What is Agartha?
Agartha is a legendary underground world said to exist inside the Earth. People with a civilization far more advanced than ours are said to live there, with a city called “Shambhala” at its center. Theories place its entrances in the mountains of the Himalayas or Tibet, or at the North and South Poles.
How the Agartha legend spread
The name Agartha became widely known through the writings of the late 19th-century French mystic Saint-Yves d’Alveydre. In the 20th century, the Polish writer Ossendowski wrote of an underground kingdom in a travel book, spreading the legend further. It has also been linked with Shambhala, the ideal land of Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
Link with the hollow Earth theory
The Agartha legend has been tied to the hollow Earth theory, which holds that “the inside of the Earth is hollow, with another world within,” and has been a popular subject of science fiction and the occult. However, observations such as of seismic waves show that the Earth’s interior is filled with hot rock and metal, and there is no scientific basis for an underground world.
