Tulpamancers are people who, through extended bouts of concentration and visualization, produce a special kind of imaginary friend that they call a tulpa. Tulpas are understood to be distinct sentient beings with their own personalities, inclinations and (relative) autonomy. Through various active and passive processes known as ‘forcing’ tulpamancers spend hours solidifying their impressions of their creations as something more than just an ordinary inner voice. (Active forcing means concentrating single-pointedly on the tulpa’s form and features, passive forcing is when the tulpamancer finds ways to bring tulpas into more regular routines, such as through ‘narrating’, where tulpamancers chat with or read stories to their creations). Tulpamancers meet tulpas in imagined environments called ‘wonderlands’, dream or mind-scapes that more fully contextualize interactions and provide a place for tulpas to ‘hang out’ when idle. They also work to perfect ‘imposition’ -seeing, hearing, or feeling tulpas in the ‘real world’ – and may practice tulpa-possession or even ‘switching’, where the tulpa takes over the host’s body and the host temporarily occupies the tulpa’s form in the wonderland.

If this is news for you, you might be wondering where this all comes from. The deceptively simple answer is: Tibet. Tulpa (sprul pa, སྤྲུལ་པ) is a Tibetan word meaning ’emanation’, ‘apparition’ or ‘magical illusion’, and the practices of contemporary tulpamancers are supposedly modeled on the esoteric procedures of Tibetan mystics, who we are often told, have been producing sentient mental-entities through meditation for centuries. Except they haven’t. Well, sort of.

Before the advent of online tulpamancer communities, and notwithstanding its Tibetan name, the concept of the tulpa as a semi-autonomous entity created by one or more individuals’ focused thought or belief was primarily a mainstay in Western esoteric and parapsychological circles. Western occultists inherited their version of tulpas from early non-Tibetan interpreters of Tibetan Buddhism like French explorer Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) and American Walter Evans-Wentz (1878-1965). David-Neel’s description of how she experimented with making a tulpa in the form of a ‘jolly monk’ while in Tibet – and her account of how this ‘mind-creature’ was subsequently seen by others who mistook it for an actual person, and how it became more and more sinister, self-motivated and unruly which obliged her to dissolve it – helped set the tone and terms of subsequent representations of tulpas. Further, as Natasha Mikles and Joseph Laycock have laid out nicely in a recent article, both David-Neel and Evan-Wentz’s understanding of Tibetan tulpas was in turn strongly influenced by Theosophical teachings related to the possibilities and dangers of ‘thought-forms’ and ‘elementals’. These ideas were already in circulation in Europe and America long before either David-Neel or Evan-Wentz ever went to the Himalayas to study with Tibetans. Thus, as Mikles and Laycock put it (paralleling my own earlier arguments here on Savage Minds about both Tibetan aliens and Tibetan singing bowls, popular ideas about tulpas today are a product of complex dialogues or cross-fertilizations between ‘East and West’, and, to be fair, probably owe more to Theosophy than to Tibetan Buddhism.

The tulpa concept has evolved and circulated to the point where it has escaped far beyond any specifically Tibetan cultural, social or linguistic moorings. During the last two decades or so, the idea of tulpas has migrated from Western esotericism and parapsychology to enter online forums and global pop culture. Tulpas have featured in episodes of hit shows like the X-files and Supernatural over the last seven years or so. In October of 2013, anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann wrote about tulpamancers in an op-ed for the New York Times. She compared tulpamancers to evangelical Christians who put in serious cognitive-emotional elbow grease to experience God as a sensory reality in their everyday lives, and argued that tulpamancers’ experiences with tulpas supports anthropologists’ and evolutionary psychologists’ claims that “the idea of an invisible agent is basic to our psyche”. I started writing this piece a week or few ago after I discovered that Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time had, as recently as a month ago, devoted a whole episode to the tulpa concept. As someone who has studied and practiced Western magical traditions for many years, I was familiar with talk about tulpas, and had been tracking with interest how representations of the entities periodically surfaced in popular culture. Watching the Adventure Time episode though, the fact that an occult concept like tulpas was now receiving treatment in one of the biggest ‘kid’s’ cartoons on TV today (even after the advent of online tulpamancers), was just too much for my feverish little anthropologist brain.

Since the appearance of Nathan Thompson’s 2014 Vice article, scholars, Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, Western occultists, and tulpamancers have debated the extent to which tulpas are and aren’t Tibetan. I decided I should gather my thoughts and say something at least vaguely meaningful about the popularization of the tulpa concept. That I should give an overview, a back-and-forth for readers about the ‘East-West tulpa dialogue’, and try to say something new and interesting on the topic, at least as far as my unique expertise might allow.

And then, just on Monday, February 8th, the latest episode of the X-Files Season 10 re-boot aired, and scooped me, kind of.

In many ways, the episode referenced the very material I was working on in this piece. With discussions about the relative (in)accessibility of academic writing and the unbearable slowness of publishing ongoing, anthropologists certainly appreciate whatever chance they can get to feel topical and up-to-the-minute. Monday’s X Files episode gave me all that and more. Not only could I pat myself on the head about being on the money, but the episode’s treatment of the subject seemed to validate many of the points I had already written down. For not only has the tulpa gone viral, but as I’ll try to show and argue, it has come to embody both fantasies and fears about virality itself, about mass cultural production and consumption in the digital age, in a manner very different to when a tulpa first trended in an X Files ‘monster of the week’ episode in 1999.

As an anthropologist doing research on both contemporary Tibetan societies and contemporary Western esotericism it’s naturally tempting for me to jump in and offer my own two cents about what a tulpa ‘really’ is. Rather than only focus on what distinguishes different kinds of tulpa though, I also want to pause and reflect on what they might have in common. In Monday’s new X Files episode FBI agent Fox Mulder offers a rejoinder to his own previous take on Tibetan tulpas from the earlier episode in the franchise. This recent episode’s presentation (which I discuss more fully below) confirms my suspicions that Tibetan and non-Tibetan tulpas alike can offer equally rich material for thinking about topics like the popularizing and secularizing of esoteric knowledge, mass mediation and collective affect, and the policing of the imagination and the ‘imaginary’.

So if tulpas aren’t exactly Tibetan, what are Tibetan tulpas? To her credit, even if her presentation of tulpas was idiosyncratic, hybrid or misleading, in addition to describing her own experiments, David-Neel did discuss many of the broader connotations of tulpa in Tibetan contexts. While there are no explicit instructions in Tibetan tantric Buddhism for ‘manifesting a tulpa’, various advanced meditative practices do exist which involve intensive concentration on and visualization of imagined entities. The ‘dream yoga’ practices that fall under the umbrella of the ‘Six Dharmas of Naropa’ in particular involve training in the intentional production of mental forms while in a lucid dream-state, and the the so-called ‘generation’ or ‘creation’ stage (bsked rim) of Tibetan tantric yogas requires the meditator to imagine, call upon and then ‘animate’ various yidams (yid dam) or ‘mind-bound’ meditational deities so as to draw near to them, experience them and attain their blessings. Accordingly, both Tibetan Buddhists and Western occultists have argued that yid dam represent a better analog for Western esotericists’ and tulpamancers’ ideas about sentient mental entities than the actual Tibetan word sprul pa.

One commentator on a Reddit tulpa feed who identified themself as a longstanding practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism celebrates what tulpamancers are doing, and points out that their practices are “all very much in line with the spiritual ‘development’ stages in Tibetan Buddhism’. “Tulpa is an accurate description of these daemons” (i.e. Yidams) the poster says. Yet another practitioner of both Western ceremonial magic and Tibetan Buddhism called Kalagni, taking a more exasperated tone and reiterating Mikles and Laycock’s misgivings about David-Neel’s presentation of tulpa, explains in a blog post entitled “Tulpa: Not What You Think” that “a tulpa is something used all the time in Vajrayana (i.e. Tibetan tantric) Buddhism, though the word is almost never used.” This poster equates tulpas with the dam tshig sems dpa’ or ‘tantric vow/commitment being’, an imagined, inner form of the tantric meditational deity into which the ye shes sems dpa’ (or gnosis-being), the actual deity itself, is invited.

Despite these comparisons, tulpamancers’ use of tulpas as friends, companions, confidants and psycho-therapeutic tools has next to nothing in common with the specifics of yid dam and their complex role in Tibetan culture and tantric Buddhist soteriology. For the most part, online tulpamancers are not Tibetan, are not converts to Tibetan religions, and are not necessarily particularly informed about or even interested in Tibet and its cultural practices either. Yet despite this, and non-Tibetan blogger Kalagni’s claim that the Tibetan word sprul pa is not widely used or known by Tibetans, the term sprul pa in fact plays a key role in one of the most important and controversial issues facing Tibetans both inside and outside of Tibet today, namely the question of the current Dalai Lama’s succession.

The Tibetan word sprul pa is generally used to refer to an emanation or magical projection that is sent forth by a Buddha, a Bodhisattva, a god, demi-god, demon, or accomplished yogi to serve some particular mediating function. As a concept, sprul pa is strongly linked to if not synonymous with the term tulku (sprul sku). Sprul sku (a typical Tibetan contraction for sprul pa’i sku gzugs, or ’emanational body’) is the name commonly given to a reincarnate lama, such as the Dalai Lama. High lamas and accomplished yogis like the Dalai Lama are understood to be able to consciously decide when they will die, as well as how (and whether) they will take rebirth in order to help beings. (The current Dalai Lama is not only the re-incarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama, he is also a sprul pa of Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, the Buddha being who according to scripture helped father the Tibetan people via another of his emanational bodies, that of a mild-mannered monkey – see this previous post for more on that story).

‘Sprul sku’ was initially coined as the Tibetan translation for nirmanakaya, a Sanskrit word connected to the Buddhist doctrine of the sku gsum, the three bodies of the Buddha, or three dimensions of existence. This Buddhist ‘Trinity’ provided a way to account for the Buddha’s manifestation within a (seemingly) perishable body, ‘within’ history. It served to explain the relationship between the person of the historical Buddha, the timeless ultimate nature of reality and enlightened mind, and a plethora of a- or trans-historical ‘celestial’ Buddhas and Bodhisattvas which came to feature so strongly in Mahayana Buddhism. Emanation and emanational bodies in Tibetan Buddhism are thus associated with the compassionate agency of higher beings. Emanation is a process of mediation whereby transcendent powers secure beneficial channels for communicating with and acting for the benefit of beings orientated differently in consciousness. Although most strongly associated with enlightened beings, worldly, unrealized beings like mountain gods or even influential human political figures can either send out their own sprul pa or be seen as sprul pa themselves. (A list of political figures recognized as tulpas of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas includes, depending on who you ask, the early Tibetan kings, Bill Clinton and Queen Victoria).

In 2011, in tandem with his devolving of political power to a democratically elected exile prime minister, the Dalai Lama released a public statement where he stressed that the Chinese government had no jurisdiction to interfere in the matter of his succession. In statements over the years, the leader has suggested that given the current political climate in Communist Chinese occupied Tibet, as well as China’s track record of attempting to co-opt identified reincarnate lamas or to install their own substitute candidates, he would most probably reincarnate outside of Chinese territory. In the 2011 statement he also noted that it was completely feasible that his successor could appear via emanation (i.e. sprul pa) and thus be identified before his own death. To clarify this distinction the Dalai Lama quoted the great 19th century Tibetan scholar Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo:

“As Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo stated: “[The reincarnation of a lama] is said to be when they take their rebirth after the bodily display/arrangement of the previous life has dissolved; emanation is the manifesting of other emanations without the (current) emanation-basis having dissolved.””
འཇམ་དབྱངས་མཁྱེན་བརྩེ་དབང་པོས། སྐུ་ཡི་བཀོད་པ་སྔ་མ་བསྡུས་ནས་ཕྱི་མ་བཟུང་བར་སྐྱེ་བ་དང། སྤྲུལ་གཞི་མ་བསྡུས་པར་སྤྲུལ་པ་གཞན་དག་སྟོན་པ་སྤྲུལ་པ་ཞེས་བཞེད། ཅེས་གསུངས།

What this would mean is that the next Dalai Lama would probably be recognized before the current one passes away, and could well be identified as an adult and not a child. This move would strategically cut out the typically unstable interregnum period that normally precedes the successor’s coming of age, and would further exclude Chinese authorities from the succession process. The Dalai Lama also stated that he has decided that when he reaches about 90 years old, he will re-open the question of the future of his lineage (and whether or how he should reincarnate) ‘for discussion by the great lamas of the (various) dharma lineages and the Tibetan people’. The Dalai Lama has thus not only used the creative tension and complexity implicit in the rather recondite relationship between emanations and emanation bodies to his strategic and political advantage, he has also allowed for the possibility that the typically esoteric and private workings of the trained yogi skilled in the practice of conscious transference from one body to the next (‘pho ba) might be submitted for consideration to a wider, vaguely more democratic audience.

