Illicit meetings, visceral initiation ceremonies, centuries of hidden knowledge, there’s just something about secret societies that continues to capture the public imagination. There’s no escaping the legacy of the Illuminati (if you start seeing triangles everywhere, seek professional help), but few people know about India’s own covert community, The Nine Unknown Men. With a rich culture and historical legacies dating back centuries, India has always been a treasure trove of knowledge but somehow this secret society has faded out of public view.
According to legend, it was founded 2000 years ago by Emperor Ashoka and consisted of nine brilliant men who he deemed worthy of building his idea of utopia. These men was entrusted with the task of collecting, preserving, and containing all knowledge available in the empire at the time. It was after the bloodbath at Kalinga where around 100,000 men lost their lives that Ashoka moved away from a path of senseless violence and converted to Buddhism, swearing that his rule would from henceforth be one of peace.
The Nine Unknown Men were pivotal in the success of that dream as they were the guardians of scientific, philosophical and political knowledge, and were thought to have unrivalled influence over history. Ashoka was aware of mankind’s tendencies to abuse power and knowledge so the primary goal of the Unknown Men was to protect people from themselves. Each of the nine was given a book and a scientific field to study and their life’s mission was to keep filling the book with new discoveries int their field. If a member were forced to retire for any reason, they would first choose a worthy successor who would continue the mission.
The contents of all the books is still unknown but it’s speculated that the 9 books are from the fields of Propaganda, Physiology, Microbiology, Communication (both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial), Gravity - with details on how to build an anti-gravity spaceship called the Vimana, Cosmology - where you can learn to bend light and break the space-time continuum, Light, Alchemy and sociology which outlines the true nature and evolutionary patterns of human society. The book of Physiology supposedly outlines a technique called the ‘The touch of death’ which enables people to kill with one touch by reversing a nerve impulse, it’s also said that ‘leakages’ of this text are the foundation for the martial art, Judo.
The Nine Unknown Men, though always anonymous supposedly leak information from their texts when the human race is in need and to aid the progress of science. If the legend is to believed, they’re like a sagacious Batman always watching over the species and ready to step in to prevent the complete destruction of mankind. We can’t help but wonder whether the rumours are true, and if so why these Nine ancient guardians have been slacking off recently, we’re definitely a society in need of some saving.
If you enjoyed this article, we suggest you read: