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In 2001 as Australians celebrated the centenary of federation, no attention was paid to the role of mystic thinkers and esoteric ideas in Australian history. The vast majority of Australians know nothing of the “inner side” of their country’s political, cultural and religious evolution.

How many people are aware, for example, that the call sign of Sydney’s pioneering radio station 2GB stands for the martyred sixteenth century mage Giordano Bruno (GB)? Or that Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, a major force in the foundation of the Australian Commonwealth, was heavily involved in spiritualism and an enthusiastic student of Madame Blavatsky’s writings? Who knows of Walter Burley Griffin’s use of occult principles in the design of Canberra, the national capital? Who today remembers the Star Amphitheatre built at Sydney’s Balmoral Beach to welcome the “World Teacher, when He Comes”? Or that in the 1920s Sydney was proclaimed a “great theosophical centre”, home of the renowned and controversial occult teacher, the Bishop Charles Webster Leadbeater. A prolific writer on metaphysics and one of the world’s greatest clairvoyants, Leadbeater predicted the “emergence of the new ‘sub-race’ in Australia and New Zealand.”

In Other Temples, Other Gods, Nevill Drury and Gregory Tillett observe that, “despite its relative youth as a modern nation,” Australia, “has had a colourful and active history of occultists and occult movements.”1

Some of the leaders of progressive politics in Australian were also students of esoteric wisdom. In 1892 the labour organiser William Lane’s political novel The Workingman’s Paradise was published in Sydney. In it the working girl Nellie says scornfully, “There is no God. How can there be?” But the mysterious socialist Geisner rebukes her in words straight from Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine. There is at least “the imperishable breath of the universe”. For Geisner explains, “the Purpose of Life is self-consciousness…. God seeking to know God. Eternal Force one immeasurable Thought. Humanity the developing consciousness of the little fragment of the universe within our ken.”2

Disillusioned with the socialist movement in Australia, William Lane (1861-1917) established a communalist settlement in South America. A non-smoker and non-drinker, Lane was also a vegetarian who recognised the importance of a healthier attitude to diet. Inspired by Lane’s vision and example, hundreds of Australian workers sailed with him in 1893 to the “New Australia” colony in Paraguay.

The first Gnostic study circle was established in Melbourne in 1886. A year earlier the Reverend Charles Strong led most of his congregation out of Victorian Presbyterianism to found a native, ethical church, the “Australian Church”. Strong’s Australian Church sponsored the Religious Science Club, a forum for all manner of independent thought and spiritual enquiry.

AUSTRALIA & THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

Such was the interest in mysticism and spiritualism at the turn of the century that Australia came to prominence in the largest international occult movement of the day – the Theosophical Society.

“The occult movement which achieved the greatest publicity in Australian history,” explain Drury and Tillett, “and for which Australia was an international focus for many years, was the Theosophical Society.”3

In the early 1890s study circles devoted to Theosophy as presented in the texts of Madame Blavatsky had formed around Australia, leading to the founding of the Australasian Section of the Theosophical Society in 1895.

As Drury and Tillett explain:

The progress of the T.S. [Theosophical Society] was steady; lectures given, meetings held, leaflets and publicity material produced, and journals published. Lodges were established throughout Australia…. But it was the lecture tours of one man which established Theosophy as a movement of public interest in Australia: Charles Webster Leadbeater toured the country in 1905, following a lecture tour of several years in the U.S.A. during which he attracted thousands of enthusiastic listeners, and in 1914 he settled in Sydney, remaining there more or less permanently until his death in 1934.4

By the 1920s there were more paid-up members of the Theosophical Society than members of the Communist Party of Australia. The twenties witnessed a surge of Theosophical activism as Australian Theosophists sort to present a vibrant alternative to the mainstream, including the growing political ideologies of bolshevism and fascism. In addition to the public lectures, lodge meetings, and libraries, there was the Society owned Sydney Radio station 2GB as well as a successful publishing enterprise. Journals with titles like Advance! Australia and Theosophy in Australia, presented the society’s views and analysis of turbulent world events. Writing in Advance! Australia, one of the society’s leaders called for:

purified patriotism, the promotion of a noble type of Australian citizenship, vitally Australian, eagerly conscious of Australia’s specific place and part in the building of the future, no less eagerly conscious of the wider and equally vital citizenship involved in Australia’s membership of the British Commonwealth, and recognising too… there is a World citizenship, the obligations of which may no longer be ignored.5

Walter Burley Griffin wrote of “Building for Nature” and the “outdoor arts in Australia” in the pages of Advance! Australia. Together with Marion Mahoney Griffin, he set up an “organic” community at Castlecrag, Sydney. Griffin hoped for the awakening of “disused powers of the universal mind” and social renewal as people turned inward to reconnect with “the possibilities of co-operation between head and mind in social service and creative effort.”6

Adyar Hall, the Theosophical Society’s impressive Sydney centre, served as the meeting place for many original social, political and spiritual groups, among them “The Australia First Movement”. Founded by P.R. Stephensen, a one time associate of Aleister Crowley, Australia First campaigned against Australian involvement in the Second World War.
A.R. Mills, a Melbourne solicitor active in Australia First, had been on the fringe of the Theosophical Society. During the 1920s and 1930s, Mills formed the world’s first Odinist religion, a mixture of Nordic mythology and occultism.

A persistent notion running through all the organisations and individuals concerned with esoteric wisdom is the conviction Australia has a special role to play in the dawn of a new Golden Age. Although popularised mainly by the Theosophists, the idea of Australia’s secret occult destiny surfaces in various mystical circles. In the early decades of the twentieth century the tireless Veni Cooper-Mathieson who founded – among other orders and institutions – the Home of Truth Esoteric College, the Church Universal, the Universal Truth Publication Company, taught that Australia was the “land of the dawning.”

AUSTRALIA: HOME OF A NEW HUMANITY

Madame Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, is credited with developing the theory that humanity evolves through a sequence of Seven Root Races, “four of which have already lived their day, the fifth still exists, and two are to appear in the future.”7

In a series of lectures delivered in Sydney in August 1915, Bishop Leadbeater proclaimed “Australia and New Zealand as the home of a new sub-race.” He had detected in Australia “children and young people of a distinctly new type.” A new antipodean human type characterised by intuition and the powers of synthesis. Jill Roe in her book on Theosophy in Australia writes:

Leadbeater urged his audience to align themselves with evolutionary law, assuring them that present confusions were merely transitional. He held that, despite distance and a small population, the Antipodes provided a favourable site for inauguration of a new era of brotherhood and cooperation, being neither decadent like Britain nor overblown by capitalist pride like America, and not yet delivered into unworkably democratic systems by ‘too young souls’. There was crudity, and reverse class legislation, but the wholesome environment held promise.8

In Leadbeater’s view, however: “It would be important to purify child-rearing practices, by abstinence from alcohol, meat and tobacco, and to educate the next generation correctly…. The reward would be the coincidence of a new sub-race and the World Teacher in fifteen or twenty years’ time.”9

By embracing techniques of physical and mental purification, Leadbeater believed in a couple of generations the whole of Australia would be controlled by a new people, who would constitute “what in Europe we should call the aristocracy of the country; that is to say, the best types”.10

Of course the Bishop’s message was not taken up by the Australian people and no new “aristocracy” emerged to lead the Antipodes into a new Golden Age. Was there any truth in Leadbeater’s predictions?

Nations, like individuals, have choices that eventually determine outcomes far beyond what can be recognised in the immediate. A collective – a group soul – like the individual soul must decide with which impulses to align. Nations can choose either the forces of materialism leading to decay and atrophy, or the higher influences of the spirit capable of leading to a New Beginning. In the case of Australia and New Zealand, the birth of the ‘new people’ was limited and distorted due to the infection of Mammonism. By concentrating on the search for outer happiness, following the path of the kingdoms of this world, the Australian nation stifled the quest for inner transcendence and the Kingdom of God.