To call this a secularization of reincarnation/emanation processes would be wrong-headed. The Dalai Lama himself has stressed that reincarnation is above all else a religious matter. His future referendum is a far cry from the secularizing of reincarnation politics that has taken place in China, where the CCP has required lamas to get bureaucratic permission to reincarnate since 2007 and has just recently set up an online data-base of authentic (state-approved, of course) ‘Living Buddhas’ as part of its regulation and ‘protection’ of the integrity of the faith. The matter of finding the Dalai Lama’s successor will still primarily involve a select group of spiritual detectives – of uniquely qualified Tibetan lamas, deities, and diviners. Still, the Dalai Lama’s statements are at the very least a gesture towards the de-privatizing and democratizing of esoteric emanation procedures typically associated with the inner psychic workings of an individual yogi-transmigrator.

With tulpamancers we see a somewhat different popularizing and secularizing of the esoteric at work. Although tulpamancers acknowledge a split between ‘metaphysical’ and psychological/neurological explanations for tulpas, much of tulpamancer discourse has a decidedly secular flavor. The approaches of today’s tulpamancers undoubtedly owe a lot to earlier developments in Western esotericism, and chaos magic(k) in particular (see here, for example) (In contrast to a lot of tulpamancer methodology, Western magical approaches for making ‘artificial spirits’ have often, although not always, involved the use of sexual fluids and orgasm as part of sex magic practices). An agnostic-experimental orientation to supernatural entities, more ‘science-y’ frameworks for magic, the online dissemination of esoterica, and working with ‘fabricated’ gods and spirits permitted chaos magicians to go beyond the methodologies and religious-moral baggage of more traditional magical systems. Still, despite the precedent set by such ‘post-modern’ occultists, tulpamancers rarely seem to claim that what they are doing is based on particularly specialized esoteric knowledge or access. Just as David-Neel did with her trial-and-error Friar-Tuck-Frankenstein, tulpamancers use whatever concentration and visualization techniques they may have learned in experimental and idiosyncratic ways. No one method works, tulpamancers often say, and firm effort, as well as trusting that producing sentience is possible, are ultimately more important factors than cleaving to any specific approach. Tulpamancers thus present a case of individuals who, though they are not practitioners of spiritual disciplines or members of initiated esoteric lineages, choose to engage in degrees of mental ‘asceticism’ usually associated with these other contexts. More than this, where ritual magicians typically make tulpas (or what are called servitors, thought-forms, bud-wills, psychogones and so on) to fulfill specific magical tasks (and while Tibetan Buddhists visualize yidam as part of specific religious practices), tulpamancers actively distinguish their tulpa companions from what they see as dumb, de-individualized servitor ‘slaves’. Instead, for the most part, tulpamancers describe making tulpas out of curiosity and loneliness, or to bring fictional characters they’d previously imagined as part of personal creative projects to greater life.

In contrast to this picture of individual, focused psychic and affective labor, popular representations often frame tulpas as both unintentional and uncontrollable. Popular media tulpas are powered primarily by collective thought and belief. Appearing unexpectedly and almost too easily, they bring terror and/or murder in their wake. In the 1999 ‘monster of the week’ X-Files episode (“Arcadia”, Season 6, Episode 15) FBI agents Mulder and Scully discover that the president of a plush planned community in California has used Tibetan magic to create a tulpa with which to menace and ultimately murder any resident who fails to abide by his exhaustive list of rules. In an apt embodiment of Kathleen Stewart’s ‘failed miracle’ of American suburbia, the tulpa, taking temporary corporeal form as a vaguely humanoid, living embodiment of the mud and lawns around the gated community, murders its creator, following which it too expires. In an episode of CW’s Supernatural (“Hell House”, Season 1, episode 17), internet users who read stories on a website about a haunted house in Texas, will a ghost from fabricated legend into existence, and this spirit begins to actually murder people in the house in question. In another episode (“Thinman”, Season 9, Episode 15), the show’s protagonists, demon-hunting brothers Dean and Sam, investigate a series of murders that appear to have been perpetrated by the ‘Thinman’, another figure from online urban legend, who the brothers suspect may have been brought to life through focused belief. In the end, they discover that human killers are impersonating the Thinman to perpetuate belief in him.

Supernatural’s Thinman character and his online fans were inspired by the Slender Man, a ‘real-world’ internet bogieman and meme whose mythos has been elaborated extensively via fanfiction, web serials, online games, and other media ever since its first dramatic appearance on a Something Awful forum thread in 2009. Digital folklore relating to the Slender Man includes theories that this tall, faceless entity is in fact a tulpa, created by collective belief. Disturbingly, Supernatural’s Thinman episode weirdly foreshadowed actual events relating to Slender Man that took place in Waukesha, Wisconsin two and a half months after the show aired. On March 31, 2014, two 12 year old girls in Waukesha attempted to stab a 12 year old schoolmate to death as a sacrifice to Slender Man. The two girls, who had read about Slender Man on the horror short-story site Creepypasta.com, said they hoped that this act would not only impress Slender Man and allow them to serve as his ‘proxies’, but would also convince skeptics that the being was real. The attempted murder saw a spate of commentary on the influence of the internet and popular culture on child psychology. Retired FBI agent John Egelhof, for example, opined that the internet had become a ‘blackhole’ of sinister influences and urged parents to better surveil and control their children’s browsing habits.

Contemporary descriptions of tulpas draw on a wide-ranging archive of ideas and images relating to human consciousness, creativity, and the paranormal. They hover in the grey areas between fantasy and reality, legend and fact, juvenile and adult affinities, and individual, ‘inner’ experience and mass-mediated culture. In being popularized, tulpas have come to embody the mysteries and dangers of popularism itself, of collective belief, mass-attention and virtual mediation. To put a twist on the old anthropological chestnut, ‘the tulpa is good to think with – and not good to think too much about’. As Mikles and Laycock note, tulpa-theory ‘para-normalizes’ cultural explanations for paranormal trends. Rather than explaining away the persistance of particular paranormal phenomena, consensual belief becomes the magic itself. Tulpas both provide an ‘answer’ to the recursivity of reality and representation, to the circularity of cultural influence (culture-produces-thought-produces-culture?) and float like an uneasy question mark over ever-fidgety boundaries between inside and out, self and other.

Tulpas of whatever variety point primarily to issues of mediation, affect and imagination. The Chinese Communist Party seeking to regulate ‘illusionary’ processes of emanational manifestation – illusory both in the official atheist sense of ‘not really, but culturally true’ and in the ‘impermanent forms as magical display’ Buddhist one; parents and lawmakers fretting over the migration of concepts and images from computer screens, through their children’s minds out into the world – each represent attempts to police the imaginary, to regulate, channel and contain collective affect and its powers. As William Mazzarella has recently shown, classic anthropological thinking about magic lends itself especially well to theorising mass media and censorship (indeed, the sympathies between ’emanations’, new technologies and magic are suggested by sprul itself, whose related form ‘phrul appears in Tibetan in words to do with ‘supernatural’ magic, legerdemain, machines and technology). In lines to make any sorceror proud, Mazzarella defines the ‘mana of mass publicity’ as being about “strategically deployed constitutive resonance via a magnetizer that may or may not be human – and who may or may not become a fetish – that is to say, come to embody the charismatic source of that resonance. The substance is our collective mimetic archive: the residue, embedded not only in the explicity articulated forms commonly recognized as cultural discourses, but also in our built environment and our material forms, in the concrete history of our senses, and in the habits of our shared embodiment.”

Tulpa could be said to partake of these processes. Concerns about the regulating of the ‘imaginary’, about censorship and violence, fears and fantasies about the private becoming public, about being watched and influenced by shadowy others shaped in our own image, about the dark recesses of cyberspace, speak to Mazzarella’s ideas about the mana of mass publicity as something ‘extimate’ in the Lacanian sense. “The other is something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me”, the French psychoanalyst tells us. This tension is as present for Tibetans orientating their sense of individual being-in-the-world in relation to the emanated form of a reincarnate lama-cum-national hero as it is for tulpamancers, whose mental companions are at once intensely intimate and in need of constant investment and care, yet live beyond them in the virtual spaces of the imagination and online and journalistic mediation.

To say that tulpamancers, the X Files and Adventure Time have ‘secularized’ the esoteric is perhaps somewhat misleading. As Lancaster University sociologist Christopher Partridge has observed, the popularization of magic and occultism is arguably as much about the sacralization or re-enchantment of the contemporary as about the secularizing of time-honoured esoteric traditions. As Patridge has argued recently, since the 1960s we have witnessed a global situation where the occult is no longer truly ‘hidden’, where the meaning of ‘privileged’ or ‘initiated’ knowledge has shifted. As Partridge puts it “(global) society is witnessing a confluence of secularization and sacralization, at the heart of which is the deceptively influential (concept of) ‘occulture'”. For Patridge, occulture refers to the particular environments in which ideas relating to the occult, the esoteric, and the conspiratorial emerge, are disseminated, and become influential. Today, pop culture is both an agent and a site for occultural discourse.

With the turn away from organized religiosity and ‘traditional modes of authority’, spirituality has come to replace religion as a category of choice in post-industrial, affluent, information-rich contexts. It is not so much then, that as Weber predicted, modernity means less religious societies, but that today the sacred is differently positioned and enacted. For the demographics most interested in tulpamancy, reliance on organized religion has been replaced by increased investment in personal experience and authority. The contemporary pursuit of illuminated knowledge, of human self-actualization, transformation, or gnosis, while driven by an interest in transcendence, nonetheless also ties into neo-liberal forms of affect and production. This turn to and sacralization of the self is predicated on post-industrial values, on having the time, money and wherewithal to focus on self-exploration, on the construction of new selves. The popularizing of discourse about tulpas exemplifies Patridge’s argument about occulture being both ordinary and everyday. While the broader public (or tulpamancers for that matter) may not necessarily credit occultists’ claims about tulpas, the dissemination of these can influence new patterns of thought and behavior. Previously, in my discussion of Tibetan singing bowls, I likened the rapid back-and-forth between the popular and the esoteric to ‘resonating feedback loops’. By being turned on through popular dissemination to potentially more initiated esoteric material, occultural consumers can do further research, only to subsequently re-project their new understandings and ideas yet again into the popular domain. In the 1990s Buffy the Vampire Slayer dramatized (and normalized) modern witchcraft. Encouraged by such popular representation, teenagers sought out real-world information on witchcraft, and became witches themselves. They then went on to produce their own expert and emic knowledge, knowledge that continues to inform contemporary popular representations as much as ethnographic ones. Adventure Time’s representations of tulpas may yet lead viewers to read up on or even practice tulpamancy. Popular culture animates occult and esoteric ideas, Partridge says, and here it does so literally.

Stories about the Thinman as Slender Man, Slender Man as tulpa, about the made-up ghost called Philip paranormal experimenters imagined into wider circulation in the 70s, capture the allure and alarm of trying to study and categorize the charged spaces of urban legend and conspiracy theory, of dream-made-flesh. They alert us to the difficulties of tracking trajectories of affect and attention in the digital age, of capturing the virtual and imaginary ethnographically . As Kathleen Stewart says so nicely in Ordinary Affects, writing about affect and urban legends, “scenes of public attention routinely drift over the fence of official news into eccentric circulation”. Arguments for my clairvoyant abilities aside, Monday’s episode of the X Files brings her poetic insights to life.

