John Greer - The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies - The Ultimate A–Z of Ancient Mysteries, Lost Civilizations and Forgotten Wisdom

The story begins with Louis Jacolliot (1837–90), a French official in Chandernagore, India, who eked out a sparse salary by writing for the popular press. Jacolliot made several contributions to the field of rejected knowledge; the Nine Unknown Men, one of many groups claimed as the secret masters of the world, was another of his inventions. One of Jacolliot’s favorite themes was euhemerism, the idea that ancient mythology recounted events from even more ancient prehistory. In 1871 he published a bestseller, Le Fils de Dieu ( The Son of God ), supposedly recounting the 15,000-year-old history of India, as revealed to him by friendly Brahmans. See Euhemerism; rejected knowledge.

Suspiciously, the “history” in Jacolliot’s book has almost nothing in common with the traditional history of India as recounted in Hindu scriptures and epics, and almost everything in common with the Norse mythology then wildly popular in Europe as a result of the folklore collections of the Brothers Grimm and the operas of Richard Wagner. The city of Asgartha, capital of the ancient Indian empire at the center of Jacolliot’s history, is a case in point. This is simply Asgarth – an alternative spelling of Asgard, the home of the Norse gods – with an a tacked on the end to make it look like a Sanskrit word.

The success of Jacolliot’s book put Asgartha on the map in French popular culture, but it is not quite clear how the city came into the hands of the next major figure in the Agharta saga, the eccentric French occultist J.-A. Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (1842–1909). Saint-Yves claimed that he was taught about Aghartta (his preferred spelling) by Haji Sharif, whom Saint-Yves called “a high official in the Hindu church” but who had a Muslim name and seems to have been a parrot-shop proprietor in Le Havre. According to the researches of Joscelyn Godwin, one of the few capable historians to explore the Agharta myth, Haji Sharif taught Sanskrit to Saint-Yves, and also passed on some material derived from Jacolliot’s book. From there, Saint-Yves went on to create the entire modern mythology of Agharta.

In 1886 Saint-Yves privately published a book about Aghartta titled Mission de l’Inde en Europe ( The Mission of India in Europe ). He then became convinced he had revealed too much, recalled the entire edition, and had all but two copies burned. Not until 1910, a year after his death, was the book reissued. It proved to be an account of astral journeys in which Saint-Yves went in search of Aghartta and found a living city deep underground, inhabited by millions of people under a Sovereign Pontiff whose absolute rule was backed up with technological marvels as well as mystical powers. Much of the book expounds Saint-Yves’ political philosophy of synarchy, and the whole account shows obvious borrowings from Jacolliot’s Le Fils de Dieu , Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s occult novel The Coming Race , and the “Mahatma letters” circulated by the Theosophical Society. See synarchy; Theosophical Society.

Well before Mission de l’Inde’ s reissue, rumors about Agharta circulated in occult circles in Paris, and the Martinist order headed by Papus (Dr. Gérard Encausse), one of Saint-Yves’ closest students. The republication of the book instantly made the hidden city a hot topic throughout the European occult underworld. This was probably the channel by which it reached its next major publicist, Polish adventurer Ferdinand Ossendowski. After traveling through central Asia in the throes of the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed it, Ossendowski published the sensational bestseller Beasts, Men, and Gods (1922). Large portions of the first three chapters were plagiarized from Saint-Yves’ book, though Ossendowski changed the spelling of most of the proper names: Saint-Yves’ Aghartta, for example, became Agharti in Ossendowski’s tale. See Martinism.

Ossendowski’s book was published in several languages and brought Agharta into a blaze of publicity that has never really faded. The Traditionalist philosopher René Guénon took time from his abstruse studies of Vedanta to write Le Roi du Monde ( The King of the World , 1927), turning the story of Agharta into vehicle for subtle analyses of symbolism and myth. On the other end of the cultural spectrum, the pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories , under its legendary editor Raymond Palmer, made room for stories about Agharta in the 1940s. See Palmer, Raymond.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Agharta became a fixture in New Age and alternative reality circles in America and elsewhere, and found itself associated and at times confused with Shambhala, the other mysterious city in central Asia. During these same years, however, most serious occult secret societies dropped the entire superstructure of occult alternative history that had accumulated during the “Theosophical century” (1875–1975), and few if any magical secret societies include teachings about Agharta at present. Further reading: Godwin 1993, Guénon 1983, Kafton-Minkel 1989.

Pharaoh of Egypt, c. 1400– c. 1350 BCE. The second son of Amenhotep III of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty, the future Pharaoh Akhenaten was originally named Amenhotep. There may have been ill feeling between father and son, as the young Amenhotep is never named or portrayed alongside his siblings on his father’s monuments, but he became crown prince after the death of his older brother Thothmes and took the throne a few years later as Amenhotep IV.

Shortly after his enthronement, he proclaimed that the gods of Egypt’s polytheism were lifeless and powerless, and the only real god was Aten, the physical sun. In the first four years of his reign he imposed a religious revolution on Egypt, abolishing the priests and temples of all gods but his own and changing his name from Amenhotep, meaning “Amen is satisfied,” to Akhenaten, “spirit of Aten.”

In the fifth year of his reign, Akhenaten abandoned the capital city at Thebes and built a new capital for himself nearly a hundred miles down the Nile, at Tell el-Amarna, across the river from the ancient city of Hermopolis. Akhetaten, “Horizon of Aten,” contained a huge temple to Aten and a grandiose palace for Akhenaten himself, built and decorated in a style that flouted the traditional geometries of Egyptian art. Surrounded by his courtiers and favorites, the pharaoh pursued his religious vision and isolated himself from the world outside Akhetaten’s walls.

The last decade of his reign was a period of continual crisis, as the burden of rising taxes and forced labor for Akhenaten’s building programs crushed the Egyptian economy, and the rising power of the Hittite Empire in what is now Turkey challenged a military already stretched to the limit by Egypt’s own internal troubles. Meanwhile epidemic disease swept through Egypt, adding another strain to a crumbling society. Many Egyptians believed that the gods were abandoning Egypt because Egypt had abandoned the gods.

In the midst of these crises, Akhenaten died. Three short-lived successors – a shadowy figure named Smenkhare, the boy-king Tutankhamen, and Akhenaten’s elderly Prime Minister Ay – struggled with the situation without resolving it. Finally, on Ay’s death, the throne passed to Horemheb, commander of the army. Often tarred as the villain of Akhenaten’s story, Horemheb was a canny realist who understood that Akhenaten’s disastrous experiment had to be reversed if Egypt was to survive. During Horemheb’s 25-year reign, Egypt returned to peace and prosperity, but the price was the total destruction of Akhenaten’s legacy. Akhetaten was razed to the ground, the temples of Aten were torn down stone by stone to provide raw materials for new temples to the old gods of Egypt, and every trace of Akhenaten’s reign, his image, his name, and his god was obliterated.