Earthly Paradise, Hitler’s Bestfriend, and the Glorified Body
By Jesus is Victory
While browsing Instagram today, I was looking through a meme account’s posts out of boredom. One of the posts, containing a picture of an Arcadian valley full of impossible waterfalls and lush greenery, had meme-font text over it asking:
WILL WE BE ABLE TO WEAR SNAPBACKS IN AGARTHA?
Today, in 2025, I am 27. The irony provided by the Internet 2.0 cultural output of the prior generation ( ‘Millennials’) led to the converse reaction by Zoomers: post-irony, meta-irony, complete mockery of mockery, followed (recently) by a resurgence in a desire for sincerity or truth (see: Tradcath, changing political parties, mental health openness, etc). This paradox: the transition of a youth born into irony and detachment into a young-adulthood of yearning and authenticity, has led to an onslaught of memes which are near-impossible to decipher.
I want to answer the silly question of the meme. As an (imperfect) Christian, I regularly grapple with visions of Heaven: the promise of a perfected body, eternal knowledge, and unbroken communion. How can I believe in such impossibles? Perhaps it is because Heaven feels curiously similar to Agartha: a place of pure spirit, absolute knowledge, perfected existence—impossibly beautiful, frightening in unknowability. Perhaps this is why these ideas persist stubbornly, resurfacing across millennia, civilizations, religions, and memes. I am not certain, though. Since I’m uncertain of my own thoughts, the best way to answer this question of being able to wear a snapback in Agartha is first with context—answering without relevant context would just be responding to a meme with a meme, an insincere (and, probably, fatal) hole to fall into.
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While Agartha originated in various Hindu and Buddhist mythologies: Shambala, mentioned in Tibetan Buddhism oft-seems to be the originator of Agartha as an idea, first arising in concept during the early 4th or 5th centuries. Patala, as well, in Hindu cosmology, is one of seven subterranean realms in which serpent deities live: effectively an underground sanctuary of esoteric knowledge.
Agartha, as it is commonly thought of today, originates within western occultism via Saint-Yves d’Alyveydre’s 1886 text Mission de l’inde. Saint-Yves was a French-born occultist, who originally coined the actual name for “Agartha” throughout his writings. In his mythos, Agartha exists as an obscured, but spiritually enlightened kingdom beneath the Himalayas. The citizens of this kingdom were divinely-advanced beings, possessed ancient wisdoms and manipulated surface-world historical events while remaining in safety beneath the ground.
Saint-Yves goes further to describe the actual details of Agarthan society. The rulers of Agartha themselves possessed pre-historic knowledge due to their discovery and research into lost civilizations such as Atlantis and Lemuria. Agarthans lived in a perfect civilization which remained obscure because of humanity’s immaturity: they believed humanity’s access to their wisdom would result only in a global cataclysm. Agarthans lived under a unique system of government, called Synarchy, a system of absolute order: spiritual, political, and scientific authorities work in absolute harmony. As such, they possessed a three-tier hierarchical government, with the leader being the Sovereign Pontiff (who ruled by divine right, a philosopher-king similar to Plato’s ideal ruler). Per Saint Yves:
The Supreme Pontiff of Agartha possesses the entirety of the world’s sacred knowledge, inherited from Atlantis and beyond. He alone holds the keys to the divine order.
Beneath the Pontiff, were three councils governing Synarchy, to maintain perfect harmony. In Agartha, there were no elections: all classes of society were free from suffering due to positions being based upon spiritual enlightenment and merit. As such, no power struggles or individual ambitions existed, all aspects were in balance and allowed their society to function as a perfect collective. The “hidden responsibility” which Agarthans served to humanity were their indirect intervention into world affairs when civilization was at risk and via their prevention of destructive knowledge falling into humanity’s hands during humanity’s immaturity:
It was they who, in ages past, brought the sacred sciences to Egypt and Greece, only to retreat when humanity proved unworthy.