In “Home Again” agents Mulder and Scully investigate a series of murders connected to the forcible removal of homeless people and the gentrification of urban neighbourhoods in Philadelphia. We learn that, as IndieWire’s reviewer sums it up “Scully’s mom died. It was sad. A trash Golem murdered a bunch of not-great people. Mulder and Scully hugged some and talked about the baby they gave up for adoption. Again, it was sad.” This ‘trash golem’, a malodorous spirit avenger for the homeless who travels in a garbage truck and tears apart city officials, art thieves, and school board presidents, is called the ‘Band-aid nose man’, and turns out to have been conjured up by the angry creative impulses of a Banksy-esque graffiti artist and activist known by the tag ‘Trashman’. As details about the killings unfold, we are treated to an at times painfully forced overlaying of the Band-aid nose man plot with Scully’s experiences dealing with the death of her mother and her guilt and regret about giving up her and Mulder’s son for adoption.Towards the climax of the episode, the agents discover Trashman’s hide-out. After a brief run in with some ‘glitchy’ tulpas, they break into the Trashman’s dark basement studio, where a clay and trash bag sculpture of the Band-aid nose man is housed. The Trashman, after telling the agents that guns won’t work on the spirits and that “if they don’t see me and I don’t see them they can’t hurt me”, offers the following diatribe:

Trashman: (pontificating, looking Banksy-esque, surrounded by stencils, art supplies and  candles) The streets, the homeless, the street people, they ain’t got no voice, right? They get treated like trash- I mean, actual trash. It’s like this: you throw your grande cup, or your pop barn in the right trash been under the sink, recycling is here, there, you tie it in a bag, you take it out, put it in the right dumpsters, you pat yourself on the head, you are a good person, yeah? You do the good thing, you fuck all the women, you love all the little animals. Friday come, Wednesday maybe, guys will come to take the trash away, it’s not your problem anymore. Magic! But it is your problem-because it piles up in a landfill, and plastic leaks toxins into the water and the sky, but if you don’t see a problem there is no problem. People treat people like trash.

Mulder then asks if the Trashman was responsible for the killings.

Trashman: Nah, I was just trying to give those people voice, the only way I know how. Through art. Not violence. Something I could put around town, so it wouldn’t be forgotten. A stencil that looked over the bad suit building man, looked down on the long nosed suburban lady.

Mulder: Well, why’d you put up the art after the fact, the morning of Cuttler’s murder?

Trashman: I didn’t… That… That wasn’t me.I only thought em up, you know? Those people that got killed, that was only him.

Mulder: Him? Who’s him?

Trashman: You saw those things in the hall…(referring to the glitchy vanishing-and-reappearing monsters that walked blindly past the agents and into a wall)

Mulder: Yeah.

Trashman: I made them. I didn’t mean to, but I made ’em. They’ll go away eventually, they’re fading. But the Band aid nose man (pointing at sculpture, zoom in, ominous music) He’s different. (Cut to Scully). (Glibly now) Tibetan Buddhists call’em a tulpa, a thought form, using mind and energy to will consciousness (now placing hands on bald, tattooed head) into existence.

Mulder: Tulpa is a 1929 Theosophist mis-translation of the Tibetan word Tulku meaning ‘a manifestation body’. There is no idea in Tibetan Buddhism of a ‘thought-form’ or ‘thought-as-form’ and a realized Tulku would never harm anyone let alone kill.

Trashman: Ok. But I’m telling you. I spend a lot of energy in my art. I uh meditated on it. I willed it. (Flashback to Trashman sketching). What I wanted him to look like, what I wanted him to be, and why I wanted him (Scully’s flashback of her own labour) I didn’t bring him here, he came to me! (Scully stares into the distance, hallucinates a baby mobile, Scully’s baby in crib crying) But in the end, he told me what he wanted to be. All we do is hold the pencil, all we do is hold the clay. I think there must be spirits or souls, (Over-the-shoulder shot of Trashman sketching the Band-aid nose man), floating all around us. And if you think real hard, and you want them so bad (Mulder and Scully cradling their crying baby) they come to you, and then they become alive with a life of their own. (Scully’s mother’s death scene, Scully crying, “Our son, I gave him up!”) This, this is what came to me, in my dreams, or some other place, yeah? But now it’s alive, and it’s out there, down to the band-aid I used to hold the clay in place. Who would copy this? And did you smell that? That smells like nothing on this earth. It has its own life, it does what it wants. I just want to scare ’em, scare anyone that took the [indistinct] away from the homeless, that’s when the violent idea popped in my head. It was just an emotion that ran through my head. An idea is dangerous, even a small one, but now it uses that violent idea (close up on Scully, overcome). He thinks that’s what he is supposed to do.

Scully: (At last speaking up, in a revelatory tone) You’re responsible! (Trashman looks quizzically at Mulder) If you made the problem, if it was your idea, then you’re responsible. You put it out of sight so that it wouldn’t be your problem (whether talking to him or herself unclear) but you’re just as bad as the people that you hate.

Here Mulder’s objection is a little over-zealous. As we have seen, there ARE Tibetan tulpas. Even if they aren’t born of angsty art and don’t ride around in trash vans, they are nonetheless manifestations of yogis’, gods’ and lamas’ focused intention. What is interesting however, is how “Home Again”‘s update of its own tulpa discourse speaks to a current occultural moment. Whereas the tulpa of 1999’s ‘Arcadia’ embodied the contradictions and sublimated desires of a suburban elite, 2016’s incarnation is a truly popular tulpa, a champion of the unwashed masses, of the victims of gentrification who live beyond insular, gated worlds of privilege. Made of and for human waste, Band-aid nose man is the hero in a modern-day cautionary tale about commoditized attention, dehumanization and issues of climate and urban change denialism that are global in scope. Moreover, an increase in the circulation and availability of information about both tulpa creation and Tibetan Buddhism has conspired to give us a wiser, more cautious Mulder. Whereas in 1999, Mulder could gloss a tulpa as “a Tibetan thought-form…a living, breathing creature willed into existence by someone who possesses that ability”, now in 2016 he refutes his own earlier claims as simplistic and misinformed. Whereas in 1999 Mulder is required merely to cite exotic esoteric ideas to make sense of the supernatural, in 2016 his paranormal expertise rests on being able to critically evaluate and even refute ’emic’ claims.

Mapping occultural, popular flows is challenging work. As Patridge has noted, by the time we scholars research, write and disseminate our reifications of pop occultural phenomena we are already out of date. Reddit and Facebook users have beat me to discussing and dissecting Monday’s X Files episode. Back-and-forths happen faster than can be tracked, let alone academically digested. And yet I believe that at least attempting to digest such flows is important. Tulpamancers, modern occultists, the representatives of affluent, information rich, self-oriented societies on which Partridge focuses may all be motivated by very different interests and problems to Tibetan refugees. And yet in today’s more informed milieu, dialogues between traditions and the shifting between vocabularies and frameworks is ongoing and complex. Trashman may not be sure or persuasive about the Tibetan-ness of his creations (or that tulpas are even ‘creations’ at all), but he knows what has worked and what he has experienced. Likewise, whether or not Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhists know or care about Western-style tulpas they too can access and contribute to discussions about them. Both occultists and non-occultists watch Adventure Time’s casual invocations of Aleister Crowley’s esoteric religion, both Tibetans and non-Tibetans watch its sneaky references to esoteric Buddhist concepts like the ‘rainbow body’ (‘ja’ lus).

In yet another example of reverberating feed-back loops, professional writer and sorcerer Jason Miller, who is an initiate of both Western and Tibetan Buddhist esoteric lineages, recently discussed with me a chapbook he is preparing on tulpa creation. Jason is well aware that ‘tulpa’ means something very different in Tibetan contexts compared to non-Tibetan ones. Yet as he explained to me, his book is based on the premise: “Tulpas dont work like that…. But what if they did? How WOULD Tibetans do such a thing?” By drawing on his familiarity with multiple ritual-meditative traditions, Jason has developed approaches to making Western magic-style ‘thought forms’ or servitors that draw inspiration from Tibetan Mahayoga bskyed rim structures without claiming to be synonymous with or equivalent to them. This kind of informed syncretism, like 2016’s Mulder, is arguably a product of a different, ‘wiser and more cautious’ moment, a time of greater information and greater discernment than David-Neel’s own period. It remains to be seen how much a new generation of Tibetans may engage with occultural discourses around tulpas. In the end, cultural production itself, like tulpas and magical emanations, appears solid and graspable one minute and mutates the next. And like all magical and phantasmagoric things, it can appear alternatively terrifying, absurd, or beautiful depending on how you look.

Lal had experimented with playing a variety of metal singing bowls – i.e. with making them ‘sing’ by striking their sides and then running a padded pestle or mallet around their rim to produce a sustained ringing sound. As he explained in his 2012 PhD thesis, such musical experiments helped him realize that, if properly arranged, tiny, resonating singing bowl-shaped solar cells could do with light what their larger cousins did with sound, and therefore maximize light-energy conversion. (Well, actually what he said was more like this:

“This thesis explores the use of plasmonic nanovoids for enhancing the efficiency of thin-film solar cells. Devices are fabricated inside plasmonically resonant nanostructures, demonstrating a new class of plasmonic photovoltaics. Novel cell geometries are developed for both organic and amorphous silicon solar cell materials…A four-fold enhancement of overall power conversion efficiency is observed in organic nanovoid solar cells compared to flat solar cells. The efficiency enhancement is shown to be primarily due to strong localised plasmon resonances of the nanovoid geometry, with close agreement observed between experiment and theoretical simulations. Ultrathin amorphous silicon solar cells are fabricated on both nanovoids and randomly textured silver substrates. Angle-resolved reflectance and computational simulations highlight the importance of the spacer layer separating the absorbing and plasmonic materials. A 20% enhancement of cell efficiency is observed for nanovoid solar cells compared to flat, but with careful optimisation of the spacer layer, randomly textured silver allows for an even greater enhancement of up to 50% by controlling the coupling to optical modes within the device.”

…but you get the idea).

That modern nano-‘photo-voltaic’ technology could meet the ancient, ritual technology of Tibetan Buddhism and be enhanced in the encounter captured commentators’ fancy. One website devoted to news about meditation and alternative health wondered how Lal had first been exposed to Tibetan singing bowls, and whether he himself practiced any form of meditation or spirituality. While Lal does not elaborate on either of these questions in his thesis, he does note that singing bowls are “used by monks in the mountains of Nepal and Tibet as an aid to meditation.” He gives no references for these points, but if reporting on his work is anything to go by, the claim that metallic bowls have been used by Tibetan Buddhist monastics for centuries as musical instruments and ritual tools would seem to be widely accepted and generally known. To be sure, metal bowls and strikers of all shapes and sizes grace Tibetan refugee stalls, curio shops and New Age boutiques the world over. Here in McLeod Ganj, India, the Tibetan capital-in-exile, you can’t swing a prayer wheel without hitting a singing bowl for sale. A significant industry exists around the power of the bowls, and singing bowl sound healing masters today provide treatments, offer workshops, record CDs, and conduct live performances in countries all over the world. The association of resonant bowls with spirituality, and with Tibetan and/or Buddhist spirituality in particular, would seem to be firmly established.

As it turns out though, singing bowls’ supposed antiquity and Tibetan-ness is rather contentious. Academic consensus is that the ‘Tibetan’ singing bowl is a thoroughly modern and Western invention, and that singing bowls are really not Tibetan at all. Perhaps the easiest way to appreciate this (to return to my earlier Dad joke) is by noting that while there is indeed a Tibetan term for both standing and hand-held prayer wheels (maNi ‘khor lo/lag ‘khor) no specific term for ‘singing bowl’ exists in Tibetan. Standing or ‘resting’ bells – unsuspended bells that face upwards and which lack an interior clapper – exist throughout Buddhist Asia and have often served as temple gongs and as devices for marking the break between sessions in ritual or meditative activities (the Tibetan ritual bell or dril bu, a fixture of tantric Buddhist rites, often serves a similiar function). Tibetans have made various kinds of bowls (phor pa) for centuries, which they have used for storage, eating and drinking, and as containers for offerings on altars. Tibetans also make use of a number of traditional musical instruments for both religious and recreational purposes, and in both monastic and non-monastic ritual contexts the chanting of prayers and mantras is accompanied by the chiming, clashing, blasting, and beating of a vast array of specially-designed ritual instruments. Yet, as historian of Tibet Tsering Shakya has confirmed in no uncertain terms, there remains no credible historical evidence for Tibetans ever having used ‘resonating’ metallic bowls in any way that resembles how they are employed by self-avowed sound and ‘vibrational’ healers today.

