RED SHAMBHALA Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia

📚🔮 "Read books online for free - RED SHAMBHALA Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia" 🌍✨

h e idea to write Red Shambhala developed gradually as a natural of - shoot of my other projects. h e i rst spark came ten years ago when I was doing research for my book h e Beauty of the Primitive, a cultural history of shamanism. By chance, I found out that in a secret laboratory in the 1920s Gleb Bokii—the chief Bolshevik cryptographer, master of codes, ciphers, electronic surveillance—and his friend Alexander Barchenko, an occult writer from St. Petersburg, explored Kabala, Sui wisdom, Kalachakra, shamanism, and other esoteric traditions, simultaneously preparing an expedition to Tibet to search for the legendary Shambhala. A natural question arose: what could the Bolshevik commissar have to do with all this? h e story of the life and death of the Bolshevik secret police oi cer Bokii and his friend intrigued me. Meanwhile, I learned that during the same years, on the other side of the ocean in New York City, the Russian émigré painter Nicholas Roerich and his wife, Helena, were planning a venture into Inner Asia, hoping to use the Shambhala prophecy to build a spiritual kingdom in Asia that would provide humankind with a blueprint of an ideal social commonwealth. To promote his spiritual scheme, he toyed with an idea to blend Tibetan Buddhism and Communism. h en I stumbled upon the German-Armenian historian Emanuel Sarkisyanz’s Russland and der Messianismus des Orients, which mentioned that the same Shambhala legend was used by Bolshevik fellow travelers in Red Mongolia to anchor Communism among nomads in the early 1920s.1