By taking the way of materialism Australians cut themselves off from the subtle influences of the spirit and cosmic destiny. Manning Clark, Australia’s greatest historian, expressed the spiritual crisis of modern Australia when he said:

The decline of faith begat nihilism, and nihilism begat hedonism. It looked as though in the contest between Mammon and ‘millennial Eden’ Mammon had won. The dreams of all those who had migrated to the great south land had evaporated. The Aborigine had been corrupted and debased by contact with the white man. The voices of the Catholic who had spoken of a land dedicated to the Holy Spirit, the Dutch Protestants who had called for the discovery of a land that would yield ‘uncommonly large profit’, and the pleas of the followers of the Enlightenment with their faith in human perfectibility, had all dropped from a roar to a whisper, Mammon had won: Mammon had infected the ancient continent of Australia. The dreams of humanity had ended in an age of ruins.11

Yet in every generation, and in every nation, there is always a remnant of men and women who have not succumbed fully to negative earthly bonds. They are the silent ones who stand among the ruins of the modern era, living testimonies to the higher world of the spirit. The ability of any nation or people to realise their spiritual potential and partake in the dawn of a new Golden Age depends on the vitality of this remnant.

Have Australia and New Zealand forfeited their occult birthright?

Certainly some of the ‘new people’ characterised by intuition and the powers of synthesis are found today in Australia, as well as in many other places throughout the world. The future depends on the ability of this remnant to impact the greater society and become a new Noah’s Ark capable of surviving the coming times of tribulation and transition. True, nearly every nation has a myth promising them a leading role in the dawn of a New Age. The universality of this myth in no way detracts from the responsibility it places on a people with ‘ears to hear’ the message of the times. Every people are called to turn within and align with the New Era. And Australasia is not impervious to this call, to this great Thought.

Over a century ago, in 1892, the Australian socialist and mystic William Lane wrote:

The brute-mother who would not be comforted because her young was taken gave birth in the end to the Christs who have surrendered all because the world sorrows. And we, in our yearning and our aspirations, in our longings and our strugglings and our miseries, may engender even in these later days a Christ whom the world will not crucify….12

The earth still awaits the revelation of the Christ people, the new humanity destined to carry out the great work in which we all have a part to play. At the end of his book, William Lane challenged his readers with words that speak to us today:

Let us not be deceived! It is in ourselves that the weakness is. It is in ourselves that the real fight must take place between the Old and the New. It is because we ourselves value our miserable lives, because we ourselves cling to the old fears and kneel still before the old idols, that the Thought still remains a thought only, that it does not create the New Order which will make of this weary world a Paradise indeed.13

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Footnotes:

1. Nevill Drury and Gregory Tillet, Other Temples, Other Gods

2. As quoted in Jill Roe, Beyond Belief, Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939

3. Nevill Drury and Gregory Tillett, Other Temples, Other Gods

4. Ibid.

5. As quoted in Jill Roe, Beyond Belief, Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939

6. Ibid.

7. H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine

8. Jill Roe, Beyond Belief, Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939

9. As quoted in Jill Roe, Beyond Belief, Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939

10. As quoted in Gregory Tillett, The Elder Brother: A Biography of Charles Webster Leadbeater

11. Professor Manning Clark, A Short History of Australia

12. ‘John Miller’ (William Lane), The Workingman’s Paradise

13. Ibid.

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MEHMET SABEHEDDIN is a long time contributor to New Dawn magazine. He is conducting research into ancient wisdom traditions.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 3.

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn Special Issue 3 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

—

Lemuria and Mu are interchangeable names given to a lost land believed to have been located somewhere in either the southern Pacific or Indian Oceans. This ancient continent was apparently the home of an advanced and highly spiritual culture, perhaps the mother race of all mankind, but it sank beneath the waves many thousands of years ago as the result of a geological cataclysm of some kind.

The thousands of rocky islands scattered throughout the Pacific, including Easter Island, Tahiti, Hawaii and Samoa, have been claimed by some to be the only surviving remains of this once great continent. The theory of a lost continent in this area has been put forward by many different people, most notably in the mid 19th century by scientists in order to explain the unusual distribution of various animals and plants around the Indian and Pacific Oceans.In the late 19th century occultist Madame Blavatsky reincarnated the idea of Lemuria as a lost continent / spiritual homeland and influenced a host of subsequent occultists and mystics including well known American psychic healer and Prophet Edgar Cayce. The popularisation of Lemuria / Mu as a purely physical place began in the 20th century with ex-British army officer Colonel James Churchward, and the idea still has many adherents today.

But is there any physical evidence to back up these claims of an ancient continent beneath the Pacific or Indian Ocean? Or should these ‘lost homeland’ stories be interpreted in another way entirely, perhaps as the symbol of a mythical vanished ‘Golden Age’ of man?

The Land of Mu

The idea of a lost continent known as ‘Mu’ in the Pacific Ocean does not actually have a particularly long history, neither is it mentioned specifically in any ancient mythologies as some writers have suggested. The title ‘Mu’ originated with eccentric amateur archaeologist Augustus le Plongeon (1826-1908), who was the first to make photographical records of the ruins of the archaeological site of Chichen Itza in Yucatán, Mexico. Plongeon’s credibility was badly damaged by his attempted translation of a Mayan book known as the ‘Troana Codex’ (also known as the ‘Madrid Codex’).

In his books Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayans and Quiches (1886) and Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx (1896) Plongeon interpreted part of the text of the Troana Codex as revealing that the Maya of Yucatán were the ancestors of the Egyptians and many other civilisations. He also believed that an ancient continent, which he called Mu, had been destroyed by a volcanic eruption, the survivors of this cataclysm founding the Mayan civilisation. Plongeon equates Mu with Atlantis and states that a ‘Queen Moo’ originally from Atlantis, travelled to Egypt where she became known as Isis, and founded the Egyptian civilisation. However, Plongeon’s interpretation of the Mayan book is considered by experts in Mayan archaeology and history as completely erroneous, indeed much of what he interpreted as hieroglyphics turned out to be ornamental design.

Lemuria

‘Lemuria’, the alternative name for the lost continent, also originated in the nineteenth century. Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919), a German naturalist and supporter of Darwin, proposed that a land bridge spanning the Indian Ocean separating Madagascar from India could explain the widespread distribution of lemurs, small, primitive tree-dwelling mammals found in Africa, Madagascar, India and the East Indian archipelago. More bizarrely, Haeckel also suggested that lemurs were the ancestors of the human race and that this land bridge was the “probable cradle of the human race.”

Other well-known scientists, such as the evolutionist T.H. Huxley and the naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, had no doubt about the existence of a huge continent in the Pacific millions of years previously, which had been destroyed in a disastrous earthquake that submerged it beneath the waves, much as Atlantis was thought to have been drowned.

Before the discovery of continental drift it was not unusual in the mid to late 19th century for scientists to propose submerged land masses and land bridges to explain the distribution of the world’s flora and fauna. In 1864, the English zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater (1829-1913) gave the hypothetical continent the name ‘Lemuria’ in an article ‘The Mammals of Madagascar’ in The Quarterly Journal of Science, and since then it has stuck.

The Geologists’ View

Zoologists and geologists now explain the distribution of lemurs and other plants and animals in the area of the Pacific and Indian Oceans to be the result of plate tectonics and continental drift. The theory of plate tectonics, and it is still a theory, affirms that moving plates of the Earth’s crust supported on less rigid mantle rocks causes continental drift, volcanic and seismic activity, and the formation of mountain chains. The concept of continental drift was first proposed by German scientist Alfred Wegener in 1912, but the theory did not gain general acceptance in the scientific community for another 50 years.

With this understanding of plate tectonics geologists now regard the theory of a sunken continent beneath the Pacific as an impossibility. They also point out that theories of lost lands in the Pacific mostly originate in the 19th century, when knowledge of the area was limited and well before the Pacific sea floor had been mapped.

