TURANIA
The author or person quoting from an earlier explorer’s text, is possibly R. Daniels, 1946. Edited and added to by Nakived, 1996.
The Soviet Union extends throughout an area of something over eight and a quarter million square miles. In considering this area, nearly all of your own conceptions are, in fact, drawn from that comparatively small portion of it, which is in Soviet Europe; and, within that small portion, from what you know of the capital and of the great 'regional' towns: Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, Kiev, and the rest.
Yet, of these eight and a quarter million square miles, more than six million square miles lie NOT in Europe at all, but IN THE SOVIET EAST! This Soviet East is an area large enough to contain the whole of Europe outside the Soviet Union five times over.
Of this Soviet East, containing so very much the larger portion of Soviet Union territory, E. S. Bates, presenting a more authoritative picture of the region than anyone else writing in English has ever done, says:
'No one person has ever seen all of it, much less lived in all of it, yet. There exists no wholly accurate map of the region, not even in the Soviet atlas, the finest atlas in existence.’ ("Soviet Asia," Jonathan Cape, London, 1942.) [At the time of Stalin.] [Note: He means no one person that ever saw and wrote down what they saw for Western eyes. There are those with an oral culture who have seen it. Marco Polo saw a lot of it during his travels - and what he saw has not changed much.]
Starting round about the mouth and middle reaches of the Volga, taking in the autonomous republics and regions of the Chuvashes, Tatars and Kalmucks, and extending southward, south-eastward, and north-eastward across the Urals, the Soviet East contains a part of the Caucasus (itself a small continent, probably the oldest in the world), the whole of Central Asia (formerly Turkistan), the whole of Northern Asia, and the Soviet Russian Far East. To the southwest, the frontiers of this Soviet dominion are the frontiers of Persia and Afghanistan, to the south and southeast, those of China, including Manchuria. In the far northeast, they extend beyond the Arctic Circle. In the east, to the Pacific Ocean.
Second to Jenghis Khan's Empire, this is the greatest continuous dominion that has ever been known, open to the ocean on two sides. Its share of those oceans is not navigable for almost all of the year. It is the land with more great rivers than any other land; but these rivers are mostly unnavigable, too: and the land's chief shortage is of water. It is the land of all others rich in resources; but the riches are as unmarketable as the rivers are unnavigable. It is the land with the world's greatest roads; but the chief of these roads lie buried under sand. Throughout million after million of square miles, and far southward again, through immensities of primeval forest, forests where daylight itself barely enters through which 'roads cannot be made, and in which people cannot live or industries thrive; save only with an almost prohibitive struggle', the great Siberian rivers, the Lena, the Ob, the Yenisei, and a dozen others, alone provide the means of transport and communication. Yet these great rivers, the mightiest waterways of the world, the basin of each of which is at least as large as the whole of western Europe, remain frozen throughout almost the whole of their length for the greater part of the year. In spring, released during a few brief weeks from their straitjacket of ice, their waters race along in torrents; yet none of this floodwater can be drained off underground. 'In spring they are seas, in winter glaciers.’ 'Half of all Soviet dominions lie in this frozen-subsoil area, where only the surface ever thaws... leaving the depths below perpetually frozen; a subsoil on which railway lines can hardly be laid, nor buildings built, nor roads made, nor water pipes be dug in, nor airplanes alight, with safety.’ Southward again of this area is Central Asia, whose landlocked shores and expanses of boundless steppe were once the bottom of the sea; the most continental area of the whole earth; the 'land of thirst.'
Here are abysses of space: chasms into which millions of living may be cast without awakening any more echo than the rolling of a stone into a gulf.
Here cities, once the capitals of fabulous empires, the Turanian (Turko-Tatar) Khanates, are silted up with ancient, unaerated sand.
Here extinct volcanoes rise like towers out of expanses of otherwise totally unbroken plain.
Here tempests rage from October to March, hurricanes carry cyclones and anti-cyclones of snow that devour all that the cultivator has labored to achieve.
Here recurring famines ravage lands between which lie other 'Black Earth:' lands of fantastic fertility.
Here are regions in which for sixty days it is unbroken night; and others in which, day in, day out, summer and winter alike, there is an average of over twenty degrees of frost.
Here, north of the Aral Sea, in Central Asia, temperatures are registered which, in January, are lower than in Moscow or Leningrad, and in summer higher than anywhere else in the world, except only in the Sahara, Arabia, and on the Equator!
Here, in the infinite, horizontal expanses of steppe, unbroken vertically by a single tree or shrub, mirages of cities hang above the corn. Locusts move in formations, like the formations of armies when they invade. Mosquitoes darken the daylight, winds cut like knives, and the sun, over oceans of dust and sand, blisters and strikes yet does not warm.
