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THE MYTH OF SHANGRI-LA:  TIBET, TRAVEL WRITING AND THE WESTERN CREATION OF SACRED LANDSCAPE

Chapter 7:  Conclusion: The Empty Vessel

When the Dalai Lama fled he took with him into exile the core of Tibet's religious and governmental hierarchy, as well as thousands of ordinary Tibetans. He left behind a geographical place that suddenly seemed devoid of immediate spiritual significance for the West. While Western nations were not completely indifferent to the fate of either the country or the 'divine' ruler and his government in exile, there was little urgency about coming to the Tibetans' aid. This failure cannot be reduced solely to political expediency, timidity or caution. As we have seen, Tibet had been embroiled in Western geopolitical struggles for over two centuries, yet at the same time it was always representative of something else, something compelling over and above political pragmatics. It was this erotic, imaginative compulsion -- or fascination -- that suddenly all but disappeared during the late 1950s, when Tibet became dramatically emptied as a symbolic vessel. By comparison with its fullness in the past, Tibet as a place was left vacant of spiritual significance for Westerners -- except, that is, for a few devotees.

After 1959 Tibet once again became closed to Western travelers; this time more firmly than ever before. It lay behind what came to be called the 'bamboo curtain'. Accounts of the rampant destruction of traditional Tibetan culture by extremist Red Guards filtered through to a West that, by and large, was unheeding of Tibet's misery. Closed and despoiled, Tibet seemed not only to have been emptied of symbolic significance, not just physically emptied both by the exile of its religious hierarchy and the wanton destruction of its ancient monasteries, but to have vanished, swallowed up into China. The symbolic vessel, so carefully prepared in Western fantasies for over two centuries, had itself been completely shattered and dissolved.

Initially it is easy to place total responsibility for this event on the Chinese communists, who, having firmly sealed the southern and western boundaries of Tibet against the gaze of outsiders, then demolished not only its monasteries but its national frontiers to the north and east. Tibet's symbolic power became diluted, contaminated and lost as the Chinese invaded and subsequently colonized the country. But on the surface these events, while extreme, were not so entirely different from those of the past. Time and again Tibet had been drawn firmly back into the Chinese Empire, had lost its power, had had its sovereignty diminished, and the Dalai Lama had been forced to flee, yet it had still held its symbolic 'charge' for many Westerners. But when the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1959, that land was already an almost empty vessel. We have seen that it was no longer a place of intense sacred power for the West. The transformation of Western fantasies within its boundaries had been completed, and Tibet seemed to be no longer needed. Therefore the fracture of the vessel, with the spillage and spoliation of its imaginal contents, should not be blamed solely upon the Chinese. Such an event was already ripe, already prepared for, from within the Western imagination itself.

Imaginal Containment

Alchemists frequently illustrated their works with pictures of a transparent alembic, an alchemical vessel, a sealed jar, its bizarre contents clearly revealed locked together in a process of symbolic transformation. In these illustrations, the alembic is often shown placed incongruously in the middle of a busy street with people going about their everyday business, apparently oblivious to the drama being enacted in their midst. [1] The whole history of Western imaginings on Tibet is encapsulated in this image: in the relationship between symbol-containment and its wider psychosocial context. The phenomenology of sacred place, which has been the meta-image of this study, found expression in many striking images, ranging in size from the whole of the immense country itself down to the city of Lhasa, to the Potala palace, or even to just a solitary meditation cell. Within each of these imaginal vessels there occurred a concentration of imaginative significance, intensity and power. Within each vessel a Western sense of the sacred, of both the mysterium tremendum and the simply mysterious -- as well as anxieties, paradoxes and hopes -- were confined, condensed and transformed. But what of the relationship between the contents of these vessels and the world outside? In order to understand Tibet's sudden loss of compelling imaginative significance, its relative abandonment by Western fantasy-making, we need to re-examine this process of symbol-containment, concentration and contextualization.

