Flex Mentallo

In 1624 Andrade set out from Akbar's court, armed with the map, and at first followed yogis and wandering pilgrims on the road across the mountains. Proceeding by way of Hardwar and the gorge of the Alaknanda he reached Badrinath on the northern slopes of the Himalaya. Traveling via the rugged and nearly impassable Mana pass he was the first European to cross the Himalaya and descend into Tibet.

The priest who penned the map was too old for arduous exploration, but the map and the essay fell to his successor, a dynamic, fanatical Portuguese Jesuit missionary named António Andrade. He was galvanized by the tale, and determined to go in search of these people.

One visiting Jesuit priest summarized the strange stories he heard at the court of Akbar in an essay, and sketched an accompanying map. On his map the area of Tibet is depicted as a great white blank, except for one place, labelled 'Manasarovar lacus' (Lake Manasarovar), with next to it a tantalizing scribbled note saying, 'Here it is said Christians live'.

During Akbar's reign India was the centre of the civilized world. Akbar gathered scholars of all races around him, hoping to find the common basis of all religions, in order to remove the sources of religious conflict for the good of humankind. As he put it: "It now becomes clear ... that it cannot be right to assert the truth of one faith above any other ... In this way we may perhaps again open the door whose key has been lost." Thus in his court congregated Hindus, Yogis and Sadhus from all corners of his empire, as well as visiting Christian monks and pilgrims from western lands. Here for the first time Europeans heard tales of the semi-mythical lands beyond the Himalayas.

As so often with such fantastical tales, the story begins with a mysterious map - this one lost, then rediscovered a hundred years ago in Calcutta. It was part of a remarkable manuscript that contained the autobiography of a 16th-century Western missionary at the court of the Moghul emperor Akbar the Great.

And the astonishing cause of it’s demise was the untimely visit of a Jesuit missionary in 1624. His name was António Andrade.

Sited on a minor trade route linking Tibet with Kashmir and India, ruled from the twin towns of Tholing and Tsaparang it thrived until the 17th century. Then it suddenly disappeared from history. The region was largely deserted until the early 20th Century, its great history and cultural treasures forgotten and undisturbed.

A succession of independent semi-feudal states developed, the most notable being the Kingdom of Guge on the banks of the Sutlej river immediately north of the main Himalaya. Founded in the 9th century Guge was the political and cultural focus for all western Tibet. It was the site of a remarkable renaissance, which saw Buddhism regain it's long lost pre-eminence in Tibetan culture.

It was in the far-western regions that Tibetans first established permanently inhabited cities. From 2,800BC this was known as the ‘heartland’, in contrast to Central Tibet which was known as the 'outer land'.

Next: The Way of the White Clouds

In 1920, Hitler became the head of the German Workers Party, now renamed the National Socialist German Worker (Nazi) Party. In 1935 Hitler authorized Frederick Hielscher, to establish the Ahnenerbe (Bureau for the Study of Ancestral Heritage), with Colonel Wolfram von Sievers as its head. Among other functions, Hitler charged it with researching Germanic runes and the origins of the swastika, and locating the source of the Aryan race. Tibet was the most promising candidate, the key to gaining the power of vril that its kindred Aryan spiritual leaders possessed...

Soon after, Hitler was initiated into the Society and they began to train him in its methods for harnessing vril to create a race of Aryan supermen.

Felix Niedner, the German translator of the Old Norse Eddas, founded the Thule Society in 1910. In 1919, the Society spawned the German Workers Party.

In The Arctic Home of the Vedas (1903), the early advocate of Indian freedom, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, added a further touch by identifying the southern migration of the Thuleans with the origin of the Aryan race. Thus, many Germans in the early twentieth century believed that they were the descendants of the Aryans who had migrated south from Hyperborea-Thule and who were destined to become the master race of supermen through the power of vril. Hitler was among them.

The French author Louis Jacolliot linked vril with the subterranean people of Thule. The Thuleans will harness the power of vril to become supermen and rule the world.

In 1871, British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in The Coming Race, described a superior race, the Vril-ya, who lived beneath the earth and planned to conquer the world with vril, a psychokinetic energy.

The hollow earth theory fired many people’s imaginations, especially with the publication in 1864 of French novelist Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.

The first element of Nazi occult beliefs was in the mythic land of Hyperborea-Thule. Just as Plato had cited the Egyptian legend of the sunken island of Atlantis, Herodotus mentioned the Egyptian legend of the continent of Hyperborea in the far north. When ice destroyed this ancient land, its people migrated south. The second ingredient was the idea of a hollow earth. At the end of the seventeenth century, the British astronomer Sir Edmund Halley first suggested that the earth was hollow, consisting of four concentric spheres.

Many high-ranking members of the Nazi regime, including Hitler, but especially Himmler and Hess, held convoluted occult beliefs. Prompted by those beliefs, the Germans sent an official expedition to Tibet between 1938 and 1939.

The Hollow Earth In The Spear of Destiny (1973), Trevor Ravenscroft asserted that Nazi Germany sent annual expeditions to Tibet from 1926 to 1943. Their mission was first to find and then to maintain contact with the Aryan forefathers in Shambala and Agharti, hidden subterranean cities beneath the Himalayas. Adepts there were the guardians of secret occult powers, especially vril, and the missions sought their aid in harnessing those powers for creating an Aryan master race.

Next: ‘To the German King, the sublime Herr Hitler from the Regent of Tibet, Reting Hutuku, on the 18th day of the first Tibetan month of the Earth-hare year. To the German King, Herr Hitler, who has achieved power throughout the whole wide world. It pleases me that you are in good health and that your good deeds are crowned with success. [...] I greatly hold the wish that the previous good relationship between our two residences will intensify. I believe that you, sublime King, Herr Hitler, agree with me on this issue and consider it important and are not indifferent to it. I wish for your good health and for news of your wishes.’

The expedition was detained by the government for five months, and forced to live in tents in sub-zero conditions and to subsist on meagre rations. Five men of the expedition died during this time. During March 1928 they were allowed to leave Tibet, and trekked south to settle in India, where they initiated a research center, the Himalayan Research Institute.

Prior to this expedition, Roerich had attempted to solicit the help of the Soviet government and Bolshevik secret police to assist him in his expedition, promising in return to monitor British activities in the area, but received only a lukewarm response. Between the summer of 1927 and June 1928 the expedition was thought to be lost, since communication with them ceased for a year. They had been attacked in Tibet and only the "superiority of our firearms prevented bloodshed... In spite of our having Tibet passports, the expedition was forcibly stopped by Tibetan authorities."

In 1925 he took his entire family on a five year long expedition that, in Roerich's own words: "started from Sikkim through Punjab, Kashmir, Ladakh, the Karakoram Mountains, Khotan, Kashgar, Qara Shar, Urumchi, Irtysh, the Altai Mountains, the Oryot region of Mongolia, the Central Gobi, Kansu, Tsaidam, and Tibet"

The Russian artist Nicholas Roerich (whose paintings are mentioned by HP Lovecraft in At the Mountains of Madness) was heavily influenced by eastern mysticism.