Due to their spiritual wisdom and isolation from most of the surface-world’s strife, Agarthan technology far surpassed that of humanity. Saint-Yves wrote that Agarthans harnessed the same forces which hold the cosmos together, having a form of energy called Vril, which was quite similar to Nikola Tesla’s ideas of free energy. Vril allowed the Agarthans to no longer abide with gravity, travel between dimensions, and communicate telepathically (specifically, to influence human thoughts). All Agarthans spoke a universal language, called Vattan, which all human language was hypothesized to descend from. All we know of Vattan is that it was perfect and sacred, allowing one who was fluent in it to unlock hidden wisdoms.
In his conclusive remarks about Agartha, Saint-Yves claimed only when the West had lost their desire for materialism and therefore inherent corruption, would Agartha’s doors finally open, allowing all of humanity to share in their eternal wisdom.
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I’m playing tennis against an old friend. Waning sunset. It creates the illusion that we are imprisoned, light traveling through and slamming against chain links. Between sets, we talk about the past and present and tennis.
In general, tennis is ritualistic, formalized…silent. The level of noise heard at packed tennis courts is often comparable to a library rather than an arena. At the elite level, coaches do not yell or speak throughout a match to their player. Audiences have specific regulations applied, to reduce interruptions in matches. Even as my friend and I sit, we speak and appear in the manner of hushed nuns.
The sport originated within the monastic circles of 11th century France. A literally divine and quiet birth. Monarchs shortly fell in love with it—the rules transformed from the relatively pure, simplistic into something esoteric and complex, in an effort to mimic the intricacies of court politics during the time. Henry the VIII was an obsessive player, having been recorded as playing matches while executions and rebellions occurred nearby. King Louis X died after an exhaustive tennis match in which he over consumed chilled wine to supplement his thirst rather than water. To this day, tennis is still a game seen as belonging to a higher class: a type of play only the lucky get to participate in.
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Saint-Yves writing never proved influential outside of various occultist circles during his lifetime, with Mission de l’inde only becoming published after his death: however, this changed only 50 years later, with the encroachment of Modernism and the rise of Aryanism and other nationalist/ethnic ideologies across Europe. Saint-Yves had been right about one thing: materialism would continue in Europe to a point of utter chaos and disruption. Rationalism, industrialism, and the dominance of scientific materialism had begun in the late 19th century to seemingly take away the aspects of life which provided meaning: World War 1 would inevitably shatter European belief in rationalism and materialism, with the horror of trench combat and prolonged warfare and millions of deaths, achieved mainly via rational machines and inventions. Germany, as we all know, was humiliated in 1919 at the Treaty of Versailles, leading to the perfect conditions for esoteric and racial nationalism to arise.
The year before the Treaty of Versailles, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Munich (then-Bavarian), Rudolf von Sebottendorff began to assemble various folk-nationalists (Karl Harrer, Gottfried Feder) and esoteric intellectuals (Walter Nauhaus and importantly, Dietrich Eckhart) forming a new group in response to the failures of Modernism, writing:
We gathered men of noble blood, the descendants of the great Aryan race, to preserve their divine knowledge from the corruption of our age.
And thus, before the first World War even ended, the seeds had been sown for the inevitable rise of the Nazis, and the Thule Society arose. A core belief of the Thule Society was based in the concept of a lost Aryan civilization, either the lost country of Thule/Hyperborea or Agartha. Walter Nauhaus, an early member and expert in racial mysticism and Germanic runes, proposed to the group that hidden powers lay within these ancient Aryan civilizations—if the society were able to attain these powers, the gates to Aryan knowledge and pride would be certain.
Over the next two years, the Thule Society, akin to the Agarthans (supposedly) mentioned in mystical texts, began to indirectly influence the events of history under the auspices of being another nationalist and anti-communist political party. In 1919, under the influence of Thule, the German Workers’ Party transitioned into becoming the Nazi Party by 1920. It is here, when, per a Thule memo from the time, they became more direct, believing in the coming of their own personal Sovereign Pontiff:
The Führer will rise among us. The time for secrecy ends; the time for action begins.
