, an essay on the political notion of the sacred and the situation of Lucifer in the modern world,” he notes, “not more than any other being, man is but an addition, a juxtaposition of Spirit and Matter, but an accumulator and an energy transformer, of variable power according to the individual, and capable of passing his energetic quantity from one qualitative level to another, higher, or lower.” Thus, we see a mixture of Christian eschatology, prophecy, as well as Gnostic doctrines on what it is to be truly human.
The visionary Abellio was also an astrologer. He predicted the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, as well as the ascent of China. He qualified its Marxism as “Luciferian,” which he did not suggest should be interpreted in a moral sense, but that Chinese materialism had to be integrated in terms of the Absolute Structure, in opposition to the individual and “Satanic” materialism of the United States.
In the West, it was the task of freedom fighters – terrorists? – to bring about this change. These “heroic” battles were brought to life in his novels. In retrospect, he said that his first three novels were indeed “apprenticeships,” where his heroes evolved, while his final novel – published 24 years after “The Pit of Babel” (1962) – “Motionless Faces” (1986) was for him “that of the companion who is trying to become master.”
However, many consider “The Pit of Babel” to be his best work and it is here that he plots intellectuals that are disengaged from all forms of ideology and scruples engaging in widespread terrorism. It is a theme he revisited in “Motionless Faces,” where the primary character attempts to poison the population of New York, not by any straightforward means but by using the creation of an illuminated architect who had built a type of “counter-structure” underneath Manhattan, which was reserved for an elite – a type of urban Agarttha.
The heroine of his last novel is named Helen, also – not coincidentally – the name of the companion of Simon Magus. In the end, she perishes, taken to the centre of the earth by a subterranean stream underneath Manhattan. In the case of the historical Simon Magus, Helen was the personification of Light held prisoner by matter. Abellio specifically chose his name because he identified himself with Apollo, another deity connected with light, and Raymond Abellio’s initials – RA – were of course those of the Egyptian sun god.
Abellio himself never met his “ultimate woman,” even though he searched for her. She may have been Sunsiaré de Larcone, herself a writer of fantasies as well as a model, who died at the age of 27 in a car crash in 1962. She called herself his disciple. Other equally beautiful women had gone before, and would go after, but no-one was apparently worthy of being “his” woman. Hence, his tomb contains an empty space for his “Lady.”
It is “Motionless Faces” that Jean Parvulesco studied in detail in his essay, “The Red Sun of Raymond Abellio,” published in 1987. Parvu is a novelist who was both close and far removed from Abellio. Close, because they shared a similar vision of the “Great Eurasian Empire of the End.” He, too, had his initiators, and he saw himself heir to the “Traditional School,” represented by authors such as René Guénon and Julius Evola, whom he met in the 1960s. Parvu was preoccupied with “non-being,” the forces of chaos, which make him into something of a dualist, i.e. a Gnostic. With Evola he shared the idea that there is a need for a final battle against the counter-initiatory and subversive forces (the non-being). Like Evola, he had an interest in Tantrism.
Parvulesco often uses the term “Polar” in reference to the “polar fraternities” with which Guénon had once associated. He sees these as important instruments in the creation of modern Europe. He also used the term to refer to the Hyperborean origins of the present cycle of humanity, which he argued would soon end with a polar reversal. Here he is close to Guénon, but far from Abellio’s thinking, who had an altogether more optimistic vision of the future. So despite their kinship and a common goal, they were not agreed on how exactly the New Europe would be accomplished.
Parvulesco has often been cited by extreme right-wing European authors. Some of them have claimed him as one of their own, but it is clear that no single writer is in charge of who and where his name is used.
In the early 1960s, Parvu was close to the OAS, the “Organisation Armée Secrète,” a terrorist group opposed to Algerian independence from France. This put him in opposition to De Gaulle, yet he is known to have claimed to be a strong supporter of De Gaulle. Incidents such as this make it difficult to place him on the political spectrum, and it’s best simply not to try and put him into one category. Indeed, what sets him and Abellio apart is largely that they had an independent vision of the future – and the role of politics. They realised that the world was radically changing, and though their models might in the end prove not to work or be unrealisable, it does not negate the fact that they were innovative thinkers.
It is Parvulesco who provides further details as to what this New Europe would be and why, specifically, a priest-king is needed as its ruler. In ancient times, these rulers were primarily seen as a denizen of both worlds, a mediator between this reality and the divine realm. Parvulesco makes it clear that “the beyond” is guiding us towards Europe’s destiny, whereby the role of European leaders is first and foremost to correctly interpret the signs, rather than invent new goals and targets.
A few constant themes run through Parvu’s writings, one of them being that of gateways to other dimensions. Whenever historical people (most often politicians) make appearances in his novels, they are not the politicians we know but their doubles who evolve in our and another dimension. The novels of Parvulesco are hence often seen as those of the “eternal present,” or the “ninth day.”
In “Rendez-vous au manoir du Lac,” the setting is a strange site where there is a gateway to heaven – Venus in particular – from where, according to Parvulesco, some chosen ones have to transit. In “En attendant la junction de Vénus,” he repeats this claim, but links it with French president François Mitterrand and specifically the Axe Majeur of Cergy-Pontoise, near Paris. This axis is the creation of artist Dani Karavan and is the “soul” of this new town. It stretches for three kilometres and if ever archaeologists stumbled upon its remains in future centuries, it would be classified as a leyline. Though the project commenced before Mitterrand’s presidency, it was during his term in office that the line became properly defined and executed. Today, it is seen – in France – as an enigmatic work, far superior to the Louvre Pyramid or Arche de la Défense, which has set the likes of Dan Brown and Robert Bauval questioning the reasons behind these projects. The Axe, however, is a far more ambitious, greater and more enigmatic project. When we note that Abellio was closely associated with the Mitterrand family, we can merely ponder whether he had a hand in the project.
With the Axe Majeure, it is clear that we are in a strange world where politics and esoterica mingle, partly in this dimension and partly in a divine realm. Well, Abellio hoped that from this mixture a new form of politics and a New Europe would arise. And it is here where we need to see the role of the Priory of Sion, not so much – as Dan Brown and others would like it – as the preservers of a sacred, old bloodline, but a new priesthood – a mixture of politician and esotericist, i.e. like Abellio himself – that can rule a New Europe.
So even though Abellio and Parvulesco are often described as synarchists, they repeatedly referred to themselves as freedom fighters laying the foundation for this New World. The new powerbrokers would not always remain hidden puppet masters, but would clearly one day step to the forefront to take up the role of priest-king. And for such thinkers, it was a given that France had come closest to attaining this ideal under De Gaulle, whereby the “Great Work” of Mitterrand was seen along the same lines, though clearly not to the same extent.
Abellio and Parvulesco were therefore New Agers building “An Age of Aquarius.” However, they did not focus on personal transformation, but on social transformation. As an author one might argue that Parvulesco operates within the domain of the “esoteric thriller,” which in Hollywood is seen in Roman Polanski’s ‘The Ninth Gate’ or Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. But both works have great difficulty in convincingly integrating the “passage to another world” within their storyline, often leaving the reader/viewer unsatisfied, or – alternatively – unconvinced of the end goal. Lovecraft has a better reputation and others argue that Parvulesco, thanks to the influence of both Abellio and Dominique de Roux, has gone further, and done better. But the main point is that his esoteric thrillers were to make this step through this “interdimensional passage” not as an individual, but as a society – as Europe.
De Roux (1935-1977) greatly inspired those authors who evoked what is known as “novels of the End” – however they saw the transformation of Europe. Parvulesco actually began his literary career in the magazine Exil published by de Roux. De Roux travelled widely, and in 1974 wrote “The Fifth Empire,” about the struggle for independence in Portugal’s colonies, which brings up the same struggle for a country’s new future. The title “The Fifth Empire” is an allusion to a popular Portuguese myth, namely that of the lost king. Like King Arthur, the Portuguese king Dom Sebastian was said to one day return to lead his people to a fabulous destiny – which, as can be expected in light of Abellio and Parvulesco’s ideology, was not necessarily of this plane. To quote the Portuguese poet and occultist Fernando Pessoa (a friend of Aleister Crowley): “We have already conquered the sea, there only remains for us to conquer the sky and leave the earth for others.”
Russia, Putin and the New Europe
What Algeria and De Gaulle had been for Abellio, what Portugal was for De Roux, Putin’s Russia is for Parvulesco. But it is in Abellio’s preface to “The Fifth Empire” that we find an interesting note explaining the true context and “key” that unlocks their works: “Those who attach a profound meaning to coincidences cannot be but stricken by the fact that the last message of Fatima was delivered in October 1917, at the moment when the Bolshevik Revolution began. What subtle link of the invisible history was thus established between the two extremities of Europe?”
