Author: Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre
Publisher: Inner Traditions
Price: £12.99
Isbn: 9781594772689

FT264

The influence of the Marquis Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (1842–1909) cannot be over-estimated. His ideas about the spiritual interconnectedness of all humans (synarchy), the essential role of esoteric societies in social government, and of the continuing intervention in this world of the ‘ascended masters’ from a ‘hollow earth’, inspired a vital school of French occultism and the golden age of Rosicrucianism. Principal among his disciples and collaborat­ors were the alchemist and Egypt­ologist René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz; the ‘magnetic’ healer Anthelme Nizier Philippe; the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner; the orientalist René Guénon; the theosophist Helena Blavatsky; and the Christ­ian occultist Gerard Encausse (also known as the founder of the modern Martinist Order, the ‘magus’ Papus).

Having married well in his early thirties, he did not need to find employment. Instead, he devoted himself to studying philosophy and occultism. In the mid-1880s, when he was exploring ideas about equitable universal government, he focused on the systems of mediæval Europe, ancient India and Egypt, and, significantly, on the legends about Atlantis.

In 1885, these studies, or obsess­ions, took an extraordinary turn. Some say that d’Alveydre was visited by a group of ‘eastern initiates’ including a ‘Prince Hardjji Scharipf’; others that he desired to learn Sanskrit to gain a better access to ancient Indian sources on history and occultism and hired Scharipf as a tutor. This meeting introduced into European culture the notion that powerful, occult beings existed in a subterranean kingdom he called Agarttha (also called Agartha or Agharti, and of which the main city is said to be Shamballa or Shangri-la). Dr Josc­elyn Godwin, who has written a valuable introduction to this first English translation of d’Alveydre’s writings on Agarttha, puts his considerable authority behind the ‘tutor’ theory, noting that Scharipf was introduced to d’Alveydre by a mutual friend. Even so, no one seems sure of the man’s true nationality, circumstances or name; supposedly fleeing India after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, he was said to have set up in Le Havre “as a bird-seller and pro­fessor of Oriental languages”.

While many writers on d’Alveydre are prepared to make light of (or even cast doubt upon) Scharipf, Godwin points out that there are manuscripts in the Sorbonne library attributed to him which “show that he was a learned and punctilious teacher.” They met three times a week for a year and a half. Scharipf would write out passages from Sanskrit texts and put his monogram on the corner of every page. He gave d’Alveydre an elaborate Sanskrit grammar “in a beautiful script and in French, with notes that show some command of English, Hebrew and Arabic”. Godwin confesses himself impressed by Scharipf’s methodical work and that d’Alveydre made excellent progress. Scharipf might have been an enigma, but he was no fake. At d’Alveydre’s first lesson, Scharipf introduces himself as “Professor HS Bagwandass of the Great Agarrthian School”. All Scharipf would say, piquing d’Alveydre’s curiosity, was that the hidden kingdom existed and preserved a language and script called Vattan (or Vattanian), which was one of the primordial languages of mankind. “For someone in quest of the secret and sacred roots of language, the mention of such things must have been unbearably exciting,” writes Godwin. I’ve often wondered whether this story provided the model for James Churchward, who claimed that a mysterious swami taught him an ancient language by which he deciphered the history of the lost continent of Mu from old tablets. Although Churchward claimed to have begun work on his Mu books in the 1870s, the first (The Lost Continent of Mu, Motherland of Man) was not published until 1926. On the other hand, several books from the 1870s by Louis Jacoll­iot (who served as a magistrate in southern India) mention the secret subterranean land of “Asgartha” and were likely to have been known to d’Alveydre.

Scharipf was sparing in introducing d’Alveydre to Vattanian, saying his pupil “was not suffic­iently prepared”, but over time more was gradually revealed to him. Godwin provides an essential background to this slow revelation, which included the ‘Hermetic Significance of the Zodiac’, symbolic alphabets, the names of angels, breathing and meditational exercises, herbal and alchemical recipes, and ‘soul travel’. As the tutelage progresses, it seems as if Scharipf’s interest wanes, his regular signature dwindl­ing to a perfunctory cross until it is absent. “Was it at this point that Saint-Yves was left to his own devices?” wonders Godwin. The cause seems to have been d’Alveydre’s growing obsess­ion with relating these ancient Oriental secrets to the French revival of Western Hermeticism, Christian Rosicrucianism and his own theory of synarchy as a universal system of knowledge.

Full of self-confidence, d’Alveydre raced ahead, making notes for Mission de l’Inde en Europe; Mission de l’Europe en Asie, which would eventually be published as The Kingdom of Agarttha, filling any gaps by telepathic contact with ascended masters and astral travelling to (by his own admission) spy out Agarttha for himself. And what a land… He discovers it was created around 3200 BC with “a techno­logy advanced far beyond our own, including gas lighting, railways and air travel” and its libraries keep lost knowledge, including communications with deceased souls and astral travel. It is governed by the ideal synarchy that d’Alveydre himself expounded, houses millions, and periodically sends missionaries to the surface world to judge whether the time is right for Agarttha to reveal itself and its treasure of lost knowledge.

As Godwin explains, occult history contains a number of moments when the oriental emissaries from the hollow earth tempt a Western mystic with fantastic tales of the King of the World and his occult emissaries, and in all but one case – that of René Guénon, not d’Alveydre – has this ‘experiment’ (so wrote the ascended master Morya to AP Sinnett) failed to result in anything substantial or coherent. For example, where Jacolliot sought the Indian roots of Western occultism, d’Alveydre could never shake off his belief in the superiority of Western philosophy, and it is this that Godwin thinks put off the earnest Scharipf.

D’Alveydre was a “deadly serious” literalist “with no gift for fict­ion”, who presents this book “as a factual report”, writes Godwin. The question remains, did d’Alveydre gain this information in the manner of a remote-viewer “spying on a physical Agarttha” beneath the Himalayas? Or was it the result of his own projected fantasies, or perhaps a bit of both? Godwin, in addition, raises the ‘possi­bility’ of the Akashic Plane, which Theosophy and Anthroposophy borrowed from the Sanskrit. This was a non-physical realm which acted as a celestial library (Fort might have called it a Sargasso Sea of data), where all knowledge ended up, not lost but preserved for all time, accessed only by disciplined minds via ‘soul travel’. Could d’Alveydre, using his proclaimed ability to astral travel, have stumbled upon such a cosmic cache and been“rewarded by visions of an underground utopia and its Sovereign Pontiff, the spiritual Lord of the World”? If so, and without the required discipline, d’Alveydre believed himself not in Atlantis, or Alexandria, but in the Agarttha of his heart’s desire. The resulting book is delirious, speaking of two-tongued men, four-eyed tortoises, levitating yogis and an ancient science that seems like magic. Godwin is characteristically generous: “I can accept that in some state of altered consciousness [d’Alveydre] saw what he claims to have seen.”

That said, this is indeed a grand book about ancient civilisations, cosmic destiny, lost continents, great wisdom and vast spans of time. Its “vivid and elegant” prose removes it from the plodd­ing structures of ‘usual’ visionary literature, and for “weirdness of imagination”, writes Godwin, “it rivals the fiction of Lovecraft or Borges”. There is much more here – the degree to which d’Alveydre plagiarised and was plagiarised; what Scharipf might have thought about his latest initiate spilling ancient secrets to the uninitiated; and how, having published this book, d’Alveydre recovered and destroyed all but two copies (the most complete version being translated for this edition in 1981) – but whether this book falls into the genre of ‘invented books’ is best left for interested readers to discover for themselves.