From Mystery to Museum

In chapter 2 it was claimed that the late eighteenth century saw Europe on the edge of a fundamental shift in its global fantasies, especially as regards nature. The expansive, relatively unbounded surface of the globe seemed full of opportunities for the confident middle and upper classes of Europe. Fascination went hand in hand with power. Such places as Tibet began to represent -- and above all to encapsulate -- such qualities. Within its vague boundaries were focused and concentrated many European longings and aspirations. At the same time the natural world was starting to feel safe for Europeans -- not just politically, but ontologically. Not long before Bogle and Turner's visits to the rugged mountains of Tibet, such places were contemptuously shunned by educated people whilst evoking deep unease, if not fear, in many others. However, neither of these late-eighteenth-century travelers revealed any signs of such attitudes.

We may recall the Himalayan traveler, early in the nineteenth century, who gazed into a mountain torrent:

Those who have brains and nerves to bear the frightful whirl, which may assail the steadiest head, plant themselves on the bridge that spans the torrent, and from this point survey the wild and awful grandeur of the scene, struck with admiration at its terrific beauty, yet, even while visions of horror float before them, unable to withdraw their gaze. [2]

Or the early Himalayan explorer Gerard, encountering a ravine: 'We could scarcely view [the deep chasms] without shuddering. I never saw such a horrid looking place ...'. [3] Giegrich astutely points out the ontological shift revealed in such episodes. These wild places were no longer a fearful window into an all-encompassing Being, but a relatively safe gaze from the shores of an ontologically secure world into just that one thing. Dangerous nature had become surrounded by safety; the unknown by the known. Such views were islands of intensity, patches of savage sublimity surrounded by a relatively safe and comprehensible world. Similarly Tibet gradually ceased to be a concentrated sign, or representative of the earth's mysterious powers, paradoxes and unlimited imaginal potential. Instead it became set apart from the ordinary world. Its heightened imaginal significance and mystery became counterposed to the comparative knownness outside its borders.

It has also been shown that the imaginative events taking place within Tibet were themselves located within a much broader, global, context. By the mid-nineteenth century virtually the entire globe had been basically mapped. Instead of islands of geographical knowledge afloat on an immense ocean of ignorance and speculation, there were now only a few blank spaces surrounded by a global network of known coordinates and contours. Tibet was one such blank space, one such unknown island, and into these shrinking blank spaces were concentrated the last remaining vestiges of Europe's primal relation to geographical unknownness, to wilderness.

As we have seen, this situation was subsequently followed, in the late nineteenth century, by an overwhelming belief in the final and general scientific comprehension of nature. The systematic theories of Darwin, his colleagues and their followers seemed to offer a key to nature's last secrets. Overall mystery was replaced by specific problems awaiting only time, effort and technique for their ultimate solution. The vast open spaces that lay protected within Tibet's boundaries no longer came to exert the ontological power they had held in earlier times. Although somewhat unknown in terms of specific geographical, botanical, zoological and cultural features, they were considered virtually known and mapped in terms of their ultimate comprehensibility.

We have seen that this intellectual event was by no means an imaginally negative one. It catalysed yet another revolution in Western landscape aesthetics: the appreciation of wildernesses as places of complex beauty. But on another level this aesthetic opening was achieved at the expense and loss of a deep sense of mystery and awe towards natural landscape. Indeed, many in the West, prompted by Ruskin and others, set about aesthetically mapping the last unknown and previously ignored or rejected landscapes of the earth. It was precisely at this time that the symbolic power which had previously been spread throughout Tibet became focused and concentrated into the city of Lhasa, and thence on to the Potala palace. This process of imaginative concentration eventually led to the isolated personage of the Dalai Lama becoming the embodiment not only of all Tibet's paradoxical mysteries and forces but of those of the wider world. It was seen how many came to imagine him as one of the last remaining vessels of ancient wisdom and occult power in an otherwise disenchanted world.