For esotericists who saw our dimension as being infiltrated by the other plane of existence, the coincidences of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima and her clearly political messages to do with the future of Russia and how it should embrace the Virgin Mary, are part and parcel of this Great Empire. Not merely a political ambition, but part of their vision as to how “real politicians” work together in league with the “denizens of the otherworld” so as to accomplish the Assumption. Hence why Parvulesco believes Putin’s Russia to be so important. This is why, no doubt, Abellio tried to make contact with the Soviets to enable this New Europe, which indeed has come about largely under Putin’s presidency.
As mentioned, for British author Guy Patton, Abellio and Parvulesco are French fascists who abused newly created myths like that of the Priory of Sion to increase their influence, power and wealth. But this, of course, is merely one interpretation. Take the literature of the Priory and its creator Pierre Plantard and we discover he was close to De Gaulle’s regime. Plantard in fact ran part of De Gaulle’s “terrorist cells” in Paris when De Gaulle was struggling for power. Then, Plantard used the Priory to create an ideology that saw a unified Europe, from the East to the West, and it is obvious those involved in the promotion of the Priory later spoke of the importance of François Mitterrand.
The Priory is indeed a fabricated myth, a non-existent secret society. But it is equally clear the individuals involved (Plantard) and those linked to it (Abellio, and to some extent Parvulesco), had genuine convictions of what a future Europe should be. Their interest in Marian apparitions was genuine, and they saw them as divine guides along the path that Europe had to walk to its future and its next stage, its Assumption. As Parvulesco pointed out, it depends whether you believe in coincidences or not. If not, then you will argue the major political events of the past century are but tangentially related to the messages received from these apparitions. If you do believe coincidences have meaning, then it is clear this New Europe is slowly emerging.
In the 1980s, Parvulesco reviewed a strange novel, “La boucane contre l’Ordre Noir, ou le renversement,” by one “Father Martin,” who had already published “livre des Compagnons secrets. L’enseignement secret du Général de Gaulle.” For an avowed Gaullist, Parvu was obviously in his element. The novel itself has certain common points with one volume of the tetralogy of Robert Chotard, “Le grand test secret de Jules Verne.” Both books speak of a “reserved region” in Canada from where there is a conspiracy directed to change the world’s climate. The base is controlled by the sinister “Black Order” and aims to create a pole reversal – a theme also explored by Jules Verne. We can only wonder whether the stories of HAARP – set in nearby Alaska – might be inspired, or reflective, of this. But it is here that we see the final framework of their political ambition: they saw their quest not so much as a desire, a longing, but as a genuine struggle of good versus evil – if a New Europe did not come, the “Black Order” would have won. And in the end, perhaps Abellio and Parvulesco should thus be seen as modern knights, fighting for Europe – a new Europe.
Vast shadowy forces are moving in Central Asia – or rather in the greater region we call Eurasia – which may change the face of our global society and civilisation forever.
Even as the balance of geopolitical forces is shifting inexorably in favour of the Eurasian superpowers – principally Russia, China, the Central Asian states and India – a new spiritual wind is blowing out of Inner Asia and its many hidden mystical schools, promising to sweep the new entente into unprecedented heights of international power, politically and culturally. The immensity of the coming turbulence occasioned by this shift from West to East is incalculable, the outer symptom of a global revolution of consciousness.
Already the transformation of consciousness accompanying this hemispheric shift is creating both exaltation and unease in all people sensitive to evolutionary change. As the West moves through increasing economic and geopolitical tumult towards what many regard as a birthing into a new World Age, pressing questions are being asked. What are we mutating into and what kind of social realities will replace those we know? The mystery and the terror is not so much the speed of change as its unknown destination. Where are we heading? To what precipice sheer and awful, or to what blessed landfall?
Striving to answer such questions, many leading esotericists today have turned to certain very ancient traditions to throw light on the crisis of our times. Increasingly heeding the overwhelming evidence for their thesis, they suggest that the key to humanity’s future lies in its distant past, in the heritage of an unknown antediluvian race that lived in a time so remote that its existence has been erased from racial memory.1
A Forgotten Race
Perhaps 100,000 years ago or more, so the hypothesis runs, a great star-gazing Ice Age people lived in the Arctic region, at that time a temperate zone, before migrating south to Inner Asia as conditions changed and the great ice sheets melted. There, in a fertile, paradisaical land, these unknown sages became the core of a Ural-Altaic race that continued to evolve over the millennia, improving the stock of primitive humanity by intermarriage, developing cosmological sciences and political structures that sowed the seeds of our present civilised state, migrating across the earth and then disappearing, leaving immortal legends about itself behind.
The British author John Michell cites the massive evidence for such a civilisation, which he regards as essentially magical, and still faintly visible across the earth for those who care to look:
The entire surface of the earth is marked with the traces of a gigantic work of prehistoric engineering, the remains of a once universal system of natural magic, involving the use of polar magnetism together with another positive force related to solar energy. Of the various human and superhuman races that have occupied the earth in the past, we have only the dreamlike accounts of the earliest myths. All we can suppose is that some overwhelming disaster… destroyed a system whose maintenance depended upon its control of certain natural forces across the entire earth.2
Michell is one voice among many claiming that in the archives of prehistoric peoples a forgotten race has left traces of an advanced body of knowledge, seemingly both spiritual and technological, which can guide us, if we will, into a viable future.
Despite being ignored by mainstream historians and anthropologists, this theory is being ever more insistently put forward by highly accredited researchers as evidence for the enormous age of our species continues to be found not only in the legends of races in every part of the planet but also in the thousands of technological anomalies being unearthed in unlikely geological strata.
The ancient Greek historians had much to say on this subject, especially concerning the legends of Asia Minor which told of the descent thereto, in the depths of the Ice Ages, of the Hyperboreans, a mysterious race of superior beings from polar regions whose Pillar works on earth sought to mirror the starry heavens above. Yet it is Central and Inner Asia further to the east, a vast land of steppes, mountains and sandy deserts, whose people preserve the most significant memories of a time beyond telling when cities populated the deserts and an Elder race walked tall on the earth. And it is these Ural-Altaic regions that are now taking centre stage as the search continues for the roots of homo sapiens and the path into a viable future.
Arkaim: A Bronze Age Town in the Southern Urals
In 1987, in the middle of the Russian steppe, a team of Russian archaeologists unearthed the ruins of a fortified town called Arkaim, causing great excitement in scientific ranks and a surge of neo-pagan and nationalist enthusiasm among Russian intellectuals. The region was known to have preserved landmarks of the most diverse cultures, ranging from every epoch and every direction of the compass, but Arkaim was the first clear evidence of an ancient advanced culture flourishing on Russian soil.
Constructed on a circular principle around a central square, with about sixty semi-dugout houses built within its ramparts, the settlement was situated in the southern Urals, near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. It was defended by two concentric ramparts of clay and adobe blocks on a wooden frame, and could only be entered via four intricately constructed passageways that would have made the entrance of enemies extremely difficult. The inhabitants and the common central square were thus well protected by Arkaim’s defensive, inward-turned ground plan. The town was found to be closely aligned to several celestial reference points, and is therefore believed to have been an observatory as well as a fortress, an administrative and a religious centre.
A layout map of Arkaim in Arkaim: 1987-1998 by D. G. Zdanowich, published by Chelyabinsk State University, pg 18
Dubbed “the Russian Stonehenge,” this Bronze age settlement was about 3,600 years old and was contemporaneous with the Cretan-Mycenaean civilisation, with the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and with the Mesopotamian and Indus valley civilisations, and older by several centuries than Homer’s fabled Troy, whose circular layout it so closely resembled. Arkaim was inhabited for 200 years and was then mysteriously burned down and deserted.
The Russian team’s explorations showed that Arkaim enjoyed an advanced technology for its time. It was equipped with a drainage gutter and storm sewage system and had actually been protected from fire: the timbered flooring of the houses and the houses themselves were imbued with a fireproof substance – a strong compound the remnants of which can still be found in the ruins. Each house gave onto an inner ring road paved with wooden blocks; and in each house there was a hearth, a well, cellars, an oven and provision for a cooled food storage system. The oven was such that it may have been possible to smelt bronze in it, as well as to fire pottery.
Subsequent to this exciting excavation, more than another twenty fortified settlements and necropolises were unearthed in the Arkaim Valley, some stone-built, larger and more impressive than Arkaim. With Arkaim possibly its capital, the complex came to be called the Land of Cities and presented scientists with many mysteries. It was the first concrete evidence of a lost neolithic civilisation in southern Russia, confirming what had long been believed, that the southern Urals and northern Kazakhstan, situated at the junction of Asia and Europe, was an important region in the formation of a complex Aryan society.
Russia’s president Vladimir Putin visited the site in 2005, meeting in person with the chief archaeologist Gennady Zdanovich.
