In other rituals the details are equally nasty: the menstrual blood of a prostitute dripped over a victim figurine; a demon cake mixed in the skull of a child from an incestuous relationship, the dough made from the brains and gall of said child; a lamp lit with a wick of human hair and fat from a person who committed murder.
All these rituals are about stunning the intellect with negative or repulsive emotional force to create a morbid belief. And such beliefs may well communicate themselves. It is the stuff of horror films, designed to scare everyone involved and raise the emotional temperature so that mad belief is possible.
Years of recording such material on his early portable Grundig reel-to-reel (an expensive item in the 1950s) must have left its mark. Deep in the subconscious brain must have been a veritable charnel house of detailed information about curses. The very act of transcribing in great detail this charged information from people who actually believed it themselves must have had some kind of effect. After all, repetition creates its own reality. Take the bizarre phenomenon of Stockholm syndrome, where prisoners come to identify with their captors (when a guard is your sole source of food and attention, the natural reaction is to try and make the guard like you – and in time you end up liking the guard). Another example from the well-documented history of brainwashing occurred in communist China, when prisoners were forced to write out false autobiographies again and again. If the prisoner was able at first to be cynical, the constant rewriting eventually got to them until they ended up believing what they had copied out so many times. Did transcribing and checking and writing up page after page of secret curses and evil ritual take its toll on the keen academic mind of Nebesky? Did he believe he had been cursed?
I think at some level he knew he had given away too much. And his wife knew that too. Perhaps all that ritual fasting and meditating before using an evil curse had a real purpose – it created a stronger belief in immunity than that of the attacking evil. But a scientific scholar, not believing in the need for protection, would be vulnerable. René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz was a truly dedicated researcher – his investigations cost him his life. He wrote in Oracles and Demons of Tibet: ‘I have often been asked by Tibetans the question what I thought of their mediums, and whether I had the impression that really some supernatural forces manifested themselves in the course of these ceremonies.’ He never tells us the answer, as if this would violate his ‘objectivity’.
Scholar Zeff Bjerken found that in the Tibetan Buddhist community there was a widespread belief that René Nebesky paid with his life for revealing secrets:
[Nebesky’s] untimely death . . . was thought to have been brought about by Tibet’s protective deities, who were avenging his efforts to reveal their secrets and magic power. At the library of Tibetan works and archives in Dharamsala, when I tried to check out Nebesky’s text I discovered it was not on the shelf with the other books but kept separate under lock and key. Only after offering the Tibetan librarian my American passport as collateral was I permitted access to the work, although not before being warned of its dangerous content.
Killed by demons? Maybe we should all tread carefully. As physicist Niels Bohr remarked when someone exclaimed over the horseshoe hanging over his door: ‘I understand it works whether you believe in it or not.’
PART 2
Pundits
1
Esoteric Invasions
If one man rides a horse, another will ride even a goat to imitate him.
Balti proverb
The Naga serpent demons may have ruled the ancient world but something new was coming to upend their world for ever. Western Europeans had been trading with the Indian subcontinent for many centuries. They knew little about its wilder and more remote extremes. As the British Empire expanded in size and ambition, it sought knowledge as well as overt power. The name for a Brahmin who was religiously learned was pundit. The British invaders decided to become a slightly different kind of pundit.
The Sanskrit term pandita means an owner of knowledge. In the traditional world, this is rather different from merely having access to knowledge, being burdened by book learning like a well-loaded mule. To own knowledge requires the fusion of experience with data from which we derive its significance in our lives and in those of others. What better way to own knowledge than to travel in its acquisition? The notion of the travelling apprentice, the Wanderjahre still required of German craftsmen, merges with the pilgrimage as the best way to own knowledge.
The British-inspired Industrial Revolution severed the connection between travel and wisely acquired knowledge. The British traditional craftsman became a poor second to the engineer and lathe operator, and the idea of owning knowledge in the old sense began to disappear from the Anglo-Saxon world. At the same time, in the way such things operate, the pundit arose in British India as a travelling spy who brought back secret knowledge of the hidden lands of the Himalaya. We see here an almost complete exoteric version of the esoteric impulse of those who conquered India.
This is not to say that Alexander the Great, who entered the Himalayas with his armies in 326 BC, was conscious of any mysterious reason to join with the East. It would not have been mysterious but it would have been, by today’s standards, esoteric. He had been told by the oracle at Siwa that he would ‘rule the world’. One of the oddities of modern history is that, though it tries hard to empathise with people from the past, it cannot do so too enthusiastically without impugning its own high standards of reason and rationality, etc. Of course, many historians look at Alexander as some kind of Greek nutter with megalomania, but more fruitful results are available if you look at him and suspend some disbelief.
Alexander, like the Semitic prophets, unites East and West – but his influence, unlike theirs, rests on the concrete (or stone) remains he has left behind in the Himalayan regions. His journey over the Khyber Pass to conquer what is now Pakistan is so audacious it is almost hard to believe – and yet we have the evidence in Greek coins and Doric columns in Afghanistan and Greek influence on Buddhist art. When Napoleon tried to emulate Alexander, he failed at the first hurdle – he couldn’t get out of Egypt, which was also Alexander’s first stop on his world-conquering mission. Hitler never managed to get more than a foothold in Egypt. Interestingly, all three conquered Siwa, home of the oracle, but only Alexander took the trouble to visit.