What then happened to the rest of Tibet, to the immense spaces within the remainder of the sacred place, now that signification had been focused so substantially on to such a small vessel, a mere human frame? As we saw in the last chapter, the land of Tibet gradually became either substantially demythologized through social realism, political pragmatics and travel rhetoric, or else contact was lost with its geographical actuality and it became a vague location for heightened spiritual, or utopian, reveries. Hilton's image of Shangri-La was a fitting conclusion to this dual process of symbolic concentration and geographical abstraction. In its lost, floating reality were concentrated all the qualities previously dispersed throughout the whole of geographical Tibet. The intense cohesion of fin-de-siecle Tibet, as a sacred place, was now fragmented into isolated points of heightened imaginative significance: the Dalai Lama of course, but also the yeti, Mount Everest, and remote mystic recluses. The boundaries of Tibet were no longer straining to contain the intense pressure of imaginative transformation; no longer were the walls of the alchemical alembic almost bursting under the heat and fullness of its contents. Tibet was no longer the 'centre of the earth'; the 'global fire' was not to be found there. [5] While the boundaries of Tibet were still vibrant and special for travelers, they simply located and positioned; they did not alchemically contain.

The fantasy of Shangri-La was the final chord in one line of imaginative development. It literally had no-place (utopia) left to go. The 'conquest' of Mount Everest also meant that by 1953 these mountain summits had ceased to be the untouched, mysterious preserve of the gods. The yeti, by its very nature, lingers on in the twilight realm as either a curious oddity or an archetypal mythologem. By 1959 only the Dalai Lama and a handful of high lamas remained with something approaching the sense of mysterious possibility previously contained within all of Tibet. Surrounding the Dalai Lama was a land that, while still exciting and curiously different for Westerners, was ontologically similar to the world outside. Any mystery, any sense of being outside time and space that it still possessed had more the quality of a museum or tourist attraction than of a temenos or sacred place.

Returning to the image of the alchemical alembic located in the busy market place, it can now be seen that in the case of Tibet the reality inside the vessel had become substantially the same as that in the world outside. Whilst both inside and outside still contained their share of isolated mysteries, symbols of imaginative power, corners for sacred reverie, nevertheless a sense of everydayness had spread itself throughout both spaces. [6]

Extremely esoteric religious practices and powers, as exemplified by the Dalai Lama, were the only bearer of Tibetan mysteriousness. Previously Tibetan religion, as we have seen, had been embedded in its landscape; consistently imagined as belonging to its place. By the middle of the twentieth century this position was almost completely reversed: it was not the landscape that provided Western fantasies of Tibet and its religion with coherence, but its esoteric religion that gave Tibet and its landscape imaginative difference and significance. Even Tibetan religion as a whole had ceased to be the object of fascination; now only the spiritual masters and their most advanced techniques excited Western fantasies. [7]

So when the Chinese communist army finally marched in force into Lhasa in 1959, it entered a shell that was already substantially empty of heightened, living, imaginative resonance for most Westerners. Indeed, by expelling the final concentrated essence of Tibetan occult mystery and authority in the form of the Dalai Lama and his ecclesiastical elite, China inadvertently seeded Western fantasy-making with what could prove a whole new series of transformations in its imaginings about Tibet. Spiritually and psychologically, many in the West provided fertile ground for these exiled Tibetan fantasies. But Tibet itself was left abandoned; a broken shell significantly empty of imaginative resonance except, perhaps, for a few echoes that grow fainter by the day, or as a memento mori, a sad reminder of loss. Western involvement in that country quickly seemed like an old dream, almost forgotten. Very soon it hardly seemed possible that the West had at one point seemed to belong in Tibet, to have had an extraordinary relationship with that country. This sense of loss has found one of its most poignant expressions in Harrer's account of his return to Lhasa in 1985. The former tutor to the Dalai Lama, perhaps one of the most widely read of modern writers on Tibet, paints a tragic and harrowing portrait of fear, loss and cultural destruction. [8]

