As I approached the top of this [orbital] arc, it was as if time stood still, and I was flooded with both emotion and awareness. But as I looked down at the Earth—this stunning, fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us, and that has protected all life from the harshness of space—a sadness came over me, and I was hit in the gut with an undeniable, sobering contradiction. In spite of the overwhelming beauty of this scene, serious inequity exists on the apparent paradise we have been given. I couldn’t help thinking of the nearly one billion people who don’t have clean water to drink, the countless number who go to bed hungry every night, the social injustice, conflicts, and poverty that remain pervasive across the planet.

However, astronaut engagements with moments of cosmic sublime go beyond spiritual experiences and approach the realm of ritualized behaviors that would seem familiar to Malinowski and other anthropologists that study symbol, myth, and ritual. Many of these ritual forms of magic come from the ancestors of spaceflight. For American astronauts on launch day, the entire crew must complete a series of rituals before proceeding to the launch pad. First, they must eat a meal of steak and eggs, the Mercury astronaut’s food of choice before a mission. Many contemporary astronauts report that they only pick at the hearty meal due to nerves, but it is never refused for fear that it will jinx the mission. After the meal, the crew participates in a simple card game and must continue playing until the crew’s commander loses.

Malinowski—in his seminal work Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays— argued that people usually engaged in magical and ritualized behaviors when they were placed in stressful situations, or found themselves with limited control over situations. Despite his colonial generalizations, if we apply these criteria to human spaceflight, I do not believe it is too far-fetched to assert that those who ride automated rockets into the vacuum of outer space are engaging with magic and ritual in order to grasp at a certain amount of control absent within the launch itself.

Magical and ritualized behavior in spaceflight is not only restricted to American astronauts; Soviet—and now Russian—cosmonauts also participate(d) in ritual prior to launching into outer space. On April 12, 1961, as Yuri Gagarin was being driven to the launchpad prior to his mission, he was overcome with a human urge that often manifests itself when one is nervous—or drinks too much coffee. Gagarin charged the driver to pull to the side of the road where he relieved himself on the rear passenger bus tire before re-boarding and rocketing his way into the history books. Due to his mission being successful—and for fear of being jinxed should they not perform the same ritual—every cosmonaut after Gagarin has also had the bus driver pull over so that they may micturate on the rear passenger bus tire prior to launch; women are not exempt from this, carrying vials of their own urine to splash on the bus wheel (Weibel and Swanson 2006). Cosmonauts and NASA astronauts launching on Soyuz to the International Space Station today still perform this ritualized urination. Furthermore, all those who wish to board a Russian spacecraft must watch the 1969 Soviet film Белое солнце пустыни (Beloye solntse pustyni—White Sun of the Desert) the night before launch.

Further afield, during the Space Race, there was also a battle between the two superpowers over the predominantly Christian United States and the state-atheism of the Soviet Union. One prominent Soviet propaganda poster after Gagarin’s flight featured a grinning cosmonaut on a spacewalk, orbiting above a Catholic church, a Russian Orthodox church, and a mosque, with two bold words separating the spacewalker and the houses of worship: бога нет! (boga nyet—There is no god!). Conversely, United States astronauts on Apollo 8 read from the Book of Genesis after becoming the first humans to circle around the moon. Furthermore, after Apollo 11 successfully landed on the surface of the moon, Buzz Aldrin asked for a moment of silence so that he might partake in the ritual consumption of bread and wine. Communion, therefore, became the first food and drink consumed by humans on another celestial body (Weibel and Swanson 2006).

Lastly, there exists many Earthly and extra-planetary memorials and ritualistic remembrances of those who have lost their lives in the name of space travel, including one on the moon. On Mars, the Pathfinder spacecraft—which brought Sojourner, the first rover on Mars—was renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station after it had landed. In popular culture, Carl Sagan’s son helped write an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise in which the crew visits the Memorial Station, which was imagined as being inscribed with a quote from Sagan: “Whatever the reason you’re on Mars, I’m glad you’re there, and I wish I was with you.”

Magic and ritual is deeply engrained in both the practice and imaginaries of technoscientific endeavors. The more that anthropologists shift their gaze toward the so-called “hard” sciences—as well as the scientists that perform their duties—the more we can reveal the illusion of pure objectivity within laboratory sciences. Perhaps when science is viewed as a human practice—wrapped up with all the imperfections inherent within any human endeavor—as opposed to some outside force able to impart supernatural objectivity upon an expert class, we can begin to leverage science as an exercise for liberation and mutual aid rather than a practice that today tends to first benefit the forces of colonialism and imperialism.

Further reading & cited:
Weibel, Deana L., and Glen E. Swanson. 2006. “Malinowski In Orbit: ‘Magical Thinking’ in Human Spaceflight.” Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly 13 (3): 53–61.

To begin, let’s travel first to Dharamsala, North India, 1992.

There, Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack (1929-2004) had a conversation with the Dalai Lama about aliens. Mack was no rube when it came to extra-terrestrials. Having already spent decades conducting research with hundreds of extra-terrestrial ‘experiencers’ in North America, he had built a career on trying to make sense of the alien abduction experience. The Dalai Lama, apparently, knew a thing or two about aliens as well. He explained to Mack and a small group that aliens too were sentient beings in the universe. He also corroborated Mack’s theory that these entities were making contact because they were disturbed by humans’ destruction of the environment. A few years later in 1999, Dr Mack met with the Dalai Lama again in Dharamsala, India, as part of a symposium on world peace. During this visit, Mack recorded an interview where he shared some thoughts about the Dalai Lama and aliens. According to Mack, for high-level Tibetan lamas like the Dalai Lama who “live at the level of…mystical formlessness,” dramatic alien contact and abduction was unlikely. Realized beings like the Dalai Lama were already used to being contacted by “a vast array of entities and beings that are very real for them in the cosmos” and so they took for granted a contra-materialist, contra-Western worldview where “things can cross from the unseen world into the material world.” It thus simply didn’t make sense for them to have the kind of shattering, consciousness-expanding abduction experiences that were typical of Mack’s more run-of-the-mill North American research subjects. In other words, the Dalai Lama’s level of consciousness was so advanced, so other or ‘alien’ to mainstream thinking, that it made encountering an avant-garde alien consciousness pretty redundant. Simply put, the Dalai Lama was already on the aliens’ wave-length.

