White Mountain

by Robert Twigger

  A gypsum-based plaster was worked up into a paste. Water and disinfectant were added and then the result plastered all over the face of the subject. Two straws were inserted into the nostrils to aid breathing, though one can imagine the claustrophobic feeling of depending for your air through such a fragile device. The mouth needed to remain firmly shut to take a good impression of the jaw, and when the plaster started to set it kept it shut. After the mask had set it was removed. Synthetic rubber solution was poured into the ‘negative’ to make a latex copy of the original face. This Beger could study endlessly back in Berlin.

  Beger could find no straws that worked that day. He assured Passang he would wipe away any accumulated plaster from his nostrils. As he shut each eyelid to start plastering the eyes, he noticed that Passang was tense and fearful. He was also having difficulty breathing as small amounts of plaster had been inhaled up his nose.

  Once his entire face was covered, Beger brought out his stopwatch. Now it was time to wait. He smoked a cigarette. When he turned back he saw with horror that Passang was jerking uncontrollably and the mask had begun to split. Beger’s initial annoyance was fast forgotten when he realised Passang was having an epileptic fit. Breathing the wet clay into his foaming mouth, Passang fell to the floor writhing in discomfort. The wet clay further impaired his breathing. He was turning blue. Beger thrust his hands into Passang’s mouth and scooped out the clay. Passang at last began to breathe normally and his fit passed. In his own mind, he had been seized by the mountain god Kanchenjunga and been shaken violently as a warning about helping unbelievers. It was not an auspicious start.

  When Schäfer, who was out hunting at the time, returned, he was furious. If Hugh Richardson learned of this, they’d be thrown out. They debated about finding a doctor to check if Passang was all right. But a doctor might talk. In the end, Beger pacified the Sherpa with the gift of his best white shirt. The other porters were threatened with instant dismissal without pay if they blabbed. Eventually, the expedition moved on to remoter places and masks were traded for quinine and other medical supplies. Beger grew adept at calming his subjects, laughing and joking with them as he measured their heads, before he slapped on the plaster.

  It was training that would stand him in good stead when he continued his research in the 1940s, at first, at Himmler’s request, into the links between prehistoric ‘Venus’ figurines, Hottentots and Jews. In 1942, following the lead of Stalin in deporting 600,000 Volga Germans, the Nazis realised the possibilities of massive deportations. The Jews arriving in the swampy land around Lublin in Poland to be forcibly rehoused in the new camps could be used for research.

  Nazis spread their poison even in the remote mountains

  Beger went to his death denying he ever knew where his ‘research materials’ came from. A report that he claimed he did not write, but most likely did, stated:

  There exist extensive collections of skulls of almost all races and peoples. Of the Jewish race, however, only so very few specimens of skulls are at the disposal of science that a study of them does not permit precise conclusions. The war in the east now presents us with the opportunity to remedy this shortage. By procuring the skulls of the Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars, who personify a repulsive yet characteristic sub-humanity, we have the opportunity of obtaining tangible scientific evidence . . .

  Though Beger managed to evade punishment for what he did during the war, the evidence is clear that he had a major part in something as gruesome as anything committed by the Germans during the Second World War.

  There are records of Beger travelling down to Auschwitz where he was entertained by leading SS officers and met the commandant Rudolf Hoess, who had agreed to expedite his mission to the camp. Beger wandered around looking for Asian types. Apparently he was disappointed to find only seven. He made up his numbers mainly with Jews. In all, 137 were selected. These he carefully measured, with some help from fellow prisoners (who he commended by name later). Beger would later claim that he had no knowledge of the ultimate fate of his subjects. He implied, like the people he measured in Sikkim and Tibet, that they would be free to go after he had applied the callipers and the plaster. Of course he did know what would be part two of the experiment. Beger spent eight days in Auschwitz in June 1943. He left early because of the danger of infectious diseases; his colleagues stayed on. Was he sickened by what he had seen and heard? If he was, it didn’t stop him carrying on with his part in the ‘experiment’.