In chapter 6 it was shown how Tibetan 'travel' writing could be usefully considered in four groups, depending on its orientation: everyday life, tourism, mystical religion, or utopianism. In the years after the Chinese communist occupation each of these styles of approaching Tibet has suffered mixed fortunes. Certainly, the fantasy of Tibet as a utopian society, a possible exemplary model for a West desperate and in decline, is rarer than sightings of the yeti. Concern with everyday life in Tibetan culture has, with the closure to Westerners of Tibet itself, received abundant coverage by anthropologists working among Tibetan and related communities in the Himalayan regions (India, Nepal" Sikkim and Bhutan). [9] The exile of high-ranking Tibetan lamas and the subsequent establishment throughout the Western world of monastic and quasi-monastic communities, well stocked with teachers, instructors, sacred texts and highly skilled translators, has undermined the traditional need for Westerners to travel to the Himalayas to search for the truths offered by Tibetan Buddhism. Of course such journeys still occur, but with few exceptions the accounts are cliched, unreflective survivals of a bygone genre. [10]

Since the mid-1960s tourism has boomed in the Himalayan regions of India and Nepal -- particularly adventure tourism, usually low-budget and involving trekking. Since 1980 Tibet too has been open, albeit in a tentative and highly restricted way, to Western tourists. It has been estimated that in the centuries up to 1979 fewer than 1,250 Westerners ever reached Lhasa, and 623 of these were with the 1904 Younghusband expedition. The last ten years have seen the influx of many thousands of tourists, with China hoping for an even more dramatic increase in the near future. [11] The literature of the popular, 'mass' adventure tourism has had a profound influence on the shaping of contemporary images of Tibetan landscape and culture. [12]

Tibetan Buddhism has become a tourist attraction. Its monks, rituals, monasteries and artifacts throughout the Himalayan region -- from Tibet to Ladakh, Nepal to Darjeeling, Bhutan to Sikkim -- have become the delight of photographers, trekkers and bargain-hunters. As we have seen, the genesis of this phenomenon can be traced far back, to the second half of the nineteenth century. However, despite the fears of some early travelers, the region had never before been swamped by Western tourists. This is a complex phenomenon with profound cultural and ecological repercussions: it is far more than simply a question of numbers. Earlier tourists viewed their 'sights' against the background of a coherent, 'other' world.

On the other hand, in the contemporary era, tourist culture (literature, images, etc.) has to an extraordinary extent created these 'places': the expectations about them, their representations. The culture of Tibetan Buddhism is instantaneously appealing, visually dramatic and suitably archaic for packaged travel. Travel to these regions is now located within a global smorgasbord of possible destinations, all of which are suitably exotic. [13]

Places in Process

Nevertheless, as this study has shown, the image of a sacred place standing in direct opposition to profane space, the one sharply delineated from the other, is merely one possible movement, one extreme within a range of less polarized imaginal possibilities. At the other extreme lies totally homogenized space, whether envisaged as entirely profane or as entirely sacred. It seems unlikely that either of these possibilities has ever existed in its pure form. [14] However, in the case of Tibet, these extremes were approximated on two occasions. Then the one seemed quickly to follow the other: an intensive polarization between sacred and profane worlds, with the hermetically sealed containment of the sacred, was superseded almost immediately by diffusion and loss of imaginal concentration. This dramatic reversal took place within the first half of the twentieth century. But even in these cases, the polarization was never complete except in the fantasies of a few; the containment was never absolute, the threshold was always porous; also, imaginal concentration was never totally diluted or lost.

To focus exclusively upon such extremes distorts the more complex phenomenology of sacred space -- the fluidity of its boundaries; the shifts and realignments of its crucial features; its transformations across time; the often contradictory levels of fantasy-making (political and religious, individual and social) sliding across each other, contradicting or reinforcing each other. This study has also shown that the boundary of such a place can be less of a narrow line drawn across time and space than a complex zone expressing an imaginal gradient. The axis mundi is less a fixed reference point than a mobile, often pluralistic, series of symbols which locate themselves according to a complex imaginal ecology that weaves itself between the sacred place and its wider context. We have seen that the region inside a sacred place is not necessarily imaginally separate from the demands of the world outside -- indeed, there can be continual dialogue between the two spaces. This can be recognized without collapsing the one into the other, or sacrificing their relative autonomy. [15] The rich and multitextured complexity of Tibet's story has also shown that geographical Otherness is rarely an imaginal unity. Rather, it is a multiplicity which echoes Jung's comment: 'The phenomenology of the psyche is so colorful, so variegated in form and meaning, that we cannot possibly reflect all its riches in one mirror.' [16]