So where does the idea of singing bowls’ Tibetan-ness come from then? Singing bowls don’t even get a mention in either Donald Lopez or Peter Bishop’s classic treatments of Tibet in the Western imagination. The bowls do however appear in Martin Brauen’s comprehensive survey of Western fantasies about Tibet, ‘Dreamworld Tibet/Western Illusions’ (2004). In contrast to the meticulous detail with which Brauen traces the origins of a host of other fantastical things connected to Tibet though, his comments on singing bowls are surprisingly brief and vague:

“A special category of such Dharma products is constituted by the allegedly Tibetan ‘singing’ bowls’, which have nothing to do with Tibet. They are metal bowls from North India or Nepal, originally food bowls, which have a beautiful tone, but are no more sacred objects than Western crystal glasses are musical instruments – despite the beautiful tone one can elicit from them by proper treatment.”

Some pages later, in a caption under a picture of some singing bowls, Brauen re-iterates that the bowls are neither ‘Tibetan’ nor ‘ritual’ in origin and proposes that their beautiful tone “was recognized one day by a clever businessman” and that it is since then – whenever then was – that “the bowls have been marketed as Tibetan ritual objects.” Overall, while scholars seem sure that Tibetan singing bowls are ‘made up’ no one seems to be able to account for exactly how the association between Himalayan serving dishes and super special spirituality actually happened. The history of the singing bowl as a commodity and sacred object has yet to be written. While researchers have studied the unique acoustic qualities of singing bowls and designed digital algorythms modelled on these  and professional counsellors and therapists have investigated the bowls’ effectiveness as aids for inducing relaxation and ‘mindfulness’, little academic research has been conducted on the social lives of these objects, and the myriad ways in which a wide variety of alternative health and spirituality practitioners are making use of them.

In the interests of encouraging further and fuller inquiry, I will offer some preliminary reflections in this post. How has the idea that the singing bowl comprises some kind of ‘secret technology’ developed, how has it been justified and elaborated? What can a magic dinner dish teach us about the role of (im)materiality in religious practice, or the relative importance of ‘traditional knowledge’ and experience in practitioners’ lives? Virtually every instructional guide on singing bowls I have come across claims for the bowls an ancient and (to at least a certain extent) Tibetan or Himalayan origin. There is a discernible pattern in much of this literature. Authors are faced with a central conundrum or dissonance. On the one hand, they know that Tibetans (and other intermediaries like Nepalis) are making these bowls and selling them along with padded mallets to foreigners as musical instruments. On the other hand, it’s also quite clear to most authors that Tibetans’ relationship to the bowls as cultural objects is different from their own.

One can often observe this dynamic unfolding in real-time. Recently, for example, I happened to be loafing in a Tibetan curio store in McLeod Ganj when an elderly tourist from what may have been Spain walked in. The partially-dreadlocked, partially-shaved haired, shawl-laden woman picked up a large singing bowl from the assortment on display and addressed the middle-aged Tibetan refugee lady who was processing customers that day. “This bowl, what chakra is it? What chakra is this bowl for?” asked the tourist in English, with some difficulty. The Tibetan shop assistant squinted at her. Having only limited English herself, she turned to a young Tibetan who was in the store at the time and said in Tibetan, “What did she say?”. “She asked which ‘chakra’ this bowl is,” the younger mediator said, saying the word ‘chakra’ in English. “I don’t know about that! Tell her it’s good quality, it’s made from many different metals, that’s what they say.” The young Tibetan relayed this and demonstrated playing the bowl as the Spanish woman deliberated. After some discussion about prices, the tourist declared that she would come back later. After she had left I went to the clerk and asked her in Tibetan, “What was that woman saying, about ‘chakras’? These bowls, how must one use them? Tibetans don’t normally use them, do they?”. “I don’t know,” the woman said, “I don’t know about all that.” “Maybe it’s something to do with white-people religion,” I volunteered. She merely shrugged.

Singing bowl enthusiasts typically state that the bowls are shrouded in secrecy. It is not uncommon for them to acknowledge that (as is in fact the case) no written records exist for the bowls’ use and that Tibetans deny doing anything with metal bowls other than putting stuff in or eating out of them. Authors often recount how they have tried – sometimes for years – to elicit further information about the bowls’ history and use from Tibetans. Tibetans’ silence or disavowals of knowledge are interpreted in three typical ways: 1) the Tibetans to which the author spoke were not privy to the deepest secrets of their own culture, and therefore unable or unqualified to speak 2) These Tibetans had forgot or lost the secret knowledge of which the bowls are a part or 3) These Tibetans are hiding something, guarding their knowledge from prying outsiders or for fear of persecution by ‘orthodox’ Buddhist authorities. The bowls’ physical ubiquity, their self-evident ordinariness thus contrasts with the depth and opaqueness of the secret histories and science that they are supposed to embody. Singing bowl enthusiasts seem unwilling to allow for the possibility that singing bowls’ resonant properties are incidental. The absence of credible information or proof of the bowls’ use in Tibet only goes to confirm for them the incredible secrecy and integrity of the ancient oral tradition that they insist lies behind the bowls’ mundane exterior.

The idea of the ‘secret’ and esoteric is thus a crucial component in the mythic histories and charisma that has been built up around the bowls. Sound therapist Kathleen Humphries’ work exemplifies this pattern. She acknowledges that singing bowls are not mentioned in any written scriptural or historical source, and notes that historical and contemporary evidence points to them being used as dining utensils and for offerings. Yet the odd fact that singing bowls aren’t used in ‘official Buddhist rituals’ only seems to convince Humphries of their original association with healing and consciousness-alteration. Relying on popular conceptions of ‘shamanism’ as a kind of pan-human, ur-religion, Humphries accepts fellow practitioner Jansen’s claim that there existed an ancient lineage of metal-working shamans who passed the secrets of their sound-based spirituality down through the centuries. For Humphries the silence and apparent ignorance of the native must point to more profound, even dangerous truths:

“…If these bowls were actually created by travelling metal smiths or by the shamans themselves, and they were secretly used in monasteries, there must be reasons for individuals to keep quiet about their shaman uses of the bowls; it is no wonder that many times when asked about these singing bowls, everyone answers with ‘I don’t know’ or simply describes them as mere eating bowls…[I]t is not unnatural for the individuals to deny owning singingbowls because this automatically ties them to shamanistic rituals. Nevertheless, many people own singing bowls in the Himalayas and secretly use them in their rituals. A common reason given for people owning these bowls is that they are simply dishes used for display in the household. It may be of [sic] that these bowls are not used in official Buddhist rituals because they simply do not want to be categorized as participating in a shaman practice. Thus, there can be several reasons as to why singing bowls are not created in the original technique for the past forty years. If the bowls were actually produced to serve the purpose of an eating dish, then they would have been replaced by China and other materials that are easier to clean than metal. If the bowls were originally produced for the purpose of sacrificial dishes, then they are not produced the same today due to the Chinese invasion of Tibet. With the destruction of many monasteries in Tibet, the demand for sacrificial dishes has come to a halt. Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that singing bowls were indeed created for the sole purpose of usage in shamanistic rituals.”

Practitioners also commonly appeal to the bowls’ innate, material properties as proof of their undeniable connection to an ancient and advanced secret science. The ‘beautiful tones’ Brauen describes could not be incidental – only something intended to be used for sacred purposes (something intelligently designed, if you will) could produce such pure and profound sounds or effects. The idea of a lost sound-based technology and its connection to material culture has received elaborate treatment in amateur, psychic archeologist and speculative historian Andrew Collins’ work. In his ‘Gods of Eden’, Collins proposes that Biblical and extra-Biblical accounts of the ‘Sons of God’ inter-breeding with the ‘Daughters of Man’ to produce an ancient race of hybrid angel-human giants (cf. Gen. 6:4) refer to literal historical events involving a physical race of advanced beings who Collins credits with building virtually all of the great stone monuments of the ancient world. This mysterious, pale-skinned, snake-eyed, god-like civilization did this, Collins explains, through a now largely lost sonic technology, by means of which they were able to levitate and dematerialize heavy stone blocks. Collins suggests that this science of sound was briefly resurrected and unsuccessfully popularized by largely discredited American inventor John Ernst Worrell Keely (1837-1898) who claimed to have discovered a new ‘etheric’, ‘harmonic’ or ‘vibratory’ force with which he could power various devices.

In addition to drawing on Keely’s legacy and mythological anecdotes from around the ancient world, Collins also cites two separate eye-witness accounts from a Swedish and Austrian traveler who are supposed to have watched Tibetan monks in pre-occupation Tibet use sound and harmonic resonance to levitate objects. The text from which Collins cites, a book by Swedish airplane designer Henry Kjellson published in 1961 is rich in detail – the account from the Swede Dr Jarl, who supposedly witnessed a whole assembly of drumming and trumpet-playing monks levitate a large stone block from a meadow to the top of a cliff 250 meters high, is replete with specific numbers and measurements, and is accompanied by various precise diagrams drawn by Kjellson. Nonetheless, there is no evidence that either Jarl or the Austrian explorer Linauer ever existed, and some of the details Kjellson reproduces – such as the fact that Dr Jarl travelled to Tibet at the behest of a high-ranking lama whom he had befriended when they studied together at Oxford in the 1930s – are impossible, since the first Tibetan to ever enroll at Oxford did so only in 1963. Nevertheless, Collins attempts (unsuccessfully) to levitate and/or dissolve stone himself by copying the details left behind by Kjellson and Keely. Somewhat ironically, he makes use of singing bowls in his experiments, despite the fact that the bowls are not mentioned in either of Kjellson’s (probably fictional) reports.

The idea that Tibetans may have actually possessed some secret science of sound is also present in the work of the somewhat more credible (and at least actually historically existant) French-Belgian anarchist-feminist-opera-singing-esotericist-explorer Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969). Although David-Neel was initially influenced by Theosophical (mis)representations of Tibet, she nonetheless did actually travel to and live in various parts of Tibet and the Buddhist Himalayas for varying periods between 1912 and 1946, during which time she received instruction in esoteric Buddhism from a number of actual lamas. In her book ‘Tibetan Journey’ (republished as ‘Tibet: Bandits, Priests and Demons’) David-Neel devotes several pages to an incident that took place during a visit to a Bonpo temple in the province of Kham, Eastern Tibet. This anecdote is frequently mentioned by singing bowl enthusiasts today, and has helped promote the idea that singing bowls’ esoteric technology can be traced back to Tibet’s supposedly shamanistic pre-Buddhist religion Bön.

In an episode that David-Neel calls ‘the mystery of the shang’, she describes how, drawn by the sounds of drumming, she walked in on two Bönpo lamas conducting a rite in a dimly-lit temple. Several of her porters had also wandered into the building, and one of these proceeds to accidentally knock over a low table which he fails to see in the half-light. The crash of the table and the porter’s cursing disturbs the officiants, and one of the two lamas demands very shortly (and impolitely) that the offendor leave. The porter, who David-Neel describes as a low-order ‘skeptic’ who had been influenced by Nationalist Chinese-style secularism, resents being spoken to in this way and refuses to go. When the lama insists that he not come near the magical diagram or mandala (dkyil ‘khor) over which he and his colleague are praying, the porter begins to yell at the priest and dismiss his rituals as nonsense. The porter grows more and more angry, but when he attempts to rush forward to attack the lama and destroy his offerings, the lama seizes a nearby shang (gshang, a kind of Bönpo flat ritual bell) and shakes it vigorously. David-Neel explains what happens next:

“An extraordinary sound, made of a thousand unloosed cries, filled the hall with a surge of tumultous vibrations and pierced through my brain. The scoffing peasant gave a cry. I saw him recoil violently, with his arms outstretched before him, as if to thrust back some terrifying apparition.