By contrast, Mack’s research with apparently sane, sincere, non-opportunistic and otherwise disconnected alien ‘experiencers’ had come to have “a shattering impact on [his] views of the nature of the cosmos”. In struggling to steer a middle path between equally dissatisfying ‘psychosocial/cultural’ and ‘literalist, there-really-must-be-flesh-and-blood-aliens-out-there’ explanations for his research subjects’ claims of contact with diminutive, big-headed ‘grey’ ETs, Mack had found his way to to cross-cultural psychiatry and the Dalai Lama. The alien abduction phenomena, he realized, called for a “widening of the ontological undertsanding of what is possible in the universe.” He thus followed in the footsteps of many other researchers of alien abduction, who had “turned to alternative notions of the nature of the cosmos, more familiar to Eastern religions and philosophy, that depict the universe and all its realities as a vast play of consciousness with physical manifestations”. Yet the fact that Mack started with what seemed like a fairly recent ‘Western’ psychiatric-cultural phenomenon only to end up with Tibetan Buddhism and non-dual Eastern philosophies concealed an irony. For according to one theory, the alien visitation narrative may have actually begun with Westerners’ co-optations and re-interpretations of Tibetan Buddhism, and the first grey alien may have actually been a Tibetan Buddhist lama.

To understand this, we need to back-track from 1999 to 1918. Sometime in that year, English occultist and sex magician Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) had an encounter with a spirit in New York. Crowley was no stranger to communication with disincarnate entities. As a dedicated ritual magician, he had by 1918 already spent the better part of his life experimenting with various esoteric methods for contacting non-human entities (as a case in point, in 1904, he had been contacted by Ancient Egyptian deities in Cairo who named him the prophet of a New Age, and transmitted to him the foundational scripture for his new religious movement, Thelema). Something of a gatecrasher, the being who contacted Crowley unbidden in 1918 in the midst of the magician’s other ritual activities sported a large, swollen head devoid of ears and slit-like eyes. The being called itself ‘LAM’, a name which Crowley correctly identified as the Tibetan word for ‘way’ or ‘path’. Claiming that Lam was the soul of a dead Tibetan Buddhist teacher or lama, Crowley included a drawing he had made of the entity in an exhibition of his artwork called ‘Dead Souls’, which he organized in Greenwich New York in 1919. He also included a copy of Lam’s portrait in his esoteric periodical the Equinox in the same year. There it appeared as the front-piece to his critical commentary on ‘The Voice of Silence,’ a book of supposedly ancient – and Buddhist – wisdom which had been channelled by the infamous Russian/Ukranian clairvoyant Madame Blavatsky twenty years prior. (Blavatsky (1831-1891), the so-called ‘grandmother of the New Age’ was co-founder of the esoteric organization known as the Theosophical Society (formally est. 1875 in New York), who as I mentioned in my last post claimed to be in contact with highly evolved spiritual Masters from the East who lived in Tibet and were the ultimate dispensors of the teachings of the ‘Universal Wisdom-religion’ which the Theosophical Society claimed to embody.)

Lam only resurfaced in Crowley’s records again in 1945, when Crowley invited his student and personal secretary at the time Kenneth Grant (1924-2011) to select any piece of artwork he liked from the old mage’s portfolio as a gift. Grant chose the portrait of Lam – or as he later recounted it, Lam chose him. Following Crowley’s death, as one of Crowley’s chief heirs and executors, Grant played a major role in preserving, disseminating, and reinterpreting the occultist’s teachings. As part of his reformulations of Thelema and Crowley’s take on sex magic, Grant became convinced that Lam and many of the beings Crowley had trafficked with were in fact extra-terrestrials. For Grant, Crowley’s encounter with Lam represented the first and perhaps most momentous example of the phenomenon of ‘grey alien’ contact, which by the start of the 1960s was increasingly becoming a part of popular culture. Although Crowley really didn’t seem to make much of Lam while alive and had little interest in aliens per se, Lam the (Tibetan) extra-terrestrial became a key figure in Grant’s new esoteric cosmology. Circulating his theories about Crowley’s legacy and Lam through various publications, Grant encouraged other ritual magicians to conduct their own experiments to contact the being. These activities, along with Grant’s statements about Lam and the ritual procedures he suggested for contacting it, became the barebones of a new religious phenomenon. ‘The Cult of Lam’ was born.

The association between Tibet, secret esoteric knowledge and extra-terrestrials has reoccurred in film, literature, and new religious movements for virtually one and a half centuries. Indeed, ‘Tibet’ and ‘extraterrestrial’ may represent two of the greatest signifiers of otherness in Western religious history. Before the advent of physical space travel, Tibet was the quintessential spiritual ‘outer space’ of the Western imagination, an ultimate orientalist frontier that transcended ordinary time and place. The story of the first grey (Tibetan) alien is thus a story of this conflation of two kinds of otherness, of a long legacy of exotic (mis)representations of Tibet by outsiders. Yet it is also a story about the blurring of the boundaries between Western and Indo-Tibetan esoteric traditions. Researchers have sometimes traced the origins of the iconic grey alien to testimony from Barney and Betty Hill, an American couple from rural New Hampshire whose account of being jointly abducted by aliens in 1961 received significant media attention. Grant and the Cult of Lam, however, suggest a different genealogy.