Imaginal coherence should not be confused with fantasies of wholeness or unity. This imaginal archaeology of Tibet has revealed a diversity of images of European Otherness. There has been a historical sequence of 'Tibets', each related yet also separate, each corresponding both to historical circumstances and also to a kind of internal mythological necessity, an imaginal momentum. We have also seen that at any one time each of these big 'Tibets' was in its turn only a temporary coherence of numerous smaller ones: Tibet as a heroic challenge, as the object of mystical inspiration or anima-fascination, the source of senex guidance or of puer aspiration, and so on. Tibet echoed Boon's observations about the anthropological creation of Bali: a compact profusion of visual-spatial symbolism. [17] However, we have also seen how an approximate consensus of imaginal unity was achieved on two occasions: first under the constraints of imperial politics at the end of the nineteenth century; secondly under the pressure of a collective desperation and disenchantment in the first half of the twentieth. But even on both those occasions, Tibet as a sacred place was always the site of an imaginal struggle. Less socially powerful interpretations, less socially sanctioned imaginal voices were never completely silenced but rather pushed to the perimeter of the more publicized paradigm, often to re-emerge later in a more favorable climate. Tibetan travel has had its high priests and its bards, its mystics and its wanderers, its politicians and its renegades, its patriarchs and its clowns.

While this study has followed the process whereby Tibet became transformed from a geographical rumor into a sacred place, I am not suggesting that such a creation will always follow the Tibetan sequence or pattern: an initial, vague feeling of numinosity; then the discovery and establishment of a boundary-zone; followed by the creation of a centre, or series of centres, as axis mundi; then its consecration as a fully formed sacred place or temenos; and finally its eventual decay, degeneration and abandonment. Even in Tibet, this creative process was not uniform among travelers, nor was it historically linear. For some early visionaries Tibet leapt into their imaginations almost complete, as a fully formed whole, whilst for others, even over a century later, it still failed to evoke deeper resonances.

Sacred places can rarely be established in a step-by-step fashion, each phase neatly compartmentalized from the next. There must usually be a simultaneous intimation, at least, of all its aspects: boundary, centre and consecration. However, some aspects are usually emphasized, or imagined, more clearly and forcefully than others. One could easily envisage -- for example, in the case of a miraculous event -- that the axis mundi would instantly be established as the very raison d'etre of the place. In such cases the mapping of the boundary-zone would come later. A slow process of geographical, political, economic, religious and mythological reasoning and negotiation, as well as of the indeterminate folkways of common habits. But this study has shown that whatever the sequence, sacred places exist in time; that time is a part of a sacred place.

The Echo of Place

We have seen that for many in the West Tibet offered a kind of imaginal continuity, especially at times of social and individual doubt or uncertainty. Such continuity, it has been suggested, is a crucial aspect of a place. [18] The most obvious form of continuity was probably the almost mechanical repetition of various discourses -- political, social, religious, scientific, and so on -- produced by succeeding generations of travelers. Layer after layer of organized imagery were placed one atop the other until a well-defined, overall image of Tibet was confirmed and concretized. As the climax of this process was reached towards the end of the last century, travelers increasingly encountered Tibet with well-prepared expectations. They involved themselves in that country with such expectations uppermost, even trying to impose such fantasies upon Tibet and its people. This process offered many a kind of static sense of identity and imaginal security. This is the level of continuity alluded to by Said and other writers concerned primarily with the overt political repercussions of travel writing in its broadest sense.