A possible light was thrown for the first time on the development, nature and wide migratory pattern of early Indo-European culture, and stimulated all sorts of theories in Russian circles about the Aryan roots of the Slavic people.3
This, however, has been only the beginning of the quest for a new ethnic, cultural and religious identity in a small but influential Russian minority since the demise of the Soviet Union. Increasingly rejecting the American and European vision of a global hegemony rooted in Western Christianity, Russians, besides their interest in their Indo-European roots, are turning eastwards to find a connection with the Turkic/Mongol ethnic strain. Many, especially among the young, are already embracing the mystique of a united Eurasian people and community cemented by spiritual bonds far older than those of Christianity or Islam. Arkaim has become a ready focus for these ideals, a symbol of the future basis for world peace.
Ar-ka means sky, and Im means earth, says Alex Sparkey, a Russian writer. He explains that this means Arkaim is a place where the Sky touches the Earth. Here the material and the spiritual are inseparable.
The East and the West are fused here. Today, in Russia, we feel that Mankind is faced by the necessity to choose Oneness. Western culture must come into unity with Eastern wisdom. If this can happen, the harmony that once reigned supreme in the Land of Cities will be restored.4
In fact, it is doubtful whether peace and harmony existed in the period of Arkaim, since it and the surrounding fortified settlements were obviously geared to warfare or at least to heavy defensive measures in a hostile environment. It is noteworthy that the cult of Tengri, the Mongol/Turkic Sky God who plays a prominent part in Central Asian religion, fosters a fierce competitive nationalism rather than peaceful relations with neighbours. However, Sparkey is right to emphasise the principle of harmonious accord implicit in the Arkaim ideology, pointing as it does to the settlement’s inheritance of a once more peaceful culture.
The head of the archaeological team observed:
A flight above Arkaim on board a helicopter gives you an incredible impression. The huge concentric circles on the valley are clearly visible. The town and its outskirts are all enclosed in the circles. We still do not know what point the gigantic circles have, whether they were made for defensive, scientific, educational or ritual purposes. Some researchers say that the circles were actually used as the runway for an ancient spaceport.5
The truth is that Arkaim was a troy town, so-called after the city in Asia Minor that the Greek king Agammenon destroyed during the Trojan Wars. Built on the same circular principle as Troy, as described in Homer’s Iliad, but at least six hundred years older, Arkaim finds its prototype in Plato’s Atlantis with its three concentric circles of canals; in legendary Electris, the Hyperborean city some said was built under the Pole Star by the sea-god Poseidon; and in Asgard, the sacred city dedicated to the Norse god Odin that is described in the Icelandic saga, the Edda. All these legendary troy towns have the same circular ground plan. They have gone down in history as neolithic Wisdom centres and the seats of ancient god-kings, and this undoubtedly throws light on the cultic function of Arkaim in its day, as we shall see.
In Russia’s more mystical quarters there is intense interest in the ancient town, seeing it as the city temple built by the legendary King Yama, ruler of the Aryans in the Golden Age, which will once again become the centre of the world.6 However, the discovery of the settlement has opened a historical aperture onto far more than the battles and conquests of an aggressive Indo-European people waged across Eurasia and south into the Mediterranean lands, where their war chariots shattered the peace of Old Europe. What the Land of Cities has revealed in its very structure and history is above all the still earlier past of the Ural-Altaic peoples – a past of such enormous antiquity that it presents more mysteries than it solves.
Built in the unique architectural mould of nordic Asgard, the most sacred shrine of the Aesir of which the Prose Edda relates that “men call it Troy,” Arkaim may have been a shrine dedicated to the Aryan Sun religion, yet the roots of its dedication would have lain ultimately in the far older cult of the Pole star. Essentially, this was the religion of the shaman, the wizard, the medicine-man and other wonder-workers in touch with the spirits of nature.
Thus the swastika, thought to be the exclusively Aryan symbol of sun-worship misappropriated by the Nazis,7 and found depicted on many of the clay pots unearthed in Arkaim, is an older religious and metaphysical symbol than that attached to the Aryan Sun God, its roots lying in totemic shamanism. René Guénon, the eminent French esotericist, points out that the swastika, symbolising eternal motion around a motionless centre, is a polar rather than a solar symbol, and as such was a symbol central to the Pole star cult, originally dedicated to a planetary deity connected to Ursa Major, the Great Bear. This centre, Guénon stresses, “constitutes the fixed point known symbolically to all traditions as the ‘pole’ or axis around which the world rotates…” The swastika is therefore known world-wide as the ‘sign of the pole.’8
In short, it would be a mistake for Russian ethnic pride to train too narrow a focus on Arkaim’s Aryan background, for the town was heir to a great civilising force that existed in the Eurasian corridor long before there were Indo-Europeans. One universal feature of troy towns is missing in Arkaim – presumably because it has been destroyed over the centuries – and that is the altar pillar in the central square. Undoubtedly, in Arkaim we see a late expression of a megalithic Pillar religion that once reigned universally in every corner of the globe, among nearly all peoples, whatever their ethnic type, and which became associated with troy towns. It is the oldest religion known to us and goes back to the most remote antiquity when men saw the heavens as revolving around the axis of the Pole Star.
Only later did the Sun, as the centre of the revolving stellar system, replace the Pole Star as the supreme deity of the Pillar cult and lead to the elevation of the Sun God of the Indo-European peoples. It led to their greater intellectual development, to complex civilisations, to advanced arts and sciences and the transcendence of nature.
Troy towns like Electris – and Arkaim – were built as stellar observatories. Their function was to unite earth to the starry cosmos above according to the principle of “as above so below” by means of a central axis symbolised by a stone pillar. Thus Diodorus Siculus of the first century BCE, quoting the historian Hecataeus, described the sanctuary of Electris as a troy town after the pattern of the spheres, by which he meant an astronomical design similar to that of Stonehenge and other ancient sun temples, in which the scheme of the heavenly spheres or astral shells surrounding the earth was represented diagrammatically by a series of concentric circles marked by walls, ditches or moats around a central pillar-stone.9
These enclosed and heavily guarded sanctuaries sacred to the gods of the greater cosmos were inhabited only by initiated priests and their families, and were forbidden to the wandering nomads beyond the ramparts. The mystery to archaeologists is how such an advanced astronomical science can have been pursued at a time when hunter-gatherers still roamed the land. Colin Wilson, a highly accredited investigator, in answer takes us back to the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia, a people who almost certainly had their origin in Central Asia, as the Bible states: “As men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar [Sumer] and settled there.” Sumer is regarded as the site of one of the first true civilisations in human history.
Wilson points out that the Sumerians were accomplished astronomers who had compiled tables of the motions of all the planets, including Uranus and Neptune, as early as five thousand years ago, long before the existence of Arkaim. He adds that according to the library of clay tablets compiled by the Assyrian King Assurbanipal (669 – 626 BCE) and unearthed during the nineteenth century, the Sumerians had also understood the precession of the equinoxes, and therefore knew about the zodiac.10
Further revelations of the Sumerians’ sophisticated astronomical science convinced Wilson that the Chaldaean astronomers understood our solar system as well as Isaac Newton did.11 Indeed Wilson came to believe that a scientific knowledge of the universe existed on earth as far back as 64,000 years ago, if not far longer.
Evidently Arkaim was a Wisdom Centre in a network of such Centres that once related all the prehistoric peoples of the earth to each other under the spiritual aegis of the Pillar religion and its priestly elites. The remains of countless similar stone circles, menhirs and troy towns are scattered throughout Europe, the Americas, Eurasia and the Pacific lands, memorials to great crisscrossing migrations of peoples, all loyal to the same axial principle that relates earth to the heavens.
As to the cradle of this great diaspora, the mystical Russian painter and explorer Nicholas Roerich saw thousands of such megalithic pillar-works in the highlands of Tibet and believed them to be older than any found elsewhere. He suggested they had strong links to the works of the Celts and the Scythian tribes, as also to the megaliths of Carnac in Brittany, and that they represented a Pillar cult that had its beginnings long ago in the Trans-Himalayas of Inner Asia.12
This proposed Eurasian cradle of the troy town phenomenon is reinforced by the researches of one Jacob Bryant in 1776. Bryant, a noted expert in Homeric Troy, published an encyclopaedia of ancient mythology in which he claimed the Trojans were descended from a very old “Atlantean” race that had long ago settled across the whole of Eurasia.13 If the first troy towns were built in Central Asia, could the universal Pillar religion also have had its beginning there?