Grant’s creative re-interpretations of Crowley and Western esotericism are legendary in occult circles (fellow ritual magician and graphic novelist Alan Moore has described Grant as “a sasquatch at a vicarage tea-party…too big to dismiss, too weird to feel entirely comfortable about.”) While Crowley had little to no direct knowledge about Hindu and Buddhist tantra or the fictional mythologies of American weird fiction ‘cosmic horror’ writer H.P. Lovecraft, Grant strongly linked both of these to his teacher’s legacy. Through his work, Grant fleshed out three inter-connected claims : 1) the apparently fictional corpus of self-avowed atheist-materialist Lovecraft was the product of psychic contact with actual extraterrestrial forces 2) these forces were parallel if not identical to those with which Crowley had engaged as part of his own magical activities; and 3) these activities and Crowley’s ‘Cult’ Thelema represented the latest and most relevant expression of primordial teachings whose ultimate source was extra-terrestrial, and which had been preserved in Hindu and Buddhist tantra and a handful of other esoteric traditions around the world. Crowley’s ‘Latest Tantra’ was merely a new and refined iteration of “the pre-Christian Gnosis, the Cult of Shaitan”, the much maligned Double-Horned and Hidden God who long ago in Egypt had been known as Set. This Gnosis was embodied in what Grant called the ‘Draconian’ or ‘Typhonian’ Tradition. Named for the Greek god Typhon, this Tradition was associated with similar primal, non-anthropomorphic, and demonized deities from various mythologies. Grant’s ideas and somewhat macabre aesthetic came to have a major influence on the so-called ‘Left Hand Path’, a loosely connected grouping of contemporary magickal and occult traditions that emphasize active engagment with the ‘dark’, transgressive and demonic as a path to wholeness, self-transformation and empowerment.

It’s safe to say that most Tibetans and scholars of Tibetan Buddhism wouldn’t accept Grant’s claims about the extra-terrestrial origins of Indo-Tibetan esotericism, nor credit his intensely weird and ghoulish re-interpretations of tantric practice. And still, exotifications of various non-Western ‘Significant Others’ have been central to the construction of modern esoteric traditions and the mythic histories that legitimate them. By now, a lot has been written on the place of Tibet in the Western imagination. Much of this scholarship has been concerned with exposing the dangers of enduring romantic misrepresentations and mystifications of Tibet, what have been short-handed variously as the ‘myth of Shangri-La’ or ‘Virtual’, ‘Dreamworld’ Tibet.  In existing scholarship, Western occultists who have promulgated key fantasies about Tibet have often appeared as either supremely naive dupes or as supremely manipulative con-men. Yet on closer inspection, Crowley and Grant’s orientations to tradition and truth complicate this picture. While a lot of attention has gone to Grant’s recasting of Lam-as-extra-terrestrial in occult circles, less focus has gone to the document in which Lam first appeared in print. Crowley’s critical commentary on Blavatsky and her teachings is thus revealing in a number of ways. It represents one early example of a ‘modern’ magician directly responding to inconsistencies and historical fabrications in occult tradition.

Before receiving his new scripture the ‘Book of the Law’ in Cairo, Crowley spent time studying Hindu and Buddhist meditation in India, Ceylon and Burma. Before his revelation, he considered himself a Buddhist and his critique of Theosophy and Blavatsky was predicated in part on his knowledge of Western scholarship on Buddhism and his direct experience practicing Buddhist meditation under the guidance of Charles Henry Allan Bennet (1872-1923) his former ritual magic mentor, (a.k.a. Bhikku Ananda Metteyya, Bennett was the second Englishman to ever be ordained as a monk in the Theravada tradition). In Crowley’s commentary, his superior knowledge of academic scholarship, but also his direct experience and attainments in yoga and meditation make him especially qualified to present the Buddha’s teachings. At the same time, his status as ‘Logos of the Aeon’, as the newest World Teacher, allow him to place the Buddha’s teachings in a larger framework of historical ages and perennial gnosis in which Thelema stands as the most recent and most ultimate revelation. Crowley was well aware that Blavatsky had little concern or capacity for scholarly accuracy. Blavatsky’s claims to have visited and studied in Tibet were shaky at best. In his autobiography, Crowley called Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled an “unscholarly hotchpotch of fact and fable”. Still, in his commentary he approves of Blavatsky’s ‘forgery’ by defending her accomplishment as a naive but gifted esotericist. Crowley critiques Blavatsky for fudging Buddhist terminology and philosophy yet he also rails against merely academic commentators. He uses a set of opaque metaphors to suggest that while Blavatsky’s ‘esoteric Buddhism’ was a ruse, it was a nonetheless strategic one. He proposes that ‘Oriental lore’ was something that Blavatsky had put on, like African hunters putting on ‘dead ostrich skins’ to draw close and unawares to their prey, or was something she had constructed, like a Trojan horse, to gain access to some strongly guarded location.

We know that Crowley regarded Blavatsky not merely as a fraud but as someone with real spiritual realization, so such analogies are about more than just debunking a skilled con-woman. Crowley here implies that historical cultural traditions are a means to an end, a strategic springboard for capturing and articulating a higher more transcendent Gnosis or Truth. While Crowley considers it important to point out Blavatsky’s terrible scholarship and inaccuracies, it remains that careful scholarship alone is not enough. The best translator of esoteric wisdom, ‘Oriental’ or otherwise, must understand his subject, and to have understanding one must be a practicing and accomplished mystic oneself. We know Crowley was concerned about Theosophical rivals and interested in bringing Theosophists into the Thelemic fold. The simplest interpretation of Crowley’s advertising of his contact with Lam may thus be his more general competitiveness towards Theosophy. By making Lam the patron of his book, Crowley may well have been saying, “Look! I too have been contacted by Tibetan masters! I too know the Way”. But Lam’s significance goes beyond mere branding in a competitive spiritual marketplace. Appearing in The Equinox and as the guiding genius of Crowley’s commentary on Blavatsky’s pseudo-Buddhism, Lam comes coincidentally to stand for Crowley’s complex positions on the relationship between spiritual truth, esoteric tradition, expert knowledge, and personal experience. Under Lam’s hooded gaze, we see the articulation of a new, contemporary philosophy of magic, one supposedly grounded in scientific empiricism and agnosticism, which, while revolving around a set of specific procedures grounded in tradition, posits an end-goal – illumination – that transcends historical and cultural particulars. This orientation towards magic appears too, for example in the opening of one of Crowley’s books on basic magical training:

Transcendent gnosis and the widening of the mind’s horizons are thus ultimately more important than the particular methods, the trappings of tradition or ‘tricks’ one uses to ‘hunt’ and achieve these. This idea would come to fruition in Grant’s work, which in turn would come to have a great influence on later ‘pragmatic’ magical developments like ‘Chaos Magic’ with its war-cry of ‘nothing is true, everything is permissible’.