Blavatsky’s Lemuria

The idea of Lemuria as something more than a physical place, or at least somewhere which had been inhabited by non-human entities before the appearance of man, derives from the writings of colourful Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891). Blavatsky was the co-founder, together with lawyer Henry Steel Olcott, of the Theosophical Society, in New York in 1875. The Society was an esoteric order designed to study the mystical teachings of both Christianity and Eastern religions.

In her massive tome The Secret Doctrine (1888) Blavatsky describes a history originating millions of years ago with the ‘Lords of Flame’ and goes on to discusses five ‘Root Races’ which have existed on earth, each one dying out in an earth-shattering cataclysm. The third of these Root Races she called the ‘Lemurian’, which lived a million years ago, and who were bizarre telepathic giants who kept dinosaurs as pets.

The Lemurians eventually drowned when their continent was submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean. The progeny of the Lemurians was the fourth Root Race, the human Atlanteans, who were brought down by their use of black magic, their continent of Atlantis sinking beneath the waves 850,000 years ago. Present humanity represents the Fifth Root Race.

Blavatsky envisioned her Lemuria as covering a vast area. In her own words it stretched from

…the foot of the Himalayas, which separated it from the inland sea rolling its waves over what is now Tibet, Mongolia, and the great desert of Schamo (Gobi); from Chittagong, westward to Hardwar, and eastward to Assam. From thence, it stretched South across what is known to us as Southern India, Ceylon, and Sumatra; then embracing on its way, as we go South, Madagascar on its right hand and Australia and Tasmania on its left, it ran down to within a few degrees of the Antarctic Circle; when, from Australia, an inland region on the Mother Continent in those ages, it extended far into the Pacific Ocean…

Blavatsky also describes survivors of the catastrophic destruction of Lemuria escaping to become the ancestors of some of the Aboriginal tribes of Australia. She maintained that she took all of her information regarding Lemuria from ‘The Book of Dzyan’, supposed to have been written in Atlantis and shown to her by the Indian adepts known as ‘Mahatmas’.

Madame Blavatsky never claimed to have discovered Lemuria; in fact she refers to Philip Schlater coining the name Lemuria, in her writings. It has to be said that The Secret Doctrine is an extremely difficult book, a complex mixture of Eastern and Western cosmologies, mystical ramblings and esoteric wisdom, much of it not meant to be taken literally.

Blavatsky’s is the first ‘occult’ interpretation of Lemuria, but on one level it should not be equated with the physical continent later proposed by Churchward. What Blavatsky and other occultists since have suggested concerning Lemuria could be partly interpreted as an ideal spiritual condition of the soul, a kind of spiritual-historical vision.

Nevertheless, there are some psychics and prophets who even today regard the existence of ancient Lemuria / Mu as a physical reality. Indeed, there are a few who when ‘hypnotically regressed’ have recalled former lives as citizens on the doomed continent.

Lemuria and Australia

The writings of Blavatsky and other Theosophists about Lemuria, and the idea of Australia as part of this ancient lost continent and the scene of a lost golden age, had a significant influence on mystics and occultists in the country at the end of the 19th century.

Queensland-born novelist Rosa Campbell Praed represented Australia as the last remnant of ancient Lemuria and believed the myth of the lost continent to be based on fact. In Praed’s case, she used the theosophical idea of Lemuria to present an idealised primeval history of Australia, a land very different to the Queensland frontier country wracked by racial violence she had witnessed first-hand as a child.

Other evidence for this fascination with ancient Lemuria comes in the series of Australian adventure of the 1890s known as “the Lemurian novels.” In The Last Lemurian, written in 1898 by historian of Australian exploration and adventure-romance novelist George Firth Scott, the narrator Dick Halwood discovers the remains of legendary Lemuria out in the Australian desert, in a plot involving reincarnation, pygmies, a bunyip-monster, and an occult Yellow Queen.

John David Hennessey’s An Australian Bush Track (1896) calls Lemuria ‘Zoo-Zoo land’, and locates it somewhere in northern Queensland. Its inhabitants, the Zoo-Zooans, are a “remnant of a great nation which came there from some part of the mainland of Asia,” but had lost all the arts of high civilisation they once possessed. The Lost Explorer (1890) by James Francis Hogan has Lemuria as ‘Malua’, located in the centre of Australia, and ruled by the cannibalistic Queen Mocata, the last survivor of a superior race that once lived in “the interior of the great southern continent.”

The idea that Australia was once part of this lost Eden has also influenced those of a more practical bent, and attempts have been made to locate traces of Lemurian civilisation on both the west and east coasts of Australia.

Aboriginal art, artefacts and mythology have also been used to identify the Aborigines as prehistoric remnants of the Lemurians (following Blavatsky again), who somehow escaped the devastation of 20,000 or so years ago. Indeed, in some Theosophical publications of the first quarter of the 20th century Aborigines were described as the last of the Lemurians. However, the Aborigines of Australia had already been established on the continent for at least 30,000 years at the time of the supposed destruction of Lemuria, in fact they have perhaps the longest continuous cultural history of any people on Earth, so the theory of them having a Lemurian origin does not hold water.

Colonel James Churchward

The lost civilisation of Lemuria / Mu was brought dramatically back to public attention in 1931 with the publication of Colonel James Churchward’s bizarre The Lost Continent of Mu, the first in a series of five books by Churchward about the lost continent.

In the book he claimed that the lost continent of Mu had once extended from an area north of Hawaii southwards as far as Fiji and Easter Island. According to Churchward, Mu was the original Garden of Eden and a technologically advanced civilisation which boasted 64,000,000 inhabitants. Around 12,000 years ago Mu was wiped out by an earthquake and submerged beneath the Pacific. Apparently Atlantis, a colony of Mu, was destroyed in the same way a thousand years later. All the world’s major ancient civilisations, from the Babylonians and the Persians, to the Maya and the Egyptians, were the remains of the colonies of Mu.

Churchward claimed he received this sensational information when, as a young officer in India during a famine in the 1880s, he became friendly with an Indian priest. This priest told Churchward that he and two cousins were the only survivors of a 70,000 year old esoteric order which originated on Mu itself. This order was known as the ‘Naacal Brotherhood’.
The priest showed Churchward a number of ancient tablets written by the Naacal Order in a forgotten ancient language, supposed to be the original language of mankind, which he taught the officer to read. Churchward later asserted that certain stone artefacts recovered in Mexico contained parts of the ‘Sacred Inspired Writings of Mu’, perhaps taking ideas from Augustus le Plongeon and his use of the Troana Codex to provide evidence for the existence of Mu.

Unfortunately, Churchward never produced any evidence to back up his exotic claims, he never published translations of the enigmatic Naacal tablets, and his books, though they still have many followers today, are perhaps better read as entertainment than factual studies of Lemuria / Mu.

Nan Madol

It was James Churchward who first posited the theory that the site of Nan Modal, on Pohnpei Island in the North Pacific Ocean, was one of the seven cities of ancient Mu / Lemuria.

The cyclopean ruins of Nan Modal, at one time a ceremonial centre covering 11 square miles, consist of around 90 small artificial islands built up out of a lagoon, and interlinked by a network of tidal canals. These islands, situated on the tidal flats southeast of Temwen Island, Micronesia, contain house foundations, sea walls – thirty feet tall in places, tunnels and burial vaults, all constructed entirely from prismatic basalt columns stacked crisscross like log cabins. These rocks weigh several tons on average, with the largest weighing 25 tons.

What makes the construction all the more remarkable is that the stone had to be transported some distance to the site, as no quarries have been found nearby, though they do exist elsewhere on the island. A clue to how this feat was achieved are crystal basalt columns discovered at the bottom of the lagoon near Temwen Island and on the shores of other islets in the area, which would suggest that the stones were transported by raft.

Modern Pohnpeians, on the other hand, believe the stones were flown over the island using black magic. Radio carbon dates and analysis of pottery from Nan Madol reveal that construction of the site began around 1200 CE, though the area may have been occupied from as early as 200 BCE. Such dates would certainly preclude any connection with Churchward’s Lemurians or their descendents.