Though Alexander entered into India through the Khyber Pass and made it to the Beas River in 326 BC, his main stay in the Himalayas probably never extended much further than what is now the Swat valley. Sikandrabad is almost certainly inspired by Alexander’s name – Iskander in much of the Orient; Skardu in Pakistan also suggests some connection to the youthful conqueror, soon to be dead.
The historical fact of Alexander is exhilarating to the historian and it is that exhilaration one feels in the grandiose plans of Napoleon. But some people have poor imaginations. Alexander was perhaps one. In a way, the world as we see it is the construction of people who have to make real what others manage to imagine or dream. The world as we see it is a testament to powers of imagination. . .
These men who would conquer entire worlds all believe in their own story – the mythos. The mythos is linked inextricably with the idea of destiny, an intuition from the ether, the universal mind. The mythos is a tale, a yarn, a personal sound bite that grows over time. It has within it some kind of growth potential – unlike most instances of self-realisation, which hardly impact us beyond the moment of understanding. Often we glimpse ourselves and then promptly dismiss the idea or forget it. We have to be smacked in the face for the same shortcomings again and again before we really start that painfully slow change that takes years to eradicate one bad habit . . . But when the mythos takes hold, there can be instant and incredible change on many levels all at once. The mythos is a tale or story or image that spurs you on. It could be an idealised and internalised image of another, an ideal, beckoning you forward – their life (the version you have decided is true, applicable) bec
omes your mythos. Richard Francis Burton was driven to be another Byron; in the end, he outdid him in every way except in achieving applause for his poetry. But the mythos served to kick him majestically up the backside to skitter through the century on journeys far and wide while writing over forty books.
Those who subscribe to such things contend that, for the mythos to work, it must connect in some way with the deeper reality of things. This might be called the destiny aspect. Which is not to say that it is inevitable, merely that a fast track has been found – legitimate or not. One may exploit a deeper understanding of the world for wrong-headed or hate-filled purposes, which is one reason that much knowledge of a vaguely esoteric kind was well guarded. It is for good reason that many mystics are noted for their antipathy to publicising their telepathic ability – we have only to look at the Soviet and American programmes in remote viewing to see what governments will do with any esoteric information that happens to come their way.
Napoleon would later try to follow Alexander to India, as the British and Portuguese had earlier. On the surface, they sought trade goods; but the esotericist contends they sought completion with the East – the imaginary journey that would complement their Western sword power, represented as the cross, the plus sign. The Eastern sign is the zero; one beloved activity of Buddhist calligraphers is painting endless zeros. The Indians used an empty space to mean zero; Arab mathematicians – principally Ibn Musa al-Khwarijmi, who synthesised Hindu and early Greek maths – were the first to use a little circle called sifr, meaning empty, from which we get zero.
The zero is also the ouroboulos – the snake eating itself. It is yin to the sword or cross’s yang. When tempered by the sword, or the staff, which morphs into the many variations of the cross, we get the dynamic cross in modified form: the Buddhist swastika and the yin-yang symbol. It is no accident that the symbol for feminine is a circle surmounting a cross, showing quite well the difference in emphasis between the sexes – the male symbol being another form of the cross, the arrow, but this time attempting to maintain, almost, dominance over the yin creativity of the circle beneath it.
Mere symbols represent the hidden forces that required Alexander to cross the mountains into India. His destiny should have been to collect and imbibe the wisdom of the Indians and cease his conquering. But what little yin energy he had left, he squandered. There was no further progress possible for his type of extreme yang adventure – so he died. Yet his mission was completed in a way by the return of Buddhists along the trade routes set up through the kingdoms he had unified.
Genghis Khan, that other extreme swordsman or archer-warrior, was also defeated by the Himalayas. He took the northern route through the top of Afghanistan, sacking the mystical centre of Balkh on his way – his grandson Timur the Lame would finish the job, turning this ancient centre of religion into a desert outpost through destruction of the vast and intricate irrigation system that had been built up over the years. The Mongols filled in the cisterns and maze of underwater posterns and tunnels that irrigated the whole region. These were never rebuilt and Balkh quietly returned to being a desert. It had not always been one: we know that four thousand years ago some of the great deserts of the world were still fertile; gradually, over the next thousand years they dried up. Balkh was thought to be such an ancient and important centre that desertification was ingeniously resisted for thousands of years; it was continually inhabited while the complex system of irrigation made life possible. But once that was destroyed, the city was lost.
With a long-standing reputation as a place for nurturing mystics of all religions, it is no surprise that Rumi – one of the world’s greatest poets, and a Sufi mystic too – was also born in Balkh. With admirable foresight, he was able to escape from Balkh just before it was fully destroyed.