In my last post, I mentioned Rothstein’s work on the ‘ufological turn’ in post-Blavatsky Theosophical movements, where, as historical Tibet became progressively de-mystified and accessible, Tibetan Spiritual Masters were recast as benign Space Brothers. Rothstein sees this shift as being about narrowing the Masters ontologically, as making them (ironically) more down-to-earth, more rational and corporeal. Grant’s extra-terrestrialism does the opposite. Extra-terrestrialism serves as a master key for Grant to dive head long into a maddening soup of material and traditions, where the lines between outer and inner reality, literal and figurative, fact and fabrication are permanently blurrry. Engaging with what he called the non-rational, suppressed ‘nightside’ of consciousness, a parallel world of hidden possibility he dubbed ‘Universe B’, Grant revels in liminality. His magical adventures in consciousness take place in the spaces between waking and sleep, between subjective and objective reality, in a space he calls the ‘mauve zone’. To make his unexpected connections Grant relies as much on hidden qabalistic word/number correspondences and ritually-induced visions as on academic (and not-so-academic) scholarship, which he cites alongside lines from works of narrative fiction as if they were equivalent sources. In this way, for example, he ‘proves’ that the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism is of a piece with H.P. Lovecraft’s pantheon of vast amoral alien gods, and that Lam as Leader of the Greys, is the Master of a new Aeon, a gateway to trans-plutonian forces who brought tantric Buddhist teachings to Bhutan/Tibet from outer space millenia ago.

At times Grant seems to insist on the positive existence of extra-terrestrial forces, at times they seem a grand metaphor for the transpersonal, for inner and outer ‘cosmic’ or transcendent truths. As with Mack, such distinctions quickly get hazy, even irrelevant. Grant’s cryptic language, his shared emphasis on Indo-Tibetan non-dual  philosophies, is a strategic form of para-rational ‘creative imagining’, “a new manner of communication” (what scholar Henrik Bogdan has called an alternative epistemology) that is designed to make the mind receptive to “an influx of certain concepts that can, if received undistortedly, fertilize the unknown dimensions of…consciousness.” For all his weirdness and multiple (often conflicting) claims, Grant, like Crowley before him, prioritized individual experimentation, with each magician being expected to find their own way in inner and outer realms, reaping their own insights through ritual, reflection and experimentation with non-human entities. Contemporary post-Crowleyan magicians’ agnostic stance, their relativisim in the face of religious ‘tradition’ and their utilitarian approach to belief can thus give rise to a highly idiosyncratic spiritual omnivorism. Peter Levenda, writing about Grant’s contributions to occultism, excuses Grant’s distortions of various religious traditions by describing approvingly how Grant and magicians like him cannibalize non-Western traditions, dissecting them and detaching them from their native socio-political contexts to extract from them powerful active ingredients or ‘technologies’ for spiritual transformation. This approach gives rise to what occultist Phil Hine has described as an attitude of ‘natives have traditions, (we less naive) magicians have techniques’.

Religious syncretism goes back to contemporary Western esotericism’s origins in the religiously hybrid landscape of Greco-Roman Egypt . The idea of a perennial philosophy that transcended and united different cultural and religious traditions is likewise old, pre-dating Blavatsky’s promotion of a universal Wisdom-Religion. These ideas remain vital in contemporary magical practice today. The politics of universalism, however, and appeals to transcendent, ‘esoteric’ truths can mean that when challenged on their representation of non-Western traditions, Western esotericists can do as Blavatsky did and dismiss those indigenous positions as ‘merely exoteric’. One of Blavatsky’s key strategies for accounting for primary or secondary native sources that contradicted her representations of Indian and Tibetan history and culture was to claim that such perspectives were at best partial, at worst wholly misled. The average Western scholar, and even the ordinary Hindu or Buddhist priest could not be expected to have access to the deeper, true mysteries to which she and a handful of others were privy, caught up as they were in either academic materialism or quotidian ritual priorities. By contrasting her superior ‘esoteric’ perspective with the supposedly exoteric misapprehensions of the masses and orthodox texts, Blavatsky could thus position her personal, Orientalist take on ‘true Buddhism’ or Hinduism as paramount, something Crowley himself calls Blavatsky out on in his 1919 commentaries. The individual syncretic magician thus becomes an unassailable authority, and the perspective of the Western re-interpreter remains secure and privileged.

My stance as an anthropologist of contemporary Tibet and as someone with a personal background in Western esotericism made me curious to understand both how contemporary magicians today were understanding Lam’s ‘Tibetan-ness’ and were engaging with non-Western traditions like Tibetan Buddhism. What is clear is that access to reliable information about Tibetan culture and history has not caused Western esotericists to abandon commitments to either historical Tibet or their own ‘fabricated’ Western esoteric traditions. Preliminary interactions with magicians engaging with the Typhonian Tradition and related esoteric currents have revealed that many practitioners are in fact engaging with Tibetan tantric Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhist teachers directly as students (and with indigenous experts from other cultural contexts as well) in complex ways. Scholars have characterized Left Hand Path, neo-tantric traditions like Grant’s that incorporate ‘transgressive’ sexuality as arising from the heady intersection of late modern, neo-liberal individualism and consumption, New Age orientalist fantasy and the ongoing globalization of Indo-Tibetan tantric traditions. Such practices represent a complex melding of Asian tantric traditions with distinctly western esoteric practices, most particularly with ‘sex magic’ (what Hugh Urban has defined as as “not just any loose association of sex and spirituality, and not simply the optimization of sensual pleasure during intercourse, but rather the explicit use of orgasm (whether heterosexual, homosexual, or autoerotic) as a means to create magical effects in the external world”.