“Go away,” the lama repeated again.

The other men hastened to their comrade’s aid, and they all left the temple in a great state of agitation.

Dung! Dung! continued the placid drum, quietly marking time for the soft chanting of the Bonpo, who once more sat in front of the kyilkhor.”

Perplexed, David-Neel follows the men outside and quizzes them about what happened. The villainous porter, shaken, claims that ‘a serpent of fire’ had come out of the shang when the lama shook it. His companions, though they saw no such apparition, claim to have seen lights flash from the instrument. David-Neel for her part denies having seen anything and claims the porter must have been dreaming, but since she still felt something peculiar, she goes back inside to the lama and asks him about what happened. The lama ultimately explains that the shang sounded to her and appeared to the others as it did because of the ‘power of the zungs (magic word)’ that he had skilfully chanted while shaking it. In this, and a future conversation, he briefly schools David-Neel in Bönpo cosmology and theories of sound and reality. “Sound produces forms and beings, sound animates them,” he tells her. Describing himself as a ‘master of sound’, he demonstrates his power of magical sonic projection once more by producing a stunningly harmonious sound for David-Neel with his shang. “By sound I can kill that which lives and restore to life that which is dead,” he says. He explains that, all things, inanimate or animate, have a signature, albeit changing sound. Being ‘aggregates of atoms (rdul phra)’ that ‘dance’ all things are capable of emitting sounds. He describes how matter was created through the sound emitted by the primordial ‘wind’ that formed the whirling, singing crossed-dorjes or swastikas (rgya gram) that are the primordial basis of all form. A saint with power (grub thob) can therefore manipulate the subtle and gross forms that arise through sound, by means of sound, for both creative and destructive ends.

While scholars have by now problematized Bon’s conflation with ‘shamanism’ David-Neel’s anecdote lends substance to practitioners’ claims that singing bowls’ sonic technologies are both pre-Buddhist and potentially dubious to Buddhist orthodoxy (it is true after all that Tibetan Buddhists have periodically demonized Bön). Tibetans themselves have sometimes stereotyped Bönpos as skilled, if disreputable sorcerors, and various esoteric ruminations on the nature of sound do exist in Bönpo tradition, much of which parallels similar ideas found in Tibetan Buddhism. As historian of Tibet Dan Martin notes, there is a long-standing association between sound and the Buddha’s teachings, and prominent Tibetan religious authorities such as Je Tsongkhapa and Drakpa Gyeltsen have written treatises on the theological significance of the Tibetan tantric bell (dril bu), whose shape and sound alike signify the Emptiness that rests at the heart of all phenomena. And yet – a shang, a dril bu or a rkang gling are not a singing bowl. So how did this specific shape and sound become so associated with Tibet and powerful, secret knowledge?

Robert Beer, a scholar of Tibetan music and iconography, supplies a useful, more visually-based clue for understanding singing bowls’ emergence. Discussing the iconographic conventions used in Tibetan religious art for depicting sensory offerings (nyer spyod) involving sound, he observes that when gongs are depicted:

“…they are represented as a pair of symmetrical bell metal bowls, with two metal striking sticks placed within them, and cloth rings underneath their bases to sustain their resonance when struck. The Chinese gong (lo) and the Mongolian gong (dudaram) were probably the prototypes of these symbols, which began to appear in later Tibetan art. In the modern mythology of the New Age spiritual movment these gongs have come to be known as ‘Tibetan singing bowls’, and many fantastic tales of occult power have been grafted onto their recent history and innovative techniques of playing. Brass or bronze bowls first began to appear on Tibetan refugee stalls during the 1970’s, but these objects were actually the eating or offering bowls of these impoverished refugees. Over the last few decades, these Tibetan singing bowls have been widely manufactured for the tourist markets of India and Nepal, but stories of their employment in ancient Tibet as mystical musical instruments are a modern myth.”

It’s thus possible that using metallic Himalayan bowls as musical instruments for broadly ‘spiritual’ purposes originated as recently as the late 60s or early 70s. In 1969 two American musicians by the name of Henry Wolff and Nancy Hennings travelled to Nepal, where they interacted with Tibetan refugees and studied with lamas from the Kagyu lineage living in exile. During this time the two became fascinated by traditional Tibetan musical instruments, and began experimenting with playing them in both traditional and non-traditional ways. In 1972 in London they released the first of what would become a series of albums that show-cased their efforts. ‘Tibetan Bells’ featured seven supposedly entirely electronically un-altered tracks that combined the sound of Tibetan dril bu, gongs (rgya rnga) and ting shag (finger cymbals) with tones produced by striking and rubbing metal bowls. Track names like ‘Khumbu Ice-Fall’ (the opening track, listen here), ‘White Light’, ‘Rainbow Light’, ‘Clear Light’ and ‘Wrathful Deity’ directly referenced features of the Himalayas and Tibetan religions.

Amazon.com’s review for the CD-medium digital remastering of the original record, notes that the album “has a quiet & atmospherically psychedelic quality due to the oscillations & extended reverberations of the bells, which would fit in perfectly to a science fiction movie (the music has similarities to the ending sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey).” Reviewer John Diliberto, observing that Tibetan Bells was the “deep chill ambient album of its time” picks up on this theme of the trippy, cosmic and in-human. Sounds conspire together to “orchestrate crystalline echoes of the mind”, tunes, melodies, and vocals are replaced by a “shimmering aurora borealis of sound that’s diaphonous and reverberant, like windows opening up into an altered state of sound.” “Deep gongs call out from a hidden abyss”. If this was indeed (as is apparently the case) the first time that the world was hearing a professional recording of ‘Tibetan’ singing bowls, by all accounts they sounded less like something from another country, and more like something from another planet. In my last post I wrote about Tibetan aliens and sex magic. If these reviews are anything to go by, if Tibetan aliens had a soundtrack it would apparently have to be Tibetan Bells. Music critics at Billboard were equally taken by the album’s unearthly quality. Using language worthy of any sex magic alien cult, reviewers gushed:

“Seminal recording…seemingly emerges out of thin air, untouched by human hands but descended from the heavens. Vital Reissue!”

Amazon.com credits Wolff and Hennings’ album with launching what is now known as ‘new age’ music, what the writer glosses as “the soundscape of a re-invented consciousness.” Crucially then, Tibet (or at least the version of it embodied in the unusual sound of the ‘Tibetan bells’ ) is present at the very birth of the New Age genre, is made to play midwife to the sound-track of ‘spaced out’ East-meets-West fusion. More research is needed to understand how Wolff and Hennings came up with the idea to use Himalayan bowls in this way. It is possible that others were experimenting with making bowls sing before them, something that only further research with surviving members of the original generation of predominantly white Tibetan Buddhist converts and travelers in Nepal – affectionately remembered as the ‘freaks’ – can unconver (it’s doubtful whether interviewing older Tibetan refugees about their memories of the tourist trade pre-1970s would shed much light on this question – many exile Tibetans probably had – and often still have – only the dimmest idea about what Western tourists were doing with the artifacts they sold them). Wolff and Hennings may well have had experience with standing-bells from other Asian contexts (they may have even played the Chinese or Mongolian bowl-gongs Beer mentions). Before the 1970s, Tibetan Buddhism had a very limited institutional or popular presence in the United States. Zen Buddhism however, was far more widespread and established, and it’s thus possible that Wolff and Hennings may have applied the principles of Japanese standing bells they had come across in America to Himalayan bowls they discovered in Nepal.

Wolff and Hennings later performed their music for the previous and 16th Karmapa, a reincarnate lama who is the highest religious authority in the Karma Kagyu lineage. The duo were aware that what they were playing was not traditional, but presented it to their guru anyway as a personal, musical offering. The Karmapa is reported to have said that their music sounded like the ‘music of the Void’, a statement that recalls the classic Buddhist treatments of the relationship between sound and emptiness mentioned above. In the curiously circular way in which these things tend to operate, the Karmapa’s statement is now often mentioned by singing bowl enthusiasts as evidence for the bowls’ profound connections to Tibetan Buddhism and higher truths. But what are the implications of thinking of the ‘cosmic’ tones of singing bowls as ‘the music of Tibet’?

Before Wolff and Hennings debuted the bowls, extant professional recordings of ‘Tibetan music’ were of Tibetan folk music, both lay and monastic. The sound of the bowls, apparently hitherto unheard of, was an open field that took on Tibetan-ness by association, but that was at once both singular and generic enough that it seemed to float free of clear historical or geographical co-ordinates. As with the Tibetan aliens of my last post, the ‘cosmic’ sound of the singing bowl could point to a universalism that transcended specific traditions or cultures – and by extension the priorities or claims of native Tibetans. Wolff and Hennings gesture towards this theme of transcendence and universalism, of Tibet as a bridge to the infinite, in the name for the fourth track on the album ‘From the Roof of the World You Can See Forever’.

As Darinda Congdon notes in her thesis on ‘brand’ Tibet in the New Age music industry in the U.S., sounds like those of singing bowls that reference “New Age representations of Tibet have become a symbol representing Tibet as a whole in America.” This point was brought dramatically home when Miley Cyrus released her fifth studio album for free on Soundcloud at the end of August this year. The album ‘Miley and her Dead Petz’, a minimally produced collaboration with the Flaming Lips, included an interlude track called ‘Miley Tibetan Bowlzzz’. The track lasts for just over two minutes and features Cyrus crooning wordlessly over a backdrop of vibrating singing bowls. The song quickly came to the attention of Tibetans. Choetso Amnyetsang, an exile Tibetan living in America, responded critically to the song on the blog Tibetan Feminist Collective, in a post titled ‘Privileged White Girl Problemzzz’. In her post, Amnyetsang slams Miley for yet another display of insensitive and self-indulgent cultural appropriation:

“Regardless of the significance of and meaning of the singing bowl (which is used in many cultures and often as an object for meditation), the fact that she put “Tibetan” as part of the song title is in itself annoying and unnecessary. That, along with casually referring to it as “bowlzzz’ (oh Miley, how many weed references will we get from you?) is literally the cause of my nightmarish migraines. Some of you may ask, so what?Why can’t she enjoy this part of Tibetan culture? The answer is simply that as a white girl who has used black culture as a prop for her music, she is now also profiting from her appropriation and distortion of Tibetan culture. Salt on a fresh wound, you could say.”

While the sound and use of singing bowls may already be over-determined as an index of white, American privilege (check out this snowy peak whiteness NPR feature if you still don’t believe me), Miley’s appropriation of ‘brand’ Tibet to lend a more spiritual, introspective or psychedelic feel to her album is both predictable and insulting. Amnyetsang continues:

“The truth is I don’t owe anyone an explanation on why it’s not ok to appropriate my culture. As a Tibetan woman, I want my culture to be respected, which I don’t think should be considered too much to ask for. Asking for basic respect towards my culture and community shouldn’t even be necessary and derided as overly sensitive. I am the daughter of refugees who escaped Tibet with absolutely nothing and risked everything to be free from the forces of colonialism and imperialism. My ancestors literally gave their lives to save their families and preserve their cultural legacy without fear of persecution. So, please excuse me if you think I’m being too dramatic about not wanting Miley to use my cultural heritage as another superficial prop to make a tasteless weed joke for her own profit.”

Another exile Tibetan blogger, the anonymous ‘Angry Tibetan Girl’ weighed in too, to note that singing bowls “were never a Tibetan thing” but were “an invention by Newari merchants” intended to be sold to ‘fascinated’ white orientalists. “Now Tibetans sell’m too, orientalism sucks, its slathered on us without our choice, but who said we can’t gain a little from it”? Whatever the origins of singing bowls, they have become an everyday and significant part of the landscape of the Tibetan diaspora. Exile Tibetans may not play or project exactly the same meanings onto the bowls as foreigners but they grow up today surrounded by the bowls, see their parents making, buying and selling them, associate them with offering bowls that are replenished daily on family shrines, and come to perceive them as one item of many from among the rich and sometimes obscure assortment of specialist Tibetan cultural objects that have now become charismatic commodities in an often livelihood-sustaining economy built on foreign curiosity.

