Alexandra David-Néel
| Alexandra David-Néel | |
|---|---|
Alexandra David-Néel in Tibet, 1933
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| Born |
Louise Eugénie Alexandrine Marie David 24 October 1868 Saint-Mandé, French Empire |
| Died | 8 September 1969 (aged 100) Digne, France |
| Nationality | Belgian and French |
| Known for | Writing on Tibet |
Alexandra David-Néel, born Louise Eugénie Alexandrine Marie David (24 October 1868 – 8 September 1969), was a Belgian–French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist and writer. She is most known for her 1924 visit to Lhasa, Tibet when it was forbidden to foreigners. David-Néel wrote over 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, the populariser of Eastern philosophy Alan Watts, and the esotericist Benjamin Creme.
She was born in Saint-Mandé, Val-de-Marne, only daughter of her father, Louis David, a Huguenot Freemason, teacher (who was a Republican activist during the revolution of 1848, and friend of the geographer/anarchist Elisee Reclus), and she had a Belgian Catholic mother of Scandinavian and Siberian origins, Alexandrine Borghmans. Louis and Alexandrine had met in Belgium, where the school teacher and publisher of a republican journal was exiled when Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte became emperor. Between the penniless husband and the wife who would not come into her inheritance until after her father would die, the reasons for disagreements grew with the birth of Alexandra. Although her mother wanted her to receive a Catholic education, her father had her secretly baptized in the Protestant faith.
In 1871, appalled by the execution of the last Communards in front of the Communards' Wall at the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, Louis David took his daughter of two years, Eugénie, future Alexandra, there to see and never forget, by this early encounter of the face of death, the ferocity of humans.
In 1873, the Davids emigrated to Belgium.
Since before the age of 15, she had been exercising a good number of extravagant austerities: fasting, corporal torments, recipes drawn from biographies of ascetic saints found in the library of one of her female relatives, to which she refers to in Sous des nuées d'orage, published in 1940.
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