Quest Magazine

Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia

Andrei Znamenski
Wheaton: Quest, 2011, xix + 257 pp., paper, $16.95.

Thanks in large measure to H.P. Blavatsky, James Hilton, author of Lost Horizon, and any number of more recent New Age authors, a prevalent image of Shambhala in the West today is of a legendary kingdom, pure and harmonious, located in an ideal mountain valley somewhere psychogeographically to the north of India, where spiritually advanced people enjoy long, blissful lives, and from whence benevolent god-men periodically emerge to guide the rest of the world’s spiritual development.

In Red Shambhala, Andrei Znamenski discovers a less familiar side to this Buddhist legend, in which cruelty, depravity, and murderous political machinations form potholes on the eightfold path to enlightenment.

With a strong scholarly background, both Russian and American, in Siberian and Central Asian shamanism, Znamenski provides a valuable historical analysis of the concept of Shambhala from its Tibetan Buddhist origins through its analogues with Mongol and Buryat legends to the uses, both spiritual and political, made of it by a bizarre group of twentieth-century Russians and Soviet Central Asians. In presenting this story for the first time in English, Znamenski draws upon a growing body of Russian archival data, scholarship, analysis, and sometimes sensationalistic speculation that has emerged since perestroika.

According to Znamenski, a double nature—otherworldly and thisworldly, blissful and bloodthirsty—has been inherent in the concept of Shambhala from the beginning, but we in the West have long preferred to idealize the one side and ignore the other. While acknowledging the power of the bright Shambhala, for the purpose of this study Znamenski emphasizes the dark aspect and introduces a cast of characters attracted to it.

Three of these characters—the artist Nicholas Roerich, his wife, Helena, and their son George—will already be familiar to many readers, though perhaps not in the conspiratorial roles Znamenski assigns to them. The rest comprise a fascinating coterie of occultists, eccentric schemers, heterodox adventurers, and crazed warlords who usually appear as mere footnotes in standard histories of the period. These include Alexander Barchenko, an obscure esotericist and mystery writer who tried to convince high Soviet officials that Shambhala held the key to future Russian communist world domination. There was also Gleb Bokii, an early Bolshevik, head of a special section of the Soviet secret police practicing encryption and investigating the paranormal. Bokii, an ascetic, was at the same time a torturer, womanizer, and host of orgies for high party officials, as well as an expert in dialectical materialism and oriental occultism who ate dog meat as treatment for tuberculosis. Ja-Lama, a Kalmyk drifter, adventurer, and Asian rabble-rouser, claimed to be the reincarnation of an avenging Buddhist deity and grandson of a heroic Mongol prince. Boris Shumatsky, a Russian-Jewish, Buryat-speaking Bolshevik, headed the campaign to convert Central Asia to communism by exploiting Buddhist legends. Sergei Borisov, an Asian Bolshevik intellectual from the Altai region, active in the same movement to convert Mongolia, posed as a Buddhist pilgrim to Lhasa in an attempt to bolshevize the Dalai Lama. There was also Elbek-Dorji Rinchino, the Petersburg-educated first dictator of Soviet Mongolia, devoted to the pan-Mongol cause of uniting inner Asia by fusing communism and Tibetan Buddhist culture. Agvan Dorzhiev, a Siberian monk, tutor to the thirteenth Dalai Lama, and Tibetan ambassador to Russia, introduced Buddhism to Petersburg intellectuals, then joined the Bolsheviks in hopes of establishing a pan-Mongol Buddhist kingdom. The most contradictory of the lot was Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a crazed, bloodthirsty Baltic Russian aristocrat who launched an anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic crusade with a ragtag army of vicious White guardsmen, Cossacks, and Buryat warriors to free Mongolia from both the Chinese and the Russians in order to establish a pure Buddhist kingdom from the Pacific to the Baltic and replace a rotten Western civilization with Shambhala.

The heyday for these doomed adventurers was the quarter-century from 1905 to 1930—years of revolution, civil war, and nation building, when various heterodox versions of socialism had not yet been hammered into orthodoxy. Occultism, mysticism, weird science, alternative lifestyles—for a short time, just about anything that appeared revolutionary and a repudiation of the past—could be tolerated, even promoted, within the Soviet system. But not for long. Of the characters treated in the book, only the Roerichs, by then American citizens, lived past 1938, the worst year of Stalin’s Great Terror.

By telling this story in readable, sometimes even colorful English, Andrei Znamenski has presented important material to a potentially wide international public. We can, however, still question certain points, particularly some of the more sensational, torture-induced testimony obtained as incriminating trial evidence. In Znamenski’s analysis, based in part on such testimony, the main thing about Shambhala is its role in the twentieth-century continuation of the “Great Game” for political domination over inner Asia.