Western practices and histories of sex magic have often been conflated with Asian tantric ones and vice versa, resulting in a situation where, as Urban puts it, neo-tantric and Asian tantric traditions have been “hopelessly muddled”. Acknowledging the reality of hybridity is one thing, but so far very little ethnographically-focused research has been done to understand how contemporary neo-tantric practitioners are parsing this ‘hopeless muddle’ in practice. That magicians are practicing ‘orthodox’ Tibetan Buddhism under Tibetan teachers, while simultaneously engaging with deeply syncretic post-Theosophic practices, should make it clear how much more complicated the politics of either syncretism or ‘conversion’ is in contemporary Western esoteric practice.

The Tibetan alien is one way of approaching this complex terrain. On one level, it points to a special, even fetishized role for certain non-Western cultures as mediators of truth – Tibetan Buddhism and its representatives, a la Mack, as having some privileged understanding of higher awareness that can explain modern mysteries. On another level, the alien is a sign that gestures ‘Beyond’ toward an ineffable, transcendent Gnosis that resolves the tensions between truth and fiction, subjective and objective reality. While by no means all contemporary ritual magicians credit Grant-style extra-terrestrialism, the alien serves for some practitioners as a mechanism for managing both religious and epistemological heterogeneity.

More anthropological research is needed to understand how individual practitioners manage their commitments to different ‘Masters’, to different religious traditions and lineages, each with their own distinct vocabularies and notions of right practice. How do contemporary Western esoteric practices that promote  the forging of idiosyncratic and hybrid ‘personal’ systems sit alongside Tibetan Buddhism as transmitted by living Tibetan teachers, with its concern for scriptural precedent and its wariness of outright innovation? Can one be an orthodox tantric practitioner and a ‘neo’ one at the same times? How does one compartmentalize (or not) one’s multiple spiritual ‘lives’ and lineages, and when, where and how can Gnosis or Illumination be said to defy all boundaries?

These questions are preliminary, mere scratches on the surface of the complex cross-fertilizations, contestations and collaborations that have taken place and continue to do so between native and neo-practitioners. Like another alien enthusiast, though, I want to believe that future research will deepen our understanding of these dynamics.

News that Karen McCarthy Brown passed away after years of deteriorating illness reached me earlier this month. I kept it to myself. When more official announcement from Drew University–where she was Professor Emerita of anthropology and sociology of religion—showed up on my Facebook feed this past Sunday, I shared it with the following comment:

Reading Karen’s Mama Lola kept me in grad school. Vodou got a human face from her. A tremendous loss, indeed.

When the first email arrived from UCSB’s Claudine Michel who penned the preface to the third edition of Brown’s award-winning ethnography in 2010, I had a flashback to nearly two decades ago.

I was sitting across from the department chair. We were in his office on the first floor of the LS&A building on S. State Street. I wanted out of the anthropology Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan. In our long conversation, I disclosed more vulnerabilities then I ever would again professionally. Tormented, I grappled with the racist history of a discipline in which I would always be a subject. I did not belong in this white institution and was exhausted from feeling I was desegregating the department all over again. Hang in there, he said. Minority retention at the doctoral level is a huge problem all over this country. It may not get easier but at least it will become more manageable. You can do it. Just don’t give up you will be a pioneer. I broke into sobs. I can’t be a pioneer, it’s not the 1950s. Was there anyone whose work really interested me? Well, there was this book, Mama Lola, about a Vodou priestess in Brooklyn. Did I know the author? No I did not. The subject was close to home. We had inherited responsibilities that have been overstretched by migration. It’s not something that we talk about. Maybe after your dissertation on Jamaica, you’ll write another book on your family’s story. In the meantime was there enough interest in this work to bring her to campus? Mere thoughts of that someday became inspiration enough to help me keep my eyes on the prize.

Karen McCarthy Brown did come to give a talk at UM on Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Between the mainstreaming feminism project led by a group of senior graduate students and supporting faculty, the event occurred a year or so later. Since I don’t do revisionist history—full disclosure—I remember sketchy details of this and my first encounter with Karen.

Mama Lola was published by the University of California Press in 1991. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted over a decade, Brown became an initiate of her subject, as a condition to deeper research and writing her life history. The resulting ethnography with its radical crossings blurred methodological and scriptive lines. Brown took creative liberties fictionalizing various strands of Lola’s familial and spiritual genealogies. The cover illustration of the first edition featured a doll from Lola’s altar representing the spirit Ezili Danto.

The book was hailed as a “new postmodern ethnography,” or “new feminist ethnography” (2001:ix) exemplary of this new genre of ethnographic writing that simultaneously weaved narrative analysis, the autobiographical and critical insights. Brown actually eschewed this connection. As she noted in the book’s second edition, which had a photograph of Lola herself on the cover, “I cannot claim to have self-consciously positioned my book in those niches” (2001:x). To the end, she re-asserted that she considered the work “primarily an exercise in interpretation” as she had done a decade before (2001:x). Brown would become a renowned religion expert and one of the founding members of KOSANBA—The Congress of Santa Barbara, a scholarly association for the study of Haitian Vodou.

A highly recognized work, Mama Lola was awarded the best first book in the History of Religions of the American Academy of Religion (1991) and the Victor Turner Prize of the American Anthropological Association (1992). But it was not without its critics. Chief among them was premier Haitian anthropologist, the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot who rightfully asked a most fundamental question: how much fiction is ethnography? Moreover, he questioned various tensions between Brown’s ethnographic authority and totalizing narrative. To that end, he wrote, “those unfamiliar with Haiti will lack the means by which to evaluate the global assertions of the transcendental narrator” (1994:653). I had not read Trouillot’s review in American Ethnologist until years later after a conversation with him at the AAAs.

