Agartha: History of a Meme

Yes, I am woke. Yes, I watch quite a lot of white nationalist content on Instagram. Two things can be true at the same time.

Me while writing this blog post

My favorite type of fascist brainrot involves Agartha, the legendary kingdom hidden within the hollow Earth that is the home of all true Aryans. Agartha occupies a place of honor within the memetic language of the dissident right. Surprisingly, Agartha content has become spectacularly popular on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube Shorts. This is a subject worth studying. Should we non-White, non-fascists be worried about this development? I conclude ultimately: no. To build this case, I’d like to discuss the history of the meme and explain a bit about how it works.

But first, I have stitched together a compilation Agartha short-form videos that crack me up. Watch a bit so you understand what it is we’re discussing here:

These videos are exceptionally popular. The median video in this compilation has 200,000+ likes on Instagram.

Pre-Internet Agartha

Agartha was originally “Asgartha”, the invention of French Sanskritist Louis Jacolliot in the 1870s. Jacolliot believed that Christianity’s true origin lay in ancient Hinduism, and he was perpetually claiming to have discovered Sanskrit documents that revealed the existence of ancient cities of immense power. In Krishna et le Christ, Jacolliot wrote:

The Greek is but the Sanscrit. Pheidias and Praxiteles have studied in Asia the chefs-d’oeuvre of Daonthia, Ramana, and Aryavosta. Plato disappears before Dgeminy and Veda-Vyasa, whom he literally copies. Aristotle is thrown into the shade by the Pourva-Mimansa and the Outtara-Mimansa, in which one finds all the systems of philosophy which we are now occupied in re-editing, from the Spiritualism of Socrates and his school, the skepticism of Pyrrho, Montaigne, and Kant, down to the positivism of Littre.”

From his studies, Jacolliot inferred the existence of “Asgartha”, a lost city that was once India’s capital. Asgartha was destroyed 5000 years ago prior to the advent of the Kali Yuga. Later, French occultist Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves asserted that Agartha still exists! It merely relocated to the interior of the hollow Earth, safeguarded from the deleterious conditions that characterize our current age.

During the 1920s and 1930s these ideas became incorporated into Nazi mysticism. German-American scientist Willy Ley wrote an incredible article about this called “Pseudoscience in Naziland”. I’m going to quote it extensively because it is so revealing:

When things get so tough that there seems to be no way out, the Russian embraces the vodka bottle, the Frenchman a woman and the American the Bible.

The German tends to resort to magic, to some nonsensical belief which he tries to validate by way of hysterics and physical force. Not every German, of course. Not even a majority, but it seems to me that the percentage of people so inclined is higher in Germany than in other countries. It was the willingness of a noticeable proportion of the Germans to rate rhetoric above research, and intuition above knowledge, that brought to power a political party which was frankly and loudly anti-intellectual.

The Nazis not only burned books they disliked, they also classified theoretical physicists with “Jews and Marxists.”

Small wonder the pseudoscientists experienced a heyday under such a regime—but it would be a mistake to believe that these pseudoscience’s which I am going to describe, originated with the Nazis. They existed, and to some extent even flourished, before Hitler. But then they were hemmed in by the authority of the scientists—after Hitler had become Führer it was almost the other way round.

…

In the days before the Nazis became important the term “Ariosophy” could be seen occasionally in some newspapers. Then, one day, there was a small ad, announcing a lecture on Ariosophy by a man whose name I forget. It was stated that he was a disciple of the founder of Ariosophy, Dr. Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels. It was also stated that priests would not be admitted to the lecture.

The lecturer, who tried hard to look like Albrecht Dürer, the famous but long-dead German painter, began his lecture with the statement that there were several human races but that skin color is not the most important criterion for distinguishing the races. Then he launched into an explanation of the hidden importance of language, saying that figures of speech contain deep truths which, in everyday usage, are usually overlooked. People say, for example, “I can’t stand that man’s smell’”—remember, the lecture was in German, where that figure of speech is used to express personal dislike for somebody, a dislike lacking specific rational reasons—well, that just indicates the otherwise forgotten fact that the various races have different smells, in short it expresses revulsion at the other man’s race.

By that time the lecture had got around to the word Man—in German Mensch—and he pointed out that there was a rare word manschen which means to mix—something unsavory—and with a long jump from linguistics into the Bible manschen and Mensch were connected. Humanity, it turned out, was the result of a—forbidden—mixture of angels and animals. Each person has a small percentage of angel and a large percentage of animal. The races indicate roughly what the percentages are, a “true race” consists of individuals of about the same percentage which seek each other out. Obviously any small community is apt to harbor individuals of about the same “race”; pure Aryans, like, for example, the inhabitants of mountain villages in Norway, may be as high as one per cent angel.

You can easily see how and where such dream-reasoning fitted into the Nazi philosophy; to my surprise no Party Group or Nazi community ever erected a statue in honor of Dr. Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels—whose real name may have been Ignaz Donnerwetter. The Ariosophers could at least quote a few Biblical passages in support of their ideas—they stated that their founder had been a Catholic priest before “he saw the light.”

