From the mountains of the Altai A legend proceeds that speaks of two mysterious concepts:brotherhood of wise beings and that inhabits a hidden kingdom. No, I am not going to talk about Shambala or Agharta or the City of the Caesars, nor about Avalon, Paititi or the Seven Cities of Cíbola.
Among the innumerable folktales, one can find tales of lost tribes or subterranean inhabitants whose technical ability and longevity would be superior to that of surface beings. The same leitmotiv is given in the folklore of Tibet, Mongolia, China, Kashmir, Persia, Altai, Siberia, the Urals, Brazil, Amazon, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Germany, France and, of course, Turkey and Spain.
Altai Mountains
One of those kingdoms is that of Belovodié , a word that means «White Waters «, located under the Altai Mountains (which today occupy the territories of Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan). Before the 17th century no one had heard of it, but from this time the Russians began to tell stories about a wonderful underground place, with all the delights that characterize an Eden, including gastronomic and climatological ones. All a Sangri-la whose distant horizons were more than lost. We are talking about a physical kingdom built by people who fled Anatolia after the capture of Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks. For some researchers, their previous habitation had been the underground cities of Cappadocia that they left deserted and "sealed" after their departure, although they were not the ones who built them.
Its members were seen on few and sporadic occasions and always to transmit some message or prophecy related to the future of humanity. In the year 1923, an expedition of men set out in search of this enclave on the Kokushi mountains with no results, as expected, otherwise what a shoddy hidden kingdom it was going to be. Of course, the clues indicated and pointed out paths that did not lead anywhere or were contradictory. The desperate result was that Belovodié it had moved or literally disappeared. They were never heard from again. According to the data of this expedition, the place was located in Tibet, although initially, when news of it was first heard, it must have been closer to Russia. The writer Geoffrey Ashe, in his work The Mysteries of Ancient Wisdom (1977), believes that Belovodié “is the Russian name of a place of transcendent mystery known to the Mongols and Tibetans as Shambhala ”. It could be, but it's going to be no.
Precisely in the Altai Mountains, in the magnificent high valley of Uimon, a venerable Old Believer (starover ), a branch of Russian Orthodox Christianity, told Russian anthropologist Nikolai Roerich one day in 1928 about the Chud (which would be the supposed name of the mysterious inhabitants of Belovodié), assuring him that it was no fantasy and led him to the entrance of his underground kingdom:
We approach a low rocky hill. With pride he taught me:
-Here we are. Here is the entrance to the great underground kingdom. When the Chud entered the underground passage, they closed the entrance with stones. We now stand by this sacred entrance.
We were in front of a huge tomb surrounded by large stones, so typical of the period of the great migrations. We saw these tombs, with the beautiful remains of Gothic relics, in the steppes of southern Russia, at the foothills of the northern Caucasus. Studying this hill, I remembered that during our crossing of the Karakorum pass, my guide, who came from Ladak, had asked me:
– Do you know why there is such a peculiar plateau here? Do you know that in the underground caves here there are many hidden treasures and that a wonderful tribe lives in them that hates the sins of the earth?
And again, as we approached Khotan, the hooves of our horses sounded hollow, as if we were riding over caves or voids. The people in our caravan drew our attention to it, saying:
– Do you hear what underground passages we are crossing? Through these passages, those who know them well can reach distant lands...
I asked them if we could also see these people. And they replied:
– Yes, if your thoughts are just as elevated and are in contact with this sacred people, because on earth there are only sinners and pure and courageous people move on to something more beautiful.
The search for Belovodié it is similar to others carried out by the human being on his pilgrimage to find his Lost Paradise, his Utopia, his roots and his identity. The Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink, a connoisseur of occult subjects, recounted in one of his works that:«according to tradition, three men descended one day into the Kingdom of Darkness. One went mad and the other blind; only the third, Rabbi Ben Akiba, returned home safe and sound and declared that he had found himself there. «.
Whoever has ears to hear…
Collaboration with Jesús Callejo