Znamenski’s approach is in part a worthy attempt to correct a previous overemphasis on the unworldly dimensions of Shambhala. But he may go a bit far toward overcorrection. The visions and ambitions of the characters discussed certainly included Shambhala fever, but perhaps not to the degree claimed by Znamenski. This is especially true, I think, of the Roerichs. Artists, dreamers, mythmakers, utopians, yes, but not the budding Lenins with paintbrushes that Znamenski portrays. He writes: “Nicholas and Helena never thought in terms of emotions and friendship. The world was strictly divided into those who were useful and those who were useless. The people who surrounded them were just pawns in their schemes.” Really? A pervasive theme in Roerich’s work as painter, writer, scholar, and humanitarian is that spiritual culture trumps politics. Znamenski tries, perhaps too strenuously, to prove the opposite.

The Ukrainian author Nikolai Gogol once had a character say during an overenthusiastic debate: “Gentlemen, Alexander the Macedonian was indeed a great hero, but why smash the chairs?” Red Shambhala is a valuable book, but in places Gogol’s wisdom might be applicable.

George M. Young

The reviewer, a specialist in Russian literature and thought, is a fellow of the Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England.

Atlantis and the Cycles of Time: Prophecies, Traditions, and Occult Revelations

Joscelyn Godwin
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2010, xii + 436 pages, $19.95

A new book from Joscelyn Godwin is always a cause for celebration. There are few scholars in the field of esotericism who are both as readable and as reliable as Godwin. His 1994 book, The Theosophical Enlightenment, was a particularly masterful overview of the occult subculture in the English-speaking world of the nineteenth century.

Atlantis and the Cycles of Time takes a much more tightly focused look at one recurring meme within the occult universe: Atlantis, the legendary lost continent that supposedly sank in prehistoric times, some say because of the inhabitants’ misuse of occult power. The book’s final two chapters also provide a brief overview of various schematic cycles of time that have seized the imaginations of occultists, theologians, and New Agers.

There is a paradoxical quality to this book of which potential readers should be aware. If one particular interpretation of the Atlantis myth looms large in your personal belief system, Godwin’s book may cause a mild crisis of faith, as he methodically summarizes the numerous Atlantis myth variations, most of them based on either clairvoyant revelations or bold assertions of authority on the part of authors. It is difficult to come out the other end of these variations without feeling that all are equally valid or, perhaps more likely, equally suspect.

On the other hand, unless you find Atlantis intrinsically fascinating, this book may be too much of a good thing, as it delivers plenty of well-organized detail on the Atlantis story, but almost no justification for why one should care.

One has the sense, more so than in any other Godwin book, that the author felt obliged to write it—perhaps to share years’ worth of research—but didn’t experience much pleasure in doing so. Godwin’s usual relish for the odd detail and his dry wit in relating the obviously ludicrous with a straight face are still present, but are mostly drowned out by the deluge of data comparing British, German, French, Theosophical, channeled, and New Age versions of Atlantis.

As a reference work, this book performs a useful public service: should you wish to compare, say, H. P. Blavatsky’s Atlantis with that of Fabre d’Olivet or Dion Fortune, Godwin summarizes each, and the book’s index facilitates further cross-comparisons. But as a cover-to-cover read, Atlantis and the Cycles of Time feels a bit like a long march through a stack of file cards.

The final chapters on various systems of cyclic time—the Hindu yugas, the Four Ages (Golden to Iron), astrological ages, and so on—are useful for their attempt to make sense out of further contradictory esoteric schemes.

Yet when all is said and done, does it really matter whether Atlantis existed as a historical location once upon a time or whether there really was a Golden Age tens of thousands of years ago? Godwin doesn’t directly answer these questions, but the cumulative implication is that it matters not.

If the essence of a spiritual orientation is simply to practice compassion for others and to minimize the grandstanding of one’s own ego, these can be practiced regardless of religious beliefs, esoteric revelations, or grand abstract systems of time and cosmology.

Yes, the Atlantis myth can serve as a warning against the hubris of humankind and as a reminder of the impermanence of life. But like all great myths, it conveys its lessons whether strictly factual or not. Godwin, I suspect, would agree.

Jay Kinney

Jay Kinney was publisher and editor in chief of Gnosis magazine during its fifteen-year span. His recent book, The Masonic Myth (Harper Collins), has been translated into five languages.

