Appropriation of Competing Secret Society Utopias
Encore takes place in present-day England. Intelligence agencies and occult secret societies work together as always. They continue manipulating people's spiritual beliefs and acceptance of magical myths that prove their ancestors were better than other people's. Legends are handy to appropriate for the sake of forming military alliances between countries. When those alliances need to be broken instead, the stories change. Intriguing figures have cleverly manipulated those competing secret society visions of utopia.
In the novel, because of the sudden disappearance of the green stone named Moldvite from the world market, people who believe the world-wide legends about it are especially concerned. All secret societies take sides with either the Eastern (Shambhalla) or Western legends (Atlantis.) Each claims Moldavite is their right to access because of legends. The two sides clash. Here are some articles about the history. Each article is the bold title: click it to go to the full article. I've pasted bits and bobs below. My interest isn't in taking sides and saying anyone is right or wrong or buying into any organized divide and conquer tactic. My interest is the rich history of occult-minded intelligent agents creating and morphing, snagging, adapting, and then throwing back cultural legends to form or break alliances between countries. It's useful to take a step back when getting upset at someone with a contrasting viewpoint about the nature of reality. Looking to see what might be behind the historical manipulation of myths can sometimes create clarity about the bigger picture. British history lives in the castle the protagonist, Miriam, is whisked off to. The hypnotic draw some charismatic storytellers have on our lives, good or bad, can make us believe things we would not normally do.
Mystical imperialism is a term used to describe 19th century British efforts to colonize the world by bringing Judeo-Christian ethics, morals and philosophies and applying them to the pagan world. In effect what Mystical imperialism became was a philosophy that rationalized the expansion of empire by infusing a sense of the divine into the raw politics of empire building. Today’s version of mystical imperialism applies to a hardened core of ideological defense intellectuals who combine their own esoteric and religious beliefs with Washington policy making. This revelation came to us as we moved further into the motivations behind the secret war against the Soviet Union.
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But while providing an acceptable Judeo/Christianized veneer for justifying Britain’s imperial destiny, the practical foreign policy aspects of solidifying the empire took a more secret if not magical turn. Grounded in British Freemasonry, but organized around the exotic rights and practices of the Near and Middle East a kind of mystical, esoteric foreign policy gained favor within London’s elite during the 19th century. Drawing on Anglo and Franco-Egyptian Masonic societies for inspiration, this “mystical imperialism” sought to create a syncretistic cult-like religion with the over-arching goal of uniting the various factions and cultures within the empire.
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Britain’s entire program for empire began with a heavy dose of occult philosophy inspired by a vision of sacred destiny during the Elizabethan Renaissance.
In their effort to establish a protestant anti-Catholic empire, influential courtiers invoked Renaissance Neoplatonism, Rosicrucianism , Hermetic-Cabalism, alchemy and numerology with the hope of transforming Britain into a new kind of empire. Utilizing Elizabeth I as their living virgin-Monad, Britain’s astral Neoplatonists sought to reform the world (with Britain as its imperial center) in harmony with the stars and their own mystical vision of the universe.
According to Dame Frances Yates in her 1979 study, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, that vision was one of three worlds; elemental, celestial and super-celestial – an intellectual realm “where the platonic ideas merge with angelic hierarchies.” Recruited by the head of Queen Elizabeth’s secret service, Sir Francis Walsingham, John Dee brought a background in astrology, mathematics and alchemy to his service as a psychic spy in the court of Emperor Rudolph II at Prague. According to Deborah E. Harkness in her book John Dee’s Conversations with Angels, Dee’s belief in Revelation and an immanent apocalypse fueled his mystical efforts on behalf of the new empire. With Natural philosophy as a curative to a nature gone horribly wrong, (as represented by the Holy Roman Empire) Dee, his associates and his intellectual inheritors – Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton – would build a bridge from this world to the next by helping to close out human history and opening up a biblical utopia.
Linking Arthurian-Britain to Israel through the magic of Christian Cabala, Dee and men such as Sir Philip Sydney, Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spencer merged the ideas of continental philosophers Giordano Bruno, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Francesco Giorgi into a form of British-Israelism with Elizabeth in a messianic role. According to Yates, Dee justified that role through the writings of the 12th century historian Geoffrey of Monmouth whose Historia Regum Britanniae traced the origins of the British kings to Wales and Troy. As told by Yates in her book Astraea, The Imperial Theme in the 16th century, “The Tudors were Welsh or ancient British descent. When the Tudors ascended the throne of England, so runs the myth, the ancient Trojan-British race of monarchs once more resumed the imperial power and brought in a golden age of peace and plenty.”
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Largely unknown in the United States and scarcely mentioned in the history of Europe, the Desmond wars would serve as a template for British Imperial design and a metaphor for imperial mysticism. In what a modern, rational political scientist might refer to today as a colonial conquest, the struggle possessed both traditional and non-traditional aspects. While armies clashed in a brutal and often genocidal conflict reminiscent of a modern day “ethnic cleansing,” behind the scenes some of Britain’s foremost nobility engaged in a war of the occult. Gathering in secret societies like Walter Raleigh’s “School of Night” or Sir Phillip Sydney’s magic circle, England’s foremost poets, soldiers and scientists mixed magic, mathematics and religion while practicing alchemy and cabala.
