extraordinary%20encounters

14 Agharti
The hidden world of “Shangri-La” as depicted in the film Lost Horizon, directed by Frank Capra, 1937 (Photofest)
had been long ago described in the sacred
bulls of the Dalai Lama, Tashi Lama, and
Bodgo Khan. He was the man to whom the
whole world belongs and who has penetrated
into all the mysteries of Nature. He pronounced
a short Tibetan prayer, blessed all his
hearers and afterwards made predictions for
the coming half century. This was thirty years
ago and in the interim all his prophecies are
being fulfilled” (Ossendowski, 1922). The
King of the World lived in an underground
realm called Agharti.
Whether this King of the World, or even
the author’s supposed informant, ever existed,
he and his kingdom soon entered occult lore.
In Darkness over Tibet (1935) Theodore Illion
recounted his allegedly true adventures in an
underground city in a distant valley. At first
he thought he had entered a utopia, but soon
he realized that the inhabitants, for all their
advanced spiritual knowledge and supernatural
powers, were cannibals. Illion wrote that
his reported experiences proved the existence
of Agharti. In 1946 Vincent H. Gaddis, a regular
contributor to Amazing Stories who later
achieved a degree of fame as the inventor of
the concept of the Bermuda Triangle, picked
up on the theme, depicting Agharti as a city of
evil that was linked to tunnels all over the
world. He incorporated Agharti into the
Shaver mystery, the subject of a series of tales
Amazing Stories was running about an alleged
underground realm populated by deros, demonic
entities in possession of a fantastic Atlantean
technology, which they used to torment
surface humans.
In a variant of the legend, Robert Ernst
Dickhoff’s Agharta: The Subterranean World
(1951) contended that two and a half million
years ago Martians landed at Antarctica, then