The Alien Archive · Inner Earth Beings · Overviews

Inner Earth Beings

Inner Earth Beings is the third section of The Alien Archive (page 21). It gathers two civilizations said to live beneath the planet's surface: the Agarthans of the inner-Earth realm of Agartha, and the Telosians of Telos, a city said to lie under Mount Shasta in California. Unlike most of the Archive's beings, these are not visitors from the stars. They are pictured as fellow inhabitants of Earth, older and quieter than surface humanity, who keep wisdom safe in hidden places. That theme, a hidden realm and a knowledge kept by a chosen lineage until the right time, is also one of the oldest themes in Gnostic literature.

From the Alien Archive

The Archive introduces the section in these words:

These are non-surface terrestrial beings described in esoteric traditions as inhabiting subterranean environments beneath Earth's surface, often characterized by advanced knowledge, isolation from surface populations, and long-standing hidden development. They are frequently portrayed as spiritually evolved civilizations preserving ancient wisdom, energetic sciences, and harmonious societal systems away from the instability of surface humanity.

As with every section of the Archive, the entries are offered in the spirit of Proceed with Playfulness: an exercise in imagination that readers may take as fact or as fiction.

Beings in this section

  • Agarthans (p. 22): radiant, peaceful humanoids of Agartha, a vast inner-Earth network linked to Atlantis and Lemuria; guardians of ancient knowledge and quiet stabilizers of Earth's energetic grid.
  • Telosians (p. 23): descendants of the Lemurians, said to live in the city of Telos beneath Mount Shasta as part of the Agartha network; stewards of Lemurian healing knowledge and compassion-based living.

Gnostic perspective

The Gnostic writers of the second to fourth centuries did not imagine cities inside the Earth, and nothing in their texts describes an inner-Earth people. But two of their favorite images, the underworld and the hidden book, run close to the themes of this section, and in one case the modern inner-Earth lore borrowed an ancient Gnostic word directly.

The underworld: Amente, chaos and the outer darkness

Gnostic maps of the cosmos go down as well as up. The Pistis Sophia, a Coptic work preserved in the Askew Codex, names several regions below the visible world where souls are judged and purified: Amente, the chaos, the "way of the midst", and, lowest of all, the outer darkness. In the Fourth Book, Mary Magdalene asks Jesus what the outer darkness is like, and he answers: "The outer darkness is a great dragon, whose tail is in his mouth, outside the whole world and surrounding the whole world." Inside it are "twelve mighty chastisement-dungeons," each with a ruler whose face is different, and every door is watched by "an angel of the height."[1] The scholar Emmanouela Grypeou calls the Pistis Sophia "deeply indebted to its Egyptian mythological context," and cites David Frankfurter's reading of it as a teaching meant to help souls avoid "the judgements of Amente."[2] Amente is the Coptic form of the Egyptian amenti ("the West"), the place where the sun sets and where the entrance to the underworld was thought to be.[3]

This is a very different underworld from the Archive's. The Gnostic underworld is a place of darkness and correction ruled by beast-faced powers, not a refuge of wise and peaceful people. Yet the Gnostic texts also say that light goes down into the dark to find what belongs to it. In the Trimorphic Protennoia the divine Mother says, "I descended to the midst of the underworld, and I shone down upon the darkness," and she speaks of teaching "those who dwell in the hidden treasuries."[4] The Apocryphon of John has the same shape: Pronoia, the divine Forethought, enters "the midst of the darkness and the inside of Hades" three times in order to wake those who sleep.[5] Read side by side with the Archive, the image is of a light that is hidden below, not lost.