As I have said, various versions of the cult of the World Pillar as it spread around the world were once known from the Americas to northern Africa, where the blond Tamahu worshipped the Magna Mater and her spouse the Heaven-Bearer, as did their cousins in Brittany and Spain. In Hindu India the World Axis, Mt. Meru, ascended into the revolving heavens above through the centre of the three worlds, and in the Canary Islands the Cro-Magnon Guanches, now extinct, worshipped with sacrifices the god of the World Pillar whom they called “the God who Holds the Heavens,” and who thus prevented the collapse of the foundations of the world.”14 A remnant of this belief-system survives in the legend of Jacob’s Ladder in the Hebrew Book of Exodus, in which we learn that on this Ladder angels ascend and descend between heaven and earth.
Each race has considered a certain tree as symbolic of the World Pillar and therefore sacred. In the Voluspa, the song of the Old Norse prophetess, the tree on which the god Odin hung in order to receive the sacred runes was called Yggdrasil, the heaven-pole or world axis. The World Ash Yggdrasil was declared to be the greatest of all trees and the best; its limbs spread over the world and above the heavens, its shaft the pivot of the ever-revolving sky. At the foot of that tree the laws were first brought into being by the Aesir, the Norse gods, and Yggdrasil was worshipped as the source of all higher knowledge.15
To the inhabitants of Sumer, whose language is unknown – being neither Indo-European nor Semitic – the Pillar was a dominant religious feature: thus Nippur, one of Sumer’s chief cities, as long ago as 3800 BCE had the meaning of “Bond of Heaven-Earth.” A prominent researcher on this subject says that in the text of the Sumerian ‘Enuma Elish’, “clues to the purpose of Nippur were found in references to a heavenward tall pillar reaching to the sky.”16 In ancient Egypt, the land of the Hamitic peoples, the city of An or Anu, which was renamed Heliopolis by the Greeks, originally meant Pillar City.17 As a commentator has pointed out, this fact may shed light on the mysterious djed pillar, the “backbone of Osiris,” often associated with Heliopolis.18
Like others of the Pillar fraternities, the totemic shaman too dedicated his life and calling to the vision of the marriage of heaven and earth achieved by means of a heaven-bearing Tree of Life. In ancient Crete he was a familiar adjunct to the temple rituals of the Great Mother Demeter; in Siberia, Mongolia and the Americas, he was the magician and wise man of his tribe. Beating his drum and climbing the central pole of his yurt, the symbolic pillar by which he communed with the sky spirits above, the shaman thus brought down healings, prophecies and advice from the ancestors to the people of his community. The Mongol-Turkic shamanic tradition with its Sky God Tengri and its World Tree still survives over a vast area of the planet, although its roots are lost far back in the mists of the palaeolithic age.
The mystery of Arkaim is indeed the mystery of the Pillar religion. Who brought to all the primitive peoples of earth this knowledge of the Polar Axis, uniting them for many thousands of years in a common planetary culture? Who taught them the astronomical secrets of the solar system, the zodiac and precession of the equinoxes at a time in prehistory when human intelligence was not supposed to be evolved enough to have developed that knowledge alone? And what part did Arkaim play in that dissemination?
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Tracing the Arctic Origins of Civilisation
The Babylonians believed in a mysterious paradise in “the far north” where a race of great sages lived; and the ancient Greeks too extolled a northern Elysium in which they believed the Hyperboreans, a wise, peaceful and long-lived race, lived in great splendour and prosperity. Even though Delphi was regarded as the centre of the Greek world, its god Apollo and his sister, the goddess Artemis, were acknowledged to be originally deities of this secret land far to the north, where stood the cosmic axle that the Greeks called Helice, “That Which Turns.” Many Greek historians as well as later scholars located this northern paradise in Scythia or the Altai, and as having its source in the shamanism that grew up around the semi-mythical magicians and pole-lords of Altai. But research and sacred tradition both suggest its origins go further back still to northeastern Asia within the Arctic Circle, to a society that flourished on the shores of the Siberian Sea.
How long ago, or for how long, this circumpolar culture may have existed no-one knows: possibly 200,000 years or more. In The Interpretation of Radium, the acclaimed physicist Frederick Soddy stated that some of the beliefs and legends which have come down to us from antiquity may be “evidence of a wholly unknown and unsuspected ancient civilisation of which all other relic has disappeared.”19 There may have been, he suggested, previous cycles in the unrecorded history of the world when civilised men lived “in a past possibly so remote that even the very atoms of civilisation literally have had time to disintegrate.”20
On the basis of years of investigation, Charles Hapgood, a New England professor of history, in 1982 declared that possibly as long ago as 100,000 years BCE the hub of a worldwide maritime civilisation with a highly developed level of scientific knowledge must have been in existence in the Arctic Circle.21 Until lately Hapgood’s finds, presented in Earth’s Shifting Crust (1958) and Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966), have been largely ignored in scientific circles, even though they elicited support from the great physicist Albert Einstein; but today interest in them is mushrooming among a growing number of highly accredited investigators.
René Guénon appeals to the oldest and most authentic esoteric traditions in claiming that long before the Indo-European races arose, at a time when a hunter-gatherer humanity was still at a primitive stage of development, the tropics were differently distributed and a great Hyperborean culture flourished around the Arctic Circle, “in the Islands of the Blest on the shores of the Ocean where the great maelstrom whirls.”22
Only later, after a catastrophic change in geological conditions, did this senior race migrate southward, some to Central Asia, others, possibly crossing the Bering Strait, to Atlantis to the west. The latter has been located by some researchers in the Antilles, two large islands beyond the Gulf of Mexico widely regarded as the remains of what was once a great sunken landmass.23 (In support of this theory, the Caribs and the tribes of Hispaniola have long had a tradition that many of the islands of the Antilles, a well-known earthquake zone, were once connected by a single landmass, before a great cataclysm about 15,000 years ago submerged the connection and left only the known island fragments.)24
Leaving aside Guénon’s oblique reference to the two southern refuges of the Hyperboreans being in Russia and Central America, he suggests that in both cases the two groups brought with them advanced mathematical and astronomical knowledge and the seeds of arts and sciences that would eventually be passed on to our brute ancestors to become the basis, about eight thousand years ago, for our own civilisations.
Both Sumer in the Middle East and Central America have flood stories written down long before the biblical account of Noah’s flood, and in all these stories the salvific activity of the Elder race is pivotal. There is the Sumerian story of Utnapishtim and his wife, who, helped by the gods, survived a flood and were made immortal; and likewise early American accounts tell how the god Viracocha, who “came from the east,” destroyed the earth in a great flood. Later, after a man and a woman survived by taking refuge in a floating box, “Virachocha recreated the peoples of the earth, and gave each one his own language and songs.”25 Wilson cites many such instances in which flood stories about the Hyperboreans and their salvation of our race are to be found in both the Old World and the New.
Guénon is emphatic, however, that of the two primary locations, both of which have at times borne the name of Tula (known to the Greeks as Thule), that of Central Asia was the elder. The Atlantean Tula, says Guénon, must be distinguished from the Hyperborean Tula, the supreme Holy Land, which latter represents the first and supreme centre for the entire current Manvantara, and is the archetypal “sacred isle.”
All the other “sacred isles,” although everywhere bearing names of equivalent meaning, are still only images of the original. This even applies to the spiritual centre of Atlantean tradition, which only governed a secondary historical cycle, subordinate to the Manvantara.26
Plato himself notes this hierarchical distribution: the Atlantean empire, he said, was only one nexus established by the gods in a greater network of Centres whose capital was elsewhere “at the centre of the Universe.”27 Thus the Eurasian heartland, Guénon says in his brief but ground-breaking work, The Lord of the World, has indeed become that “centre of the Universe,” the authentic “supreme country” which,
According to certain Vedic and Avestan texts, was originally situated towards the North Pole, even in the literal sense of the word. Although it may change its localisation according to the different phases of human history, it still remains polar in a symbolic sense because essentially it represents the fixed axis around which everything revolves.28
However, this still does not tell us why the location in Central Asia was chosen as the Hyperboreans’ primary destination? Guénon’s response to this question is cryptic in the extreme. He admits he is dealing with proscripted material he is not permitted to divulge, but goes so far as to reveal that Mt. Meru, the “polar mountain” stands in the centre of the “supreme country” – and Mt. Meru, as is now generally understood, symbolises the mysterious World Axis or World Tree of esoteric tradition. In other words, Central Asia was chosen because the World Axis was there; that was the real goal of the migration. The World Axis was, and is, the “centre of the Universe”; it is the World Axis that renders its geographical location a Holy Land – a fact which is only now being elucidated in para-scientific circles.
As we shall see in the second part of this article, the earth’s esoteric structure is a subject that has been veiled in secrecy for thousands of years, and this applies especially to the mystic’s Mt. Meru or World Axis. John Major Jenkins, in his book Galactic Alignment, is one of the first modern researchers to throw light on the meaning of this and much other Hyperborean lore that Guénon was unwilling or unable to discuss. Beyond referring to the senior race as “the guardians of Earth’s sacred mysteries,” Guénon’s initiatory vows kept him silent.