Indeed, in many ways, Mama Lola was something of an insider ethnography. In retrospect, I formed an attachment to it precisely because I had some knowledge to discern fact from fiction, to fill in the silences and to decipher practices layered in an opacity that was part of a historically damaging trope. Simultaneously, it expanded my lexicon as I learned so much about religious practices in my birth country that to this day remain trapped in obscurity, familial and otherwise. In that sense, the book had done for me what anthropology is supposed to do, make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. It also sensitized me to the restrictions of genres, fieldwork dynamics and negotiations among so many other things. I knew there would never be an ethnography of my family’s story. Performance, maybe?. Memoir, definitely. Some stories are not mine to tell.

Since I began teaching years ago, I routinely used Mama Lola in my staple Haiti course. Despite my own feminist critiques, it’s an excellent project with which to debunk stereotypes, explore conflicts between researcher and subject and point to other disciplinary shortcomings. What I appreciated then and still do despite its limits is that this book, which kept me in grad school, actually managed to accomplish something that had been quite elusive until its publication. By (re)/constructing the So-Called Life of Marie Thérèse Alourdes Macena Margaux Kowalski, Karen gave Vodou a human face, at least in anthropology and one step beyond. Considering the long history of demonization and stigmatization that marred the religion, this is a Herculean achievement indeed, for which Karen McCarthy Brown should be recognized. Chapo ba!!!!!!!

Karen McCarthy Brown 2001 [1991] Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot. 1994. Review of Mama Lola. American Ethnologist 21(3):653-654.

Let’s start with taking ideas seriously. There are three problems I see with this argument. First, whose ideas do we look to? Not only is Islam a large and diverse religion, of which the kind of political Islam associated with groups like the Muslim Brotherhood are a minority, but even those following the Muslim Brotherhood are much more diverse in their thought than most observers are willing to acknowledge.

Yet the declaration of jihad was tearing the Muslim community apart. There was never a consensus that the jihad in Afghanistan was a genuine religious obligation. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, the local chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood refuted the demand to send its members to jihad, although it encouraged relief work in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those who did go were often unaffiliated with established Muslim organizations and therefore more open to radicalization. Many concerned Saudi fathers went to the training camps to drag their sons home.

Even if we could identify a coherent ideology, or perhaps abstract certain commonalities across this diversity, we still have the problem that these ideas are not necessarily clearly understood or interpreted in the same way by those who act in its name. For instance, this profile of Chérif Kouachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers, says he described himself as a “ghetto Muslim” and that not long ago he was so ignorant about religion that one source said “He couldn’t differentiate between Islam and Catholicism.” But we need not rely on such profiles to understand that real people are bundles of contradictions who often believe in multiple contradictory ideas at the same time.

This brings us to the second objection which is that, for anthropologists, “emic” accounts of people’s own motivations are only one of several sources of data that anthropologists use in the process of constructing an “etic” interpretation. Taking people’s own words seriously means interpreting those words, not simply accepting them at face value. Psychologists understand that many explanations are post-facto justifications, not necessarily reflective of the thinking that led up to the action in the first place. This is one reason why anthropology doesn’t just rely upon interviews, but on participant observation as well.

Third, for the past fifty or so years anthropologists have increasingly shifted from thinking about forms of culture as a “code” from which people take marching orders to a view of culture as a form of social action, highlighting how people create and transform ideology and social structure through social action (including speech). (See my discussion of Asif Agha’s book.) Treating religious belief as a form of social action moves us from a conception of religion as a form of brain washing to taking seriously how people actually use religion, even transforming it through their lived practices.

But by focusing so much on individual interpretation, agency, and practice, do we go too far in dismissing difference? This is a valid concern. Anthropologists do not think action takes place in a void, nor do we dismiss the importance of ideology. However, we tend to treat these things at a different level of analysis than do many who rely entirely on written texts for interpreting culture. For anthropologists, culture is often manifest not so much in specific ideas, but in underlying rules of interpretation or in the very categories through which people think about the world. Thus, the numerous Chinese words for “uncle” reflects a history of patriarchal family relations and so, while Chinese people’s actual family practices no longer adhere to many of the old patriarchal customs, the words and categories they use to think about family still reflect upon that history and are meaningful for them.

In short, differences matter, ideas matter, beliefs matter, but for an anthropologist they don’t matter in the way that many people who talk about Islam think they matter. You can’t say we need to take people’s ideas seriously but then deny them the agency to interpret and act upon those ideas in their own unique and historically contextualized ways. An Arab kid growing up in the suburbs of France is going to read Islam in a uniquely French way and his radicalism may have much more in common with a follower of Le Pen than it does with someone living in the Middle East. That is why it is important to understand the socio-political context of French racism, not because those who bring it up are trying to blame the victims or something silly like that.

You know that guy. He talks about ‘Tantric yoga’ in casual conversation. Maybe he has dreadlocks. Maybe he’s shaved his head. He’s definitely not had a beverage with regular milk in it for years. He’s probably white and affluent. He’s probably been to India. And he probably wears Buddhist prayer beads as jewelry.

It’s easy enough to compare this stereotype to the ‘serious’ convert to Buddhism, who though they too may talk about Tantra, sport distinctive hairstyles or be white and affluent, seem at least to wear their prayer beads as more than just a fashion statement. Yet, how easy is it to identify where religious conversion begins and cultural appropriation ends?