Here the sky, at night, instead of vaulting the earth bears down upon and seems almost to touch it. Huge stars, blindingly white and bright, hang so low as to seem magnified out of recognition.
Here, primeval as their own dark forests, taiga and tundra, burning suns, eternal steppes, sky and snow, snow and sky, the inhabitants (to name only a few) of this immense world, Evenks, Tungus, Manchus, Ostiaks, Samoyedes, Yakuts, tribes of the Amur basin and Paleo-Asiatics who inhabited the Far East before anybody else at all, Khazaks, Khirgiz, Kara-Kalpaks, Turkmans, Uzbeks, lone fur-clad fishers of the Arctic, nomads of the infinite plains, Buriats on Lake Baikal, Mongols off the edge of China, Pacific men from the north of Manchuria and scores and scores of others, of their own free will have altered nothing in their habits throughout thousands of years. They evolved biologically, but not so much culturally.
Is this the planet Earth? One might surely ask that question, because NO poet, NO literature, NO effort of imagination, could so compass, or fit to minds shaped like yours, this Soviet East, except, perhaps, H. P. Lovecraft when he wrote of Kadath in the Cold Waste or of the Plateau of Leng! (H. P. Lovecraft: "At the Mountains of Madness")
For the small, settled peoples of Europe, orchardmen, farmers, city workers, members of the learned professions, butchers, bakers, trade unionists, back benchers, taxi-drivers, oil-and-color merchants, miners, civil servants, and the rest, lovers of back gardens, frequenters by preference of a single public-house could not fathom the Soviet landscape. The events that took shape in the Soviet Union did not take shape against any backgound you are familiar with; they did not transpire in a civilized and industrialized country.
These oceans of dust and sand, grasses higher than a horse and his rider, forests never penetrated by daylight, oceanic slopes, lake floors and Polar drifts, are paralyzing to the imagination. This reality, the everyday life of people in Kazan and Saratov, Ashkabad and Tomsk, even in the very suburbs of Moscow, is as remote from the Western observer as the dark side of the moon from the stargazer's telescope. The moon, indeed, is nearer to your ways of thought! Your own reveries and the reveries of your poets have brought the moon within your orbit; luminous, familiar, predictable, almost akin: a part of memory and experience, and accessible to your imagination.
Here, then, where what is unimaginable elsewhere is the stuff of everyday life, a far cry from Soviet Europe and further still from your own knowledge of it and such centers of civilization as Moscow or Kiev, lies almost entirely the background and the reality that the Bolsheviks had to deal with and deal in, not just this landscape, but these people who had lived there seemingly forever.
It is within these unimaginable expanses, against these wastes of snow and sky, beneath the blind roofs of these primeval forests, along these ice-bound waters and across these oceans of sand and steppe that events took place that events took shape. These events made this land and its people into a World Power to be reckoned with; a World Power with space stations and space science.
For this reason, much that happened in the Stalin era must at first sight appear startlingly unlike much else which received publicity and slander from the West. It is that in each case, with each set of facts, critics are dealing with only one aspect of a whole SO VAST as to set a girdle half way around the earth: and which encloses within itself peoples and ways of life more remote from each other than the peoples and ways of life of, say, the Congo compared to Boston, or Paris, and Oxford compared to Peking and the Amazon Jungle!
Within the boundaries of what is now the Soviet Union, there existed, up to 1917, the Russian Empire. Prior to that, Khanates. (See "Empire of the Steppes," Rene Grousset, NY, 1970.) Of this Empire, a Frenchman named Paleologue, last French Ambassador to the last Tsar, writing of the years 1900 to 1914, has left the following description:
'The Russia of these years is not, as so many people imagine, to be thought of as a country like some country of Western Europe might be, were it thirty or forty or even fifty years out of date. It is not like this at all. Scratch underneath the surface of the cultured St. Petersburg circle and you are back in a country which is what a Western European country may have been four and five and six hundred years ago - back before Western Europe had its French Revolution, or its Reformation, or its Renaissance - back to a country that is still in the darkness of the Middle Ages.’
Arthur Koestler, in "Darkness at Noon," compared the level of culture of the people living there to the level of New Guinea Savages! There is NO comparison to anything Western with the vast majority of people living there.
Within this Empire, and up to the very last hour of its existence, that is, up to 1917, the population of more than one hundred and seventy-five million persons was divided by both law and usage into five groups called 'orders' or ‘estates.’
Of these orders, the first two, who were the nobility and the upper clergy, had everything.