As long established competitors to the crown for control of Irish real-estate and Irish taxes, the Desmond Geraldines also laid claim to kingship through a Tudor ancestry5 and through that ancestry a competing claim on the magical tradition stretching back to King Arthur. Geoffrey of Monmouth aside, all royal houses were given to proving their legitimacy by lineage and no King of Britain could have greater legitimacy than to trace his roots to Arthur and the knights of the round table.
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Preaching a “Secret Doctrine” reportedly taught to her by hidden masters in Tibet, the mystic Helena Blavatsky made her way from Moscow to India to New York and back, weaving herself and her Theosophical society into British and Russian intrigues. A close friend of Russian Tsar Nicholas II and the so called “mystic Eurasian scholar” Prince Ukhtomsky, she was accused more than once by British authorities of conspiring with the Sikhs to overthrow the British occupation of India. Her association with Ukhtomsky’s mysterious Tibetan friend Shamzaran Badmaev who actively lobbied for the unification of Russia with Mongolia and Tibet and her close relationship to the right-wing Russian Imperialist publicist Mikhail Katkov stands in mute support of this belief. But Blavatsky’s mission was as much mystical as political. Blavatsky fascinated the Tsar and Tsarina with her book The Secret Doctrine – its cover adorned with the ancient Indo/Tibetan sun symbol, the swastika. However political or mysterious, her quest to uncover the hidden city of “Shambhala” (sometimes referred to as the Shambhala project) and usher in a New World Order, was the main purpose of her endeavors and continued long after her death as the central theme of a variety of both British and Russian mystical societies. To many in the Blavatsky camp, Nicholas was the prophesied northern “White Tsar,” the only European leader strong enough and saintly enough to thwart the ruthless mercantile evangelism of the British empire. Prior to the turn of the century this too had become something of a holy cause, with Nicholas viewed as much a messiah as potential Eurasian Emperor.
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That natural connection to the East found a powerful source of inspiration in the Slavic cultural revival of the 19th century – recognized internationally in Russian literature, music and spiritual movements. Blavatsky’s Imperial Russia rejected the materialism and rationalism of the West while foreshadowing the longed-for spiritual revolution-to-come by offering a purer form of society modeled on the peasant commune. This innocent dreamlike utopia combined with beliefs of a hidden kingdom of enlightened adepts (Shambhala) was a direct competitor to the Western dream of a new Atlantis with Shambhala representing the natural freeing of the human soul and Atlantis its fall into technological enslavement. But Blavatsky was no Russian peasant. Born of Russian-German nobility, her Theosophical Society founded in 1875 was the original “New Age” cult, attracting multitudes of disillusioned middle and upper-class Spiritualists bent on finding the path to higher wisdom. An eclectic mix of philosophies, Blavatsky’s Theosophy also mirrored John Dee’s 16th century efforts to “heal” the natural world by channeling conversations with angels from the astral plane.
But at the last moment, the omnipresent Yakov Blumkin was “clasped on” as an “addition” from the Special Department. The terrorist disguised himself as a Tibetan lama and followed Nicholas Roerich incognito – it was namely to the latter that Trilisser had entrusted direction of the mission to Lhasa. Upon their return, neither Roerich nor Trilisser “made their mark” – the information they collected was considered “of little significance.” Meanwhile, high government decorations awaited Blumkin, Bokii, and Barchenko. For what were they awarded? For Blumkin presenting certain proof of the existence of the mythic Shambhala.
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There Barchenko searched for a certain “stone from Orion” or “Grail stone” supposedly accumulating and transferring psychic energy at a distance and securing contact with the cosmos.
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Haushofer and Sievers seriously thought that he who masters Tibet – the “heart of the world” – would also become master of the entire world. And Boky’s Special Department possessed such secrets. However it was, the Germans came across not a few secret materials – either from Barchenko himself, or through some other channels. And in the war years, the German intelligence services genuinely set out to hunt down officers of the disbanded department, driving to fill their knowledge at the cost of the latter.
There was a widespread conviction among Anglo-American and French occult circles since the 1880s to be engaged in anongoing Great Game between Western and Eastern occultists for spiritual domination over several parts of the world. For example, a fierce confrontation existed between the members of the influential Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, purporting to defend “Western hermetic tradition”, and the outlets of “esoteric Buddhism” like the Theosophical Society.
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By now it is time to ask once more: What actually was the origin of the communications transmitted to Elena Roerich since 1920? Were they only deception, delusions, manifestations of a psychially deranged person? Or was there some truth in the recurrent claim that there existed a hidden “great Asian brotherhood” with a political agenda of its own? And who was behind the so-called “Tibetan Master” “Djwahl Khul”, who was known to be one of the Theosophist’s “Ascended Masters” and who since the 1920s spoke “through the astral light” to another medium, the founder of LucisTrust and the Arcane School Alice Bailey? “Djwahl Khul” came forward in 1938-39 with nothing less than the idea that all contemporary ideologies of the 20th century were in one way or another inspired by the “Shamballa force”.