  Eighty people were shipped to Natzweiler camp in the Alsace. Records show that their fate was known from the beginning, as accommodation was requested for ‘a short period only’. Here, speaking of the first of the group to arrive, the former prison commander Josef Kramer later admitted during interrogation at Nuremberg, ‘I told these women that they were going into a disinfection room, without letting them know they were going to be asphyxiated.’

  The bodies were injected with preservative and stored in containers filled with ethanol. The purpose was for racial study, primarily to obtain skulls and skeletons to complement the measurement already done by Beger.

  Beger would claim that by the time he knew of the fate of his subjects ‘it was too late’. Unfortunately for him, there is a record of his trip to Natzweiler after the executions had taken place. It is an expenses claim. He also filed a complaint that the expenses were late in coming. In a letter to Schäfer he spoke of one subject he had measured in Auschwitz: ‘his movements and the way he introduced himself were simply ravishing, in a word: from the Asian heartland.’ His concerns – like many of the Nazis – were only aesthetic and worldly. The fates of the last people he measured were marked, just as the first was, by an absence of any real human interest or sympathy.

  Schäfer, paradoxically, got off less lightly than Beger. Though a member of the SS Ahnenerbe, Himmler’s project in researching Aryan origins around the globe, Schäfer was less complicit in any criminal acts. Schäfer was asked to record, with the cameraman they had used in Tibet, horrific altitude experiments in Dachau. Though he did nothing to stop them, he wanted no part of it himself – and said so. This continues to be debated, even after his death in 1992. There are some, despite the lack of evidence, who believe Schäfer was a willing assistant in the murderous regime of the SS.

  The official British intelligence report in 1938 on Schäfer noted:

  Dr Schäfer’s chief trouble is that he is unbalanced mentally . . . an ardent Nazi who is apt to let himself go when he gets on to politics. In addition he has taken no thought to respect local prejudices in the matter of taking life etc. For all these reasons it seems highly desirable to get him back to Germany as soon as possible . . .

  He had planned to take a young Nepali Gurkha back to the Fatherland with him. It is just as well he was dissuaded from doing so.

  10

  The Tibetan State Oracle

  A person who is promiscuous steps on two boats.

  Tibetan proverb

  Tibet may be the only country in the world that has an official oracle (plus a few unofficial ones). It has always been so, and the current government in exile in Dharamsala sees no reason to change. Given the disastrous record of most governments in their attempts to predict the future and act with a semblance of wisdom, I can’t help thinking: oracles? Why not?

  Other methods of predicting the future that were used in the not so distant past in Tibet include doughball scrying, dice divination, rosary counting, bootstrap haruspication, interpretation of strange birds and other incidental phenomena, clairvoyant dreaming, ritual flame examination, observing the flickering patterns of a butter lamp, mirror divining, and – in common with the prehistoric Chinese – using the shoulder blade of a deer as a predictive knuckle bone.

  The official state oracle was established, as was so much that characterises modern Tibet, by the fifth Dalai Lama in the seventeenth century AD. He combined the role of state oracle with that of the highest-ranking lama in the Nechung Monastery residence. Here the lama oracle wou
ld have his own small court and celebrate rituals and chants in a temple of his own, which would be painted black inside. This is not a colour that has the same morbid sense as it does in the West, or, rather, its morbidity is leavened by white shouldering the burden as the colour of death and mourning. So imagine a rather low-ceilinged, somewhat oppressive black-painted temple hung with dry leather masks and the likenesses of demons and terror gods. Dusty weapons – great thick broadswords and long daggers, together with more magical weaponry fashioned from bones – were displayed alongside stuffed birds, snow tigers, elephants’ feet and leopards. A human ribcage, like some macabre birdhouse, dangled from the roof by a leather thong.