By 1923, the Thule Society officially disbanded, with most of their membership becoming full members of the Nazi Party. Members of the party such as Dietrich Eckhart, saw Hitler as a messianic figure, foretold by the research of the Society between 1918 and 1923. Indeed, it was Eckhart, with his spiritual and racial beliefs, who identified Hitler as a profound speaker, becoming Hitler’s mentor for much of the future Fuhrer’s younger years. Eckhart lent Hitler mystic books on Aryan philosophy, styled him by providing his iconic trench coat, provided feedback on his speaking style, introduced him into the Munich anti-semitic art scenes, he formed key relationships between Hitler and the wealthy donors of the volkisch nationalists, and facilitated his meeting with the socialite Helene Bechstein (who would then, over the next decade, provide Hitler his meteoric rise through the Berlin upper-classes).
Eckart, who had by 1922, spent multiple years mentoring a young Hitler, suddenly found their relationship cooling. Hitler had, via Eckhart’s assistance, become an extraordinarily confident individual. Once Hitler had power within the Nazi Party on an operational basis, Eckart’s assignments as political agent were frequently lackluster and disappointing. Eckart had also developed a drinking problem since the humiliation at Versailles in 1919, leading to him being seen as a political liability by Hitler and the rest of the party, leading to his sidelining by late 1923. Still, Hitler retained an intensely personal, intellectual, and emotional relationship with Eckart until Eckart’s death. It was Eckart who, in his proclamations of Hitler as the foretold Aryan messiah, first provided Hitler’s internal belief of his function as a superior being to other humans. It, too, was Eckart who pushed for the purchase of the major magazine Volkischer Beobachter in 1920, so as to disseminate to the Aryan nation, through various essays and articles Hitler’s role as “Germany’s Leader” and inherent uniqueness and intellectual capacity to the rest of the Aryan nation. In a letter to a friend in 1923, Eckhart wrote:
Follow Hitler! He will dance, but it is I who has called the tune! We have given him the ‘means of communication’ with Them.
Eckart died the day after Christmas, in 1923, of a heart attack. Hitler, undoubtedly, was profoundly changed by the death of his mentor. Only in private, to retain his image of inherent superiority to others, would Hitler ever mention Eckart after his death. While the initial volume of Mein Kampf had no mention of Eckart, the entire second volume was dedicated to Eckart. Towards the end of World War 2, Hitler has been recorded as mentioning to one of his secretaries that his old friendship with Eckart had been “the best experience” of his in the 1920s, proclaiming he had never, since Eckart, had a friend with such “a harmony of thinking and feeling.” In 1942, Hitler recalled Eckart in a heartfelt and nostalgic manner, claiming:
we didn’t see what [Eckart] used to be back then: a polar star. The writings of all others were filled with platitudes, but if he told you off… such wit! I was but a mere infant then, in terms of style….
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Why mention Eckart at all, when all I seek to do is answer the question provided initially?
For an individual, the winds of fate are not as harsh or intense as they are with history: the winds are instead always gentle, subtle, even completely unnoticed.
Who is Dietrich Eckart before 1918 aside from a one-hit-wonder playwright, confirmed morphine addict, who had squandered all his wealth, having to live with his brother Wilhelm—Eckart was but a failed member of an old nobility class, which existed at his birth in 1868 but had fully disappeared by the 1900s. Importantly, Eckart was not always an antisemite, it was not until the 1910s that these traits of humiliation and fear appeared within him. In 1898, we see a heartfelt poem written and published by Eckart, extolling the virtue and beauty of a Jewish girl he had been pursuing. In that same year, he wrote that his most admired writers were Henrich Heine and Otto Weininger, both of them Jewish poets.
The societal and spiritual conflict, so far beyond Eckart, warred without any actual battle. Marx, Haeckel, Comte, Lenin—the harbingers of materialism—colliding in mental and spiritual warfare with the German idealists and occultists like Blavatsky, Steiner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky.
What point is there, in answering the question which only exists, meme or serious, in the now of 2025, without seeking why the question is posed at all?