Who, then, were these mysterious Hyperboreans – or as we might perhaps better call them, these Elders, these early Masters of Wisdom who understood the importance of the World Axis? The records of most of the Bronze age nations have a legend that an unknown race of Elders gave us kingship and civilisation and that they came from the gods and understood the most powerful secrets of our planet – secrets that have since been lost.
The Elders have been known as the Nephilim, the Sons of God, the Anunnaki, the Watchers and many other appellations; G.I. Gurdjieff spoke of them as agents of the divine Demiurge from a previous cycle of humanity. But beyond being credited with great wisdom and magical powers as well as having giant stature and extremely high craniums, little more is known about them. Did they really exist? All that can be said with certainty is that they remain a benign shadowy presence moving inscrutably in the background of virtually all the prehistoric traditions of our race.
These souls from Sirius, say the ancient texts, descended down the World Axis and incarnated on earth long ago in order to aid our fledgling species. When a great catastrophe towards the end of the Ice Age, around the twelfth millennium BCE, threatened us with extinction, these sons and daughters of the gods instituted the hieros gamos, a genetic science that mingled their genes with ours and so bred a superior human stock with a greater survival potential that spread gradually from the heart of Asia on one hand, and Atlantis on the other, to the rest of the world.29
The climate changed again around the ninth millennium BCE, which is widely regarded as the date of the demise of Atlantis and the enforced dispersal of its people both westward to Central America and eastwards to Europe. Bringing catastrophic earthquakes and coastal flooding to vast areas of the globe30 and a severe threat to the survival of our species, it was a racial crisis that brought another response from the senior race.
Although the Elders had gone, their dynastic descendants, a long line of neolithic priest-kings, began a new evolutionary programme. In their migrations from Central Asia, the Ural-Altaic race is credited with establishing in every corner of the earth its Pillar religion, which Plato’s Critias vividly describes as also the religion of the Atlanteans. Stone pillar altars have survived in Malta from c. 5000 BCE, also from Catal Huyuk, in Anatolia, c. 5800 BCE.31 The Pillar religion is the earliest known vehicle of a comprehensive body of wisdom originally centred on the Pole Star, in which the moon is the primary image of the mysteries of birth, generation and death. It is the fundamental root of all the religions and esoteric traditions we know today, as well as all our higher learning. Its spread heralded the dawn of peaceful, egalitarian, Goddess-loving societies clustered in neolithic towns and villages around the world wherein the feminine principle was dominant and strife little known.32
Modern historians have found that three great floods seem to have occurred in the known span of human history. According to Stephen Oppenheimer in Eden in the East, the third of these, around the fifth millennium BCE, corresponded to Noah’s Flood and was the greatest of the three, peaking during the fourth millennium.33 It caused catastrophic coastal flooding, tsunamis and severe earthquakes, and also desertification of the interior of the land masses, and civilisation disappeared. Once again the species was threatened with a reversion to savagery, and once again salvation appeared from Inner Asia.
In the third millennium BCE, so the Chinese Celestial records tell us, the Sons of the Sun – also known as the Sons of Heaven – fanned out across the world from their homeland in the Karakorum Range at the western end of the Trans-Himalayas, bearing with them the higher revelation of the Sun religion.34 It was a patriarchal and hierarchical belief-system that disclosed new depths of metaphysical and technological knowledge inducive to civilisation. Everywhere the stone circles whose central axis was dedicated to the Pole Star, like Stonehenge in ancient Britain, evolved over a further thousand years into more sophisticated observatories focused instead on the Sun and its circling planets, and human culture once more blossomed.
This innovation, however, was not without inter-faith warfare, since many ethnic groups, such as the Mongol/Turkic peoples of the eastern steppes, remained loyal to the Pole Star cult. At the same time, pyramids as well as defensive troy towns like Arkaim sprang up in dedication to the Sun Gods, whose mystique became more and more occulted as enmity grew for the powerful new faith. Indeed Arkaim may have been the seat of one of the Solar mystery religions of that period, and the fiery holocaust that destroyed the settlement after two hundred years of operation may well have been caused by that same internecine conflict between the old order and the new.
The pictorial evidence contained in the ‘Enuma Elish’ shows that the Sumerians understood full well that the Elders they revered so much were “from the gods” – not gods themselves but human beings, though far more advanced in consciousness. According to the murals they have left us, the early Egyptians too knew in some sense that their deities were really high shaman masters, each masked in the official headdress of his animal totem. But that understanding was to be occluded with the increasingly aggressive dominance of the Solar religion, when a kind of darkness of amnesia fell over the collective consciousness of our race. The Solar priesthoods withdrew behind barricades, and a spiritual division opened up in society that had never before existed.
As the historian Giorgio de Santillana has pointed out in Hamlet’s Mill, from then on the enlightened understanding of our forbears began to descend into mythology and superstition as small pockets of secret wisdom called temples shone out in a sea of darkness, and a mystique of gods replaced the cosmological knowledge of an earlier age.35 While bands of initiate culture-bearers spread out across the globe to sow the seeds of civilisation once more, a nucleus of the senior race withdrew deep into the mountain ranges of High Asia that surround the Takla Makan desert and severed all direct contact with the outside world.
Ever since, the whole Eurasian heartland, from the Urals to the Gobi and including southern Siberia, has borne the stamp of a special sanctity. High Asia in particular has been called by a succession of peoples and religions Paradesha, the Forbidden Land, the Land of the Living Gods, Thule, Djong, Uttarakuru, Olmolungring, Shambhala, the Holy Land and the Land of White Waters. Whatever its current name, almost all esoteric traditions in the Old World have related this vast, mysterious Inner Eurasian region, so rich in higher knowledge, to the legendary Elder race and revered it as the home of the Ancient Wisdom for the present World Age.
The legend of the Sons and Daughters of God has thus never died, though it has gone underground. Inner Asia, thought to be the immemorial cradle of shamanism as well as of all yogic and religious systems, is believed by many to be still spiritually efficacious, still a holy land which, under a single governing Hierarchy, nurtures without fear or favour arcane schools and brotherhoods persecuted elsewhere. Sufis, Buddhists, Nestorian Christians, Taoists, Zoroastrians, Jews, Neo-Platonists and others who have been hidden from the profane world by long chains of initiatic transmission have never failed to find sanctuary in that specially blessed protectorate, where everything began.
From being hidden in shadows for thousands of years, today the region is being illuminated by an intense spotlight from every possible angle. The discovery of Arkaim is only one such angle. The highly publicised row between China and Tibet is another; the ever-worsening struggle between the US and Russia for military dominance over the oil- and gas-rich provinces of Central Asia; the increasing commitment of Russia, China, Iran and India to a Eurasian geopolitical bloc, in tacit opposition to the Western powers; and at the same time the awakening of interest in the West to the mysterious spiritual wealth that can be glimpsed in the place, are yet other factors bringing the heart of Asia to the very centre of world attention. Yet the questions they pose remain unanswered.
What is the secret of the Holy Land? Who really were the Elders who gave us civilisation? Are they still guiding our evolution in discarnate form? What is the secret of the World Axis? Do we as yet understand the archetypal principles that shape our planet? And why are we only now beginning to ask such questions?
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Footnotes:
1. Colin Wilson, Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals, Bear & Co., Vermont, 2006.
2. John Michell, The View Over Atlantis, Sphere Books, London, 1975, 117.
3. V.A. Shnirelman, Archaeology and Ethnic Politics: the Discovery of Arkaim, Unesco, 1998.
4. Alex Sparkey, The Ancient Land of Arkaim, from Spirit of Ma’at: Russia: Land of Living Mysticism, Vol. 3, No. 9, 3.
5. Pravda.Ru, An Ancient Aryan Civilisation, 16/07/2005.
6. Shnirelman, op. cit., 38.
7. Louis Pauwels & Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, Souvenir Press, London, 1960, 188.
8. René Guénon, The Lord of the World, Octagon Press, U.K., 1983, 9.
9. Victoria LePage, Shambhala, Quest Books, Illinois, USA, 1996, 197, citing Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, Loeb Classical Library, London, 1936 – 67.
10. Colin Wilson, op. cit., 32.
11. Ibid., 32.
12. Nicholas Roerich, Shambhala: In Search of the New Era, Inner Traditions International, 1930, 221.
13. Jacob Bryant, A New System or An Analysis of Ancient Mythology, T. Payne, P. Elmsly, B. White and J. Walter, publishers, London, 1776.
14. Jurgen Spanuth, Atlantis of the North, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1979, 123 – 24.
15. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. 1, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984, 121.
