The Nine Unknown – An Invisible Library September 15, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, Contemporary , trackback
In Beachcombing’s ergot, ‘invisible libraries’ are books or collections of books that have never existed except in the fantasies of readers. And today he has a cracker. In Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s Morning of the Magicians there appears a description of the Nine Unknown Men of India and their notebooks.
For those who do not know it, Morning of the Magicians is a glorious conspiracy-fuelled history of humanity that sees aliens drooping from the clouds and the marks of ancient and hidden civilisations all around us.
Beachcombing once had a nose bleed while reading Erik von Daniken and would eat celery or sleep with the dead rather than peruse the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail again. Pauwels and Bergier are though intelligent authors and their nonsense is often sublime. The pages don’t exactly fly by, but some certainly remain seared in the memory.
The Nine Unknown Men were, according to our authors, nine wise men who kept, in perpetually updated notebooks, reflections on nine different fields of science that were secretly being used to shape the human race. Their club – Beachcombing likes to think of it as off Delhi centre with a butler trotting around with unfiltered cigarettes – had been around since the third century BC when it was founded by the wise Emperor Asoka.
Pauwels and Bergier make great claims for the Nine Unknown Men, they even had the nine giving a robot to a tenth-century pope! But the nine’s origins are almost certainly to be traced to a novel by Talbot Mundy in 1923 named the Nine Unknown – a good rule of thumb is that when Pauwels and Bergier make a claim for an ‘earlier source’ you shouldn’t believe it until you have the scanned page on the screen in front of you. Mundy was a minor British thriller writer of the 1920s and 1930s and in this novel the Nine are shown fighting nine evil priests of Khali.
And so what about the invisible library of the Nine Unknown? Well, each of the Nine had their own book relating to their speciality that was ‘being constantly rewritten’.
And what were the nine subjects – the essence of all knowledge – that protected the world against the machinations of Khali and her diabolical servants?
The first of these books is said to have been devoted to the tecnique of propaganda and psychological warfare…
The second book was on physiology. It explained, among other things, how it is possible to kill a man by touching him, death being caused by a reversal of the nerve impulse. It is said that Judo is a result of ‘leakages’ from this book.
The third volume was a study on microbiology, and dealt especially with protective colloids.
The fourth was concerned with the transmutation of metals…
The fifth volume contains a study of all means of communication, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial.
The sixth expounds the secret of gravitation.
The seventh contains the most exhaustive cosmogony known to humanity.
The eighth deals with light.
The ninth volume, on sociology, gives the rule for the evolution of societies, and the means of foretelling their decline. [28-29]
Beachcombing closed his eyes and tried very hard. With a few aspirin in his system he could just about have gone along with this. A small elite body protecting humanity from itself: in some ways it is more comforting than the melange of corporations and governments running our lives with questionable competence.
Yes, yes, Beachcombing has become a conspiracist. Indeed, when he read about reversing the nerve impulse and microbiology (what are colloids?) he perhaps, for a nano-second, did believe. In fact, he was feeling great until he got to the last on the list when something like an atom bomb went off in his head. After all, if the Unknown Nine are relying on sociology to save the world then they (and we) will quickly run into trouble…
Beachcombing would love to know if anyone has ever tried to substantiate the bold claims for the Unknown Nine prior to Talbot: drbeachcombing AT yahooDOTcom
30 Dec 2014: Bruce writes in ‘I have a sister who went Wiccan in her early teens. She began to drag all sorts of esoteric and occult books into the house shortly afterwards. The infamous Helena Blavatsky was a favorite of hers. I enjoyed Blavatsky’s books, too. I thought of her as a Russian Baroness Munchausen. Helena talked about ” Nine Hidden Masters” who controlled the world, disseminated knowledge telepathically, and lived the high Himalayas in her books and talks. Or above the Himalayas, at times, she put them on a “higher plane”. She also varied their numbers from time to time. She was traveling around Tibet, Central Asia, and India in the mid-late 19th Century, where she picked up many of the ideas she put forth in her books. It seems to me,Arkon Daurul, aka ,Idris Shah, makes mention of the Nine Men in his book “Secret Societies” circa 1962. Not as early the 1928 mention in your article, and certainly well after Madame Blavatsky. As HB still has wide following amongst New Age types and crank writers, my money is on the Russian Munchausen. Whether she made the story up or heard some local lore, we’ll never know.’ Thanks, Bruce!