  Bowls of incense and drumming on large tambourine-like drums, accompanied by ritual chanting, were enough to send the Nechung Lama into a trance. Once in a trance, he was transformed into a twitching, sweating demon with superhuman strength. He was known to bend iron swords, wear an 80 lb crown as if it weighed little, and could dance and leap much higher into the air than he ever could when unpossessed.

  The deity that enabled this was Pedkar, or Pehar as he was sometimes known. Pehar commands five wrathful gods known as ‘the protective wheel’. In pictures he has three faces of different colours and wears an ornate bamboo hat. He is armed with bow and arrows, sword, cleaver, knobbly club, and rides upon an angry snow lion. His power can, on occasion, be so strong it damages the health of the Nechung Lama. When his power is too strong, therefore, a lesser immortal takes control of the lama’s body: Pehar’s assistant, Dorje Drakden.

  Pehar originates in the ‘devil’s country’ – northern Tibet. In earlier times he was war god of the Hor Mongols, who were themselves described in old texts as ‘red faced, flesh-eating demons’.

  The Nechung Lama was observed on a number of occasions by Heinrich Harrer when he was living in Tibet. The Nechung was nineteen at the time – the late 1940s – and must have been successful as he remained the oracle until 1987, when he died. Harrer writes: ‘Hollow, eerie music greeted us at the gate of the temple. Inside the spectacle was ghastly. From every wall looked down hideous, grimacing faces and the air was filled with stifling fumes of incense.’ Then the young monk oracle was led into the temple to the sound of insistent drumming:

  He wore a round metal mirror on his breast . . . No sound could be heard except the hollow music. He began to concentrate. I watched him closely, never taking my eyes from his face – not the slightest movement of his features escaped me. He looked as if the life were fading out of him. Now he was perfectly motionless, his face a staring mask. Then, suddenly, as if he had been struck by lightning, his body curved upward like a bow. The onlookers gasped. The god was in possession. The medium began to tremble; his whole body shook and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

  Harrer observed the other monks putting a heavy headdress on the oracle. He noticed the sheer physical strain on the young man and thought it might explain why so many oracles died young.

  The trembling became more violent. The medium’s heavily laden head wavered from side to side, and his eyes started from their sockets. His face was swollen and covered in patches of hectic red. Hissing sounds pierced through his closed teeth . . . Now he started beating on his gleaming breastplate with a great thumb ring, making a clatter which drowned the dull rolling of the drums. Then he gyrated on one foot, erect under the weight of the giant head-dress, which just now two men could hardly carry.

  The young monk was held fast by servants and a cabinet minister approached with all kinds of high-level questions. The oracle mumbled answers. Often the question was repeated several times. The oracle’s answers were taken down by the secretary to the oracle, who wrote swiftly and fluently – and had been the secretary to the previous oracle. Harrer writes, ‘I could not prevent myself from suspecting that perhaps the real Oracle was the secretary.’

  Harrer is sceptical but also naïve – he thinks it illogical that an oracle who gives poor advice should be relieved of his post: ‘Did the god speak through the medium or not?’

  He plays the usual game of the indignant materialist who believes he has ‘caught out’ a seer or telepath. Only a moment’s reflection would surely provide a reason for an oracle failing to deliver accurate forecasts – he is human, and of this world, and anything that lives in this world must perforce partake of the corruption of this world, and sometimes this naturally will interfere with the work of mediums and oracles. And if it isn’t broken, why fix it? One of the major problems for any Western researcher in the East is to disentangle fraud and superstition from genuine insight and reliance on methods that we only dimly appreciate in the West. There is no ‘scientific’ way to distinguish between the two – only experience and that rare but necessary combination of an open mind and common sense can tell them apart. Harrer has common sense but he lacks the experience to know whether he is seeing an outright fraud or something that has a function, so he falls back on the old chestnut of suspecting things that are not in ‘his philosophy’.