16. Alan F. Alford, Gods of the New Millennium, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1996, 261.
17. Ibid., 261
18. Ibid., 261
19. Frederick Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium and the Structure of the Atom, Putnam, New York, 1922, quoted by Colin Wilson, op. cit., 292.
20. Ibid., 292.
21. Colin Wilson, op. cit., 2.
22. Hesiod [Works], R. Lattimore, trans., University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1959, 172 – 3.
23. Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis, Rider, London, 1926; cited by Geoffrey Ashe, Atlantis, Thames & Hudson, London, 1992, 21.
24. Eberhard Zangger, The Flood from Heaven, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1992, 66.
On his way across the wastes of Mongolia in 1921, Polish writer and refugee Ferdinand Ossendowski witnessed some strange behaviour on the part of his Mongol guides. Stopping their camels in the middle of nowhere, they began to pray in great earnestness while a strange hush fell over the animals and everything around. The Mongols later explained that this ritual happened whenever “the King of the World in his subterranean palace prays and searches out the destiny of all people on Earth.”1
From assorted lamas, Ossendowski learned that this King of the World was ruler of a mysterious, but supposedly very real, kingdom, “Agharti.” In Agharti, he was told, “the learned Panditas [masters of Buddhist arts and sciences] write on tablets of stone all the science of our planet and of the other worlds.”2 Whoever gained access to the underground realm would have access to incredible knowledge – and power.
Ossendowski was not exactly a casual listener. As noted in a previous article [The “Bloody” Baron von Ungern-Sternberg: Madman or Mystic?, New Dawn No. 108 (May-June 2008)], during 1921 he would become a key adviser to “Mad Baron” Roman von Ungern-Sternberg who established a short-lived regime in the Outer Mongolian capital of Urga.3 A self-proclaimed warrior Buddhist who dreamed of leading a holy war in Asia, the Baron allegedly tried to contact the “King of the World” in hopes of furthering his scheme.
Ossendowski’s credibility later was assailed by the likes of Swedish explorer Sven Hedin.4 Among other things, Hedin accused the Pole of plagiarising the story of Agarthi from an earlier work by French esotericist Joseph Alexandre St.-Yves d’Alveydre.5 To one extent or another, that probably was true, but Hedin, a veteran seeker after lost cities, did not dismiss the possibility of a hidden Kingdom; indeed, he likely harboured the aim of finding it himself.
In any event, Ossendowski did not invent the story of a fabulous land secreted somewhere in – or under – the vastness of Central Asia, be it called Agharti, Agarttha, Shangri-la, or, most commonly, Shambhala.6 Some believed it to be a physical, subterranean realm inhabited by an ancient, advanced race, while to others it was a spiritual dimension accessible only to the enlightened. The Shambhala legend is firmly grounded in Buddhist tradition which vaguely puts the Kingdom somewhere to the north of India. The legend also proclaimed that a time would come when the King of Shambhala and his mighty hosts would come forth to vanquish evil and usher in a golden age guided by pure Dharma. As noted, Baron von Ungern-Sternberg envisioned himself as the initiator of this “Shambhala War.” So would others.
The tantalising possibility of a hidden trove of advanced knowledge and technical know-how did not just pique the curiosity of explorers and occultists. The practical advantages to be gained by accessing and exploiting such knowledge was not lost on certain politicians and intelligence officers, above all in Soviet Russia. But whatever attracted the attention of the Bolsheviks was bound to draw British curiosity as well, and where both those powers were concerned, the Americans, Germans and Japanese were unlikely to be far behind.
This article focuses on the activities of three men, two Russians and one American: Aleksandr Vasil’evich Barchenko, the so-called “Bolshevik professor of the occult,” the artist-mystic-explorer Nicholas Roerich, and the man often cited as the real-life model for Indiana Jones, Roy Chapman Andrews. While, so far as can be told, none of the trio ever met, all were involved with expeditions roaming the deserts of Mongolia and the high valleys of the Himalayas in search of lost civilisation and ancient man. In the case of Barchenko and Roerich, the specific object was Shambhala. As we will see, these explorations were only the tip of a clandestine iceberg of intrigue and hidden agendas which included secret societies and a host of spies. Just who was doing what for whom – and why – remains uncertain.
“Bolshevik professor of the occult” Aleksandr Barchenko
A.V. Barchenko was born in Elets in 1881 and manifested an early interest in the “paranormal.” Part occultist, part scientist, part explorer, and maybe just a bit of a charlatan, Barchenko was, above all, a seeker. His interests came to focus on recovering the lost knowledge of a prehistoric civilisation, remnants of which he thought might still survive. It was in medical school, c. 1901-1905, that Barchenko gravitated to Masonic and Theosophist circles and their esoteric doctrines. One of his professors was acquainted with the above Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, and so introduced his pupil to the legend of Agarttha/Shambhala.
D’Alveydre’s works also promoted the mystical-political doctrine of Synarchy, a system supposedly perfected by the denizens of the hidden Kingdom. Loosely defined, Synarchy signifies “rule by secret society” or enlightened elite. In the late 19th century, the idea was picked up by yet another French occultist, Gerard Encausse, better known as Papus, who combined it with another mystical current, Martinism, to form the quasi-Masonic Ordre Martiniste et Synarchie.7 During 1900-1905, Papus visited Russia where he established cells of his new order and even recruited members among the Romanovs.8 More intriguing are suggestions that Papus simultaneously functioned as a French “agent of influence” to counter German intrigue among the Russian elite and, more secretly, to foster social revolution. One associate of Papus later claimed that Martinism was the “germ of Sovietism.”9
Prior to World War I, Barchenko embarked on a career as journalist and writer. At the same time, he joined the Martinist Order and the “Kabbalistic Order of the Rose & Cross.”10 His ever-widening interest in the occult came to include palmistry, the Tarot, alchemy, hypnosis, “radiant energy,” astrology and mind-reading. In 1911 he wrote an article for Priroda i liudi (“Nature and People”) on “thought transference.”11 His literary outpourings included two “fantastic” novels, Doktor Chernyi (“Dr. Black”) and Iz mrak (“From the Darkness”). His literary alter ego, Dr. Aleksandr Nikolaevich Chernyi, had spent years in India and Tibet studying arcane knowledge at the feet of mysterious mahatmas. Barchenko dreamed of doing the same.
After brief service in World War I, Barchenko returned to Petrograd (the renamed St. Petersburg) where he moved deeper into occult circles. One self-proclaimed master of Eastern mysticism who frequented Petrograd in this period was George Gurdjieff. Whether Barchenko had direct contact with him is uncertain, but he was well-versed in Gurdjieff’s teachings and the two would be linked in curious ways in the years ahead.
While Barchenko welcomed the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas in 1917, he was not enamoured of Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Still, to earn a living in the post-October environment, he began giving lectures on esoteric subjects to the revolutionary sailors of the Baltic Fleet. He used Shambhala as an example of a “primeval communist society,” which had been part of a prehistoric “great universal federation of peoples.”12 Such Bolshevik-sounding sentiments contrasted with his more private affiliations. In the “Sphinx” society, Barchenko associated with Martinists, Theosophists and “Christian pacifists” who were out-and-out enemies of Soviet power. He later confessed that the group harboured “conspiratorial quarters of the White Guards” and connived with militant anti-Bolsheviks such as Boris Savinkov.13 Savinkov, in turn, actively conspired with British and French agents, among them Ace-of-Spies Sidney Reilly who helped concoct an abortive effort to overthrow Lenin in the summer of 1918.14
One result of that failed plot was the “Red Terror,” a wave of bloody reprisals spearheaded by the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka. So, when Barchenko received a summons to the office of the Petrograd Cheka (P-Cheka) in the fall of 1918, it was an ominous sign. However, he found there a cadre of fellow Martinists and students of the occult who had no interest in shooting him as a counter-revolutionary.15
The most important of these chekisty was Konstantin Konstantinovich Vladimirov, a self-described “psychographologist” who would do much to promote Barchenko and his ideas within the Soviet establishment. On the surface, it would appear that Vladimirov recruited Barchenko as an informer in occult circles, but things may not have been so simple.
Vladimirov’s own loyalties are questionable. He soon was involved in the case of two Britons, Harold Rayner and G.H. Turner, arrested for supposed involvement in the August 1918 assassination of the chief of P-Cheka, Moisei Uritsky. The actual gunman was a follower of the above Boris Savinkov. Even more interesting, Vladimirov and comrades apparently nabbed the wrong men. Then, instead of being executed, one somehow managed to evade proletarian justice and make it back to England. Finally, Vladimirov became romantically involved with the widow of the second Englishman, a woman also identified as a British spy. As a result, he found himself booted from the Cheka, but somehow managed to get himself reinstated. However, in 1927 Vladimirov was again arrested and ultimately shot as an English spy, exactly as his protégé Barchenko would be a decade later.16 So, did Vladimirov recruit his fellow occultist to spy for the Cheka in 1918, or was he even then a British agent who enlisted the like-minded Barchenko into another, more secret conspiracy?