A modern bridge between the two worlds also exists. The American occultist Maurice Doreal, who claimed that in 1931 two Atlanteans took him to a cave beneath Mount Shasta, and who taught about "underground races," published The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean in the 1940s or early 1950s. One of its tablets is titled "The Halls of Amenti." So the Egyptian word used by the Pistis Sophia for the underworld re-entered inner-Earth lore in the twentieth century.[6][7] Scholars regard Doreal's Tablets as a modern composition with no connection to the ancient Hermetic Emerald Tablet.[7]

Hidden knowledge kept by a lineage

The Archive's inner-Earth beings are "guardians of ancient knowledge" and "custodians of lost wisdom." The Sethian Gnostic texts tell a similar story about the seed of Seth, a spiritual lineage that keeps a secret teaching through the ages. The Apocalypse of Adam ends: "This is the hidden knowledge of Adam, which he gave to Seth." It says the words kept by this generation "were not committed to the book, nor were they written," but will be brought by angelic beings, "for they will be on a high mountain, upon a rock of truth."[8] The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit (also called the Gospel of the Egyptians) says that the great Seth wrote his book and placed it "in high mountains on which the sun has not risen," in a mountain called Charaxio, so that "at the end of the times and the eras" it might come forth and reveal "this incorruptible, holy race."[9]

The pattern is close to the Archive's: wisdom withdrawn from an unstable world, sealed away in a mountain or under the surface, guarded by an "immovable race," and released at a moment of transition. The ancient texts mean a spiritual lineage and a sacred book, not a physical people underground. See Sethianism and Gnosis.

Background and history

The modern inner-Earth tradition was pieced together in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from science, fiction and occultism:

  • Hollow Earth. In 1692 the astronomer Edmond Halley suggested that the Earth might be a hollow shell with inner shells inside it. John Cleves Symmes Jr. added polar openings in 1818, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton's anonymous 1871 novel Vril: The Power of the Coming Race imagined an advanced civilization underground. Gravity and seismic measurements long ago showed that the Earth is not hollow.[10]
  • Agartha. The name first appears in Louis Jacolliot's 1873 Les fils de Dieu. Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's Mission de l'Inde en Europe (1886) turned it into an underground realm, and Ferdynand Ossendowski's Beasts, Men and Gods (1922) made it famous.[11]
  • Lemuria and Mount Shasta. "Lemuria" began as an 1864 scientific hypothesis about lemur fossils and became, in Helena Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine (1888), the homeland of an early "root race."[12] Frederick Spencer Oliver's A Dweller on Two Planets (published 1905) placed a hidden temple inside Mount Shasta, and later writers built the Telos story on that foundation.[13]

See Agarthans and Telosians for the full history of each.

Reflection

  • The Archive's inner-Earth beings chose to step back from "the instability of surface humanity." Is there a part of your own life you keep "underground" to protect it?
  • The Gnostic texts imagine wisdom sealed in a mountain until the right time. What knowledge do you think the world is only now ready to hear?
  • Why do you think "below" is so often pictured as dark and dangerous, and what changes when you picture it as a place of shelter?

See also

References

  1. ↑ Pistis Sophia, Fourth Book, Chapter 126, trans. G. R. S. Mead (1921) — The Gnostic Society Library, gnosis.org. Accessed 2026-09-19.
  2. ↑ Emmanouela Grypeou, "Pistis Sophia and Demons of the Afterlife" (conference paper) — SBL Central. Accessed 2026-09-19.
  3. ↑ Imentet — Wikipedia. Accessed 2026-09-19.
  4. ↑ Trimorphic Protennoia, trans. John D. Turner — The Gnostic Society Library, gnosis.org. Accessed 2026-09-19.
  5. ↑ The Apocryphon of John (long version), trans. Michael Waldstein and Frederik Wisse — The Gnostic Society Library, gnosis.org. Accessed 2026-09-19.
  6. ↑ Maurice Doreal — Wikipedia. Accessed 2026-09-19.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean — Wikipedia. Accessed 2026-09-19.
  8. ↑ The Apocalypse of Adam, trans. George W. MacRae — The Gnostic Society Library, gnosis.org. Accessed 2026-09-19.
  9. ↑ The Gospel of the Egyptians, trans. Alexander Böhlig and Frederik Wisse — The Gnostic Society Library, gnosis.org. Accessed 2026-09-19.
  10. ↑ Hollow Earth — Wikipedia. Accessed 2026-09-19.
  11. ↑ Agartha — Wikipedia. Accessed 2026-09-19.
  12. ↑ Lemuria — Wikipedia. Accessed 2026-09-19.
  13. ↑ A Dweller on Two Planets — Wikipedia. Accessed 2026-09-19.

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