Barbarian Rites: The Spiritual World of the Vikings and Germanic Tribes

Hans-Peter Hasenfratz Translated by Michael Moynihan
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2011. Paper, xi + 164 pages, $16.95

For reasons both good and bad, the religion of the pre-Christian Germanic tribes exercise a fascination on the modern mind. Unfortunately, a clear picture of what these tribes practiced and believed has been hard to come by.

One reason is a shortage of sources. During the period in question, from roughly 200 bc to ad 1000, most of these tribes were preliterate. Since literacy generally coincided with conversion to Christianity, the vast majority of written sources come from a time after Christianization, and it is sometimes hard to tell what kinds of alterations this produced in the myths and sagas. Was the famous sacrifice of the god Odin on the World-Tree Yggdrasil, for example, a genuine Germanic myth, or was it somehow an echo of the sacrifice of Christ?

Admittedly, there are a few texts from pre-Christian times. One of the most important is the Germania (“Germany”) by the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus, written around ad 100, a short work that can be reckoned as one of the first anthropological treatises ever written. Other sources include the Old English poem Beowulf and archaeological artifacts, some of which bear a few scraps of writing in runes, the quasi-magical Germanic alphabet, but most of which are mute.

But there is another reason that the Germanic tribes have been hard to approach. They have been mythologized in ways both benign and sinister. As Hans-Peter Hasenfratz points out in this learned but readable study, part of Tacitus’s agenda was to portray the Germanic tribes of his day (whom the Romans were never able to subdue) as epitomes of the ancient martial virtues that he believed Rome had lost. A far more familiar, and more malign, use was that of the Nazis, who claimed to be reviving the spirit of the Germans’ ancient forebears.

Thus Hasenfratz’s book is particularly welcome. The author is a professor emeritus of the history of religion at Germany’s Ruhr University, so he comes well-equipped to sift through the evidence in a balanced and impartial way. Barbarian Rites gives a brief, general survey of the religion of the ancient Germanic tribes, including the populations of present-day Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries. He devotes considerable attention to the Age of the Vikings (ad 800-1100), not only because of the intrinsic interest of the period but because so many of our sources come from that time. But he is remarkably judicious in evaluating the evidence. He points out, for example, that the bloodthirsty aspects of Viking religion may have been partly a reflection of the warlike times and that our picture of Germanic religion may have looked somewhat different if we had more evidence from more peaceable periods in the tribes’ history.

Another strength of this work is that Hasenfratz does not sentimentalize his subjects. He portrays them as he sees them, and the portrait is a stark one. A “straw death”—dying peacefully in bed—was considered contemptible; it was far more glorious to die in battle. Old people were frequently abandoned or dispatched as unnecessary mouths to feed, and human sacrifice was common. The grimmest version was the “blood eagle” ritual of the Vikings, in which a living victim’s back was cut open, the ribs separated from the spine, and the lungs pulled out in such a way that they formed a pair of “wings”—presumably speeding his journey to the gods.

There are enough such details in this book to suggest that any attempt to revive the Germanic religion is misguided. Hasenfratz does not dwell at length at the largest and most ambitious of such attempts—the Nazi quasireligion of the Third Reich—but he does suggest how Nazi ideology was in some cases drawn from German antiquity. He notes, for example, that Hitler and Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg envisioned the Third Reich as an Ordenstaat—an “order-based state,” with a Führer (“leader”) chosen out of this order. (“Order” in this sense means an elite brotherhood of Nazis that was inspired by the ancient German institution of the Männerbund, a kind of male sodality with its own, often secret cultic rites and functions.) Below this elite order would be the classes of ordinary Nazi party members and, at the bottom, the sheeplike masses.

Hasenfratz avoids moralizing about these facts, but for the reader, the lesson is clear. While we may enjoy the Germanic myths as expressed in the Icelandic sagas or the operas of Richard Wagner, a real restoration of these religions is neither possible (we know too little about them) nor desirable (what we know is too appalling). While the author may not have intended to sound a warning against Neopagan revivals of the ancient German cults, this is in the end one objective the book achieves.

Richard Smoley

Alistair Conwell
Brooklyn, N.Y.: O Books, 2010. Paper, 259 pages, $24.95

Alistair Conwell’s scholarly and poetic work explores the phenomenon of the audible life stream, or the primordial sound current of the universe. Sound is presented as a messenger offering guidance from otherworldly realities. Testimonials from those who have had out of body and near-death experiences, quotations from classical religious texts, and references to quantum physics are presented to explain the potential for the expansion of consciousness by attunement to the sounds that reverberate around us always. Readers who are facing the grieving process, as well as those who seek understanding and a peaceful acceptance of the inevitability of death, will be especially uplifted by this highly original volume.

Dikki-Jo Mullen

The reviewer is a Florida-based astrologer and spiritual counseler.