The other night i was ran across this article called The Deep Dwellers. It traces the concept of subterranean races beneath the earth’s surface in mythology and fiction, as well as contemporary urban legend. It starts with the kurgarra and the galatu, and Pazuzu, and then moves through the centuries, up to the pulp horror of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. I don’t even want to mess with the modern tales trying to connect Sasquatch and the chupacabra into this mad tradition.
It’s not surprising that there’s no attempt to tie in René Guénon and Le Roi du Monde, a response to Ferdinand Ossendowski’s account of Agarttha, Beasts , Men and Gods (which passes itself off as a true account, when it seems based on a novel by Saint-Yves d’Alveidre called Mission de l’Inde en Europe (there’s bound to be a translation online of that as well, but i have yet to track it down,) because it’s more fun to have literal monsters lurking in subterranean caverns than to delve into the metaphysical meaning of what these archetypes are.
Bill posted on Guenon before, back on Virtue in a Vacuum, and references to him became an immediate catalyst for much fun.
[...] Anyway, back to Roman von Ungern-Sternberg… it gets weirder. A few days ago, i made a reference to Ferdinand Ossendowski’s Beasts , Men and Gods, but have not taken the time to read it. [...]