At the beginning of the 13th century CE the island of Pohnpei is thought to have been conquered and unified by the mysterious ‘saudeleur’ dynasty, and it was then that the spectacular complex was constructed as a ceremonial and political seat for the new royal line. The saudeleur line was brought to an end in the 1500s by exiled Pohnpeian warrior, Isokelekel. The new chiefs, known as Nahnmwarki, occupied Nan Madol for a couple of hundred years, but by the 1800’s when the first Europeans arrived, the site was deserted. Why this happened remains one of the many mysteries of this incredible site.

The Kerguelen Continent

In the last twenty or so years submerged civilisations have once again been in the news due in particular to a number of intriguing underwater discoveries. In 1999 the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling (JOIDES) Resolution research vessel made an amazing discovery drilling in an area of the southern Indian Ocean about 3,000 km to the southwest of Australia.

The researchers discovered that an underwater plateau about a third the size of Australia, known as the Kerguelen Plateau, was actually the remains of a lost continent, which sank beneath the waves around 20 million years ago. The team found fragments of wood, a seed, spores and pollen, in 90 million year old sediment, as well as types of rocks associated with explosive volcanism.

One of the many fascinating points about the Kerguelen Plateau is that it contains sedimentary rocks similar to those found in India and Australia, which indicates that they were at one time connected. Scientists believe that around 50 million years ago, the continent may have had tropical flora and fauna, including small dinosaurs. With further research planned, the fascinating puzzle of the Kerguelen Plateau may yet resurrect the Lemuria debate.

Yonaguni Island and the Gulf of Cambay

In 1985 off the southern coast of Yonaguni Island, the westernmost island of Japan, a Japanese dive tour operator discovered a previously unknown stepped pyramidal edifice. Shortly afterwards, Professor Masaki Kimura, a marine geologist at Ryukyu University in Okinawa, confirmed the existence of the 183m wide, 27m high structure.

This rectangular stone ziggurat, part of a complex of underwater stone structures in the area which resemble ramps, steps and terraces, is thought to date from somewhere between 3,000 to 8,000 years ago. Some researchers have suggested these ruins are the remains of a submerged civilisation – and that the structures represent perhaps the oldest architecture in the world. Connections with Lemuria and Atlantis have also been mentioned.

However, some geologists, such as Robert Schoch of Boston University, and others with knowledge of the area, insist that the underwater ‘buildings’ are natural, mainly the result of ocean erosion and coral reef settlements and similar to other known geological formations in the region. Furthermore, archaeologists also point out that no man-made tools or weapons have been recovered from the site, which would indicate human settlement.

In December 2000 a team from the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) claimed to have discovered the remains of a huge lost city 36 metres underwater in the Gulf of Cambay, off the western coast of India. A year later further acoustic imaging surveys were undertaken and evidence recorded for apparent human settlement at the site, which included the foundations of huge structures, pottery, sections of walls, beads, pieces of sculpture and human bone. One of the wooden finds supposedly from the city has given a radiocarbon date of 7500 BCE, which would make the site 4,000 years earlier than the oldest known civilisation in India.

Research is ongoing at this fascinating site, now known as the Gulf of Khambat Cultural Complex (GKCC), which if the dates are proved correct, may one day radically alter our understanding of the world’s first civilisations. However, it must be added that a number of marine geologists believe that the NIOT scientists have made serious errors in their interpretations of the sonar images obtained from the area. The opinion of these researchers is that the supposedly ancient ‘ruins’, shown as geometric patterns on the images, are natural rock formations and there is no evidence that the artefacts discovered in the area of the site, including the radio-carbon dated block of wood, are associated with it. The debate is still continuing among geologists, archaeologists and historians on this controversial discovery.

Whether any of these underwater finds in the Pacific and Indian Oceans prove to be the remains of forgotten civilisations or not, one thing is certain – man will always be searching for a lost homeland or a more spiritually satisfying ancient past. In this sense Lemuria or Mu will always be more than just a physical place.

Sources and Further Reading

The Lost Continent of Mu by J. Churchward, C.W. Daniel Co. Ltd, 1994 (1931).

The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories by Sumathi Ramaswamy, University of California Press, 2005.

The Secret Doctrine II – Anthropogenesis by H.P. Blavatsky,  Theosophical University Press, Pasadena, California, 1970 (1888).

Other Temples, Other Gods: The Occult in Australia by N. Drury & G. Tillett, Sydney, Hodder & Stoughton, 1982.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/353277.stm – ‘Lost Continent Discovered’. The Kerguelen discovery.

www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1905/19050670.htm – ‘Questionable Claims’. The finds in the Gulf of Khambat.

www.morien-institute.org/yonaguni.html – Morien Institue page about Yonaguni.

www.pohnpeiheaven.com/nanmadol.htm – ‘Pohnpei – Between Time and Tide’.

www.uoregon.edu/~wsayres/NanMadol.html – Dr. William S. Ayres’s site about his work in Nan Madol.

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BRIAN HAUGHTON is a qualified archaeologist and researcher with an interest in the strange and unusual. He is author of Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries and Webmaster of www.mysteriouspeople.com, a site devoted to the lives of enigmatic people. He has written on the subjects of ancient mysteries and unusual people in history for various print and Internet publications including the B.B.C.’s Legacies Website, New Dawn Magazine, Awareness, and Paranormal Magazine in the U.K. His website is www.brian-haughton.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 103 (July-August 2007).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 103 (PDF version) for only US$2.95

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

Beneath the broad tide of human history there flow the stealthy undercurrents of the secret societies, which frequently determine in the depths the changes that take place upon the surface.
– A.E. Waite1

Have secret societies and occult brotherhoods been active behind the scenes of world events for thousands of years? Do these guardians of secret wisdom shape the growth of human consciousness and influence the destiny of nations? Are hidden masters of occult knowledge empowering and infiltrating certain political, cultural, spiritual and economic movements, in fulfilment of an ancient plan? Could it be that man’s great upheavals, wars, and revolutions, as well as his pioneering discoveries in science, literature, philosophy and the arts, are the result of a ‘hidden hand’? Can we decode history and find the mysterious interface between politics and occultism, thereby uncovering the real movers and shakers in our modern world?

The German philosopher Oswald Spengler warned of a “mighty contest” between groups of men of “immense intellect” who the “simple citizen neither observes nor comprehends.” Back in 1930 Ralph Shirley, the editor of the London Occult Review, Britain’s leading journal of esoteric sciences, endorsed “the suspicion that the ranks of occultism are secretly working for disintegration and revolution. Positive proof in the shape of a group of occultists working with this objective in view recently came under the notice of the present writer.”

Major-General Fuller, a former disciple of Aleister Crowley, who had links to British military intelligence, wrote about an insidious force using “Magic and Gold” striving “to gain world domination under an avenging Messiah as foretold by Talmud and Qabalah.” Fuller’s former chief Crowley worked as a secret agent for both Britain and Germany, although his British handlers noted his ‘unreliability’ warning he should only be used in espionage operations with the utmost care. During the First World War the German Foreign Office secretly requested the occultist Gustav Meyrink to write a novel blaming the Freemasons of France and Italy for the outbreak of war.

Madame Blavatsky believed the Catholic society of Jesuits had transferred their headquarters from the continent to England where they plotted to plunge man into passive ignorance and institute “Universal Despotism”. The founder of the Theosophical Society, a woman of immense intellect and first hand experience of secret societies, warned:

Students of Occultism should know that while the Jesuits have by their devices contrived to make the world in general, and Englishmen in particular think there is no such thing as Magic and laugh at Black Magic, these astute and wily schemers themselves hold magnetic circles and form magnetic chains by the concentration of theircollective WILL, and when they have any special object to effect or any particular and important person to influence.2

The French Revolution, one of Europe’s most important political upheavals, was largely the work of Masonic lodges dedicated to the overturning of the monarchy and an end of the established Catholic religion. In Proofs of a Conspiracy (1798), John Robison showed that the political clubs and correspondence committees during the revolution, including the famous Jacobin Club, sprang from these Masonic lodges.

