Estonians Eduard Otto and Alexander Ricks, had proved no less intelligent and polite. h ey had informed Barchenko about the complaint but immediately added that they did not believe all the lies spread about him and did not believe his lectures were counterrevolutionary. Moreover, the three oi cers then shocked the “doctor” by asking permission to learn more about Shambhala wisdom. Barchenko was thrilled, and eventually, all three became good friends. And Vladimirov would lead Barchenko to Bokii.
Mastering Brain Rays
Barchenko was born in the town of Elets in Orel District into the family of a court notary and received a good education, completing gram-mar school. In 1904, he entered the medical school at Kazan University.
h e next year, Barchenko transferred to Tartu University in Estonia, at that time part of the Russian Empire. h ere he met Alexander
Krivtsov, a professor of Roman jurisprudence who liked to treat his students as friends and was very interested in esoteric teachings. h ere was nothing strange about this. In the early twentieth century through the First World War, many educated people all over Europe, including Russia, were involved in the world of the occult. In Russia this period, known as the Silver Age (1880s–1918), saw the rise of interest in spiritism, h eosophy, Tibetan Buddhism, and Freemasonry. For Barchenko, the meeting with Krivtsov was a landmark, an intellectual initiation into the world of the occult and esoteric that shaped his future spiritual quest.
h e professor especially fascinated the mind of the youth with his stories about a French esoteric writer named Marquis Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (1842–1909), who wrote about the mysterious land of Agartha that was hidden somewhere in the mountains of Inner Asia and possessed science and spiritual wisdom far superior to what was known in Europe: “h e story of Krivtsov gave me the i rst push that moved my mind toward the quest that i lled all my life. Assuming that 48
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remnants of this prehistoric science might have somehow in some form survived to the present day, I began to study ancient history and gradually immersed myself in the realm of the mysterious.” 8
Soon, hoping to make more money to provide for his wife and a small son, Barchenko moved to St. Petersburg and turned to writing i ction, plugging into the popular fascination with the occult. On the eve of World War I, he was already a successful author, producing adventure mystery stories and novels that sampled cutting-edge paranormal discoveries and Oriental magic. His two major novels, Doctor Chernii (Doctor Black, 1913) and Iz mraka (Out of Darkness, 1914), are set in Russia, India, and Tibet, and describe the mysterious adventures of Dr.
Alexander Chernii, a professor of medicine, h eosophist, junior mahatma, and member of a secret order with headquarters in the foothills of Tibet. h e plots revolve around the professor’s attempts to put secret knowledge possessed by the order to public benei t and the ef orts of his mahatma comrades to keep it secret.
In 1911, in addition to i ction writing, Barchenko toyed with contemporary popular science and even conducted a series of “scientii c” experiments. His major interests were thought transfer and energy, topics popular with the educated Western public in the early twentieth century, especially at er the discovery of X-rays, radiation, and the theory of relativity. Many scientists and spiritual seekers became involved in what one can call “positivist occultism,” a scientii c explanation for spiritual and paranormal phenomena. Scientists involved in this research argued that paranormal ef ects were possible because invisible brain rays produced sound waves, which conveyed thoughts at a distance and even moved objects.
Barchenko, familiar with this research, jumped on the bandwagon of this scientii c fad and performed his own experiments on thought transfer. His technique was very simple. Two volunteers with completely shaved heads put on aluminum helmets specially designed by the writer for this occasion. h e helmets were linked by a long piece of copper wire. Barchenko placed oval screens in front of both participants and 49
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asked them to stare at the screens. One volunteer was a receiver, while the other, the transmitter, was to think hard of a word or an image and mentally beam it to the recipient. Barchenko claimed that beaming images was no problem, whereas with words, as he admitted, there were many mistakes.
Subterranean Blues: Agartha and Synarchy Plugging himself into thought-transfer research and reading popular literature about hypnosis and magnetism, Barchenko could not get rid of the compulsive questions that had haunted him since the time he learned about d’Alveydre and his Agartha. What if all knowledge that modern science bragged so much about had already been known to the ancients and then had been wiped out by barbarian hordes? What if Agartha, the mysterious subterranean country d’Alveydre wrote about, indeed still harbored remnants of this superior knowledge? What if the French occultist was also right in suggesting that traces of the advanced ancient science could be found scattered in great religious texts such as the Bible, Koran, Kabala, Rig Veda and other great sacred books, as well as in ancient symbols, rock art, and folk legends? Barchenko took the message of the French esotericist very seriously. In his Mission of India in Europe (1886), d’Alveydre appealed to a French president, a Roman pope, and a Russian emperor, asking them to learn from the wisdom of Agartha. In a similar manner, a desire to penetrate the mysterious subterranean country and retrieve its wisdom in order to enlighten the Russian elite about the correct political and spiritual path eventually became a lifelong obsession for Barchenko.
Besides Agartha, Barchenko became drawn to Synarchy, a social theory propagated by d’Alveydre. h e French writer noted there were two types of human organization: Synarchy (the total and benevolent state) and anarchy (total lack of state, political and social chaos). D’Alveydre viewed all of history as a tug of war between these two opposing systems. Examples of anarchy were revolutions, class war, secularization, 50
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unemployment, decline of tradition, prostitution, alcoholism, poverty, slums, and other vices of modern society.