The general assumption that this only proves again the overall dangerous
influence of “irrationalism” and “the occult” doesn’t take into consideration very concrete historical and geopolitical manoeuvres or interests.
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Yet after the withdrawal of Soviet engagement in Inner Asian affairs around 1930, Allal Ming and the Roerichs seemed less convinced of the efficiency of the Bolsheviks and began to turn towards the United States to gain support for the realization of the “Grand Plan” in the course of a second expedition, officially with the purpose of setting up an agricultural cooperative in Inner Mongolia, acooperative bank and cultural establishments.
American financial support had been assured through the Roerich Museum in New York and rich patrons like Charles Crane and Louis Horch ever since1921.
From 1933, they had an enthusiastic supporter in the Secretary for Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace (1888–1965), who was himself deeply immersed in all kind of spiritual and occult matters: seances, symbols, secret societies, rituals, astrology, Native American and Oriental religions.
Wallace had attended meetings of the Theosophical Society since 1919, joined the Liberal Catholic Church associated with Theosophy, and became a Scottish Rite and a Blue Lodge mason until he received the32nd degree in 1928. By 1929, his search had led him to Roerich who became in the early 1930s his revered “Guru” until the abrupt and complete break during autumn 1935. But up to this moment, Roerich’s suggestive power was considerable. When Wallace suggested in 1934 that the symbol of the Great Pyramid from the Great Seal of the United States would be appropriate for the dollar bill, he was probably convinced by the arguments of none other than Nicholas Roerich.
Many high-ranking members of the Nazi regime, including Hitler, held convoluted occult beliefs. Prompted by those beliefs, the Germans sent an official expedition to Tibet between 1938 and 1939 at the invitation of the Tibetan Government to attend the Losar (New Year) celebrations. Tibet had suffered a long history of Chinese attempts to annex it and British failure to prevent the aggression or to protect Tibet. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union was severely persecuting Buddhism, specifically the Tibetan form as practiced among the Mongols within its borders and in its satellite, the People’s Republic of Mongolia (Outer Mongolia).
In contrast, Japan was upholding Tibetan Buddhism in Inner Mongolia, which it had annexed as part of Manchukuo, its puppet state in Manchuria. Claiming that Japan was Shambhala, the Imperial Government was trying to win the support of the Mongols under its rule for an invasion of Outer Mongolia and Siberia to create a pan-Mongol confederation under Japanese protection. The Tibetan Government was exploring the possibility of also gaining protection from Japan in the face of the unstable situation. Japan and Germany had signed an Anti-Commintern Pact in 1936, declaring their mutual hostility toward the spread of international Communism. The invitation for the visit of an official delegation from Nazi Germany was extended in this context.
In August 1939, shortly after the German expedition to Tibet, Hitler broke his pact with Japan and signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact. In September, the Soviets defeated the Japanese who had invaded Outer Mongolia in May. Subsequently, nothing ever materialized from the Japanese and German contacts with the Tibetan Government.
In any event, Ossendowski did not invent the story of a fabulous land secreted somewhere in – or under – the vastness of Central Asia, be it called Agharti, Agarttha, Shangri-la, or, most commonly, Shambhala. Some believed it to be a physical, subterranean realm inhabited by an ancient, advanced race, while to others, it was a spiritual dimension accessible only to the enlightened. The Shambhala legend is firmly grounded in Buddhist tradition which vaguely puts the Kingdom somewhere to the north of India. The legend also proclaimed that a time would come when the King of Shambhala and his mighty hosts would come forth to vanquish evil and usher in a golden age guided by pure Dharma. As noted, Baron von Ungern-Sternberg envisioned himself as the initiator of this “Shambhala War.” So would others.
The tantalising possibility of a hidden trove of advanced knowledge and technical know-how did not just pique the curiosity of explorers and occultists. The practical advantages to be gained by accessing and exploiting such knowledge was not lost on certain politicians and intelligence officers, above all in Soviet Russia. But whatever attracted the attention of the Bolsheviks was bound to draw British curiosity as well, and where both those powers were concerned, the Americans, Germans and Japanese were unlikely to be far behind.
This article focuses on the activities of three men, two Russians and one American: Aleksandr Vasil’evich Barchenko, the so-called “Bolshevik professor of the occult,” the artist-mystic-explorer Nicholas Roerich, and the man often cited as the real-life model for Indiana Jones, Roy Chapman Andrews. While, so far as can be told, none of the trio ever met, all were involved with expeditions roaming the deserts of Mongolia and the high valleys of the Himalayas in search of lost civilisation and ancient man. In the case of Barchenko and Roerich, the specific object was Shambhala. As we will see, these explorations were only the tip of a clandestine iceberg of intrigue and hidden agendas which included secret societies and a host of spies. Just who was doing what for whom – and why – remains uncertain.
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.
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.
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”.