The influence on history of mysticism, the occult and secret societies is generally dismissed by Western academics. Mainstream historians choose to ignore this aspect because they believe it has no real significance to world politics. In fact it is only through acknowledging the role and influence of the ‘occult underground’ that important world events can be fully understood and placed in their real historical perspective.

Atlantism Verses Eurasianism

Secret societies and the teachers of occult wisdom consistently trace their origins back to the very dawn of civilisation. Within Judeo-Christian culture, the secret schools speak of Adam, Seth, Moses and the Patriarchs as initiates of a divine wisdom carefully passed from one generation to the next. Other occult groups look back beyond ancient Egypt and the Mystery schools of Greece, to the lost continent of Atlantis. Still others trace their lineage to Sumeria or Babylon and the mysterious plains of Tartary.

Examining mankind’s myths, legends and arcane stories we encounter countless references to a vanished primordial civilisation. The brilliant French metaphysician Rene Guenon wrote of a great Hyperborean culture that flourished around the Arctic Circle and of its outposts Shambhala in the East and Atlantis in the West. Plato wrote of Atlantis, describing it as the heart of a great and powerful empire which, due to the indiscriminate mixing of “the sons of God” with “the children of men,” suffered “violent earthquakes and floods” and “disappeared beneath the sea”. According to occult tradition, Atlantis came to an end after a lengthy period of chaos and disaster brought about, in the words of Madame Blavatsky, because the “Atlantis-race became a nation of wicked magicians.” Atlantis was destroyed by a conspiracy of evil magicians who had seized control of the mighty continent.

Long before the final end of Atlantis, great migrations took place to different centres of the earth. In one legend we are told of a righteous remnant journeying from the Arctic Circle to Shambhala, in the remote fastness of Central Asia. Other legends suggest Atlantean survivors established the ancient Egyptian civilisation.

Victoria LePage, the author of one of the most comprehensive studies of Shambhala explains how Atlantis and Shambhala are more than mere geographic locations:

In folklore Atlantis and Shambhala are implicitly linked together as charismatic images of heart’s desire, two shining mirages that lie on the farthest horizon of human longing, unattainable, always receding as we reach for them; at best no more than ideal states of consciousness never realized. But their association seems to have a far more real and historically concrete basis than that. Initiatic tradition affirms they have both genuinely existed, one in the western sea, the other in the eastern mountains, as lynchpins of what was once a network of Wisdom centers located on a great power-grid extending around the globe. Further, Shambhala still exists within a framework that awaits reactivation.3

In order to identify the historical activities of secret societies we need to appreciate the origin of a most powerful idea. Occult lore speaks of Shambhala as the positive centre of the Brotherhood of Light, and Atlantis the negative centre of the evil magicians, the Brothers of the Shadow. Wherever we look we see the division of secret societies and occult endeavours into these two opposing ‘Orders’. All occult movements and teachings inevitably serve either the “Order of Eurasia” or the “Order of Atlantism”, with their respective symbolic centres of Shambhala and Atlantis. Concealed behind a multitude of different forms and represented by an array of unsuspecting agents of influence, these two centres – Shambhala and Atlantis – represent two different impulses in human evolution.

Viewed from the perspective of sacred geography, in our present historical cycle, Atlantism is the triumph of the most destructive and diabolical elements in the civilisation of the West. One modern authority on sacred geography and geopolitics observes:

Sacred geography on the basis of “space symbolism” traditionally considers the East as “the land of Spirit”, the paradise land, the land of a completeness, abundance, the Sacred “native land” in its fullest and most perfect kind. In particular, this idea is mirrored in the Bible text, where the eastern disposition of “Eden” is treated.

Precisely such understanding is peculiar also to other Abrahamic traditions (Islam and Judaism), and also to many non-Abrahamic traditions – Chinese, Hindu and Iranian. “East is the mansion of the gods”, states the sacred formula of the ancient Egyptians, and the same word “east” (“neter” in Egyptian) meant at the same time “god”. From the point of view of natural symbolism, East is the place where the sun rises, Light of the World, material symbol of Divinity and Spirit.

The West has the opposite symbolical meaning. It is the “country of death”, the “lifeless world”, the “green country” (as the ancient Egyptians called it). West is “the empire of exile”, “the pit of the rejected”, according to the expression of Islamic mystics. West is “anti-East”, the country of decay, degradation transition from the manifest to the non-manifest, from life to death, from completeness to need, etc. West is the place where the sun goes, where it “sinks down”.4

Russia & the Magical Universe

Russia, geographically the largest country on earth, occupies a unique position in the study of human history furnishing us with a window into the world of secret societies, occult teachers, and subterranean political currents.

Ideas and practices drawn from magic and the occult have always been a part of Russian life. In the sixteenth century Tsar Ivan IV consulted magicians and was aware of the occult significance of the precious stones set in his staff. His reign was the culmination of the dream of building a prophetic, religious civilisation in the Eastern Christian tradition of Byzantium. Surrounded by secret orders of apocalyptical monks, Ivan saw himself as heir to the Israelite kings and attempted to transform Russian life in accord with his magical view of reality. Ivan was convinced the Russian nation had a special mission to accomplish, nothing short of the redemption of the world.

In 1586, Tsar Boris Godunov offered the huge salary of 2000 English pounds a year, with a house and all provisions free, to John Dee, the English magus and spy master, to enter his service. Dee’s son Dr. Arthur Dee, who like his father was an alchemist and Rosicrucian, went to Moscow to work as a physician. Mikhail Romanov, the first Tsar of the Romanov dynasty, allegedly ascended the throne with the help of Dr. Arthur Dee and the British Secret Service. Before their rise to power the Romanovs were accused by their enemies of practising magic and possessing occult powers.

The legendary Count of Saint Germain, described as an alchemist, spy, industrialist, diplomat and Rosicrucian, became involved in several political intrigues in Russia and was, according Nicholas Roerich, “a member of the Himalayan brotherhood.” In 1755 he traveled throughout Eurasia to study occult teachings, and may even have visited Tibet. It is said that while studying occultism in Central Asia the Count was introduced to the secret rites of Tantric sex magic which provided him with a technique to prolong his youth. He also engaged in spying operations against the notorious British India Company. Saint Germain founded two secret societies called the Asiatic Brethren and the Knights of Light. As early as 1780 he warned Marie Antoinette that the French throne was in danger from an international conspiracy of ‘Brothers of the Shadow’. Rumours continued to circulate for many years after his alleged death that Saint Germain was still alive working behind the scenes in European politics or studying occult doctrines in Central Asia.

West Meets East

Occult powers seem to be a matter of national temperament… Russia tends to produce mages – men or women who impress by their spiritual authority; no other nation has a spiritual equivalent of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, or even of Rozanov, Merezhkovsky, Soloviev, Fedorov, Berdaev, Shestov. Certainly no other nation has come near to producing anyone like Madame Blavatsky, Gregory Rasputin or George Gurdjieff. Each is completely unique.
– Colin Wilson, The Occult

The process of synthesis of the occult traditions of East and West is seen in the work of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society and the author of the magnus opus The Secret Doctrine. Born Helena von Hahn, the daughter of a Russian military family and cousin to the future Russian Prime Minister Count Witte, she is a true emissary of the Eurasian Order. Nevill Drury says of the Russian occultist:

Her main contribution to mystical thought was the manner in which she sought to synthesise Eastern and Western philosophy and religion, thereby providing a framework for understanding universal occult teaching.5

Madame Blavatsky traveled throughout Asia and Europe, joined Garibaldi’s national revolutionary militia, fighting in the battle of Mentana, in which she was severely wounded. In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of her first book Isis Unveiled, a compelling indictment of contemporary Western religion as spiritually bankrupt, she moved from the United States to India where the headquarters of the Theosophical Society remains until this day.