According to d’Alveydre, for the past i ve thousand years, people had been living in a state of anarchy. Yet, it had not always been like that all the time. At the dawn of history, humans lived in a synarchical social state based on tradition, security, and hierarchy. h e synarchical government was a pyramid composed of three layers. h e top leadership was a group of priests who controlled advanced science and technology.
h e second layer was the initiated ones and the third common people.
In modern time, this well-ordered society, strongly reminiscent of Plato’s totalitarian republic, had become almost extinct except in mysterious Agartha. Here, the synarchical priests were able to preserve high wisdom immune to anarchy with its modern vices. h e task was clear:
the wisdom of Agartha was to be retrieved and the ancient synarchical form of government restored, in order to overcome anarchy and to bring back social and spiritual stability.
According to D’Alveydre, the subterranean kingdom not only represented the best form of government but also possessed the wonders of technology: “h ey explored everything around them, above and under-neath, including the role of magnetic currents l owing from one pole to the other. h ey examined everything in the air, even invisible beings that exist there, even electricity transformed in an echo at er being formed in the heart of the earth. Air l eets of zeppelins have allowed them to observe what is still for us out of reach. Electric railroads, made not from iron but from highly durable glass, crisscrossed this kingdom.
Chemistry and physics had advanced to the highest degree, unimaginable to the modern reader.” 9 Large chunks of his writings read like the science i ction of his famous contemporary and compatriot Jules Verne, who similarly described in his novels technological wonders in space, air, and underwater. In fact, d’Alveydre’s Agartha strongly resembled parts of Twenty h ousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), and h
e Mysterious Island (1874). Like
Jules Verne’s captain Nemo, a sad romantic hero who, fearful that the 51
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populace might misuse his laser beams and other technological miracles, went underwater with his submarine, residents of Agartha, plagued by similar fears, went underground, taking along their own advanced knowledge. In both cases the message was obvious: superior technology and the best political system would be open only to highly spiritual and morally perfect people.
Synarchy and Agartha were clearly an esoteric response to the insecurities of the emerging modern society with its chaotic industrial development, city slums, urban worker revolts, and expansion of popular democracy. Like d’Alveydre, many contemporaries viewed these developments as anarchy and chaos. In the early 1900s, the ideas of people like d’Alveydre gradually mutated into a conservative intellectual movement called traditionalism. Traditionalists insisted that modern society could be redeemed through an ancient order based on tradition, hierarchy, and a universal ideology that would unite people instead of splintering them into competing groups and classes.
D’Alveydre located his conservative utopia in Inner Asia, feeding on the European romantic Orientalist tradition, which claimed that the source of European civilization was the classical Orient, especially Aryan India. In fact, a desire to look for answers in the ‘‘Himalaya’ became a staple for several generations of scholars and writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Commenting on this cultural fad of his romantic contemporaries, Adolph Erman, a German explorer of northern Asia, ironically called it an attempt to establish a mysterious depot for everything that was elsewhere undiscoverable. 10
h e same “out of Asia” romantic Orientalism became one of the sources of Helena Blavatsky’s h
eosophy—the fountainhead of modern
Western esotericism. When d’Alveydre was developing his Agartha political utopia, Blavatsky was shaping her own version of the Inner Asian paradise she labeled Shambhala, the habitat of the so-called Great White Brotherhood. Unlike d’Alveydre’s underground utopia, which was based on the heavily refurbished Nordic myth of Asgard, she drew on Tibetan Buddhist tradition and anchored her mysterious Asian kingdom high in 52
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the Himalayas. Blavatsky’s dreamland was a hub of high spiritual wisdom devoid of Agartha’s political and technological traits of ensive to present-day spiritual sensibilities. h is might explain why her Shambhala became more popular with current seekers than d’Alveydre’s subterranean country. As for Barchenko, in his talks he frequently merged these two “ancient centers of knowledge” into Shambhala-Agartha, indicating that he was feeding on both sources.
War, Revolution, and Brothers from Bolshevik Secret Police Carnage and chaos caused by World War I, revolutions, and the bloody Civil War petrii ed Barchenko. He became convinced more than ever that the wisdom of Shambhala-Agartha should be retrieved to save the country. In fact, the occultist himself had suf ered the horrors of war and revolutions. Drat ed into the army at the very beginning of the war, Barchenko was seriously wounded and, as he stressed, suf ered from
“epileptic i ts” caused by “organic damage to the brain.” 11
Like many educated Russians, Barchenko was appalled with the magnitude of popular violence unleashed by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.
Although he shared the deeply rooted belief of the old Russian intelli-gentsia that individualism and private property were evil and collectivism was inherently good, the Communist takeover with its dictatorship, despite of intellectuals, and terrorism against the rich and the middle class appeared to him as mass insanity. So did the mob rule, which disgusted him: “I received the October Revolution in a hostile manner, taking into consideration what lay on the surface—the sentiments of the crowd. I linked the proletariat to the dregs of society. In my view, workers, sailors, and Red guards behaved like beasts. h is attitude planted in my soul a desire to hide away and to shelter myself from the revolution.” 12 Yet soon the i rst shock from the Bolshevik revolt passed away. He saw that the new regime had seriously entrenched itself and that the “dictatorship of proletariat” was not a short-lived project. Like many middle-class people who did not join the two million Russians 53
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