The Nine Unknown Men: a 1923 novel that became history
A secret society of nine, founded by the emperor Ashoka, guarding knowledge too dangerous for the world. It is one of the best-travelled legends in conspiracy literature — and it can be dated precisely, because somebody wrote it.
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Search for the Nine and you will quickly meet a different nine: the Nine Unknown Men, an ancient Indian society said to have been founded by the emperor Ashoka in the third century BC, each member entrusted with one book of dangerous knowledge. It is a superb story. It is also traceable to a specific author, in a specific magazine, in a specific year.
What is documented
The Nine Unknown was written by Talbot Mundy, a British-born adventure novelist, and serialised in the American pulp magazine Adventure in 1923 before appearing as a book. Mundy wrote a great deal of fiction set in India, drawing on theosophical ideas that were current in his time.
The idea then jumped media. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier included it in Le Matin des magiciens in 1960 — in English, The Morning of the Magicians — a book that did more than any other to seed post-war Europe with occult-conspiratorial material. From there it entered general circulation, and it has been recycled ever since.
What was claimed
The mature version holds that Ashoka, appalled by the carnage of his conquest of Kalinga, founded a society of nine to sequester knowledge that could destroy humanity — subjects usually listed as propaganda, physiology, microbiology, alchemy, communication, gravitation, cosmogony, light and sociology. The nine books are said to be renewed and passed on across generations.
It is worth saying that the emotional core has a real historical anchor. Ashoka’s remorse after Kalinga is genuinely attested, in his own edicts, carved in stone and readable today. The society is not.
What was added later
Almost everything. The specific list of nine disciplines, the continuity into the present, the occasional claim that particular modern figures have been contacted by the group — all of it postdates Mundy, and much of it postdates 1960.
The confusion with Puharich’s Nine is a later accretion still, and mostly an accident of the word "nine". There is no evidentiary link between a 1952 Maine séance and an Indian society that a novelist invented in 1923. The two are joined by a numeral.
What remains unexplained
Nothing about the society, which needs no explanation beyond its author. What is genuinely interesting is the transmission: how a story becomes a fact in sixty years, without anyone lying, simply through the ordinary process of each retelling dropping one qualifier.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
- 01
Did Mundy draw the nine from an existing Indian tradition?
He was steeped in theosophy, which borrowed heavily from Indian sources. Whether any pre-1923 antecedent exists is a real question, and would be the only thing that changes this article.
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Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
The Nine Unknown
Talbot Mundy, serialised in Adventure magazine · 1 Jan 1923 · no public copy located
The Morning of the Magicians (Le Matin des magiciens)
Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier · 1 Jan 1960 · no public copy located
The Edicts of Asoka
N. A. Nikam and Richard McKeon, University of Chicago Press · 1 Jan 1959 · no public copy located
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