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After the death of Eckart in 1923 and Hitler’s imprisonment in 1924, esoteric Aryan mysticism (and belief in Agartha) suddenly fell from major influence. While vital in early Nazi thought via Eckart and Thule, it was now clear for the Nazis that political power and “real-world” expansions needed to occur. In prison, Hitler writes Mein Kampf, focusing on racial, national, and political struggle: no mention of mysticism. Within the Nazi Party itself, Hitler began to purge overt occultists, including leftover figures from the Thule Society, as the party sought real-world strategy. In public, Hitler would dismiss Agartha and Thule beliefs as nonsensical, with an interview from 1933 stating:
I have no time for fools who waste their energy on ghosts and lost continents. We will build our own future.
Thus, the concept of Agartha fell from popular thought, until 1929, when a disciplined and fanatical Aryan of middle-class background, who had been described in early life as physically weak, awkward, and possibly autistic (in hindsight) was appointed by Hitler to take over as leader of the Schutzstaffel (SS), an organization which, at that time had less than 270~ members and served as Hitler’s personal bodyguard. His name was Heinrich Himmler and he would go on to be one of the most known figures of Nazi Germany and their associated atrocities.
After Himmler’s appointment, he began to reframe the SS purpose as a bodyguard unit into an elite paramilitary, culturally fashioned as an Aryan warrior-priesthood. It is via Himmler’s racial spiritual views and occult mystic views that he achieved massive success in his goal. By 1933, the SS had risen, over a period of less than 4 years, from a 270-member unit to a 50,000 member paramilitary order. Part of his success was via his introduction of the concept of Ariosophy—Aryan spiritualism—which modeled the SS in the form of historic Teutonic Knight orders combined with the teachings of the Thule Society and Ariosophy. As such, the SS only allowed “pure Aryans,” with applicants to the SS being first-checked by the SS Race and Settlement Office (RuSHA) to confirm the prospective member’s Aryan ancestry back to at least 1750.
Importantly for us, Himmler also believed in the idea of an Aryan “Ultimate Secret,” which he believed to be the hidden society of Agartha, which held the final repository of lost Aryan wisdom. In a speech to SS officers, Himmler stated:
We are the chosen of the Germanic race. It is our duty to retrieve the knowledge lost in the fall of Atlantis and Hyperborea!
Himmler rose to Hitler’s good graces as a result of his actions during The Night of the Long Knives, from June 30th to July 2nd of 1934, in which both Himmler and the SS assassinated the entirety of Ernst Röhm’s Sturmabteilung (SA/Brownshirts) leadership.
For brief context, prior to 1934, the SA had been a paramilitary group of over 3 million members led by Ernst Röhm, who had been instrumental in the rise of Hitler and the establishment of Nazi power in Germany by 1933. Issues between Hitler and the SA arose in 1934, as Röhm pushed for the SA to merge with the Reichswehr (German Army) or entirely replace it. The SA had, as a result of their public nuisance (frequently having street brawls and petty crimes throughout Germany) and their threats of a second revolution (by allying with big businesses over Nazi officials), lost authority in the eyes of Hitler and the remainder of the Nazi party.
Himmler, of course, saw the SA as a direct obstacle to his own SS in terms of the rise of a Nazi paramilitary group. Thus, seizing the moment, Himmler and Hermann Göring (head of the Gestapo), fed Hitler false reports that Röhm and the SA were planning a coup in the summer of 1934. Hitler hesitated, given his relationship and past with Röhm, but Himmler and Göring cooperated and made deals with Reichswehr leadership and major business leaders, leading to pressure on Hitler to confirm a purge. Thus, within less than 24 hours, Himmler’s warrior-priesthood completely removed their only competition within Nazi Germany, with Röhm himself being arrested by Hitler, only to be shot to death two days after by SS officers in his cell when refusing the offer to commit suicide by pistol (the option provided to him by Hitler).
The success of The Night of the Long Knives cemented multiple things in Himmler’s mind: the SS is the spiritual elite and thus would protect Aryans from impure elements and because of this, the SS are truly like mythical Argarthan rulers who were divinely wise due to their purging of unworthy ideologies from their society. In a speech in 1935 to his officers, likely in response to the success of the purge, Himmler stated:
The SS shall be the guardians of the Volk, as the ancient Aryans were the guardians of Agartha. The weak must be cast aside, as they were in ages past.
In 1935, Himmler formed an institute within the SS, the Ahnenerbe, to serve as a research unit which specialized in their pursuit of proving Aryan superiority and of uncovering hidden Aryan knowledge. An internal memo at the institute in 1937 mentions that Agartha was “not mere legend, but echoes of a lost truth…We must recover this knowledge before our enemies do.” Himmler himself believed Agartha held the last truly pure Aryans, who had fled underground after the collapse of Atlantis and Hyperborea. Interestingly, because of this, he hypothesized that Tibetans and certain European ethnicities descending from the area of the Himalayas, were direct descendants of Agarthan Aryans.
Due to research from the Ahnenerbe, in 1938 Himmler commissioned an SS expedition led by Dr. Ernst Schäfer to Tibet. The purpose of the expedition was explicit: seek connections between Argathan civilization, Shambhala (a Tibetan mystical paradise that Himmler believed to be linked with Agartha), and the Aryan people with a final goal of finding useful ancient wisdom for the Nazis. The expedition was given 500,000 Reichsmarks (around $200,000 for the time) and was comprised of five members: Ernst Schäfer (Zoologist, Tibetan researcher; group leader), Bruno Beger (anthropologist; expert in skull measurements to seek “Aryan” features of the local population), Karl Wienert (Geophysicist; Agartha researcher), Edmund Greer (Technical expert; mapping, data, and logistics support), and Henrich Harrer (SS mountaineer who joined the expedition later on; became famous for his memoir written about his time in tibet which is called Seven Years in Tibet).
The expedition to Tibet from 1938-1939 was performed under the auspices of purely scientific studies, given that their route through British-controlled India was heavily monitored, leading Schäfer to perform as their main negotiator when encountering various Tibetan or Indian authorities. Once within Tibet, the team performed a variety of studies and tasks to search for an entrance to Agartha. Beger, their anthropologist, performed over 300 skull measurements of various Tibetans to investigate if they were remnants of an Aryan race. Schäfer spoke with multiple Tibetan lamas who recounted vivid descriptions of Shambhala indicating it as a real and physical place, with possible connections into Agartha. The team ultimately collected, analyzed, and returned with over 50 Tibetan spiritual and mythological texts, which gave detailed descriptions in reference to an underground world beneath the Himalayas. While the expedition returned with no physical proof of Agartha, their findings of Tibetan myths correlating with their own Aryan occult theories led to a neutral result in Schäfer’s letter to Himmler in 1939, stating:
The monks hold knowledge beyond our understanding. They speak of an inner world, but it remains closed to us.
However, Himmler’s response to the expedition was one of optimism and pleasure. He interpreted the Tibetan findings as proof for Shambhala’s existence, which would certainly lead to Agartha if further investigated. In 1940, as World War 2 was fully raging, he wrote to Ahnenerbe’s staff that the truth was within their grasp and that continuing the search for the hidden world would certainly lead to a discovery that would allow them to change the outcome of the war significantly. As we know, this would not occur for the Nazis.
Throughout the late 1930s up until the end of the war in 1945, Himmler pursued various other theories and expeditions within Europe and out. At Externsteine, a prehistoric rock formation within Germany, Himmler ordered studies to prove its connection to Aryan ancestors, with some inside the SS believing it was a possible alternative entrance into Agartha. Prior to the Tibetan expeditions, Himmler had also funded expeditions into Iceland, Greenland, and all over Scandinavia, in search of Hyperborea—another mythical homeland of the Aryans, which Himmler believed had underground tunnels linked directly to Agartha. In 1942, while the American and British forces were forcing Rommel’s German forces from Egypt, Himmler had sent SS researchers to the Andes and the Amazon in South America, seeking tunnel systems beneath the continent that could lead to Agartha. Regardless of the expedition or research, the result was the same—no physical evidence of Agartha, yet multiple texts and mythologies that could be relatively correlated within Nazi Esotericism to justify further trust in finding the Aryan homeland.
