Beasts, Men, and Gods

Beasts, Men, and Gods, by Polish writer, explorer, professor, and anti-Communist activist Ferdinand Ossendowski, was originally published in English as translated by Lewis Stanton Palen in 1922. The work is a quasi-autobiographic tale of high-adventure told by a Polish Colonel in the White Russian Army (Tsarist loyalists) who escaped from Vladivostok and made his way through Siberia, the Transbaikal, and Mongolia. It is a monumental journey both in the amount of time he spends, and having to avoid the Bolshevik forces along the way. The novel is also renowned in occult and theosophical circles for its tales of a subterranean kingdom which exists inside hollow Earth, a kingdom known to the Buddhists & Theosophists as Agharti, or more commonly as Agharta. Of further interest to the occultist is the story recounted in Tibet about the Hidden King of the World, a head of an initiatic hierarchy, named Brahytma, or World-King of Tibetan Buddhism.