In 1891 the future Tsar Nicholas II, in the company of the mystic Eurasian scholar Prince Ukhtomsky, visited the headquarters of the Theosophical headquarters at Adyar. Prince Ukhtomsky’s description of the society is revealing:

At the insistence of H.P. Blavatsky, a Russian lady who knew and had seen much, the idea sprang up of the possibility, and even the necessity, of founding a society of theosophists, of searchers for the truth in the broadest sense of the word, for the purpose of enlisting adepts of all creeds and races, of penetrating deeper into the most secret doctrines of oriental religions, of drawing Asiatics into true spiritual communion with educated foreigners in the West, of keeping up secret relations with different high priests, ascetics, magicians, and so on.6

Madame Blavatsky wanted to unite Central Asia, India, Mongolia, Tibet and China, in order – with the involvement of Russia – to create a grand Eurasian power able to oppose British ambitions. Traveling across India Blavatsky agitated against British rule and found herself accused by the colonial authorities of being a Russian spy. Prince Ukhtomsky saw support for Eurasia in the “readiness of the Indians to group themselves under the banner of the strange northern woman.” He believed Madame Blavatsky had been forced to leave India by “the suspiciousness of the English.”

As early as 1887 H.P. Blavatsky had become a topic of debate in “mystic Petersburg” and received the prestigious support of Ukhtomsky’s friend the mysterious Tibetan Dr. Badmaev, soon to become notorious for the favour he received at the Russian imperial court and his relationship with Rasputin. Madame Blavatsky’s sister insisted that the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan of Kiev had recognised the young Helena’s psychic gift, and admonished her to use her powers with discretion, as he felt sure they were given her for some higher purpose.

Dr. Stephan A. Hoeller, a scholar of comparative religion and a Gnostic Bishop, reminds us that Blavatsky,

was a true daughter of Mother Russia. Some feel that her life and character correspond strongly to the archetype of the traditional Russian wandering holy person, known as the staretz (literally ‘old one’), denoting a wandering, non-clerical ascetic, or pilgrim, who travels about the countryside, exhorting people concerning spiritual matters, sometimes in a decidedly unorthodox manner.7

After H.P. Blavatsky’s death in London in 1891, the Theosophical Society came under the firm control of the English occultists Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, a confirmed British imperialist. The Eurasian orientation given to early Theosophy by H.P. Blavatsky was compromised by the influence of British Masonry and Leadbeater’s esoteric High Anglicanism. In the great struggle of the magicians the Eurasian impulse found new historical agents in the West, among them the celebrated French magus Papus.

Grand Battle of the Magicians

When the 19th century will have come to an end, one of the Brothers of Hermes will come from Asia to unite humanity again.
– Nostradamus

Papus, together with Oswald Wirth and De Guaita, dreamed of uniting occultists everywhere into a revived Rosicrucian brotherhood, an international occult order in which they hoped the Russian Empire would play a leading role as the bridge between East and West.

Papus was the pseudonym of Dr. Gerard Encausse (1865-1916), a disciple of Joseph Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (1842-1910), an initiate of the French Gnostic Church and often the instigator of many of the occult groups of his time. One of the most famous turn-of-the century occultists, he was the founder of the Hermetic School in Paris, which attracted many Russian students, and directed the leading French occult review, L’Initiation. Papus was also the head of two secret societies, the L’Ordre du Martinisme and the L’Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix.

When the Russian Tsar and Tsaritsa visited France in 1896, it was Papus who sent them a greeting on behalf of “the French Spiritualists,” hoping that the Tsar would “immortalise his Empire by its total union with Divine Providence.” This greeting was reminiscent of the hopes of mystics at the time of Tsar Alexander I’s Holy Alliance.

Papus made his first visit to Russia in 1901 and was introduced to the Tsar. He quickly set up a lodge of his Martinist Order in St. Petersburg with the Tsar as the president of the “Unknown Superiors” who controlled it. The historian James Webb says Papus “was merely reviving a devotion to a philosophy that had flourished in Russia at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries before being suppressed.”

As the foremost student of Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Papus knew of the key role to be played by Russia in unifying Eurasia and her occult destiny as the Empire of the End, the outward manifestation of the enigmatic power of ‘Northern Shambhala’.

Through Papus the Imperial family became acquainted with his friend and spiritual mentor Master Philippe (Nizier Anthelme Philippe). A sincere Christian mystic, he was given rank and honours by the Russian Tsar, and maintained contact with the imperial court until his death in 1905.

Papus returned to St. Petersburg in 1905 where it was rumoured he, in the presence of the Imperial couple, evoked the spirit of the Tsar’s father, Alexander III, who offered practical advise on handling a political crisis.

Both Master Philippe and Papus played an important political role at the Russian court. They not only advised the Tsar on affairs of state but maintained contact with influential Russian initiates of the Martinist Order, among them two of the Tsar’s uncles and numerous relatives. The German occultist Rudolf Steiner, who had his own disciples among the German General Staff, followed the mission of the two Frenchmen, disturbed by Papus’ “extensive influence in Russia”. A strong advocate of the alliance between France and Russia, Papus warned the Tsar of an international conspiracy aimed at world domination.

He believed that the vast Russian Empire was the only power capable of thwarting the conspiracy of the ‘Shadow Brothers’. He also urged the Tsar to prepare for the coming war with Germany, then being engineered by sinister forces in Berlin. According to one account, he promised the imperial family that, the Romanov monarchy would be protected as long as he, Papus, was alive. When the news of his death reached Alexandra in 1916, she sent a note to her husband (at the time commanding the Russian armies at the front in World War I) containing the words ‘Papus is dead, we are doomed!’8

Papus promoted his Martinist Order as a counter to the Masonic lodges which, he believed, were in the service of British imperialism and the international financial syndicates. From his papers it is known that he furnished documentation to the Russian authorities about Masonic activities in Russia and Europe. Papus condemned Freemasonry as atheistic in contrast to the esoteric Christianity of the Martinist Order. He castigated “our epoch of scepticism, adoration of material forms, so vitally in need of a frankly Christian reaction, independent of all priesthoods.” Shortly after returning from his first visit to Russia in 1901, a series of articles appeared in the French press for which Papus was largely responsible. They warned of a “hidden conspiracy” the existence of which the public was totally unaware and of the machinations of a sinister financial syndicate trying to disrupt the Franco-Russian alliance. The public is blind to the real forces of history:

It does not see that in all conflicts whether arising within or between nations, there are at the side of the apparent actors hidden movers who by their self-interested calculations make these conflicts inevitable….

Everything which happens in the confused evolution of nations is thus prepared in secret with the goal of securing the supremacy of a few men; and it is these few men, sometimes famous, sometimes unknown, who must be sought behind all public events.

Now, today, supremacy is ensured by the possession of gold. It is the financial syndicates who hold at this moment the secret threads of European politics…

A few years ago there was thus founded in Europe a financial syndicate, today all-powerful, whose supreme aim is to monopolise all the markets of the world, and which in order to facilitate its activities has to acquire political influence.

The Papus inspired articles in Echo de Paris revealed the role of the British Secret Service, which was exposed as being behind British Freemasonry, to isolate and weaken Russia. In France British agents concentrated on anti-Russian propaganda, while in Russia they used “financial trickery” to infiltrate all levels of society. Every effort was required “to preserve the Russian Emperor – so loyal and so generous – from the evils… [of ] the syndicate of financiers… which at present controls the destinies of Europe and the world.”

The Mysterious Tibetan

St. Petersburg… in 1905 was probably the mystical centre of the world.
– Colin Wilson, The Occult

Shamzaran (Pyotr) Badmaev was a Buriat Mongol who had grown up in Siberia and converted to Russian Orthodoxy with Alexander III acting as his godfather. He gained considerable influence at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Tsar granted him the title of Privy Councillor. Badmaev was renowned as a doctor of Tibetan medicine, herbalist, and healer, who treated high society patients at his fashionable ‘Oriental Medicine’ clinic in St. Petersburg. Described by a Russian historian as “one of the most mysteries personalities of the day,” and a “master of intrigue”, Badmaev enjoyed a close association with the mystic healer Rasputin.