One more twist is that some insist Vladimirov was identical with another clandestine operative, Yakov Blumkin.17 That they were one and the same is demonstrably untrue, but Blumkin and Vladimirov did move in the same murky circles in 1918. Through those same circles, Blumkin also came to know Barchenko. Thus, there is reason to suspect, if no more, that Blumkin was another British double-agent. As a supposedly renegade chekist, he assassinated the German ambassador in Moscow in July 1918. Nevertheless, like Vladimirov, he soon found his way back into the good graces of Soviet intelligence. A year after Vladimirov’s demise, however, Blumkin would stand before a firing squad as a Trotskyite conspirator.
Barchenko also found friends in Soviet academia. With such backing, during 1921-22, he led an expedition to the remote Kola Peninsula, north of the Arctic Circle, where he found ancient petroglyphs and megalithic structures.18 This reinforced his belief in an advanced prehistoric civilisation linked to mysterious Shambhala. As early as 1920, Barchenko sought permission to mount a “scientific-propagandistic” expedition into Mongolia and Tibet to search for “Red Shambhala.”19 Recovery of its ancient science and wisdom, he argued, would expand Moscow’s influence throughout Asia. This early lobbying came to naught, though it may have influenced Moscow to dispatch two Baltic sailors, Barchenko’s former “pupils,” on a secret mission to Tibet in the early 20s.20
At the same time, Barchenko founded a “Masonic” lodge dubbed the Edinoe Trudovoe Bratstvo, ETB, or the “United Labor Brotherhood.” The new Brotherhood included Vladimirov and numerous other current or former chekists. Closely associated with the ETB, if not a formal member, was Yakov Blumkin, back in the saddle as a special agent of Soviet intelligence.
The Lodge’s name bears a curious resemblance to an earlier group formed by Gurdjieff’s followers, the Edinoe Trudovoe Sodruzhstvo (“United Labor Fellowship”), and at least one prominent member of ETB, P.S. Shandarovskii, was a devotee of Gurdjieff.21 Another link may have existed through Soviet sculptor Sergei Merkurov, who was Gurdjieff’s cousin.22 Interestingly, Gurdjieff had alleged ties to British intelligence, including the charge that he had for years served as a British asset in Central Asia and the Near East.23 What is undeniable is that among Gurdjieff’s pupils in pre-Revolutionary Russia was English composer Sir Paul Dukes, a man whose interests included not only Gurdjieff, but also esoteric Buddhism and Tibet. Dukes joined MI1c (MI6) during World War I and for much of 1919 headed the British spy network in Petrograd.24 Could Barchenko and Vladimirov have been linked to this?
By far the most important brother of the ETB was chekist bigwig Gleb Ivanovich Bokii. Bokii, a veteran Bolshevik, had an equally venerable involvement in the occult. Among other things, he was a pre-Revolutionary member of the “Kabbalistic Order of the Rose & Cross.” Curiously, his advancement in that Order was approved by none other than Aleksandr Barchenko.25 More curious still, Bokii took over the P-Cheka after Uritsky’s death and was running the show when Barchenko was “recruited” in late 1918. Nevertheless, both men later swore that they never met until the early 1920s. Bokii would confess that for him the Revolution died with Lenin in early 1924. Growing disillusionment led him to oppose Stalin and to support Barchenko’s schemes, schemes that, he admitted, included espionage.26
By 1924, Bokii sat in control of the OGPU’s (the renamed Cheka) Spetsotdel, or “Special Department.” This outfit handled codes and included an elite outfit, the 7th Section, which delved into paranormal issues ranging from hypnotism and ESP to the Abominable Snowman.27 The Spetsotdel also guarded the so-called “black dossiers,” the personal files of the Soviet leaders which included sexual kinks and, undoubtedly, any association with things occult.28
Besides personal curiosity, Bokii had practical incentive to pursue paranormal research. Telepathic communication offered a perfect means to send and receive messages from agents abroad. Likewise, what we today call Remote Viewing offered the ability to spy on the imperialist enemy without leaving Moscow. Unlocking the secrets of hypnotism and mind control had potential application in propaganda. To explore such matters, Bokii put Barchenko in charge of a special “neuroenergetics” lab within the All-Union Institute for Experimental Medicine.29
Still, the primary aim of Barchenko and the ETB was establishing direct contact with Shambhala. To this end, he exploited Bokii’s help and made common cause with other esoteric groups, most notably the “Great Brotherhood of Asia.” He connived with at least two members of the Brotherhood, a Tibetan lama, Naga Naven, who claimed to be a direct representative of Shambhala, and a Mongolian official, Khayan Khirva, future chief of the Mongolian secret police.30 In that role, Khirva would work side-by-side with Yakov Blumkin.
In the spring of 1925, thanks to Bokii’s access to secret funds, the Shambhala expedition seemed set to go. Bokii picked Blumkin to head the expedition’s secret intelligence angle.31 But the plan ran into opposition. Dark rumours painted Bokii as a dangerous degenerate who drank human blood.32 A leading opponent was Mikhail Trilesser, head of the OGPU’s foreign intelligence branch (INO). He naturally felt that any activity outside the USSR fell into his bailiwick. By summer, Barchenko’s Shambhala expedition was dead. Or was it?
In September 1925, a humble Muslim pilgrim crossed the Pamir passes into British-controlled Kashmir. In fact, the pilgrim was Yakov Blumkin who was on his way to even more remote Ladakh to rendezvous with an expedition led by Nicholas Roerich. Roerich’s aim was to enter Tibet and contact Shambhala. However, soon after crossing the frontier, tribal police seized Blumkin. Apparently, someone had tipped-off the British. The crafty chekist soon gave his captors the slip, and assuming a new guise as a Mongol lama, pressed on towards Roerich. Anyway, that is how Blumkin later told the story. There could be another explanation. The brief arrest and fortuitous escape also gave Blumkin convenient cover to check-in with British intelligence prior to joining Roerich.
Russian Painter, Theosophist and Philosopher, Nicholas Roerich
Born in St. Petersburg in 1874, Nicholas (Nikolai) Konstantinovich Roerich is best known today as a painter and tireless advocate of Yoga and Buddhism in the West. He definitely was a Theosophist and probably a Martinist.33 He also became a secret Soviet agent-of-influence. Some of his admirers vociferously dispute this, and it may be true that Roerich used the Bolsheviks as much as they used him. Nevertheless, his ties to Soviet intelligence are too extensive to be denied.34 By the time the Revolution hit Russia, Roerich had left the country, and he initially showed no interest in the Great Socialist Experiment. By 1920, he was in London where he joined the local Theosophist scene dominated by Annie Besant. Besant and her followers were outspoken supporters of Indian independence which brought them under the scrutiny of British security. By the early 20s, Moscow had become the main benefactor of anti-British agitation in Asia and in the view of MI6’s Desmond Morton (later one of Churchill’s most trusted spies) “nearly all these theosophist and theosophical societies are connected in some way with Bolshevism, Indian revolutionaries and other unpleasant activities.”35
Roerich came to see British influence over Tibet as an evil he must combat, and during 1920 other things pushed him further towards Moscow. Roerich’s wife Elena (Helene), a medium, began receiving messages from an entity calling himself Master Morya, or Allal Ming, who claimed to be a member of the Great White Brotherhood and “spiritual teacher of Tibet.”36 Allal Ming convinced Roerich that he was the key to the fulfilment of a “Great Plan” which would end with creation of a vast, pan-Buddhist state that would encompass Tibet, Mongolia, parts of China, and much of Siberia. The first stage would be the “Shambhala War,” the end result of which would be the “earthly expression of the Invisible Kingdom of Shambhala.”37 The Plan is virtually identical to the one envisioned by Baron Ungern at almost the same time. However, whereas Ungern aimed to build his New Order by making war on the godless Bolsheviks, Roerich’s guide encouraged him to see the Soviets as allies and Lenin as a harbinger of a new, enlightened age. Perhaps the King of the World was hedging his bets.
At the same time, Roerich acquired a new follower in the person of a young Russian Theosophist, Vladimir Anatol’evich Shibaev. Shibaev also happened to be an agent for the Communist International (Comintern) working with Indian nationalists. He introduced the Roerich’s to other Soviet officials and encouraged their plans to move to India as a first step in realising the Great Plan. London’s MI5 kept a close eye on Shibaev and his dealings with Roerich.38
The Roerich’s moved to New York in October 1920. They thus evaded the hostile scrutiny of British authorities and secured support among wealthy Americans. One such benefactor was Wall Street broker Louis Levy Horch who helped found the Roerich Museum and became the Mystic’s financial manager and mainstay. Naturally, Horch, too, had a secret life. A successful businessman with important connections in American politics, he also was an underground operative for the Cheka/OGPU.39
The Roerich’s next relocated to Darjeeling, India in late 1923. This put them under the watchful eyes of Frederick Marsham Bailey, the British “political resident” in nearby Sikkim, and a man intimately familiar with Russian activities in Central Asia.