The next group was literally founded upon a novel. That group which I think called itself Wahrheitsgesellschaft—Society for Truth—and which was more or less localized in Berlin, devoted its spare time looking for Vril. Yes, their conviction’s were founded upon Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race. They knew that the book was fiction, Bulwer-Lytton had used that device in order to be able to tell the truth about this “power.” The subterranean humanity was nonsense, Vril was not. Possibly it had enabled the British, who kept it as a State secret, to amass their colonial empire. Surely the Romans had had it, enclosed in small metal balls, which guarded their homes and were referred to as lares. For reasons which I failed to penetrate, the secret of Vril could be found by contemplating the structure of an apple, sliced in halves.

And so the “Hollow Earth” doctrine incorporated itself into Nazi science.

Don’t tell me you still believe in orthodox geography…

The Hohlweltlehre—Hollow Earth Doctrine was invented, as far as I was able to find out, in about 1920. Its main tenet was: the Earth is real, everything else is an optical illusion. The Earth was a spherical bubble, of the same dimensions which “orthodox geography” ascribes to it, in an infinity of solid rock. Humanity lived on the inside of that bubble which was precisely like an “orthodox globe,” but seen from the inside. Three bodies moved near the center of that empty bubble, the Sun, the Moon, and the “phantom Universe,” a dark-blue sphere with little lights on it, mistaken for the fixed stars. Night was caused by the phantom Universe obscuring the Sun for a part of the Earth: eclipses by the shadow of the phantom Universe falling upon the Moon.

Questing spirits desire to find the entrance to Agartha.

This memeplex persists today due its incorporation into the cosmology of René Guénon, who used to be required reading for Neo-Nazis and occultists on 4chan.

4chan Agartha, Twitter Agartha, and Short-form Video Agartha

Agartha was a major preoccupation of the /x/ and /pol/ boards of 4chan. Here’s a video collecting classic /x/ greentexts discussing Agartha and how to find it.

By the time we get to twitter/X in the 2020s, we see many dissident right poasters mood-affiliating with 4chan white nationalist concepts. This is all semi-ironic.

From this we get to the final stage, where now we are seeing an explosion of Agartha content on short-form video platforms.

Let’s return to the compilation video at the opening of the post. For those lacking existing familiarity, I’ll explain some of the elements of the memeplex:

• A10 Eye Color - This is a reference to this eye-color-based hierarchy:

  

  Where are you on the chart? I’m T40.

• Raw Milk - White nationalists enjoy raw milk:

  

  Milk party with the lads

• White Monster - Similar story. There’s a rumor that drinking white monster can turn you white.

• Yakub - According to the Nation of Islam he is the progenitor of the white race. He was a brilliant geneticist with an enormous cranium who created white people 6,000 years ago through selective breeding. He died at 150, but not before passing onto his children the gift of “tricknology”, a collection of social technologies used to enslave, oppress, and manipulate black people. White supremacists have affectionately incorporated Yakub into their pantheon of Agarthan heroes.

• Vril - Another late 19th century concept from fiction that has been integrated into the white nationalist mythos. Vril is a type of psychic energy wielded by an advanced subterranean race in the novel Vril: The Power of the Coming Race. These days, men can increase their vril by drinking white monster, chugging raw milk, and sun tanning their balls.

• “Down Under” - A song from the rock band Men At Work, and the unofficial national anthem of Australian. A detuned version of Down Under is the unofficial national anthem of Agartha.

Retvrn to Liberalism

What to make of this? Is white nationalism becoming mainstream? Ten years ago, I couldn’t find any of these concepts outside of 4chan. One puzzle is that Agartha memes are made by and for a multi-ethnic coalition of people. One of the video creators I compiled is named “Saint Natticus”, and I believe he is Kenyan-American. What causes such a person to put on a blonde wig and do skull measurements on social media?

The Agartha phenomenon could be a part of what the political Youtuber JREG called “Post-Racial Fascism” (PRF). JREG argues that despite fascism’s association with Nazism, fascism is both in-principle and in-practice compatible with multi-ethnic coalitions. He cites early Italian Fascist tracts¹ and Brazilian Integralism as examples. PRF is a political faction with growing influence, as right-wing politics seems to be eager to embrace authoritarian machinery but unwilling to commit to full-bodied white supremacy propre. Agartha is part of the Based Ritual, but outside of that function it does not have any deep significance for race relations. Anyone who masters the Agarthan memetic language is white, anyone who can’t isn’t. No need for ethnic cleaning.

However, I think even this doesn’t say enough. I believe Agartha is “Post-Racial Post-Fascism”. I don’t think there is any political content left in this memeplex. Agartha came hurtling towards the Overton Window and was absorbed by it without causing much of a disturbance.

I suspect this is ultimately due to liberalism being an inescapable attractor state. People can swing around the political extremes all they like — but eventually they will return to liberalism.

1. Mussolini explicitly denounced racism initially before getting “big bro’d” by Hitler, as JREG puts it.