The third, called 'honorary citizens,' were allowed to sit in.
The fourth, which included merchants, artisans, small bourgeois and some others, lived by favor of the first three.
But, still, these four orders, all added together, amounted in number to slightly less than 20 per cent of the whole population!
THE REMAINING 80 PER CENT, who made up the fifth order, HAD NOTHING AT ALL: they were the exploited on whom others lived. Living on the land and cultivating it for a 'baron' or master (Kulak), the members of this fifth order, until 1861, could be, and were, bought and sold, bequeathed in gift, put up to auction, lost or won at play in exactly the same way as the land itself or any other kind of livestock maintained on it.
After 1861, and the Bill of Emancipation, they could no longer be bought and sold, or even legally flogged, but the same solid line of demarcation as before continued to mark them off from the four orders above them. As an order, they were still the objects of special legislation, and a special administration presided over the whole of their lives. In practice, up to the very last hour of the Tzar's Empire, that is, until well on into the closing period of World War One, any member of the other four orders was still, in the eyes of the fifth, a baron, master, lord; and any member of the fifth was a "Muzhik," or slave.
In 1914, when the Empire entered on its last and decisive war (World War One), 80 per cent at least of its one hundred and seventy-five million inhabitants were totally illiterate. Of the fourteen million Imperial soldiers mobilized 'to fight Germany,' four-fifths could not have said, and had never had the dimmest facilities for finding out, whether 'Germany' was a man, a thing, a village, or a monster out of a fairy-tale...
In 1917, the Empire ceased to exist and it was upon the ruins of this social system that Soviet civilization had first to rise and then to persist. The Soviet system had to struggle to persist after inheriting the aftermath of a particularly disastrous and demoralizing foreign war, which the Western Nations fought against them (including troops from the U.S.A.), revolution at home and the bloodiest civil war in history; and with further long years ahead of famine, typhus, cholera, and local reversions to cannibalism. It is a tragedy and a struggle that the Western World, TO THIS DAY, not only fails to recognize and honor, but continues to slander and debase.
For the territories throughout, which this New Soviet civilization was to be spread, the conventional geographical name "Russia" is both misleading and false. In the sense in which such terms should be used: THERE NEVER HAS BEEN, AND ALMOST CERTAINLY THERE NEVER NOW WILL BE, A GEOGRAPHICAL ENTITY WHICH MAY CORRECTLY BE SPOKEN OF AS 'RUSSIA!’
There has been, and almost certainly always will be, an area of expansion, radiating from Moscow, which has been styled successively a principality, an Empire and a Union of Federated Republics; and which has been conditioned by the initiative, military spirit and colonizing genius of a group of people spoken of by the English until not very, long ago, and by their neighbors in Europe to this day, as Muscovites. They INHERITED this power from Batu Khan, the grandson of Jenghis Khan and Khan of the Golden Horde, who gave the title "Grand Duke" to Ivan One of Moscow.
The Muscovites, or people living about Moscow, are the people who in the fifteenth century established themselves in Novgorod; who, with Cossack riders recruited in the Ukraine (and with the help of that Cossack institution, the knout), reached out as far as the Urals; and from the Urals spread themselves over the whole of the north of Asia until, from the Volga to the Ob, from the Ob to the Lena, from the Lena to the Amur and beyond, they arrived at the Pacific Ocean; and who have since been the ruling class throughout successively acquired dominions amounting to at least eight and a quarter million square miles, or one-sixth of the whole land surface of the globe.
It is the members of this ruling class only who, more European than Asiatic, though not too wholly European, and differing greatly among themselves, are Russian-speaking; and who think and speak of themselves, and are thought and spoken of by the two hundred or more other races under their rule, as "Russians." This Empire, radiating from Moscow and carried first west and then east, to the Urals and from the Urals east again, until it ended only at the Pacific, was consolidated for the ruler and his successors by the greatest of all the Muscovite princes, Peter the Great. His successors, even if they parted in 1867 with Alaska to the Government of the U.SA., kept up the work of expansion by the annexation, during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, of ten large provinces in Poland, of Finland, and of the territories on either shore of the Caspian Sea.
From the time of this great prince onward, two entirely different lines of policy were applied by successive Imperial Governments to the very numerous non-Muscovite races brought under Imperial rule. The first of these policies, and the one which predominated down to 1880 and the accession of Alexander the Third, was tolerant (within limits, and with the one very marked exception of the Polish Provinces), of native customs and cultures within the Empire. The second, paramount from 1880 onwards, was determined upon the "Russification" of all minorities; a policy which profoundly injured its own cause.