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I don’t know if I’m truly lucky, though I’ve played tennis for much of my American life.
During the peak of Nazi Germany’s power, the regulation and promotion of tennis was delegated to the National Socialist League of the Reich for Physical Exercise (the NSRL). The Nazi obsession with perfection, naturally, first extended over the physical.
Gottfried von Cramm—famous for being the first non-American/British/Australian/French player to win a singles Slam title, at the 1934 French Open—stood tall at six feet, sweat drenched through his natural blonde hair, gazed down court with blue eyes, of aristocratic birth, undeniably charismatic, confident. In Aryan physical aesthetics, Gottfriend was the physical ideal of an Aryan.
As the ideal, Gottfried’s life was inherently tied into the mythos of Nazi Germany. The regime, early on, transformed him into a propaganda figure, parading him as God-like. Yet, Gottfried was not a Nazi. In all personal beliefs, Gottfried silently opposed the regime. He refused to mention Hitler or Aryanism after winning competitions, never joined the party proper, and maintained close friendships with ‘undesirables’ (including the Jewish-German tennis star Daniel Prenn, who had been banned from further competition by the party). As a result, the Gestapo arrested Gottfried in 1938 with “moral indecency” (based on his past relationship with Manasse Herbst, a Jewish-German actor who had, by then, fled Germany), humiliating the party. Gottfried’s fall from Aryan myth followed the silence of the sport—the administration quietly jailed him for a year, releasing him only a year after, due to pressure from international tennis circles.
With the setting sun backing me, I am golden. The projection of my shadow… twice my height, looming, undefined against asphalt… contains—for the short moment between point-of-contact in an exhausted, almost-wide serve and the awkwardly placed (but legal) ball’s impact—my perfect life.
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In 1945, as the Soviets cornered what remained of the Nazi forces in Berlin, Himmler spoke for the final time with Hitler on April 20, 1945—Hitler’s birthday—swearing his unwavering loyalty and that he would stay within Berlin with other Nazis and Aryan leaders regardless of the Soviet advances. Immediately after this meeting, Himmler would immediately flee Berlin towards the West. Himmler then set up a meeting in secret with the Head of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte, to claim Hitler would soon be dead and that Himmler was best to represent as the provisional leader of Germany. Himmler had hoped that Bernadotte would inform the commander of the Allied forces, Dwight Eisenhower, that Germany sought to surrender to the Western forces, who would then ally with Germany under leadership by Himmler, to combat the Soviet forces.
While Bernadotte obtained this in writing and delivered it to Eisenhower, Himmler’s betrayal had been notified to Hitler prior to his death within the Fuhrerbunker in Berlin. Outraged at the deceit of one of his closest confidantes, whom he had called “the loyal Heinrich,” Hitler immediately ordered Himmler’s arrest and instead named Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor to have leadership over Germany after his suicide. In his last will and testament, Hitler stripped Himmler of all party and state offices and expelled him from the Nazi Party. As a result a day after Hitler’s suicide, when Himmler attempted to convince Dönitz that he serve as second-in-command (claiming the benefit of the SS as a tool to restore and maintain domestic order) in the post-surrender interim government, Dönitz instead fully rejected Himmler and dismissed him from any and all posts in any German authority.
As a result, Himmler became hunted by the Allies and had no immediate comrades. He had attempted to escape over the following weeks using a forged checkbook and ID, but was identified by British military officers via a special stamp on his papers which had been normally seen on fleeing SS members. During interrogation, Himmler admitted his real identity. While having a medical exam conducted afterwards prior to imprisonment, at the headquarters of the Second British Army, Himmler (at the very last second, no less—as the doctor was attempting to examine his mouth) bit into a hidden cyanide pill and died. He was buried in an unmarked grave whose location remains unknown to this day.
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With the defeat and subsequent collapse of Nazi Germany, the study and belief in Nazi Occultism became relatively taboo and uncommon. While much of the core Nazi leadership was executed after the Nuremberg Trials (Ribbentrop, Keitel, Frank, Rosenberg, Streicher, etc.), committed suicide during/before the trials (Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Ley, Göring), or imprisoned with some ultimately released (Hess, Speer, Schirach, Funk, Dönitz): it is true that a number of the party successfully fled and evaded immediate capture over the years.