Around the same time that the singing bowl industry was taking off, and more bowls with more elaborate painted and engraved Buddhist icons and mantras were emerging in South Asian markets, Austrian anthropologist and practitioner of Hindu tantra Agehananda Bharati coined a term that is useful for understanding singing bowls’  status today. To make sense of the existence and popularity of modern, ‘Western’ forms of yoga in India, Bharati pointed to what he called a ‘pizza effect’. Here, cultural phenomena that are initially from one place get transformed or embraced in another only to be re-imported back to their source-culture or context. Bharati based his term on a particular reading of the modern pizza: Italian immigrants to the United States re-invent a low-status or banal food from their homeland, thereby imbuing it with an appealing, ethnic charisma. This culinary novelty is then re-imported to Italy where it is incorporated and potentially embellished even further so as to seem more ‘authentic’ (chefs in Rome swear ‘the original real Italian pizza’ always used a thin base and lots of rosemary etc). As the pizza analogy demonstrates, these sorts of complicated cross-fertilizations and ‘hermeneutic feedback loops’ as Stephen Jenkins has put it, are potentially endless. While five hundred years ago Indian yoga may have been more about corpse-ash and skull-cups than about Lulu Lemon and coconut water, and while today’s ‘ancient yoga’ may have been a more modern construction forged through collaborations between Indian holy men, nationalists, and ‘fascinated’ colonialists, it remains that native Indians today are selling yoga back to the West, and practicing it themselves.

Likewise, today, both Nepalis and Tibetans are positioning themselves as expert singing bowl healers and players in their dealings with foreigners. Some years ago, I was invited by a friend to attend a public singing bowl healing session conducted at the Denver Botanical Gardens. A white American couple dressed in white conducted the performance, which involved us all lying on the floor, shoes off, eyes closed in a dimly lit conference room, listening to about an hour’s worth of live, carefully orchestrated tones sounded from a raised circular platform in the middle of the room. Afterwards, I asked the two how they had become master singing bowl healers. To my surprise they told me they had learned from a third-generation Nepali sound healer from Kathmandu called Shree Krishna Shahi. The blend of the new and ancient in Shree Krishna’s story is interesting. The not all that old man acknowledges that he was the first to start using the bowls in Kathmandu, but claims for himself a far older lineage at the same time. Claiming to have been taught the ancient secrets of the bowls from his adoptive Tibetan grandfather Tashi Lama, a monk who came to Nepal from Tibet in the early 80’s, Shree Krishna now comes regularly to Boulder, Colorado to conduct workshops with foreigners. Shree Krishna’s innovation is thus tied to an older, uninterrupted genealogy whose home remains in Tibet. In Cardiff, Wales, a Tibetan exile lama by the name of Topgyal Lobsang also plays the bowls for healing. Lama Lobsang (who also achieved some fame for rescuing a mentally-ill teenager who had run away from home in Germany) says on his website that in addition to offering counselling, Buddhist teachings, ceremonies, and blessings he practices Tibetan sound healing “with my singing bowls, just as others have for centuries”. His description of this therapy is in line with much sound healing discourse today, invoking as it does ‘vibration’ ‘bio-feedback’ ‘relaxation’, the ‘balancing of chakras’ and being ‘at one with the universe’.

Lama Lobsang appears to have incorporated the playing of singing bowls into entirely ‘official’ Buddhist rituals without sharing any of Humphries’ anxieties about the dangers of flaunting heterodox shamanism. Sound healers today, whether ‘native’ or otherwise, are studying Indo-Tibetan meditative traditions and combining these with the bowls, just as Buddhist converts Wolff and Hennings did as students of the 16th Karmapa decades ago. The bowls’ veneer of ordinariness and lack of elaboration from most Tibetans puts the onus on practitioners to improvise, to fill the bowls’ void of indigenous meaning with all manner of significance. If the bowls were once containers for rice and water, they have now become containers for various syncretisms, for resonating hermeneutic feedback loops that are both hypnotizing and difficult to pin down. As veteran sound healer Frank Perry demonstrates, there are more than enough existing and verifiable esoteric traditions involving sound mysticism from around the world that can, if one wishes, structure and legitimate the use of the bowls for ritual and meditation (the intellectual history and evolution of the idea of ‘vibration’ in both mainstream and ‘occult’ science alone would require at least a whole book to cover).

On one level, the bowls’ materiality has become important, has been fetishized by sound healers. Each bowl has its own ‘frequency’ and accumulated psychic history. Practitioners have become connoisseurs, travelling across the world to find authentic antique bowls, which they infer must have originally been made for sacred sound healing purposes unlike modern ‘knock offs’. Bowls with different combinations of metals are associated with different chakras, planets, elements and energies. And yet despite this focus on the concrete quality of the bowl itself, sound healing is nonetheless a largely intuitive, more felt-than-seen exercise. Healers learn to listen minutely to different bowls and tones, develop subtle associations between sounds, feelings, colours, smells, and non-human agents like spirits, guides, aliens, gods and angels. This intituitive ‘tuning in’ involves new regimes of attention and sensory discipline that beg for closer ethnographic investigation.

With singing bowls, the equivalent of a common wine glass has become a lost and holy Grail, a floating signifier that can accomodate any number of referents. At the same time, the ‘fascination of Orientalists’ has in part helped to transform a household object into a charged metonymn for Tibetan cultural and national identity, and a lucrative commodity that ultimately puts food on poor refugees’ tables. Through the singing bowl, strange and ‘spiritual’ sounds have come to be linked in intimate and difficult-to-disentangle ways with ‘brand’ Tibet. The commodification of Tibetan culture by privileged outsiders enmeshes marginalized Tibetan refugees in transnational economies that offer both pain and possibility. The ambivalence of this kind of commodification came to light again recently in a parallel case to Miley and her ‘bowlzzz’. The casting of actress Tilda Swinton as ‘The Ancient’ One’ in Marvel’s upcoming film adaptation of the 1950’s comic ‘Dr Strange’ (starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Dr Strange) also generated debate among Tibetans who were following these developments.

In the comic series, a rich white American surgeon’s career is destroyed after his hands are damaged in an accident. He searches exhaustively for a cure, and ultimately lands up in Tibet, where he meets an old sage – The Ancient One – who heals him and tutors him in the occult arts. It turns out that the Ancient One is a kind of cosmic protector who uses magic to protect the world from destruction at the hands of dark forces from other dimensions, and the unsuspecting New Yorker must take up his mantle. He does so, thereby becoming the super-hero Dr Strange. While some Tibetans expressed excitement that a Tibetan character would be appearing in such a big film, others criticized the casting of a white person for the role. Pointing to the under-representation of Asians in major Hollywood roles, and to Hollywood’s long history of ‘yellow-face’, they demanded in a petition that the character be recast. Still, other Tibetans questioned the value in claiming the ‘Ancient One’ at all. As Tenzing Thabke reflected in a Facebook post:

“I guess I probably don’t disagree with this line of attack entirely, but I hardly think that replacing Tilda Swinton with a Tibetan would count as a win for anyone involved given the role’s heavily orientalized origin in the Blavatskeyian-theosophical fancy of the mahatmas in the Himalayas, indeed it would probably only serve to further confuse what is already the quagmire of the western reception/conception of Tibetan & the Tibetans. Let the dusty orientalism in the Western comic mythos/canon be, I say, leave well enough alone in this case and let the Hollywood corporations serve up their reiteration of old orientalist tropes in new new age lights to the Marvel publics, which seems to include everyone these days…Hopefully that gives us some time to work on the more pressing issues, but at the very least we’ll be able to sit in theaters with our noses in the air as Tilda Swinton and Bumblesnuff do their thing/stuff.”

As Tibetans continue to discuss the potential meanings and consequences of these sorts of cultural commodification pizza-effect-meets-cultural-appropriation scenarios, singing bowl enthusiasts continue to strongly resist acknowledging their own ‘off-label’ use of the bowls. As an anthropologist, rather than throw down some gauntlet and declare that singing bowls are or aren’t Tibetan, I would much rather focus on the complicated social and political lives of these deceptively mundane/deceptively sacred objects. If the anthropological literature on religious movements has taught us anything it’s that cognitive dissonance need not spell disillusionment and cosmological collapse. Rather, cognitive dissonance, epistemic ‘murk’, and excess themselves spur reformulation, and promote innovation, religious creativity, and change. Which totally feels like a vibe anthropologists can get into.

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.

Paging through the comic I observed that rather than opening with King Nyatri’s birth, the book’s authors had started their account instead with the beginning of all life on earth. They had also decided to describe the creation of the Tibetan people in general before they attended to the circumstances of Nyatri’s birth specifically. Glancing at this sequence I noticed something interesting. I was familiar with the traditional Tibetan account of how the early ancestors of the Tibetan people had emerged from the union of a wise and compassionate monkey and a blood-thirsty, cthonic Tibetan demoness, a story which technically speaking, the comic reproduced. What struck me, though, was how through its pictures and descriptions the comic had reworked earlier versions of this origin myth so as to align the tale with science, or with what at least on the surface looked like science and contemporary theories of evolution. Here are the first nine pages of the comic, with my rough translation:

(1) A long, long time ago, this land of Tibet of ours was covered by a great ocean and even Mount Everest was but a small hill beneath it.

(2) After many millions of years had passed, this land gradually bulged outwards and oceans and rivers drained out in all four directions. Then later, the land developed a hot climate and became a center in which all sorts of animals and plants could live.

(3) At a certain time, a kind of ‘man-bear’-like creature called a draksin or ‘Rock Ogress’ appeared. This ferocious creature lived in the rocky mountains of the Yarlung region, loved to fight and was devoted to eating blood and meat. Having taken possession of the Yarlung forest she lived as she pleased.

(4) Within the upper reaches of the thick Yarlung forest there were a great many kinds of monkeys who depended on fruits and vegetation as their food. From among these, there was an intelligent and gentle monkey who treated everyone with loving-kindness who all the monkeys made their leader.

(5) One day, the chief-monkey and the rock ogress felt desire for one another and from their intercourse at Tsethang (rtsed thang – ‘the field of play’) in the land of Yarlung, many kinds of monkey-ogress hybrid progeny emerged. These later gradually became the human race and the ancestors of Tibetan people.

(6) From among the monkey-children (beings of) diverse natures emerged. Some of the children were red-faced like the monkey but had flat feet, no tails and little fur. Some were black-faced like the rock ogress, but lacked claws.

(7) Able to get up from their parents and go about and do many jobs with their hands, the monkey children walked standing upright, and were dextrous, intelligent, powerful, and ferocious. They all made use of fruit as well as blood and meat as food.

(8) Gradually the children got big and by having sex with one another became even more sharp of mind and skilled of hand. Their descendants multiplied and bit by bit invaded the areas of the other monkeys in the forest.

(9) After many thousands of years of eking out a living, these creatures came, by stages, to possess the bodily form of what are known as ‘human beings’. They learned how to say many things by sign language and falteringly with words, as well as how to wear leaves as clothes and how to make huts from plants”

What jumps out here is the way in which the origin myth’s key characters have been brought down to earth, have been ‘naturalized’ or stripped of their overt religious affiliations. One earlier version of the tale appears in the Mani Kabum (maNi bka’ ‘bum), a compilation of stories and rituals that were revealed by various twelth century Tibetan Buddhist visionary-saints (gter ston). In the Mani Kabum’s version of events, the monkey appears as a magical emanation (sprul pa) of Chenresig (spyan ras gzig), a deity that embodies the Buddhist ideal of totally selfless, omniscient compassion. Likewise, the Mani Kabum’s ogress is identified as an emanation of Chenresig’s divine consort Drolma (sgrol ma), the Tibetan Buddhist Mother-Saviour goddess. The ancestral couple’s identification with these deities is central to the Mani Kabums’ overarching narrative in which Chenresig is positioned as the primary progenitor and patron of Tibet, Tibetans and Buddhism in Tibet. By doing this, and by reframing the early Tibetan kings as emanations of Chenresig as well, the Mani Kabum lent an air of predestination to Tibet’s Buddhicization, and promoted the indigenization of Indian religious culture and the mythologization of the imperial period (7th-9th century) in the Tibetan imagination.