But this study has also drawn attention to other levels and styles of imaginal continuity. There were, for example, vestiges of historical memory which became actualized in Tibet: the lingering images of Tartars, the Celestial Empire, the Silk Route, or more recent ones such as Alpine exploration, colonial wars, gold rushes, and so on. Foucault has called such things 'memory traces' and discusses them in terms of leprosy's powerful influence on the way madness was subsequently viewed, handled and physically placed in post-medieval Europe. [19] In the same way, the memory traces intersecting in Tibet were not only located in the mind of the traveler but were embedded in the practices and rituals they followed. Such practices included the unwritten and written rules for organizing and equipping expeditions, the folk mores of expedition life, the genre of recording, expressing and processing experiences and discoveries. All these things created a kind of expedition ritual and context which defined the travelers' attitude towards Tibet as a geographical Other and at the same time confirmed a kind of historical relationship to the place. Such rituals were integral to the creation of Tibet. Place and ritual were inseparable. Through them, the traces of the past wove their way through to the present.

In addition, there was a kind of spatial memory, rather than a purely historical or temporal one. Frances Yates has shown how memory was viewed spatially in Classical, medieval and Renaissance times. [20] Memory was envisaged not as something in the past but as a quality of discrete interior space. As Corbin writes: 'The past is not behind us but under our feet.' [21] Within such a perspective, memory has to do with the placing and organization of images in relation to each other. The process of remembering then becomes a journey through this 'interior' landscape to reclaim these images; such interiority being located both within the subjectivity of the individual and within the world outside. [22] Memory here becomes a true re-collection. Such a re-collection, in the case of Tibet, occurred both on a mundane level (memories of previous explorers, certain specific discoveries and incidents) and on a deeper level (reminders of existential hopes and fears, of social duties and expectations). [23] Tibet became differentiated, throughout the nineteenth century, into discrete zones, some based on geographical features such as the bleak northern plateau, the Chumbi valley, or the Tsangpo river, whilst others were based upon cultural references such as the area around Lhasa, or Tashi Lumpo. Routes into Tibet also began to take on imaginal differentiation. Deeply mythological fantasies such as Aryan ancestors, archaic mysteries, the yeti, or gold were specifically located within this Tibetan 'memory system'. Also, such spatial remembering occurred within a fairly well-defined global context of imaginal places. Tibet, as we have seen, was just one space located within a well-organized global structure of other complex imaginal places: the European Alps, the source of the Nile, Egypt, the Arctic, Bali, the Andes, the gold fields of Australia, South Africa, California, and so on.

However, there was yet another way in which Tibet offered a profound imaginal continuity, a way that was perhaps less 'grand' than any of those discussed above. Instead of the metaphors of archaeology, or memory systems, memory traces and so on, we could use that of echoing. Places echo. This echoing is one of the defining characteristics of a place's placeness. Without imaginal echo there is only geographical location. As we have seen, Tibet was the site of echoes that reverberated across history and through changing imaginal landscapes. As Berry writes: 'Echo ... is not separate from her surroundings.' [24] These echoes and the place of Tibet were inseparable. Again, Berry reminds us that 'As Echo shapes, she is shaped by what's around her.' [25] Echoes counter the narcissistic desire, held by many Westerners, to see a simple reflection of themselves in the mirror of Tibet. Tibet was never a simple mirror to the West's desires. At the very least it gave these projections its own specific form, color, tone and texture.

This continuity, through the intangible reflections of apparently marginal images, were no less significant than the grander reorganization of global space and time. Unlike the other forms of imaginal continuity, echoes cannot be abstracted from the geographical place, cannot be somehow universalized, systematized and generalized.

Some echoes reverberated deafeningly -- gold, Egypt, archaic mysteries -- had sent their sounds around the globe. Some were chased, like Manning's hats, in an attempt to grasp them and transform them into something stable and substantial. Some were very personal and soon faded. Recent Himalayan travel writing continues this tradition. Matthiesson, for example, heard his own deep personal doubts and hopes ricochet off every overhang, evoked by every bend in the path. His 1980 book The Snow Leopard also records contemporary echoes of a more collective nature: ecological disregard, the energy crisis, pollution, species extinction, Third World oppression. [26] In both cases, the personal and the collective, small details of landscape trigger off associations for Matthiesson which then plunge into imaginal depths, only then to fade quickly.