For ‘world’ religions like Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam the distinction is perhaps obvious. These religions operate according to an evangelical logic: everyone can (and often must) enjoy access to the means of salvation. Accusations of cultural appropriation, suggesting group-specific rights and restricted entry, might seem incompatible with an ethos of universalistic salvation. Tibetan Buddhism, like Islam and Christianity, is an enthusiastically evangelical religion. Buddhist theology widens the possibilities of evangelizing enormously: beyond spreading the Dharma to their fellow human beings, Tibetan Buddhists say prayers for everything from ants to vampiric spirits so that these beings might be swiftly reborn in human form and achieve salvation through Buddhist practice. Like Islam and Christianity too, Tibetan Buddhism is today an increasingly global religion. Unlike Christian and Muslim missionaries, however, today’s cosmopolitan Tibetan lamas have been motivated by both a universalist theology and by a sense of urgency to preserve their religion in the face of persecution by Chinese authorities in Tibet. As such, Tibetan Buddhism’s significant spread westwards in recent decades cannot be separated from Tibet’s colonial history: from Tibet’s occupation by the People’s Republic of China in 1950 and the exodus of thousands of Tibetans from their homeland following a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959. The political context of Tibetan Buddhism’s globalization then has made the Western convert an ambiguous figure.

A newcomer to Buddhism, the convert is on the one hand culturally and spiritually impoverished: dependent on Tibetan experts, she is a beneficiary of Tibetan lamas’ spiritual charity. Compared to most Tibetans, who are stateless refugees or occupied people, however, she is distinctly advantaged. Her material and political privilege means she is often positioned by Tibetans in the traditional role of patron (jindak), yet while Tibetans may expect or hope that converts will serve as allies and advocates for Tibetans’ interests, commitment to Buddhism doesn’t guarantee any particular political subjectivity. These dynamics can make the lines between conversion and cultural appropriation blurry in the Tibetan Buddhist context.

ISC protesters in Upper West Side New York in November 2014

In November of last year, the fourteenth Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso completed an extensive lecture tour of the USA. Of the thousands who showed up for the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s talks, one group arrived without fail to each of his events: crowds of mostly white protestors in Tibetan robes who came to boycott the religious leader. Brandishing placards and shouting slogans, they accused the Dalai Lama of being a hypocrite, a liar and a denier of religious freedom. Calling the leader ‘the worst dictator in this modern day’ and a ‘false Dalai Lama’, the demonstrators seemed to be channelling the most zealous of Chinese Communist Party ideologues. Yet these were no party cadres. Rather, they were converts to the Dalai Lama’s own school of Tibetan Buddhism. As representatives of the ‘International Shugden Community’ (ISC), the protesters came to highlight their grievances over the Dalai Lama’s opposition to a Tibetan deity known as Dorje Shugden, and the discrimination and human rights violations they claim the religious leader’s rejection of this being and its followers has engendered.

The ISC is a major mouth-piece for the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT), a sect of almost exclusively non-Tibetan converts to Tibetan Buddhism that currently spearheads the global pro-Shugden, anti-Dalai Lama agenda. On the surface, the NKT’s almost two decades-long global campaign against the Dalai Lama and his supporters – that is, the overwhelming majority of the ethnic Tibetan and Tibetan Buddhist global population – appears to be primarily about a dispute hinging on opposing theological positions within a single tradition. The Dalai Lama believes that Dorje Shugden is a dangerous demon masquerading as a benign deity, the NKT believes that the being is a bona fide Buddha. What I want to argue here is that the controversy, and specifically NKT’s involvement in it, points as well to the politics of race, appropriation, and privilege involved in conversion and new religious movements, and highlights ongoing tensions between ethno-nationalist and universalist impulses in the globalization of Tibetan Buddhism and culture.

The Dalai Lama and NKT converts are all members of the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism, in which at least since the 19^th century, Dorje Shugden has been seen by some practitioners as a particularly potent worldly ‘protector’ (in Tibetan Buddhism such protectors are powerful, yet ferocious, egotistical spirits that have been ritually converted into defenders Buddhism). Although the Dalai Lama is technically not the highest spiritual authority in the Geluk school (this is the Ganden Tripa), his line’s historical political leadership of Tibet has made him one of the school’s most prominent figures. His dual role as a national leader and sectarian authority, however, has generated some tension, and historically the Dalai Lamas’ more inclusive, nationally orientated policies have clashed with the narrower sectarian priorities of some Gelukpa elites. Himself once a Shugden propitiator in accordance with his Geluk education in Tibet, the current Dalai Lama began to voice reservations about the spirit in the 1970s. Shugden’s reputation for ruthlessly punishing (and assassinating) prominent Gelukpa practitioners who engage with teachings from other schools has made the spirit iconic of a certain brand of Geluk supremacism. Such bias is in fundamental conflict with the Dalai Lama’s particularly non-sectarian vision of Tibetan Buddhism and a Tibetan nation in exile. Thus, to protect himself and the Tibetan people from what he sees as a dangerous demon, the Dalai Lama has prohibited those with ritual commitments to the spirit from attending any of his teachings, and some officials have set about purging exile monastic and government posts of anyone associated with the being.

Different actors and institutions in exile have interpreted and responded to the Dalai Lama’s statements about the spirit in their own diverse, haphazard, and inconsistent ways, with different community prohibitions being indepedently implemented on-the-ground.  Ultimately though, given Shugden’s current status, ties with the spirit automatically preclude involvement with any exile administrative institutions. While some pro-Shugden lamas continue to hold posts in exile monasteries, their continuing relationship with the spirit ensures their isolation from mainstream religious life.