In the Mani Kabum’s account, the rock ogress (brag srin [mo]) embodies the morally ambiguous wildness of Tibet’s pre-Buddhist landscape. A spectre materializing out of Tibet’s endemic mountains (brag = rocky cliff face), this ‘crag-hag’ is an emblem for Tibet’s cthonic, primordial powers. Categorically bloodthirsty and feminine, these forces must be tamed or ‘civilized’ by contrastingly masculine (and initially foregin) agents of Buddhism. In addition to being used to translate the Sanskrit word ‘rakshasi’ into Tibetan (rakshasi are man-eating ogresses in Indian folklore) the word srin refers to a (pre-Buddhist) class of dangerous spirits with a long history of being associated with cthonic, sub-terranean forces (srin can also refer to bugs and various creeping things, and resurfaces in Tibetan neologisms for ‘virus’ and ‘bacterium’) .

In a related mythic narrative, the Chinese bride of the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo discovers that the reason Buddhism is failing to ‘take’ in Tibetan soil is because the whole country of Tibet is in fact one giant srinmo ogress lying on her back. Buddhism finally flourishes when it systematically and forcefully pins down this demoness through a network of Buddhist shrines that are erected on top of her body’s vital-energy points (I use this sexualized language advisedly – a phallic effigy is placed at the point identified with the srinmo’s genitals). While not killed per se, she is, like similar monstrous mothers from other cosmogonies from around the world, repurposed – her energies are suppressed, pacified, and redirected towards Buddhist projects.

In the above Department of Education version, we read nothing about emanations of Chenresig or Drolma. Other versions describe how the ogress bullied the ascetic monkey-saint – who had come to Tibet to meditate in seclusion – into having sex with her, and describe him as assenting to her aggressive advances solely out of a compassionate desire to placate and ultimately ‘tame’ her and her wild unenlightened appetites. Here we have only page five’s matter-of-fact prose and the suggestive positioning in its accompanying image to hint at any kind of gendered power-play. Likewise, the subjugation narrative and pointed demonization of the ogress appear only in a muted or oblique way, when the comic explains that the monkey’s behaviour is ‘tamed’ i.e. ‘gentle’ or ‘civilized’ (spyod pa dul ba) in contrast to the ogress’ vicious anti-socialness. We read about how the pair’s offspring inherited distinct physical, but not moral, traits from each parent (in other versions Tibetans’ ‘wildness’ and less noble qualities are traced directly to the srin mo)

Overall, the rock ogress appears in the comic less as a blood-drinking vampiress and more as a kind of bad-tempered Big Foot. She is described as being ‘a kind of [thing] resembling a man-bear’ (mi dred ‘dra ba’i rigs shig). ‘Man-bear’ here is cognate with ya dred, a regional Tibetan term from which the English yeti derives. Mi dred and similar words for ‘bear’ in Tibetan dialects are somewhat ambiguous. At times they can indicate certain extant (and possibly extant) species of flesh-and-blood bears endemic to Tibet and the Himalayas (see here ongoing research relating to the hunt for the abominable snow man along these lines, for example), and yet can also refer to a whole different category of more ambiguously corporeal, ‘magical’ beasties. While admittedly the line between these two categories can be blurry in Tibetan contexts, the comic’s imagery and descriptions work together to thoroughly naturalize the ogress, and transform her from a cosmological monster into a crypto-zoological one. In a similar vein, the progressive transformation of the monkey and ogress’ offspring into humans is depicted in a way that suggests contemporary theories of human evolution, with multiple lineages of primates and early human ancestors interbreeding and competing for resources. Rather than reading about how Chenresig and Drolma supply their offspring with magical food so they can slowly grow and lose their tails and so on, a sense of autonomous, natural selection over long historical periods of time prevails.

The question arises: why exactly did the Department of Education repackage the story this way? The comic was produced by the department of traditional education (srol rgyun shes yon sde tsan). A supplementary unit internal to the DoE, this department was founded in 2002 (this is the date given in the comic’s foreword, 2003 is listed on the DoE’s website) with the express purpose of ensuring that chief aspects of both oral and literary Tibetan traditional culture do not deteriorate but instead increase among Tibetans in exile. Given this emphasis on preservation, it is noteworthy that the authors saw fit to re-present classic material in this way. While I have not yet had the opportunity to speak with the comic’s authors and artist about their thinking when it came to the comic’s images, text, and design, their book might be seen as pointing to broader developments relating to education, cultural preservation and the separation of church and state in exile.

From the 17th century until just prior to the Chinese invasion, under the Dalai Lama’s government in Central Tibet religious and political affairs were formally hyphenated under a system known as ‘religious-and-temporal (affairs) united’ (chos srid zung ‘brel). Still, formal philosophies of continuity and compromise aside, religious and political authority and interests were just as likely to be at odds with one another than they were to overlap or co-operate. Since coming into exile, finding consensus on the relationship between religious power and worldly, political power on the one hand, and between religious knowledge and scientific understanding has continued to engage Tibetans. The Dalai Lama and the Tibetan exile administration have developed various projects and institutions to bolster secular education and scientific literacy both in exile monasteries and in Tibetan society more generally (not least of which is the Tibetan Children’s Village TCV or standardized exile schooling system geared towards providing Tibetan refugee children with a culturally-rich yet still rounded education.)

The Dalai Lama has encouraged dialogue between Tibetan Buddhist experts and foreign scientists, and has championed the idea of Buddhism’s compatibility with science. He has actively supported collaborative clinical studies, conferences (like the now annual Mind and Life meetings that bring together philosophers, Buddhist practitioners, psychologists, and neuroscientists), publishing projects, and pedagogical exchanges between Tibetan Buddhist practitioners and academic researchers. Still, debates about the need for more or less secularity in education and society continue. In the past, authority figures like former prime minister and monk Samdhong Rinpoche have stated that the TCV system would benefit from monastic instructors and from more religiously-orientated material. Equally, while marginalized religious groups within Tibetan society like the Jonang sect have recently protested in a demand for more representation in parliament, many Tibetans are wondering if there should be seats reserved for sectarian representatives in the Tibetan exile parliament at all. Stories of families and individuals in smaller Tibetan refugee settlements in South India being subjected to fines and other punishments for not attending community prayer gatherings and majoritarian political events also circulate and provide important talking points for Tibetans’ discussions about the appropriate role of religion in the public sphere.

So where does our comic, our srin mo-yeti-early-human-ancestor come in? While the comic claims to be concerned with preserving traditional knowledge it gives this knowledge a secular gloss. As stock-images of prehistory, artistic supplements like jelly fish and ferns make of Tibet’s ancient mythological ocean a primordial soup. Given the comic’s pop anthropology style of depicting early human life and evolution, it’s certainly tempting to see the tale of the monkey/srinmo as a compelling case of myth-as-ethno-science, especially given new research on contemporary Tibetans’ ancestors’ sexual encounters with that mysterious species of ancient humans the Denisovans. Indeed, the myth has not only been cited by anthropologists as an exemplary example of ethno-primatology, but it has also appeared repeatedly in novels and alternative histories as evidence for the fact of extra-terrestrials having interbred with early Tibetans and/or humans. This mention of aliens is more than incidental. Jamyang Phuntsok, a Tibetan scholar at Pennsylvania State University, commenting on an earlier Facebook post I made about my initial thoughts on the comic, had this to add about the way the comic had naturalized mythological material:

“I wonder what purpose is served by such ‘naturalization’? It is faithful neither to the original creation myth, which must be preserved and presented as one would a literary work or piece of artwork, nor to the scientific findings (according to which adaptation and settlement of the Tibetan plateau became possible AS A RESULT of introgression with the Denisovans). Isn’t this a kind of revisionism? Kind of like trying to rewrite Sherlock Hollmes stories by taking cues from the latest forensic techniques.”

Is the secular or ‘sciency’ flavour that the comic’s art and descriptions impart to the myth merely gratuitous or cosmetic? How does it serve the cause of furthering either scientific or cultural literacy? Jamphuk’s Sherlock Holmes analogy reminds me of similar processes of (relative) rationalization or updating, what scholar of religious history Mikael Rothstein has referred to as ‘mythological modernization’. Rothstein uses the term to describe how the Tibetan ‘Mahatmas’ or ‘Masters’, those super-beings that were supposed to be the higher powers behind Victorian esoteric movements like Theosophy, were later recast by new new religious movements as visitors from outer space. According to Rothstein, this move brought the ambiguously corporeal (and controversially located) Masters of a previous period up-to-speed with recent developments – it made them seem (relatively) less kitsch and (relatively) more tangible and reasonable too. (In my next post I will explore in more detail the phenomenon of Tibetan aliens, and the roles they have played in interactions between Indo-Tibetan and Western esoteric traditions). This sort of mythological modernization has proven exceedingly popular more recently, as the likes of best-selling conspiracy theorist David Icke and the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens have reframed gods and spirits from the world’s pantheons as (maybe mostly probably) flesh-and-blood aliens to weave their alternative histories.

While the DoE’s comic is probably more understated and subtle than either Icke or Ancient Aliens could ever be, it’s possible that the DoE likewise wanted to present something ancient and mythological as compatible with the (relatively more) secular, rational, and science-y. (It’s certainly a myth that’s good to think with – once, while teaching English names for parts of the mouth and jaw to Tibetan monks, I found myself explaining the existence of ‘canine’ teeth alongside molars by comparing it to the idea of shared human parentage from a fruit-eating monkey and a flesh-devouring demoness). Still, while mythological modernization might bring religious cosmologies more in line with current preferences or assumptions, it is, importantly, still cosmology that is at stake.

Ultimately, the draksin captures much of Tibetans’ ongoing deliberations about the relative moral and political value of different forms of knowledge today, about the relative worth of the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, of culture and science. Suggesting fraught indigeneity and ambiguous inheritance, she is a worthy mascot for Tibetan ‘tradition’: at times the indomitable-and-powerful and at times the slightly-embarrassing grandmother. She and the comic above hint at the way in which secularization is an ambiguous and uneven process in exile. A somewhat awkward hybrid, she alerts us to the uncertainties that remain when it comes to working out how local and indigenous regimes of knowledge should engage with (apparently) universal and transcendent ones.

Mass monasticism has often been used as a shorthand for Tibetan civilization in general. Over the last few decades in particular, large-scale Buddhist monasteries, whether in diaspora or in Chinese-occupied Tibet, have become key symbols for the continued vitality of Tibetan culture in the face of adversity. Yet even so, for centuries, ngakpa have existed in Tibetan societies as an alternative, smaller community of religious professionals, who though they are not monastics, nonetheless embody many of the possibilities and particularities of Tibetan culture life. Like monks and nuns, ngakpa are professional Buddhist renouncers, individuals who have taken formal vows to devote their lives to religious attainment. Unlike monastics, however, ngakpa are non-celibate and can engage in activities forbidden to the monastic community. Ngakpa thus straddle lay and monastic worlds and reside in a shifting third space of both accommodation and resistance to more centralized political and religious institutions. While monastics are the ‘yellow’ clothed community (ser) and laypeople are ‘grey’ householders (mi skya), i.e. clothed in no particular religious uniform, ngakpa, with their long hair and white and-red cotton shawls and robes, are known as the gos dkar lcang lo sde, the ‘white-robe, dreadlock [wearing] community’ of non-celibate yogis. Able to marry, have families, and pursue worldly work, ngakpa nonetheless spend much of their time in study, meditative retreat or working as ritual specialists for hire. 