In spring 1925, Roerich was ready to launch his expedition into the Himalayas and beyond. The synchronicity with Barchenko’s plan seems more than coincidental and doubtless had something to do with the scuttling of that effort. Travelling under the American flag and backed by Yankee money, Roerich had the advantage of not being a blatant Soviet cat’s paw. Still, it is interesting that Bokii’s and Barchenko’s pal Blumkin should materialise at Roerich’s side. Whatever his connection to the British, did Blumkin maintain communication with his friends back in Moscow? Regardless, he and Roerich would roam the fringes of Tibet (never reaching Lhasa), and press on into Sinkiang and Mongolia. There was even time for a side-trip to Moscow where Roerich hob-nobbed with more Soviet officials. In fact, his expedition was Moscow-managed from beginning to end, whether Roerich fully realised it or not.
That fact was not lost on the British. During this period, MI6 monitored Red activities in Asia through one of its men in the Moscow embassy, Arthur V. Burbury. In 1928, persons in London concluded that Roerich had been “illuminated” as to the “excellence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”40
Real-Life Model for Indiana Jones, Roy Chapman Andrews
In contrast to Barchenko and Roerich, American Roy Chapman Andrews had no obvious interest in the occult and paranormal.41 Of course, given his curiosity about natural mysteries, he must have harboured a little about supernatural ones. Born in Wisconsin in 1884, Andrews evidenced an early lust for knowledge and adventure. By World War I, he had acquired a degree from Columbia University, membership in the exclusive Explorer’s Club and employment at the American Museum of Natural History (MNH).
His early explorations took him to China, which doubtless accounted for a new assignment that came his way in 1918. He travelled as a “naturalist” but he was really an officer of the US Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) assigned to the American Legation in Beijing.42 Befitting a good spy, Andrews was subsequently very mum about what he did there, but he made at least two “reconnaissance” trips into turbulent Mongolia, visiting its capital of Urga (where Baron Ungern would soon take charge) and venturing into Siberia where the Russian Civil War raged.43 Andrews subsequently compiled a map of the “Southern Boundary Region of Asiatic Russia” which found its way to the US Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID).44 In his travels, did Andrews hear the same whispers of Agharti/Shambhala that reached the ears of Ossendowski, Roerich, and Barchenko?
Andrews left the Navy in the spring of 1919, but no sooner did he return to the States that he offered his services to the Army’s MID. His former boss in Beijing, US Naval Attaché Commander I.V. Gillis, vouched for Andrews as someone “who in case of emergency could be depended upon to do work with required skill and nerve,” and a colleague at the Museum of Natural History assured MID that Andrews was the “only American who is at all familiar with Mongolian.”45
Between 1922 and 1930, Andrews led five expeditions into the Gobi Desert and adjoining regions of Mongolia. All were sponsored by the MNH and made notable fossil discoveries, including the first dinosaur eggs. However, the original goal of the explorations was not animal fossils, but evidence of early man. Andrew’s boss at the Museum, Henry Fairfield Osborn, was convinced that the origins of the human race lay somewhere in Eastern or Central Asia. Some of his theories echoed those of the Theosophists, or so thought the Theosophists.46
From our perspective, the most interesting of Andrews’ forays was the one that commenced in early 1925 and took him and his companions deep into western Mongolia. The “mapmaking” team consisted of a US Army officer, Lt. Fred Butler, and a British officer, Lt. H.O. Robinson, detached from His Majesty’s Legation in Beijing.47 Butler’s later report also went to MID.48
Andrews might have gleaned information about Roerich’s activities from another explorer then roaming the wastes of Central Asia, Ossendowski’s nemesis, Sven Hedin. The Swede told Andrews that his expedition was a “reconnaissance” of a projected Lufthansa air route across Central Asia to Beijing, but it may have been something more.49In any case, Andrews dutifully reported his conversation with Hedin to MID.
In the end, Shambhala remained hidden, or so it seems. Roerich and Andrews went on to live out full lives and pass on, respectively, in 1947 and 1960. Barchenko, Bokii and the brethren of ETB were not so fortunate. All perished in the purges of the late 1930, condemned for crimes they did not – or did – commit.
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Footnotes
1. Ferdinand Ossendowski, Beasts, Men and Gods (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1922), 300. 2. Ibid., 311. 3. Richard Spence, “The ‘Bloody’ Baron von Ungern-Sternberg: Madman or Mystic?” New Dawn, No. 108 (May-June 2008), 31-36. 4. Sven Hedin, Ossendowski und die Wahrheit (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1925). 5. Joseph Alexandre St.-Yves d’Alveydre, Mission de l’Inde (1910). D’Alveydre, arguably, was in turn influenced by two other works: Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1870) and fellow Frenchman Louis Jacolliot’s Les Fils de Dieu (1873). 6. See, e.g., Jason Jeffrey, “Mystery of Shambhala,” New Dawn, No. 73 (May-June 2002), and Joscelyn Goodwin, Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1996), 95-104. 7. Ostensibly a school of mystical Christianity, Martinism takes its name from the 18th century French esoteric philosopher, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin. 8. Markus Osterrieder, “From Synarchy to Shambala: The Role of Political Occultism and Social Messianism in the Activities of Nicholas Roerich,” Paper presented at the conference on The Occult in 20th Century Russia, Berlin, March 2007, 11, n. 68. 9. Ibid., 11, n. 67. 10. Oleg Shishkin, Bitva za Gimalai ( Moscow: Eksmo, 2003), 31. 11. Anton Pervushin, Okkul’tnyi Stalin (Moscow: Yauza, 2006), 133. 12. Aleksandr Andreev, Okkul’tist Strany Sovetov (Moscow: Yauza/Eksmo, 2004), 101. 13. Ibid., 74. 14. On the intrigues of Reilly and Savinkov, see Richard Spence, Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2002), especially, Chapter Nine. 15. Pervushin, 143-144. 16. Andreev, 91. 17. Aleksei Velidov, Pokhozhdeniia terrorista: Odisseia Yakova Bliumkina (Moscow: Sovremnik, 1998), 243. 18. Pervushin, 144-152. The expedition centred on the region of Lovozero-Seidozero. 19. Aleksandr Andreev, Soviet Russia and Tibet: The Debacle of Secret Diplomacy, 1918-1930s (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 108-109. 20. Andreev, 101. 21. Shishkin, 105-106. 22. Ibid., 259. 23. E.g., Peter Roberts, “Gurdjieff’s Origins,” www.promart.com/g.origins.html, (12 May 2008). 24. See: Sir Paul Dukes, The Story of “ST 25”: Adventure and Romance in the Secret Intelligence Service in Red Russia (London: Cassell, 1938). 25. Shishkin, 31. 26. Protokol dopros [Interrogation] of Bokii, 18-18 May 1937, in Andreev (2004), 360-361. 27. Shishkin, 177. 28. Ibid., 367. 29. Shishkin, 179, Pervushin, 171-173, and “Barchenko, Aleksandr Vasil’evich,” Liudi i sud’by, http://memory.pvost.org/pages/barchenko.html. 30. Protokol dopros [Interrogation] of Bokii, 17-18 May 1937, in Andreev (2004), 354-355. 31. Shishkin, 197. 32. Ibid., 203. 33. Osterrieder, 12 and n. 78. 34. Ibid., 1 and n. 3, and Shishkin, passim. 35. Gill Bennett, Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence (Routledge: London, 2007), 72. 36. Osterrieder, 2, 4 and n. 8. 37. Ibid, 1. 38. Shishkin, 48. 39. Shishkin, 68. 40. UK, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, notes on July 1928 exchange between India Office and Foreign Office. 41. On Andrews, see: Charles Gallenkamp, Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions (New York: Penguin Books, 2001). 42. Andrews US Passport application, 18 June 1918. 43. Gallenkamp, 72-73. 44. US National Archives, Records of the Military Intelligence Division, MID, 10989-H-12/8, MID to George H. Sherwood, 20 Jan. 1922. 45. MID, 2338-H-12/39, Report from N.A. China, 5 July 1921, and MID 2657-H-158/2, Clarence A. Manning to MID, 8 Nov. 1921. 46. G. de Purucker, Theosophy and Modern Science, Pt. I [Reprint] (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2003), 101. 47. Gallenkamp, 188. 48. MID, 2055-632-5, C of E to G2, 5 April 1926. 49. MID, 2657-D-935/2, HA, 29 April 1927.