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, who studied with one of the Dalai Lama’s teachers in Tibet, refused to accept the spirit’s demotion. In 1977, under the auspices of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT) – a Geluk organization in exile that has over time come to cater increasingly to non-Tibetan converts – Kelsang Gyatso relocated to England and quickly amassed a number of inji (non-Tibetan, typically white) students. By the time the FPMT formally went along with the Dalai Lama’s rejection of the spirit, Kelsang Gyatso had already moved away from the organization and its leadership. In 1991, he founded the NKT, and set himself up as its sole spiritual director. From this moment, Shugden reliance, opposition to the Dalai Lama and a strict focus on Geluk exclusivism became pivotal parts of Gyatso’s disciples’ identity. Unyielding in his conviction that Shugden was an enlightened protector and increasingly disturbed by what he saw as the laissez-faire, ecumenical approach of his Gelukpa peers in exile, Kelsang Gyatso came to believe that he alone could preserve the authentic and unadulterated Geluk tradition for posterity. Importantly, despite becoming one of the largest, fastest-growing Buddhist group in Britain, when Gyatso cut ties with the FPMT and the Dalai Lama, the NKT became effectively isolated from the wider Tibetan world. Not just cut off from but actively hostile to virtually all other Tibetan Buddhists, NKT members became the Death Eaters to the broader Hogwarts of global Tibetan Buddhism.

NKT members have made their quarantine into something of a virtue. NKT converts claim Tibetans have become too worldly and politically-focused to be worthy of functioning as custodians of pure Buddhist teachings. Though inji monks and nuns entering the NKT rely on a Tibetan guru, adopt Tibetan names, wear traditional robes and preserve lineage practices hailing from Tibet, any direct engagement with Tibetan politics or culture is denounced as retrogressive and unnecessary. The NKT’s philosophy is one of ‘one lama, one yidam (meditational deity), one protector’ in reference to their sole reliance on Kelsang Gyatso and his particular teachings, a stance distinctly odds with how Tibetan Buddhism has historically been practiced. Today, the NKT curriculum is based exclusively on Kelsang Gyatso’s texts, and ritual activity and teaching in NKT centres worldwide happens pretty much entirely in languages other than Tibetan.

How legitimate are NKT members’ claims of human rights violations? The Shugden controversy has had serious consequences in Tibetan communities. Tibetans thought to be associated with Shugden have suffered discrimination. Evidence remains patchy, but it appears that individuals and families have been denied services, harassed and attacked. A mood of paranoia prevails, with Shugden ‘scares’ and witch-hunts periodically erupting in Tibetan communities. Monastic communities have been split. In 1997, Lobsang Gyatso, a Gelukpa geshe and close friend of the Dalai Lama was murdered in Dharamsala, India, along with two of his students in a ‘revenge killing’ by assailants who were identified through a letter at the scene as Shugden advocates (the NKT denied any involvement and the perpetrators were never apprehended). The Tibetan administration in exile continues to publish lists of Tibetans who have taken part in Shugden protests around the world, replete with specific, personal information.

As the Shugden controversy has evolved, a policy change internal to the Tibetan societies has come to implicate not only Tibetans but non-Tibetan converts across the world. On one level, inji NKT converts want to expunge themselves of Tibetanness. On another, to make themselves heard and intelligible, they have appropriated the suffering of Tibetans affected by the Shugden controversy as their own. While NKT members claim to speak for Tibetan Shugden practitioners, and amass cases of Tibetan-on-Tibetan discrimination in exile to bolster their cause, they fail to explain how their subjectivities and politics diverge from those of Tibetans so affected. For most Tibetans raised in Shugden propitiation, especially newcomers arriving from Tibet, family or monastic histories of Shugden practice do not equal a wholesale rejection of the Dalai Lama or of Tibetans and their politics. This inconsistent solidarity from typically anti-Tibetan injis is both curious and perversely ironic. The ISC/NKT’s tireless, well-coordinated and well-funded attacks on the Dalai Lama – which ultimately have very little to do with the merits or demerits of Shugden reliance – have helped cement for Tibetans an image of Shugden practitioners as a unified and organized group, unambiguously and unanimously opposed to the Dalai Lama (not to mention have helped fuel popular theories that the NKT are Chinese agents on a CCP payroll). An insidious circularity is at work here: protestors’ agitating against the Dalai Lama helps persuade exile Tibetans of the real threat of Shugden supporters in their midst, a witch hunt mentality ensues, and then the NKT uses this as legitimation for its claims and efforts. Tibetan activist Tenzin Dorjee has underscored NKT converts’ privilege in no uncertain terms:

“The Ultimate Insult: After 300 years of colonizing, plundering and devastating the East, the White man in the West now claims they’re the victims of a homeless refugee monk who has no army nor police nor an inch of territory on which to set up a tent? If these people feel oppressed by the Dalai Lama, all they have to do is take off their robes and walk away, back to their edifice of European privilege built largely from the bricks of former colonies.”

Ultimately, the Shugden controversy underscores the challenges involved for Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhist converts in negotiating the links between religion and politics and in deciding how ethnic identity is mobilized in response to these. To what extent and in what ways does conversion oblige political commitment? Where does religion end and culture begin?

The Dalai Lama has often stated that Tibetan Buddhism in the West need not import Tibetan culture wholesale, nor follow any particular politics. He has admonished Tibetans and non-Tibetans alike to disaggregate core Buddhist teachings from ‘folk’ (Tibetan) practice. By engineering a (Tibetan) Buddhism where Tibetans are expendable, the NKT might seem to exemplify just this kind of independent Western Buddhism. Yet the NKT presents a more complex picture. In his zeal to perfectly preserve the teachings of his own lineage, Geshe Kelsang has prioritized non-Tibetan disciples and interests over Tibetan ones. His is an extreme and peculiar case, one he has rationalized in terms of a plan by Shugden himself to relocate the teachings to the West for posterity. Here Buddhist evangelical and sectarian imperatives overpower any loyalty to ethnicity and nation. Yet considering that one of Tibetans’ key strategies in appealing to the world for political support against China over the last half century has been to emphasize the distinctiveness of Tibetans’ culture and civilization as enshrined in Buddhism in particular, this is troubling. By arguing that the flame of pure Dharma has passed to the West and to the NKT specifically, NKT members reprise a stubborn Orientalist trope. Namely, that the erasure of Tibet as a distinct nation is what will allow for the universal teachings of the Buddha, once sequestered and ‘frozen’ in timeless Tibet, to at last become ‘open-access’, to be enjoyed by their truest, most deserving heirs: modern (typically white) Westerners.