Meeting ngakpa in her travels in Tibet during the early 20th century, French explorer and early convert to Tibetan Buddhism Alexandra David-Neel profiled them as ‘shamanists’ disguised as Buddhists (1992). To be sure, David-Neel was projecting her own categories and judgements onto native practitioners, and her turn of phrase has lurking behind it a long tradition of foreigners claiming that (as far as they were concerned) much of Tibetan Buddhism wasn’t really ‘real’ Buddhism at all. At the same time, David-Neel’s description usefully captures issues of esoteric power, authenticity, legibility, representation, and transparency that have proven to be central so far in my fieldwork with ngakpa living in exile. Ngakpas’ association with tantra, the esoteric forms of Buddhism that came to Tibet from India from the 7th century onwards, is key to understanding their position and importance in Tibetan societies. It is also key to understanding what makes them interesting anthropologically. Anthropologists have long been interested in how cultural histories, practices, and institutions are sustained and transformed cross-generationally in situations of major change and upheaval. They have described how shared religious beliefs and practices have served as a basis for political mobilization, for the legibility of diasporic groups, for the forging of transnational moral communities and ethno-nationalist imaginaries (phew!), and for the development of marked forms of cultural identity. As specialists in esoteric Buddhism living in exile, ngakpa present rich opportunities for exploring how religion, identity, and politics may intersect in situations where religious knowledge and power are distributed highly unequally, and where religious authority and practices that contribute to cohesive moral communities depend upon secrecy, ambiguity, and restricted occult knowledge. 

Esoteric or tantric Buddhism (the so-called Vajrayana or ‘Vehicle of the Adamantine Thunderbolt’) with its alchemical register,  stresses that what is impure and poisonous can be transmuted into the highest medicine. It promises that through a shrewd re-orientation towards the sensory arisings and afflictive emotions that are often treated in more exoteric Buddhist contexts as sources of contamination and suffering, these obstacles can be transformed into sources of realization. Tantric practitioners’ ritual repertoires draw on elaborate iconographies that embody Vajrayana’s unique orientation to visceral forces of sex, violence, and death. Through intensive imaginative engagement with both peaceful and forceful tantric Buddhist deities and vital forces in the subtle channels of the body, practitioners of various systems of tantric yoga seek to rapidly transform their (apparently) impure bodies, speech and minds into their innately pure and blissful state of Buddha-nature. Pursued under the guidance of a legitimate guru, and with proper preparation and intention such methods can guarantee enlightenment in a single human lifetime. Practiced incorrectly, however, they can bring corruption, madness and death.

While pretty much all aspects of Tibetan Buddhism have a tantric sensibility or aesthetic, concerns about the preservation  and regulation of high-level and especially non-celibate tantric practices have been longstanding in Tibetan societies. Ngakpa lineages, which are strongly associated with the Nyingma (rnying ma) school, the most ancient sect of Buddhism in Tibet, were consolidated and elaborated during Tibet’s ‘Dark Age’. During this so-called ‘period of fragmentation’ (dus sil bu, approx. 842 to 986 C.E.) large-scale monastic institutions and state patronage/co-optation of religious power foundered in Tibet. Ngakpa, transmitting esoteric teachings within families, outside of monastic and state surveillance and regulation, were instrumental in adapting and indigenizing tantric Buddhist teachings from India and helped keep such traditions alive during a time of civil war and intense political upheaval. Anxieties about tantra going ‘rogue’ are particularly linked to the age of fragmentation in Tibetan histories. Records from this time describe non-celibate ‘village tantric masters’ misinterpreting tantra, and pursuing esoteric practices for selfish, immoral or harmful ends, without a proper Mahayana Buddhist motivation to liberate all beings from suffering. Since monastics with the proper training can and do engage in higher tantric practices, celibacy and monasticism have sometimes been seen as providing a more controlled context for the pursuit of potent but easily misused tantric methods.

Ngakpas’ non-celibacy and closeness to the  ‘wildness’ of everyday, worldly life is thus part of what makes them powerful and what makes them ambiguous. Ngakpas’ ambiguous charisma has shown up historically in various ways. As wandering ‘crazy’ ascetics ngakpa have lampooned entrenched institutions, yet as a hereditary clergy authorized to employ ritual violence as part of potent tantric rituals to exorcise and manipulate natural forces such as the weather, they have figured prominently in everyday community activities. Ngakpas’ shifting status can be seen in traditional legal codes from Tibet: ngakpa are forbidden from giving legal testimony for fear that they might delude their audiences with magic, yet their same powers may be called upon as an extra-judicial measure to settle intractable disputes (French 2002). Visiting groups of ngakpa attached to monastic institutions in early 20th century Eastern Tibet, David-Neel observed how ngakpa had been able to sell their unenviable but valuable talent for subduing demons to monastic authorities, thereby earning a partial incorporation into institutional, administrative structures, and a measure of prestige, privilege and payment. In my current research, I am interested in how such mediations of religious power between ritual specialists and institutional authorities are continuing in exile. How are ngakpas’ esoteric expertise and ambiguous charisma faring in the face of calls for increased democratization, clarity and standardization in Tibetan exile society? 

Since the People’s Republic of China invaded Tibet over six decades ago, stateless Tibetan refugees who have fled their homeland have struggled to rebuild and stabilize their political and social institutions in exile. As the spiritual leader of Tibetans, the fourteenth Dalai Lama has spearheaded efforts to both preserve and to reform Tibetan life in diaspora. In particular, he and the Tibetan administration have taken measures to promote co-operation and inclusion among Tibetans’ diverse religious communities. One major development along these lines has been the establishing of the Central Tibetan Administration’s Office of Religion and Culture in McLeod Ganj, India, and the selection of formal ‘heads’ to represent the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism and Tibet’s pre-Buddhist religion Bon in exile. Ngakpa, like other religious professionals, have thus found themselves newly consolidated under the leadership of sectarian authorities in exile. With the encouragement of religious authority figures from both within and without their sectarian communities, they have built new educational and ritual colleges (ngakpa dratsang, sngags pa drwa tshang) and transmitted their lineage-practices to new students for the sake of posterity.

Yet drives for standardization and categorization can sit uneasily with ngakpas’ distinct styles of religious practice. Recently, I was told a story by a ngakpa friend about how some decades ago ngakpa in McLeod Ganj had complained to the Office of Religion and Culture about having been passed over by community members when it came to receiving donations for ritual services they had performed on behalf of the administration and the public. While monks had received alms for their religious labours, these ngakpa, feeling that they ought to receive adequate recompensation and recognition for their contributions, felt short-changed. The Office’s response, apparently, was that ngakpa had not been dressing properly – having failed to consistently wear markers of their affiliation as members of the ‘white religious community’ people had not known who, or what, they were. It was thus suggested that ngakpa at least wear their white yogi shawl when performing such services so as to avoid confusion.

The Dalai Lama has frequently stated that religious vow-holders should dress more consistently and distinctly to reduce ambiguity and misunderstandings  (especially among foreigners) about what is and isn’t permissible for different classes of practitioners. Invoking the way in which the early Tibetan kings set up distinctive boundaries between laypeople, ngakpa and monastics in accordance with the Buddha’s own teachings, the Dalai Lama has warned that inconsistency in dress and conduct can become a cause for the criticism, repudiation and deterioration of the teachings. Nonetheless, research shows that ngakpa rarely stay in uniform. Not only do ngakpa often dress in lay clothing when not conducting ceremonies, but recommendations that ngakpa stick to their white, long-hair ‘uniforms’ brush over the very real historical and regional diversity of ngakpa lineage-practices. Ngakpa in exile hail from different parts of Tibet and hold a range of major and minor vows. They conduct their work and embody their tantric commitments in distinct ways. While for some ngakpa heaped masses of dreadlocks point to their maintaining of a ‘natural’, ‘unfabricated’ (rang bzhin, ma bcos pa’) state of mind in the midst of worldly life, other practitioners prefer less elaborate hairstyles, tying their washed and combed hair back discreetly. From time to time, some practitioners have shaved their hair entirely, citing reasons of both practicality or necessity (itchiness, lice, heat etc) and modesty. Likewise, despite their association with white and red yogis’ robes, tantric ritual specialists from some regions have traditionally worn other colours, such as black or brown –  what one exile ngakpa described to me as a ‘low’ colour, appropriate for the very high practice of maintaining an ordinary, outer appearance alongside a lofty state of inner cultivation.

Resistance to ‘standard uniform’ is thus also strongly linked to the ways ngakpa understand the relationship between outer and inner forms of religious practice, and to how they engage with larger tantric themes of revelation, concealment and the relativity of appearances. While ngakpas’ specific vows are concretely and visually marked through the various tantric ornaments, clothing, hair-stylings etc. associated with in scripture with a tantric vow-holder, ngakpas’ frequent foregoing of full regalia is tied up with culturally-specific understandings of self-presentation, modesty and secrecy. In conversation, ngakpa have often been quick to remind me that without inner commitment and attainment, the material trappings of their practice remain merely symbolic and trivial. Indeed, rather than suggesting discipline or transparency, staying in costume may sometimes indicate untrustworthiness. Tales about young Tibetan and sometimes foreigner men who flaunt elaborate dreadlocks and full tantric finery just to drink beer and pick up women (individuals ngakpa and scholar Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche once labeled ‘appearance ngakpas’ ) surface often in conversation. Such anecdotes suggest by way of contrast the figure of the ‘hidden yogi’ (sbal pa’ rnal ‘byor pa), the accomplished practitioner who avoids advertising their spiritual accomplishments through strategic performances of ordinariness. They underscore how no one but a Buddha can truly know the state of another being’s mind, how easy it is to be mislead by appearances, to dress up and merely pose as a tantric practitioner, and how much harder it is by contrast to consistently maintain one’s vows and the mental orientations associated with them in every situation. At the same time, while ngakpa often warn one not to judge based on misleading appearances and be wary of showiness, respected practitioners’ great potency or ritual efficacy (nus pa chenpo), is something concrete and demonstrable – emerging from the accumulation of vital-force and special abilities (dngos drub) in one’s person that can be pointed to and benefitted from by others. Status and self-disclosure tie into the gendered politics of religious practice as well. While ngakma or female non-celibate tantric vow-holders play important social and religious roles, they appear more often as the wives and sexual consorts of male practitioners than as stand-alone practitioners or experts in their own right. The cultural politics of being in and out of the lime light thus take on even further layers for female practitioners. 

Such ambivalence aside, representation and transparency still matter for Tibetans today. While exile ngakpas’ self-presentation varies contextually and individually, their vows and moral commitments as a religious community remain unambiguous and codified. In a social context where advertising one’s own spiritual accomplishments can sometimes be tantamount to providing proof you don’t have any, religious authority must be both secured and contested through daily and ongoing performances, and complex interpersonal and community dynamics. Today, ideas and practices connected to Tibetan religion are circulating more and more widely, and ngakpas’ knowledge and power are involved in ever broader economies of value and exchange. With the rapid globalization of Tibetan Buddhism since 1950, Tibetan refugee lamas are more and more catering to non-Tibetan students for whom the possibility of engaging with advanced Buddhist teachings without having to become celibate is distinctly practical and appealing. While Tibetan ngakpa continue to fulfill important functions within diasporic communities, new emphases on secular education and employment in exile have also meant that many exile-born Tibetans are opting not to take up hereditary religious vocations. As tantra is being reappropriated and reapplied in new contexts and for new audiences, and as more and more non-Tibetans are coming to adopt ngakpa styles of dress and religious practice, fears about the corruption of the teachings and about the spread and regulation of tantra outside of monastic – and native Tibetan contexts in particular -are as salient as ever. Various tantra-related ‘casualties’ – vow-breaking controversies and abuses of power involving Tibetan Buddhist convert communities that frequently operate beyond the pale of Tibetan structures of authority – reveal the extent to which truly centralized or standardized channels of authority or regulation do not exist for the deeply heterogenous (and now significantly transnational) landscape of contemporary Tibetan Buddhism. The current moment in Tibetan history can thus be compared to an earlier period of fragmentation, characterized as it is as much by dispersal and decline as by innovation and an unprecedented proliferation of Buddhist teachings. Ngakpa/ma thus provide a particularly relevant, albeit under-explored lens through which to understand processes of cultural and religious change as they are affecting Tibetans today. Ngakpa/mas’ shifting relationships with centralized authority and with material expressions of power show how the forging of cultural coherence and stable institutions in diaspora involves both creativity and contradiction – how cultural life revolves around tensions that are as unsettling as they are meaningful.

REFERENCES: 

David-Neel, Alexandra. 1992. “Tibetan Journey,” New Delhi: South Asia Books.

French, Rebecca. 2002. “The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet,” Boston: Snow Lion Publications.