In more recent times, Alexandra David-Néel was among those to associate Balkh with Shambhala – Sham-i-Bala, meaning elevated candle – a classical meditation object. J. G. Bennett claimed that the name came from shams-i-Balkh, a Bactrian sun temple. We know that Rumi, its most illustrious sun/son, left, taking with him the Himalayan legacy of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Islam. Not that the Sufism he developed was in any way a compote or assemblage of mismatched religious parts; rather, the very streets he walked as a child resonated with the mystical teaching of centuries.
It is a tenet of much traditional thinking (that is, the thoughts of most people of the world who have not been cornered by too much errant or arrant schooling) that certain spots in the world are propitious at certain times. These become pilgrimage spots or centres of specialisation. Balkh was undoubtedly such a spot.
The notion of the ‘power spot’ would become mythologised or romanticised in the notion of the ‘power houses’ of the Himalayas – mysterious hidden monasteries in which the monks could direct their mental force all over the world in order to intervene for good or ill. The mythical kingdom Shambhala – Shangri-la – is the power spot of power spots, deeply hidden in a valley of the Himalayas.
The dragon's back ridge: another power spot
2
Madame Blavatsky Did Not Go to Shigatse
The man without ability shouts loudest in order to hide.
Tibetan proverb
Which brings us to the modern seekers of Shambhala: the theosophists. Theosophy was the invention of Madame Blavatsky, the first of the magus matriarchs, those women travellers who accomplish journeys of both body and imagination and who later get accused of telling lies . . . Madame Blavatsky wrote a great deal and was highly influential, yet her influence remains slightly under the radar because she made things up.
Born in the Ukraine in 1831, Helena Petrovna von Hahn was the daughter of a highly esteemed novelist. She inherited a novelist’s skill for world-building. We see what would later be combined in the person of L. Ron Hubbard, the sci-fi novelist who created a religion – the integral connection between fantasy, creativity and inner life. Blavatsky’s sister wrote:
Fancy, or that which we all regarded in these days as fancy, was developed in the most extraordinary way, and from her earliest childhood, in my sister Helena. For hours at times she used to narrate to us younger children, and even to her seniors in years, the most incredible stories with the cool assurance and conviction of an eyewitness and one who knew what she was talking about. When a child, daring and fearless in everything else, she got often scared into fits through her own hallucinations. She felt certain of being persecuted by what she called ‘the terrible glaring eyes’ invisible to everyone else and often attributed by her to the most inoffensive inanimate objects; an idea that appeared quite ridiculous to the bystanders. As to herself, she would shut her eyes tight during such visions, and run away to hide from the ghostly glances thrown on her by pieces of furniture or articles of dress, screaming desperately, and frightening the whole household. At other times she would be seized with fits of laughter, explaining them by the amusing pranks of her invisible companions.
At seventeen she married the elderly Nikifor Blavatsky, but after two months fled with her grandmother and travelled in Greece, Turkey, Egypt and France. In London she met her first Hindu holy man. This was an exotic enough source for her to invent trips to India and Tibet.
She claimed to have crossed into Tibet in 1856, at a time when pundits rather better prepared than her would have probably been stopped. She went with a Tartar shaman and crossed over a pass from Kashmir to Shigatse, where she learned various secrets from the monks. Here she learned of the ‘masters’ who operate from ‘powerhouse’ monasteries and in a hidden way control the fortunes of the planet. Just as electricity comes from a powerhouse and enlightens the world, Blavatsky’s notions appeal as some kind of mystical parallel. In order to reassert the importance of the esoteric it must be restated in modern terms – perhaps it is no accident that theosophy arises at the same time as commercially available electricity.
For those who would ignore the esoteric it is worth noting that both Gandhi and Nehru
were seriously influenced by Blavatskian teachings, although, in later life, they diverted attention away from theosophical ideas. Gandhi derived his mythos from many sources, but theosophy gave him his first glimpse of the way to project Eastern ideas so that Westerners would be impressed rather than scornful. In a strange circle, Nehru would later have a huge effect in allowing the Chinese a free hand in Tibet, making it a place where Blavatskian ‘powerhouses’ would be outlawed and destroyed.
There is no corroborated material to suggest that Blavatsky visited India, the Himalayas or Tibet in her early life. Almost certainly she made up her early travels as even historians fairly soft on esotericism suggest there are problems with the chronology.
Yet the very fact that eventually she did go to India and the Himalayas, fact following fiction, is almost as remarkable as having made that imaginary journey in the first place. She became a guru – and then did the travelling that a guru is supposed to do . . .
Twenty-three years after her first supposed trip, when she finally arrived in Bombay in 1879 with Henry Steel Olcott, the newspaper writer who publicised the newly invented theosophy, it must have been a curious experience – all so new and yet all so familiar . . . As a child, I once told my friends I had visited the Blue John Caves in Derbyshire. When I had to do it for real in their company, no one reminded me that the key element of the journey – an exciting boat trip through a flooded tunnel – had been missing in my original narrative. I had actually made reality MORE boring than it really was in order to be believed. Madame Blavatsky certainly never made this rookie error in fabulation. I suspect she was less interested in being believed in the mundane sense and more concerned with raising the emotional pitch through narrative excess in order to overwhelm the reader’s habitual and ossified defences against potential enlightenment.
White Mountain Page 11