Known as ‘the Tibetan’, Badmaev dreamed of the unification of Russia with Mongolia and Tibet. He involved himself in endless projects aimed at the creation of a great Eurasian empire. Russia’s historic mission, he believed, lay in the East, where she was destined to unite the Buddhist and Muslim peoples, as a counter to Western colonialism. Badmaev outlined his vision in a 1893 report to Tsar Alexander III entitled ‘The Tasks of Russia in the Asiatic East’. His considerable political expertise secured the support of the Mongol tribes in the Russo-Japanese War.

In a letter of 19 December 1896, Badmaev wrote to Tsar Nicholas II: “…my activities have the aim that Russia should have greater influence than other powers upon the Mongolian-Tibetan-Chinese East.” Badmaev expressed particular concern over the influence of England in the East, stating in a special memorandum:

Tibet, which – as the highest plateau of Asia – rules over the Asiatic continent, must without doubt be in the hands of Russia. By commanding this point, Russia will surely be able to make England more compliant.

Badmaev knew of the legend, popular in Mongolia, China and Tibet, about the ‘White Tsar’ who would come from the North (from ‘Northern Shambhala’) and restore the now decadent traditions of true Buddhism. He reported to Tsar Nicholas II how “Buryats, Mongols and especially lamas… were always repeating that the time had come to extend the frontiers of the White Tsar in the east….”

Badmaev had a close association with a highly placed Tibetan, the lama Agvan Dordzhiyev, the tutor and confidant of the 13th Dalai Lama. Dordzhiyev equated Russia with the coming Kingdom of Shambhala anticipated in theKalachakra texts of Tibetan Buddhism. The lama opened the first Buddhist temple in Europe, in St. Petersburg, significantly dedicated to the Kalachakrateaching. One of the Russian artists who worked on the St. Petersburg temple was Nicholas Roerich, who had been introduced to the legend of Shambhala and Eastern thought by lama Dordzhiyev. George Gurdjieff, another man of mystery who had a tremendous impact on Western esotericism, knew Prince Ukhtomsky, Badmaev, and lama Dordzhiyev. Was Gurdjieff, accused by the British of being a Russian spy in Central Asia, a pupil of the mysterious Tibetans?

“I am training young men in two capitals – Peking and Petersburg – for further activities,” Dr. Badmaev had written to Tsar Nicholas II.

Mystical Anarchism

The sway of ‘the Tibetan’ reached beyond the Imperial court into the Russian intelligentsia and further still to the subterranean world of espionage and revolutionary politics. One of the intellectual movements at the time of the 1905 political upheavals was called “Mystical Anarchism”. Two of its leading exponents were the poet and writer Viacheslav Ivanov and George Chulkov, both associates of Dr. Badmaev. Chulkov, like ‘the Tibetan’, is described as an unconscious medium transmitting mysterious forces.

A radical political doctrine aimed at reconciling individual freedom and social harmony, Mystical Anarchism drew on the ideas of Friedrick Nietzsche. This is not surprising when we consider Nietzsche’s positive view of Russia as the antithesis of the decadent West, and the German philosopher’s appreciation of Buddhism and Oriental culture.

According to the historian Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Mystical Anarchists, convinced “that unseen forces are guiding events here on earth, believed that political revolution reflected realignments in the cosmic sphere, and that a new world of freedom, beauty, and love was imminent.”

Advocating the abolition of all external authorities and all constraints on the individual – government, law, morality, social custom – they were indifferent to legal rights as merely “formal freedoms” and opposed constitutions and parliaments in favor of sobornost’. By sobornost’ they meant a free community united by love and faith whose members retain their individuality (as distinct from individualism, self-affirmation apart from or against the community)….

They grounded this ideal in their notion of the “mystical person,” the soul or the psyche, which seeks union with others and recognizes itself as a microcosm of the macrocosm, as distinct from the “empirical person,” the I or the ego, which asserts itself apart from or against others. Evoking and developing this “mystical person” would make feasible a “new organic society” united by invisible inner ties of love (eros, not agape), “mystical experience,” and sacrifice – the very opposite of liberal society, based on the social contract and mutual self-interest and characterized by rational discourse.9

Mystical Anarchism is a thoroughly Eurasian sociopolitical idea. Here we have a most arcane motif in a modern form: The great struggle of the empirical, plutocratic Western civilisation, against the mystical, sacrificial culture of Eurasia. In occult terms it is the conflict of the impulse of ‘Shambhala’ with the renegades of ‘Atlantean civilisation’. The Brotherhood of the Northern Light battling it out with the Brothers of the Shadow, external manifestation of the long war between the agents of Being and Non-Being.

Nicholas Berdyaev, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Zenaida Hippius, Valerri Briusov, Mikhail Kuzmin, Alexandre Blok, Vasili Rozanov, along with a host of other Russian poets, writers and artists, transmitted different aspects of Mystical Anarchism and the Eurasian vision. When in the years before the Revolution the Sufi Master Inayat Khan visited Russia, he found much to commend in “the Eastern type of discipleship which is natural to the nation.”

Merezhkovsky saw the possibility of evolving a “new religious consciousness” from the two peculiarly Russian types represented by Tolstoy and Dostoievsky. Tolstoy stood for a pantheistic mysticism of the flesh, and Dostoievsky for the more ascetic spiritual values. “In this Russia the ‘Man-God’ shall be manifested to the Western world, and the ‘God-man’ for the first time to the Eastern, and shall be, for those whose thinking already reconciles both hemispheres the ‘One in Two.’”

After the Bolshevic Revolution, Blok contrasted the new Russia with the West. He called Russia the “Scythian,” i.e., the young, fresh nation whose destiny it was to challenge the decaying West:

We are the Scythians, we are the Asians… Centuries of your days are but an hour to us, Yet like obedient slaves, We’ve held a shield between two hostile races – Europe, and the Mongol hordes… From war and horror come to our open arms, The embrace of kin, Put the old sword away while there’s time, Hail us brothers… Ah, Old World, before you have perished, join our fraternal banquet.

The poet Nikolai Kliuev and his young friend Sergei Esenin featured occult images and Eurasian themes in their work. At the end of 1917 Kliuev (1887-1937), a prophet and emissary of Eurasia, wrote:

We are the host of sunbearers.
On the hub of the universe
we will erect a hundred-story, fiery house.
China and Europe, the North and the South
Will come to the chamber in a round-dance of playmates
to match together Abyss and Zenith.
Their godfather is God Himself and their Mother
is Russia.

Kliuev’s protege, Esenin (1895-1925), longed for the end of the old world and its replacement by a new one, and even proclaimed a new religious trend called “Aggelism,” with clear roots in Russian Gnosticism. He hailed both Christ and Gautama the Buddha as geniuses because they were men of “word and deed”. In a letter to a friend, Esenin wrote:

People, look at yourselves, did not Christs emerge from you, and can you not be Christs? Can I with will-power not be a Christ…? How absurd all our life is. It distorts us from the cradle, and instead of truly real people some kind of monster emerges.

He warned the United States, to him the symbol of all non-Russian and rationalist sources, not to commit the mistake of “unbelief” and ignore the new “message” from Russia, as the way to the new life is only through Russia. A friend wrote how Esenin and his fellow ‘Scythian’ poets wanted a “deepening of the political revolution to the social” and came to regard Russian Marxism as “coarse”. Before his death Esenin became convinced ‘evil forces’ had usurped the Revolution and the Bolshevics betrayed Russia’s mission.

