"But over the past year, memes about Agartha-a mystical, underground city in the center of the Earth full of flaxen-haired, blue-eyed people-kept going viral and have become a staple of the youth internet. If you search for Agartha on Instagram, you'll find dozens of videos with view counts in the millions, and many more in the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands."
"Before Christmas, the White House shared a Department of Homeland Security meme that has many of the attributes of the Agartha phenomenon but with a festive theme: Santa in front of a subterranean snowy workshop with Earth's core in the background, overlaid with the text Christmas After Mass Deportations. Jon Lewis, a researcher at George Washington University's Program on Extremism who has written about neo-Nazism, told me he saw the image as a clear reference to online Agartha content."
Heinrich Himmler and Third Reich occultists in the 1930s believed the Aryan race descended from semidivine beings who left the heavens and established a secret civilization on Earth, possibly beneath Central Asia. Himmler funded an SS expedition to Tibet in 1938 seeking such a utopia. Nearly a century later, the myth of Agartha — a mystical underground city of flaxen-haired, blue-eyed people — has resurfaced among teenagers on social media, with Instagram videos reaching millions. Related myths like hyperborea and vril also trend. Before Christmas, a Department of Homeland Security meme shared by the White House used imagery and text that a researcher interpreted as referencing online Agartha content.
Read at The Atlantic
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