Among the other legacies of the ruined Empire taken over by the early Soviet Union, there existed in consequence a comparatively new, practically universal, spirit of separatism, and a deep-rooted tendency to see in every member of the light-skinned and Russian-speaking ruling race a foreigner, a colonist, and an oppressor, or a non-Turanian, a non-Turk, and even "not a real Slav." (It is fair to note that the Nazis were easily able to recognize on sight their "kindred folk," i.e., other Anglo- Germanic people living in the Soviet Union as settlers, and were easily able to distinguish them from the real Slavs and other Turanians.)
These inherited difficulties of the young Soviet Union (or rather of the Russian Bolshevik Communist Party who had assumed power and who were creating the Soviet Union) were further enormously augmented by the nature of what they had set themselves to do. The empire-builders before them had been concerned only with the comparatively simple business of making themselves rich; with the acquisition first of salt and then of sables and then of minerals and then of wheat, and last of all, of the trade in otter pelts which, in the eighteenth century and under the influence of the Hudson Bay Company on the other side of the Behring Straits, was beginning to push the little Siberian sables out of the market. Wherever the territory and whatever the local divergences, the guiding principle of the early (and non-Turanian) colonists: parasites, vampires, thieves everywhere, had simply been, "how much of what is here already can we, for our OWN purposes, TAKE OUT?"
Their Soviet successors had bound themselves to the accomplishment of something infinitely more difficult. In the process of unifying and colonizing, which it now appeared must be begun all over again, it was their intention not to take out but to bring in; and what they meant to bring in, however much it might be machinery, implements of agriculture, telegraph posts, electric lights, or other material benefits, was also a new ethical conception of the universe and of man's place in it, a new moral code and a new system of laws, for The People, of and by The People: a grand socialism.
The territories throughout which these conceptions were to be disseminated occupy, as has been said, more than one-sixth of the whole land surface of the globe. The human beings who were to embrace the new doctrines numbered one hundred and seventy-five million, of whom 80 to 90 percent were totally illiterate and who had a standard of living incredibly primitive and a social consciousness consistent with a status legally identical with that of pigs and goats!
This does not mean or imply that they were stupid; far from it: they had also to struggle against the climate, the fantastic brevity of certain seasons, the ferocity and length of others, against the nature of the soil, the fallibility of programs, and the hostility of the outer world. Almost any extract taken at random from the works of Lenin, written between the year 1921 and his death in 1924, may serve as an illustration of the discouraging and almost superhuman nature of the task which had seemed comparatively simple in 1917. 'Russia,' he exclaims, when addressing the Tenth Party Congress in 1921, 'has come out of the war in the condition of a half-dead man beaten nearly to death... After nearly seven years of war, the workers and peasant masses of our backward country are in a state of exhaustion rendering them almost incapable of labor...' A little later in the same address he speaks of 'a country radically ruined, and populated for the most part by destitute peasants.’
In his tract, "On the Food Tax," Lenin says: 'We avoid talking about certain problems, we do not think about them, we overlook them. Not because we are clever and strong, but because we are stupid and weak. We are afraid of facing the bare truth, we prefer much too often the lofty delusion. We repeat all the time that we are passing from Capitalism to Socialism and forget who "we" are. "We" are the vanguard of the proletariat, but the vanguard is only a small portion of the population...'
In another place, Lenin exclaims with even greater discouragement: 'Glance only at a map of Soviet Russia! North of Vologda, southeast of Rostov-on-Don and Saratov, south of Orenburg and Omsk, and north of Tomsk, you will see abysses of space that could contain dozens of large civilized states. These territories remain in conditions patriarchal and/or half-wild, where they are not wholly savage. And of the peasants lost in still remoter corners of Russia, what is to be said! Everywhere, for hundreds of versts, primitive tracks separate (or rather isolate) the villages from the railway stations: that is, from contact with civilization, with capital, with large industries, with the big cities. Is it to be imagined that under such conditions Russia can pass immediately to Socialism?’ (See the book by A. Tishkov: "Felix Dzerzhinsky" for a view of practical problems they faced and conquered and of the economic situation, and/or N. Belskaya "Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Biography.")
Confronted with ignorance and apathy, with obstruction, sabotage and physical resistance, the Russian Bolshevik Communist Party found itself committed to more and more military expeditions, more and more industrial penetrations, and, increasingly and on a growing scale after the death of Lenin, to more and more liquidations, pacifications, mass deportations and purges and, contrary to what is written by Western propagandists (including Robert Conquest), these happened with good reason.