The famed poet Nikolai Kliuev knew both Dr. Badmaev and Grigory Rasputin, and like the latter had been initiated into a secret school of Christian sexual mysticism with similarities to Tibetan Tantra and Indian Shivaism. “They called me a Rasputin,” Kliuev wrote in a 1918 poem. Kliuev’s spirituality was deeply rooted in the tradition of the Russian religious dissidents like the Old Believers, the Khlysty and Skoptsy, who formed a veritable subterranean river among the common people. Kliuev admitted how challenged by a Khlyst elder to “become a Christ,” he was introduced to the secret community of “Dove brethren”. With the help of “various people of secret identity”, Kliuev traveled all over Russia participating in secret rituals and imbibing the occult traditions of the Russian East.

In his poems Kliuev sought to convey the mystic spirit of Eurasia. He was a prophet of Belovodia, the name given by Russian Old Believers to the awaited earthly paradise similar to Shambhala. Kliuev envisioned a radical transformation of Russia that would bring about a classless society where peasant culture would triumph over industrialism, capitalism, and the general mechanisation of life. He expressed his concern about the dangers of soulless Western civilisation in a 1914 letter to a friend:

Every day I go into the grove – and sit there by a little chapel – and the age-old pine tree, but an inch to the sky, I think about you… I kiss your eyes and your dear heart… O, mother wilderness! Paradise of the spirit… How hateful and black seems all the so-called civilised world and what I would give, what Golgotha I would bear – so that America should not encroach upon the blue-feathered dawn… upon the fairy tale hut.

The Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev articulated the vision shared by pre-revolution Russian thinkers as well as the cultural elite, when he wrote of the end of Western rationalism and the birth of a new era of the spirit which would witness the struggle of Christ and Antichrist. He saw the popularity of mystical and occult doctrines as proof of the approach of this New Era, and called for a “new knighthood”. “Man is not a unit in the universe, forming part of an unrational machine, but a living member of an organic hierarchy, belonging to a real and living whole.” Berdyaev’s attacks on Western materialist values only reflected a view widely held by Russian society. Writing in exile in the early 1930s he observed:

Individualism, the ‘atomisation’ of society, the inordinate acquisitiveness of the world, indefinite over-population and the endlessness of people’s needs, the lack of faith, the weakening of the spiritual life, these and other are the causes which have contributed to build up that industrial capitalist system which has changed the face of human life and broken its rhythm with nature.

Journey to Shambhala

Nicholas Roerich was a man who brought glory to our [Russian] people; he is a representative of our civilisation and of its culture, one of its pillars.
– Mikhail Gorbachev

Nikolai Konstantinovitch Roerich (1874-1947) had been introduced to the idea of Shambhala while working on the construction of the first Buddhist temple ever to be built in Europe. Personally acquainted with Russia’s pre-revolution intelligentsia, Roerich became a highly respected and prolific artist. A student of Madame Blavatsky’s works, Roerich believed in the transcendent unity of religions – in the notion that one day the Buddhist, the Muslim, and the Christian would realise their separate dogmas were husks concealing the truth within. Between 1925 and 1928, Roerich undertook five remarkable expeditions through Central Asia, focusing on the mysterious region between the Urals and the Himalayas, the area regarded as the heart of Eurasia. The traditions and legends encountered by Roerich in his travels are described in the books Altai-Himalaya, Heart of Asia and Shambhala.

In the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, Shambhala is the hidden land in which the teachings of the Kalachakra (‘Wheel of Time’) Tantric school are kept in their purest form. Roerich discovered that the Shambhala of Tibetan Buddhism is not too different from the legend of Belovodia preserved by Russian Christian mystics. An elder of the Old Believer sect confided to Roerich:

In distant lands, beyond the great lakes, beyond the highest mountains, is a sacred place where all truth flourishes. There one may find the supreme knowledge and the future salvation of mankind. And this place is called Belovodia, meaning the white waters.10

Nicholas Roerich wrote how on a visit to the Mongolian capital Ulan-Bator in the 1920s, he heard soldier-revolutionaries singing:

The war of Northern Shambhala.
Let us die in this war
To be reborn again
As Knights of the Ruler of Shambhala.

By ‘Northern Shambhala’ is meant Russia-Eurasia. In his book Heart of Asia, Roerich defined Shambhala not so much as a coming kingdom but an event – a new epoch for humanity of which Shambhala and Belovodia are timeless symbols:

You have noted the concept of Shambhala corresponds to the aspirations of our most serious Western scientific research…. In their striving, the Eastern disciplines of Shambhala and the best minds of the West, which do not fear to look beyond the outworn methods, are uniting.

Roerich never doubted the crucial role Russia would play in bringing together the noblest wisdom of both the East and the West. In Russia a new synthesis would emerge and a new day dawn for humanity, neither exclusively Western nor wholly Eastern, but truly Eurasian. In 1940, as the world found itself plunged into war, Roerich discerned the first glimpses of a New Era and wrote:

The Russian people have piled together great stones. To the admiration of everyone they have built no tower of Babel but a Russian tower. A Kremlin of Sun-bearers with a hundred towers!… Listen – that is the future, and how radiant it is!”

A year later in 1941 he commented:

The whole world is rushing towards Armageddon. Everyone is confused. Everyone is unsure about the future. But the Russian people have found their course and with a mighty flood are streaming towards their radiant future.

‘You Must Pay Attention to Me, In Order to See Me’

Humanity’s radiant future, like Shambhala, stands at the threshold. An invisible college of men and women in every age and nation have glimpsed it and responded to the impulse. Living in the first years of a new millennium we are witnessing the unfolding of an ancient plan. Just as there is no day without night, so too there is no authentic New Era without its counterfeit. And as the darkness must give way to the new dawn, so our present Dark Era will pass away in the great light of ‘Northern Shambhala’.

Behind the tangle of present day events the ancient battle is being concluded. “In wartime,” said the emissary of Atlantism Winston Churchill, “truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” Empowered by the wicked Magicians of Atlantis, Western secret societies are in a state of occult warfare with the Order of Eurasia.

We await the arrival of the New Era of Shambhala, the casting out of the Brothers of the Shadow from the governmental and financial centres of the earth, and the end of the evil karma inherited from the darkness of Atlantis.

Alice Bailey, who described Shambhala as “the vital centre in the planetary consciousness” and related it to the Second Coming of the Christ, also prophesied Russia’s special role in bringing in the true New Era:

Out of Russia… will emerge that new and magical religion about which I have so often told you. It will be the product of the great and imminent Approach which will take place between Humanity and the Hierarchy. From these two centres of spiritual force, in which the light which ever shineth in and from the East will irradiate the West; the whole world will be flooded with the radiance of the Sun of Righteousness. I am not here referring, in connection with Russia, to the imposition of any political ideology, but to the appearance of a great and spiritual religion, which will justify the crucifixion of a great nation and which will demonstrate itself and be focused in a great and spiritual Light which will be held aloft by a vital Russian exponent of true religion – that man for whom many Russians have been looking, and who will be the justification of a most ancient prophecy.11

Footnotes:

1. Arthur Waite, The Real History of the Rosicrucians
2. Letters of H. P. Blavatsky as quoted in The Occult Establishment by James Webb
3. Victoria Le Page, Shambhala: The Fascinating Truth Behind the Myth of Shangri-la
4. Alexander Dugin
5. Nevill Drury, Dictionary Of Mysticism And The Esoteric Traditions, 1992
6. As quoted in The Harmonious Circle by James Webb
7. Stephan A. Hoeller, “H.P. Blavatsky: Woman of Mystery and Hero of Consciousness,” The Quest, Autumn 1991
8. Stephan A. Hoeller, “Esoteric Russia”, Gnosis Magazine, No.31, Spring 1994
9. The Occult in Russian And Soviet Culture, edited by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal
10. Nicholas Roerich, Heart of Asia
11. Alice Bailey, Prophecies by D.K.

MEHMET SABEHEDDIN is a long time contributor to New Dawn magazine. He is conducting research into ancient wisdom traditions.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 68 (September-October 2001).

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.

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