Interestingly, many of the major escapees had been members of the SS. Alois Brunner, an SS officer, escaped to Syria after the war and died there in 2001. Josef Mengele, the infamous SS officer and torturer/physician of Auschwitz, fled to South America and died in Brazil (via drowning) in 1979. Adolf Eichmann, an SS officer who was the principal architect of the Holocaust, escaped to Argentina before Mossad agents found him and executed him in 1962. Otto Skorzeny, another SS officer who had been renown for leading daring operations such as that of the rescue of Benito Mussolini, escaped from his internment camp in 1948, fleeing to Spain—where he lived and worked as a military advisor until his death in 1975. Erich Priebke, an SS captain who had been involved in the Ardeatine massacre in Italy where 335 civilians had been murdered, fled to Argentina (interestingly, living openly under his real name) until he was extradited in 2010 and imprisoned, dying in prison in 2013. Samuel Kunz, an SS guard at the Belzec extermination camp, simply avoided attention and lived as a civil servant in Germany after the war, until he died in 2010 right after he was finally charged.
After the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, the notion of Agartha, which had briefly flourished in the esoteric fringes of Aryan mysticism through figures like Himmler and institutions such as the SS Ahnenerbe, seemingly vanished from public discourse. The disappearance was, however, largely superficial. Remarkably, as noted above, a disproportionate number of SS officers, compared to standard Wehrmacht personnel, successfully evaded justice, fleeing Europe and establishing new, often hidden lives. Figures such as Alois Brunner in Syria, Josef Mengele in South America, Otto Skorzeny in Spain, and others escaped the fate that befell most Nazi leadership. These individuals, deeply steeped in the occult beliefs nurtured within SS circles, quietly perpetuated those ideologies in exile.
Their survival and continued freedom likely provided a few motivational concepts to the remnant Nazis: “We have escaped by the grace of Aryan power alone and we must survive and continue the revival of our civilization.” Indeed, "microscale" pursuit of Agartha and related esoteric beliefs continued throughout the world even after the end of the War: Neonazi political groups began to appear in disgruntled groups within Western Germany, within the anti-communist movement in the United States and United Kingdom, and in the relative privacy (with ex-SS officers involved) throughout South America (Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Paraguay). Those who saw themselves as the inheritors of the Aryan spirit no longer had the resources or institutional backing of the Schutzstaffel or Himmler’s elaborate funding mechanisms, yet their occult mythologies persisted underground, passed through small circles, personal writings, and clandestine networks. The scattered SS exiles continued searching, in a diminished but tireless hunt, for the mythic spiritual perfection represented by Agartha. These survivors, these Nazi occultists and their extraordinarily tiny but fanatic networks of followers, are those who have assisted heavily to the continuing Western cultural relevance of Agartha.
Thus, Agartha had completed its full narrative cycle, from a perfect fantasy dreamed of by an obscure French mysticist, reinterpreted into a grandiose, racially-focused, state-sponsored obsession by Nazi Germany, before collapsing back into a relatively obscure but forever-enduring myth. In the work of Karl Spiesberger and the Landig Group throughout the 1950s, we see Nazi occultists reviving the concept of an Agartha, the chase for Aryan runic power and lost civilizations that could bring their race back from their humiliation. In this quiet influence, these esoteric ideas survived between the frames of post-1945 history, eventually permeating themselves into cultural and spiritual subcultures or countercultures. This continual, smaller-scale pursuit re-seeded the myth in contemporary consciousness, evidenced by its periodic resurfacing in pop culture, spiritual circles, internet memes.
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The courts in my hometown still use metal-halide bulbs for lighting. The warm-up time for this type of lighting to reach full brightness is significantly longer than the newer, near-instantaneous LED lighting used in most of America.
