alexandra david néel my journey to lhasa

He opposed the monarchy of Louis Philippe, participated in the Revolution of 1848, and fled to Belgium with his friend and compatriot, the novelist Victor Hugo. The style of her day was to examine things dispassionately and objectively, but David-Néel experienced them personally and, in such books as My Journey to Lhasa and Magic and Mystery in Tibet, wrote about them the same way.Īlexandra’s father, Louis David, was a French Protestant, a Huguenot, a socialist and a Freemason. In an age when even those sympathetic to the East were mostly dabblers or lovers of the occult, Alexandra David-Néel distinguished herself both as a scholar and a practitioner. She left four projects unfinished when she died just short of her 101st birthday. On her return to Europe, she was celebrated as an adventuress and lived another 45 years as a lecturer and writer. Niel did not understand his wife’s interest in Buddhism and the East, but in 1910 he offered her a “long voyage”-he meant something like a year-to “get it out of her system.” She was gone for fourteen years, traveling and living in India, Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan, China, Japan, making forays into the forbidden kingdom of Tibet.

It was not until middle age that she married Philippe Néel, the French engineer who supported her through her subsequent adventures, but with whom she almost never lived.

Her early adulthood was taken up by a career as an opera singer-ample accomplishment for an ordinary life, but almost overlooked in hers. At the age of 16 she was already running away from home for jaunts across Europe, and she traveled to India at 21. It is tempting to think that she was born too soon, but so free and bold a female spirit would have encountered obstacles anywhere, at any time.

Alexandra david néel my journey to lhasa