What is the connection between a UFO magazine, the Hollow Earth, the
Theosophical Society and the 'King of the World'?
MIKE JAY and JOSCELYN GODWIN trace the influence of the mysterious Vattanian
alphabet.
In 1885, a French political writer and historian named St-Yves d'Alveydre
decided, as many men of letters did at the time, that his education and
understanding of history would be improved by learning the classical Indian
language of Sanskrit. He enlisted a tutor, an expatriate Indian calling
himself Haji Sharif, who was living in a northern suburb of Paris and
supporting himself as a seller of exotic birds.
St-Yves was to learn far more than he expected. During the very first lesson,
Haji Sharif revealed that he was a 'Guru Pandit of the Great Agarthian
School', an ancient society that had preserved the secret and primordial
language of 'Vattan' and its alphabet on which all other languages, including
Sanskrit, were based.
This alphabet was to transform St-Yves' life. His study of Vattanian led him
into psychic contact with the Agarthian Masters, located since Atlantean
times in a vast hollow earth beneath the mountains of Tibet, who were
destined to rise up and usher in a new age based on the wisdom of their lost
high civilisation. Furthermore, Vattanian became the foundation for his
system of 'archeometry', perhaps the most bizarre and complex occult edifice
the 19th century was to produce.
This story might seem strangely familiar to some Fortean readers in many
details it it foreshadows, uncannily, the far better known tale of Richard
Shaver, who in the 1940s began to sell his 'true story' to Amazing Stories
magazine edited by Ray Palmer. The 'Shaver Mystery', as it became known, also
started with revelations about a 'primordial alphabet' preserved in secret
since Atlantean times and then developed into a fully-fledged mythos
featuring a hollow earth populated by non-human puppetmasters who pulled the
strings behind the lives of us surface-dwellers. The presence of the
ubiquitous Ray Palmer responsible more than anyone else for introducing the
extraterrestrial UFO hypothesis into popular culture links St-Yves and
Shaver in more tangible ways, as we shall later see.