The evening buzz of this form of lighting, so often one of the most comforting and nostalgic sounds I can think of, are the result of imperfections and faults. Metal-halide lighting requires a ballast: a device which limits electric currents and provides a consistent bridge for the arc of energy into the lamp. The ballast is the regulator of my happier, athletic, and competitive, younger memories. The familiar buzzing of the light is the ballast malfunctioning, degrading and failing over time. It is failing to do its only purpose. The buzz I’ve known as perfection is a myth, a problem, an issue. I will not hear the buzz, at some future point in the next decade, when the last of these lamps across public courts in America have been entirely replaced, when the ballast fully disintegrates in function.
My friend, who has a son that is starting pre-k in the autumn, calls our match after 30 minutes in the sunless glow. “Gotta cook dinner.” OK. It was nice to see you. I go back to my mom’s house. “Gotta…” and “perfect…” and “we must continue…” and everything else.
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The ongoing fascination with Agartha in 2025—when humanity has all of recorded history and knowledge at our fingertips through the Internet—suggests a cultural or existential desire that material or rational progress alone cannot fully satisfy. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's prophecy—that the gates to Agartha will only open when humanity matures beyond materialism—resonates, consciously or otherwise, with current frustrations around relentless productivity, the exhaustion of hustle culture, the commodification of self-care. The meme humorously masks a serious question:
Is there a place (or state of being) in which humanity can achieve true peace beyond this endless cycle of striving, yearning, and retreating?
Thus, Agartha survives not despite, but because of its historically dark associations—it has evolved beyond its past usage, transcending into one of the many symbols of our collective desire for a world more meaningful, less bound by modern systems that only seem to serve to disappoint and exhaust us. Symbolic places or ‘events’ like a Singularity, living within a simulation, Mars, the Metaverse, Shambhala, one’s youth, so on and on and on—all serve a similar existential purpose as Agartha. It endures because the desire for spiritual liberation and existential fulfillment, ironically, remains as potent today as perhaps it was in 1918, when Eckhart first met Hitler, seeing an answer from Paradise foretold in ancient runes in the face of a friend. Agartha transcended historical context, as all our most desperate hopes tend to do.
The silly meme asking about snapbacks and hair in Agartha, which led me down this long essay, expresses a fundamental concern for all of us and highlights a human truth. Humans will always pursue visions of Heaven, not because they are realistically attainable, but because we logically know they are impossible to find in our mortal lives. Mythologies of places like Agartha persist because they reflect an essential aspect of our inherent condition, not only due to ironic humor or the yelling of fanatically passionate remnants of a long-defeated regime. In seeking Agartha, or Heaven, or any yearned-for utopia, we are all able to confront the enduring, bittersweet paradox of our own imperfect lives: this ceaseless quest for impossibles is what drives meaning, purpose, and, probably, profound beauty alongside the closest we can come to knowing some form of divine happiness.
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Back at my mother’s house, I look at myself in the bathroom mirror. I am not very tall. I have enlarged pores on my nose, the result of anxious picking alongside imperfect or nonexistent facial care. I have a pair of thick-framed black glasses sitting on my face, a relic of an ancient time. My legs are trembling from a relatively light amount of friendly tennis. There is a rash on the back of both of my arms, from the elbow to the shoulder, which I’ve been told is called keratosis pilaris: a benign skin condition that is from overproduction of keratin, clogging the pores which hair follicles would normally arise from, creating small bumps. The shorts I am wearing, white and somewhat-stained Nike, are the same pair from over a decade ago, when I played tennis in high school. My hair is black but I have a single silver hair where my natural part begins. My eyes have dark lines beneath them, from some type of habitual or lifestyle mistake (or combination thereof) I’ve made chronically over my life. I need to cut my fingernails. It’s quiet.
I get on my laptop to finish my thought on Agartha:
In summary, the answer to the original question displayed on the meme is “No.”
Agartha is clearly anti-materialist, in almost all interpretations of the myth.
There would be no snapbacks, as there would be no need for a non-spiritual and non-intellectual, consumerist product—the snapback would serve no purpose and not exist within the realm.
In Agartha, one wouldn’t worry themselves about imperfections or want, at all.
Jesus is Victory is an accountant from Kentucky. He has a mother, father, and brother. He currently resides in Kentucky