The details of the place provide the timing, shape, resonance and momentum of the associations; this is what makes them echo. Through echoing, the place almost assumes the role of psychoanalyst. [27] Indeed, we have seen how the marginal, ephemeral echoes of Bogle's, Fleming's and Byron's Tibets were overtly used to deepen critical reflection and understanding of their own culture's fantasy-making. Echoes are not a horizontal mimicry but the soundings of imaginal depth. Through its Tibetan echoes the West was occasionally shown a deeper, less conscious aspect of itself. By listening to its Tibetan echoes, the West could perhaps discover its own questions. This procession of imaginal Tibets represented attempts to complete questions the West was asking about its own identity. Berry writes: 'Echo is not only an echo of something but also a kind of response that completes the word to itself.' [28] Many in the West came closer to hearing their questions by listening to the responses from Tibet.

The metaphor of echo demands that we listen to the place as it sounds through the travel texts. It demands an 'acoustic imagination'; an imaginative listening in terms of tone, rhythm, harmony and discord. [29] Instead of grand vistas, powerful rituals, well-regulated mystic assemblies or geopolitics, echoes reveal a more insubstantial and indirect aspect of place, rather like the incident Maraini recorded of the Maharaja of Sikkim eating peas. 'Echo's aesthetics', writes Berry, 'occur in the empty spaces.' [30] Indeed, when one is relieved from the thaumaturgical Tibet and all the other spaces filled with expectations, openings appear which are so suitable for Echo's persistent yet delicate art.

Berry suggests that echoing is a form of alchemical iteratio, an attempt at continuity, at concretizing, materializing, at making something take. 'Repetitions', she writes, 'are longings for self-reflection ... Echo longs for this beauty of self-reflected depth ... an aesthetic self-longing.' [31] Perhaps there was also something in Tibet that wanted to see itself echoed in the travelers' tales.

The fantasy of Shangri-La can be seen, like all utopias, as an abstracted memory system, or as a memory trace, perhaps for example of earlier, idealised, spiritual communities. It can also be seen as the product of ritual repetition by generations of travelers, the final layer of a centuries-old archaeological past. But in a sense, too, Shangri-La was the last great cohesive echo that reverberated from Tibet before it fell into ruins. As an echo should, it began life well defined, clearly shaped by its immediate connection with the place, but as its sound radiated further from its echoing source, the form became more diffuse and vague. It still survives as the faintest of echoes, but for most people it has long since lost any connection with a specific place. Perhaps it was Hilton's genius to have gathered up the rapidly fragmenting and vanishing images of Tibet into one last cohesive echo. As Lowenstein put it: 'Orphean echo impels mythos'. [32]

The Return of Soul to the World

This study has been a contribution towards the return of soul to the world, to an anima mundi psychology. The world presents itself in its images. Jung wrote that the alchemists considered the greater part of the psyche to lie outside the body. [33] And as Hillman warns, 'the more we concentrate on literalizing interiority within my person the more we lose the sense of soul as a psychic reality ... within all things.' [34] While there was a long tradition which located psyche, in one form or another, somehow within both the individual and the world, to a considerable extent this world connotation has been lost in recent centuries. [35] Jung was a seminal figure in reclaiming this world-centred psyche. The primary texts he used were those of European alchemy, through which he realized the imaginative power of matter, and hence of nature. Travelers' tales are also a form of alchemy. As Hillman insists: 'The same imagination, the same soul, that presented itself in fifteenth and sixteenth century alchemy showed itself in the extroverted psychology of the explorers seeking gold, the journey across the perilous seas ... the world as metaphor.' [36]

This study has shown how many of these travelers to Tibet were searching for the secret which they believed lay in the mysterious unknown. Like the alchemists, some chose a somewhat extroverted path of physical exploration, whilst others were lured into the place in the search for ideas. But in neither case was the place simply passive, a mere blank sheet on to which the travelers could impose their wildest fantasies. The place of Tibet had a logic and coherence of its own, its genius loci. Tibet was not a 'silent Other', it was alive, substantial and compelling. It was part of the world calling attention to itself, deepening our soulful appreciation of mountains, of deserts and rivers, of light and color, of time and space, of myriad peoples and their cultures, of fauna and flora, of the plurality of imaginative possibilities.
 

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