  He remarks that he could hardly get used to meeting the state oracle when he was acting normally: ‘his face was that of a nice-looking young man, and bore no resemblance to the bloated, red-flecked, grimacing visage of the ecstatic medium’.

  There were several other mediums with varying functions. One could bend long swords into a spiral. Harrer tried to do the same thing himself – and he was strong, fit, athletic – but wrote ‘I could not begin to do it’. As we have seen, humans in a trance state are capable of gaining access to the full power of the human frame, a power we sometimes glimpse in epileptics and those in life-and-death situations. One of the mediums was an old woman, the rest were men. A key medium was the rainmaker, but since the paltry fourteen inches (36 centimetres) of rain came in only one season it wasn’t such a tricky task. Aufschnaiter – Harrer’s fellow German escaper – installed a water-gauge on the river in Lhasa – he claimed it rose on almost the same day every year.

  An example of the seriousness with which the Tibetans regarded the oracle came when the German expedition of 1939 tried to film the Tibetan New Year festival in which the oracle makes an important appearance. As the would-be cinematographers cranked their cameras, the mob suddenly caught sight of them. With a single mind, they raced after them hurling sticks, stones and anything else that came to hand. The Germans were lucky to escape with their lives, fleeing over garden walls and across low rooftops.

  Pehar, who lives through the state oracle, may be dangerous but he is an old friend to successive Dalai Lamas. He was consulted before the current Dalai fled, both in 1950 and in 1959. And in 1950, as the Chinese invaded, it was the state oracle who advised, ‘Make him king’ – there was still a regent controlling power in Tibet at the time.

  As the current fourteenth Dalai Lama writes:

  Mostly those who consider themselves ‘progressive’ have misgivings about my continued use of this ancient method of intelligence gathering. But I do so for the simple reason that as I look back over the many occasions when I have asked questions of the oracle, on each one of them time has proved that his answer was correct.

  On 4 September 1987 a new Nechung Lama was enthroned in Dharamsala. The previous one had died three years earlier. The Dalai Lama had three minor mediums as stand-ins. Divinatory arts, astrology, the interpretation of dreams, the drawing of sanctified lots – all have a place in the Tibetan government method of proceeding. But the Dalai Lama was prepared to wait until the right person came along to fulfil the top position. With the new Nechung’s arrival the Tibetan government in exile and the Dalai Lama all attended an inaugural trance session: ‘We consider these spirits reliable; they have a long history without any controversy in over 1,000 years. However my relationship to Nechung is that of commander to lieutenant.’

  Pehar took possession and made the following prediction: ‘The shine of the wish-fulfilling jewel [the Dalai Lama] will light up in the West.’ It is a prediction that has very largely come true.

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  Blame Nehru

  You go on your shining path and I’ll go on my single-plank bridge.

  Tibetan proverb

  China wanted Tibet. Mere suzerainty was not enough. China wanted full sovereignty. The British had always remained firm: China had a place in Tibet but they should not run the place and they certainly should not annex it to become a mere province of China. Two things happened to change the situation: the Korean War and Nehru’s hatred of the British. True, the Brits, with the usual well-meaning bungling that characterises twentieth-century British and American foreign policy, had, in their honourable treatment of the Tibetans and their military pull-out from Lhasa, ignored a basic tenet of Eastern life, which earlier, wiser and less arrogant English diplomats had observed. This was: speak and act in the cultural language of the nation or people you wish to rule. Do not deal with them on your terms and expect them to reciprocate as you would in their situation. Why should they? Sadly, powerful Western nations became used to getting their own way, childishly demanding instant results and insisting on ‘fairness’, which children always mistake for justice, though it’s a rather different beast since it takes into account foresight – that subtle combination of experience, good character, objectivity, information, and, above all else, courage, that marks the higher form of intelligence. Money and power tend to insulate individuals and nations from the need to acquire courage; they certainly insulate them from the means to acquire experience of the kind that nurtures foresight: experience of not getting one’s own way being rather important.