Everyone has heard the legend of the Hollow Earth, the one that says that our planet does not have an incandescent plasma center inside, but a world similar to ours. Its inhabitants reached such a great cultural and technological level that allowed them to evolve to unsuspected levels, far from the light of the Sun. The capital of this subway country was called Agartha.
The first reference to the land of Agartha dates back to the 17th century. It was the Jesuit priest, polyglot, erudite, orientalist scholar, encyclopedic, and scientific spirit Athanasius Kircher, who in 1638 suggested that the planet was “hollow.”
The Russian writer, occultist, and theosophist Helena Blavatsky, also known as Madame Blavatsky, claimed that Agartha (which she calls the White Lodge) was founded some fifteen million years ago on what was an island in the “Gobi Sea” (today a desert) where the Lords of the Flame, demigods from the planet Venus, landed. Helena claims that this subterranean world may have inspired ancient religious beliefs such as Hades, Sheol, and Hell.
The idea was taken up in the following centuries by magicians and secret groups, which added elements to this idea until the 20th century. Based on Greek and Christian mythologies, many have searched for this underworld (Hades and Tartarus), starting from the supposed entrances to the hollow world found at the planetary poles. Their idea was to reach the place where the dead dwell and gain supernatural advantages over their enemies.
The occultists of the time said that Agartha was illuminated by an inexhaustible source of power that also filled its inhabitants with vitality, beings of ancestral knowledge that had evolved beyond humanity and whose technology was beyond human understanding. This intraterrestrial “Sun” has always illuminated the land of Agartha, so its inhabitants have always lived by day.
At some point, Germany wanted to control the energy and technology of Agartha, so they conducted several expeditions. Some authors say that they even sent an expedition to Tibet under the command of Ernst Schäfer, accompanied by “five German sages” and several soldiers to establish “ties with the mysterious cave dwellers, belonging to the people of Agartha.” No data has ever confirmed this expedition, and even less that they found Agartha, but they did establish relations with the Tibetans.
But the search for this land did not stop with the Germans. The Italian-American author F. Amadeo Giannini, a devout Christian, took the idea of Jules Verne’s ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth and created the Flat Earth theory (sadly, still popular today). In his book The World Beyond The Poles, he claimed that the American aviator Richard Evelyn Byrd found the entrance to the Hollow Eart after flying 2300 miles inland. There he lived with a humanoid who asked him to bring a message of peace to humanity. According to Giannini, Byrd had written all this in a secret diary.
Thanks to satellites, we know today that there are no such entrances at the south and north poles, and, more importantly, we know that our planet is not hollow. That hasn’t stopped the human imagination, which has taken its cue from the hidden nation of Agartha to create novels, music, movies, animations, artwork, and more.
Story originally published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva
