Alexandra David Neel
1868-1969
Alexandra David Neel was a Belgian-French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist, opera singer, and writer. She is most known for her 1924 visit to Lhasa, Tibet, when it was forbidden to foreigners.
When David Neel was 2 years old, her father Louis David, appalled by the execution of the last Communards, took her to see the Communards Wall at Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. She never forgot this encounter with the face of death, from which she first learned of the ferocity of humans.
At the age of 15, she had been exercising austerities such as fasting and corporal torments drawn from biographies of ascetic saints found in the library of one of her female relatives. In the same year she ran away from a holiday with family to try and embark for England but lack of money forced her back.
At the age of 18, David Neel had already visited England, Switzerland, and Spain on her own.
She joined various secret societies and reached the thirtieth degree of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.
In 1912 she met the 13th Dalai Lama in exile and he encouraged her to learn Tibetan.
David Neel wrote 30 books about Eastern religion, philosophy, and her travels including “Magic and Mystery in Tibet” which was published in 1929.
Her teachings influenced the beat writers, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and the popularizers of Eastern philosophy Alan Watts and Ram Dass.
“Who knows the flower best? The one who reads about it in a book, or the one who finds it wild on the mountainside.”
-Alexandra David Neel