Kalimpong, India. He advised her to learn Tibetan. Shortly thereafter, she met a naljorpa, a wizar d, who told her to enter Tibet and be initiated by a master. At the time, travel in Tibet was forbidden to foreigners, but the naljorpa told David-Neel she could do it by bypassing dangerous areas. Instead, she returned to Sikkim to resume her study of Sanskrit, believing that her destiny lay in writing a major comparative work on branches of Buddhism. Her circum- stances changed radically in 1914, when the early death of Sidkeong cut off her access to royal courts and World War I prevented her return to her husband.
David-Neel became a disciple of the Gomchen (Great Hermit) of Lachen, whom she had met in 1912 and who lived as a hermit 12,000 feet high in the Sikkim Hima- layas at De-Chen in the Cave of Clear Light. David-Neel pledged complete obedience to him. They agreed to teach each other English and Tibetan. If she proved worthy, he would also teach her secret Tantric wisdom. She took up residence as a hermit in a cave one mile below his. One of her servants was Aphur Yongden, a 15-year-old boy who later became her adopted son and a lama.
David-Neel and the Gomchem developed a telepathic rapport, considered the highest form of teaching but rarely attained because most pupils lacked the proper psychic development. She learned various psychic arts, such as
tumo breathing, a technique that is used to raise body tem-
perature during the severe winters and that prepares one for spiritual emancipation. During this time, David-Neel connected with a past life in which she was a nomad in central Asia.
The Gomchen is most likely the one who initiated David-Neel into the “Short Path” of Tibetan mysticism. The traditional path is to enter monastic life. The Short Path is free of the bondage of discipline, and the initiate may undertake whatever experiments he or she desires for advancement. The Short Path is the preferred path of Tibetan sorcerers and magicians. The Gomchen gave her the name of “Lamp of Wisdom” and probably gave her permission to reveal certain knowledge to the West.
In 1916 David-Neel secretly entered Tibet and settled in Shigatse in the monastery of the Panchen Lama, second in rank to the Dalai Lama. The British authorities found out, sacked her hermit’s cave below the Gomchem, and expelled her from Sikkim. All of her servants except Yong- den, who had a British passport, deserted her. Determined to reenter Tibet, David-Neel and Yongden went to Japan and then China. They secretly penetrated Tibet in a dan- gerous journey. They traveled to Kumbum, a monastery that probably served as the model for the Shangri-La in James Hilton’s novel by the same name. There they spent two-and-a-half years, during which David-Neel translated rare Tibetan occult manuscripts into French and English and observed the magical and psychic feats of Tibetan adept s.
In 1921 she, Yongden, and a new party of servants set out for Lhasa. She had no money and wore tattered cloth- ing. She was beset by bandits but was never harmed, per-
haps because Yongden passed her off as a sorceress and as the wife of a deceased sorcerer. She also masqueraded as a kamdora, a f airylike female spirit whose blessings are sought. This enabled her to obtain food from peasants wherever they went.
The journey to Llasa took her three years through rough territory. They made their way through deep snow and slept in icy caves. In the last stage they trav- eled across the uncharted and treacherous Po country, whose wild inhabitants were rumored to be cannibals. David-Neel used tumo breathing to stay alive during the severe winters. She also used lung-gom, a type of entranced movement that lightens the body and enables rapid trav- eling—even fl ying—without food, water, or rest. Accord- ing to lore, entranced lung-gom-pas cannot be disturbed, or the god within them will depart prematurely and cause their death. David-Neel also had a frightening time with a
tulpa, or t hought -f or m, that she created, which went out
of control.
The party reached Lhasa in February 1924. David-Neel retained her disguise as a beggar, which prevented her from engaging in the intellectual life she desired. A year later she and Yongden were back in Paris, where she was lauded for her exploits. She lectured and began a demand- ing schedule of writing books and articles. In 1928 she bought a small villa outside of Digne in southern France and named it Samten Dzong, the “Fortress of Medita- tion.”
In 1937 David-Neel and Yongden went to Peking, where they intended to get help in translating old man- uscripts. They never reached the capital, because of the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, but they stayed in the country until 1945. Meanwhile, her husband Philip died in 1941.
David-Neel and Yongden returned to France in 1946. With Philip gone, David-Neel publicly acknowledged participating in Tantric sexual rites. She also said she performed a mild version of the chod (“to cut up”) ritual, designed to stir up occult forces and liberate one from all attachments. In the chod, the participant sacrifi ces himself of herself to dismemberment and devouring by hungry ghouls or spirits, and then renounces the sacrifi ce as illu- sion because he or she is nothing and therefore has noth- ing to give. David-Neel probably continued to practice the
chod during her later years in France.
Yongden became an alcoholic and died of uremic poi- soning in 1955. In 1958 David-Neel hired a secretary, Jeanne Denys, to look after her estate. But David-Neel’s bad temper caused Denys to despise her, and the secretary spent many years trying to debunk David-Neel’s work as fi ction. In 1959 Denys was replaced by Marie-Madeleine Peyronnet, who looked after David-Neel until her death on September 6, 1969. True to her assertion that travel and intellectual activity constituted the elixir of longev- ity, David-Neel was nearly 101 when she died. Of all her adventures, she considered her stay in the hermit’s cave
in the Sikkimese Himalayas to be the summit of her life’s dream.
Most of David-Neel’s manuscripts and Tibetan artifacts went to museums or remained at Samten Dzong, which became a conference center and museum.
Works
David-Neel’s works include more than 30 titles and con- tain descriptions of Tibetan magical and religious prac- tices, rituals, and ceremonies. Her best-known books are
My Journey to Lhasa (1927), an account of her three-year
journey; Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929), anecdotal accounts of magical and mystical practices; Initiations and
Initiates of Tibet (1930), a more serious discussion of Tant-
ric lore and mystical rites; and Buddhism: Its Doctrines and
Its Methods (1936), a recapitulation of an earlier work on
Buddhist doctrines.
FURTHER READING:
DAVID-NEEL, ALEXANDRA. Magic and Mystery in Tibet. 1929. Reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1971.
———. My Journey to Lhasa. 1927. Reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.
Foster, Barbara, and Michael Foster. Forbidden Journey: The
Life of Alexandra David-Neel. San Francisco: Harper &
Row, 1987.
Da Vinci Code, The Author Dan Brown’s extraordi-
narily successful thriller novel, published in 2003, which proposes that for over 2,000 years, the Catholic Church has been trying to hide—and destroy—any evidence that would reveal the most explosive secret in world history: that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, that she was pregnant at the time of the crucifi xion, and that descen- dants of this holy marriage have survived to the present day, faithfully documented and protected by the shadowy Priory of Sion and its Grand Masters, notably Leonardo da Vinci. The movie by the same name, starring Tom Hanks and Ian McKellen, was released in 2006.
The Da Vinci Code is Brown’s fourth book and the sec-
ond in a trilogy featuring Harvard professor of religious symbology Robert Langdon. He fi rst appeared in Angels
and Demons (2002), which takes place in Rome and con-
cerns the il l uminat i. Brown’s fi rst book, Digital Fortress, was published in 1998, and the third, Deception Point, was released in 2001. The last of the Langdon books, The Solo-
mon Key (2007), takes Langdon into the esoteric rites of
f r eemasonry.
Plot
The plot of The Da Vinci Code, full of SYMBOLS and coded riddles, begins with the murder of Jacques Saunière, a cura- tor at the Louvre in Paris. His nude body is found posed like Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing, Vitruvian Man, marked with a PENTAGRAM drawn in his own BLOOD. Next to the body is a cryptic message consisting of three ana-
grams: the fi rst consists of the digits of the mathematical Fibonacci sequence, but out of order; the second and third are “O, draconian devil!” and “Oh, lame saint!,” which when rearranged say, “Leonardo da Vinci” and “The Mona
Lisa.” Additionally, there seems to be a postscript, “P.S.:
Find Robert Langdon,” which French police offi cial Bezu Fache thinks is a clue to the murderer’s identity.
Cryptologist Sophie Neveu realizes that the “P.S.” refers to her, however, as Saunière was her grandfather and always called her “Princesse Sophie.” He had raised Sophie after her family died in an auto accident, but they have been estranged for 10 years. Langdon is brought in to interpret the strange clues. Sophie warns him that he is in danger from Fache, and the two manage to elude Fache to solve the next puzzle. The Mona Lisa anagram reveals a secret message written on the protective glass over the painting that says “So dark the con of Man,” which leads to da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks. And behind that paint- ing is the key to a box held in a Swiss bank.
Langdon and Neveu manage to escape Fache and open the box, which contains a cryptex, an encrypted cylinder that works like a Rubik’s cube as a means of sending secret messages. This cryptex is the “keystone” that Saunière’s murderer sought, and it holds a smaller cryptex with another code. After successfully dodging Fache yet again, Langdon and Neveu head for the chateau of Langdon’s old friend Sir Leigh Teabing.
Meanwhile, Father Aringarosa of the Catholic Church organization Opus Dei and his associate, a fanatical monk named Silas who engages in self-fl agellation and other mortifi cations of the fl esh, are also heading for Teabing’s along with Fache. Silas murdered Saunière. Before all parties collide, Teabing explains to Neveu about the search for the g r ail (san greal in French), which is really a wordplay on sang real: royal blood. He tells her and Langdon that the fi gure to Jesus’s right in da Vinci’s Last
Supper is not the apostle John but actually Mary Mag-
dalene. The space between them is a “V,” which repre- sents both the male (the “blade”) and the female (the “chalice”). Teabing asserts that Mary Magdalene was pregnant with Jesus’s child at the time of His crucifi xion, and that afterward she fl ed to what is now France and had a daughter, Sarah. Other descendants married into what became the Frankish Merovingian ruling dynasty, eventually overthrown in 751 c .e. by Charles Martel, the fi rst Carolingian.
The tumult over the possibility of an important woman in the life of Christ supposedly led to the church’s Coun- cil of Nicea in 325 c .e., during which the church fathers established what was orthodoxy and suppressed other early texts from the canon—including any that gave women a larger role or made mention of a marriage or children between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. But accord- ing to legend, documents of the sacred union were hidden in Jerusalem and discovered by knights on Crusade in the 11th century. These knights—who became the or der of t he knight s t empl ar s—vowed to preserve and protect the