Alexandra

Imagine a woman, age 2, taken to view the Communards’ Wall at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the City of Light, where 147 soldiers of the French national guard plus 19 officers had been lined up and executed.  The horrors of the modern world pressed upon her.  

By the age of 18, she had visited England, Switzerland and Spain, and was studying with Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society.  She wrote a treatise on anarchism, and then at the age of 27 studied piano and singing and, to help support her family, took the position of first singer at the Hanoi Opera House, where she interpreted works of Verdi, Gounod, and Bizet.  

Later she befriended Maharaj Kumar, the crown prince of Sikkim (in present day India) and began an exhaustive correspondence with the 13th Dalai Lama. She learned Tibetan, lived in an anchorite cave, was possibly the first Western person to enter Tibet, and met with the Panchen Lama, among the highest ranking officials of Buddhism.  She was allowed to consult the scriptures and visit temples, was introduced to persons of rank, to the Lama’s professors, and to his Mother.  She received the honorary titles of a Lama and a Doctor of Tibetan Buddhism having “experienced hours of great bliss.”

She was then exiled for violating the no-entry edict, and so during World War I traveled to Japan, Korea, China, Mongolia.  Dressed as a beggar she hiked back to Lhasa, the Forbidden City, in 1924, staying for two months exploring that holy city and its surrounding monasteries.  When her disguise was uncovered, she was denounced to the Governor of Lhasa, but quicker than the officials, she had already departed east, heading to Gyantse, where the British maintained a garrison for training Tibetan soldiers.

She opened up Tibet to the Western world.  

Imagine a country during the same time period that for 144 years did not allow its women to vote.  The 19th Amendment was eventually passed, granting women suffrage, but the governing white men still practiced discrimination and large segments of the female population – indigenous and women of color, primarily – remained disenfranchised.  

It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin was outlawed, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (60 years ago this week!) prohibited racial discrimination in voting.  As Churchill said “history is written by the victors,” so then America exceptionalism seems best understood as a myth perpetuated by the governing men, passed down generations.  

Alexandra David-Néel is an exemplar of the trailblazing woman, so far ahead of her times.  Remarkably bold and adventurous, she was compassionate and given the name “Yeshe Tome” which translates to “Lamp of Wisdom.”  

Her memoir My Journey to Lhasa was published in 1927, released simultaneously in Paris, London and New York but critics were dismissive, refusing to believe her stories of Tibetan practices, such as levitation and increasing the body’s temperature to withstand cold.  Living in a cave at 13,000 foot altitude requires a higher consciousness.  She published more than 30 books and her home in Digne-les-Bains, France is now a museum, listed among the “inventory of French historic monuments.”  

Alexandra seems worthy of mention in the Pantheon of Wise Women.  

_______________________________

Credit where credit is due: David Vernon Purpur. The lead photograph was provided by Elena.