Fundamental, and quite insuperable, was the totality of difference between their conceptions of standards a human being sets himself in his private, and particularly in his physical, life. Conceived of as little more than cattle, housed as cattle, monstrously herded together in hovels worse than byres, 80 to 90 per cent of the Tsar's subjects had never known, and had barely even aspired to the standard's of human beings. Tsardom at an end, their fingers had been taught to handle intricate machinery and their tongues to repeat a new lesson, but for the great majority the physical conditions under which they lived had hardly changed at all.
The new regime, intent on its vision of the future, occupied in the present less with bodies than with minds, had not yet embarked on transforming the personal habits left over from centuries of serfdom; that is to say transforming the people themselves, transforming their consciousness and educating them.
What Lenin started, Stalin completed. Not one person who saw it or lived during those times, neither friend nor enemy, could deny or would deny now that from a primitive agrarian and wildly nomadic society the Soviet Union had become a World Power with a space program. From a country of small, individually farmed, hand-and-sickle crops, along with people living in yurts and riding on horseback, it had become a country of collective, large-scale, mechanized agriculture. From an ignorant, illiterate and uncultured country, it had become a literate and cultured country covered by a vast network of higher, secondary and elementary schools teaching in the languages of the many nationalities of the Soviet Union.
During Stalin's time, which is to say an extremely short time period compared to any other nations, the Soviet Union became a World Power. This is to be looked on with respect, possibly with awe - and not with derision. For some Stalin was the first true Communist that led The People on the path of real Communism. For others, he was the Great Stalin Khan.
SOME NOTES OF POSSIBLE INTEREST OUTSIDE OF POLITICS:
The Turanian people, it has been found genetically, are the most closely related people to the Native Americans (Amerindians). The appearance, if one wishes to know what is meant here, is also similar to many Amerindians (not all). Take a look at moving pictures (not drawings or touched up photos) of Stalin or Lenin or Yezhov for an idea, or Alexander Lebed, the modern former head of the armed forces in the x-USSR. Replace the suit and tie with a robe. Change the hair from a Western style to, say, a topknot. They look exactly like the rest of the Turanian (Turko-Tatar) people.
The Slavic indigenous religion had to do with Charnaya Bog (means "Black God"), which is the same idea as the Tibetan Mahakala (Great Blackness, more at a dark FORCE in nature permeating and motivating nature in a dialectical or yin/yang fashion. It is not a centralized deity and "Bog" is NOT an Indo- European word for God, it is Altaic (Turanian). Their indigenous non-central deity traditions are known to be WHOLLY UNRELATED to anything Indo-European or Semitic. These are clearly not Western people, Indo-European or Semitic.
In ancient Persia, the Turanians (called "Turia" or "Turan") were the ancient enemies of the Aryas (Aryans, Iran, Persians). Consider this when you consider the abject paranoia and fear the Anglo-Western people have for the Soviets: they would call it the "Evil Empire." That is what the tyrants in Persia thought and said, too, about the people of Turan. The Persians even believed and wrote that the Turanians cursed them by making them into bodies of flesh and also making the sun, which they worshiped, burn and hurt them! This is not all that well known. Considering that previously, in India, these Turanians were called Chandravansa and known as NAGA, Serpents and the Chinese often referred to them as Hsien (sorcerers), the Christians and Jews believed that the "Serpent" cursed them. When Europeans speak of the "yellow peril" they are not referring to Chinese of Japanese people. They are exclusively referring to Turko-Tatars - the people of Turan.
What this means, curses, serpents, etc., allegorically or literally, is unknown. It is primarily, in Western and Semitic thought, a kind of phobia about the flesh itself, one's own body, that persistently leads, like a disease, to the desire for a savior and belief in fantasies. Such feelings and beliefs do not exist in others. Is it genetic? Is it cultural? That Christianity (which happens to be the main Western mind-set) is directly connected to Manichaeism (Persian beliefs, dualism) and in its aspects and images almost identical to Persian Zoroastrianism with its anti-flesh "bodies of pure light" and its savior Sosiosh (also Persian) is quite well known.
The curious thing is: where would humans get such notions about "up there" and "bodies of pure light not made of flesh?" What does this refer to and is it literal or allegorical? There IS something that could make people despise their own flesh: PAIN! That could do it. What Christianity existed amongst the E. Slavs (or "Oguz") was Hellenistic (also known to be Eastern in essence) and Dionysian. The Russian tradition is Byzantine and Asiatic from the previous long period of Tatar rule; it's not Latin, and Byzantium was the inheritor of the Hellenic traditions, in part. The Georgians (Stalin was from Georgia) are thought to be the Argonauts of old and are mentioned in ancient Hellenic times as the Gargarensians.
European belief (religious), especially previous to Christianity, is primarily grounded on an agrarian system with familiar agrarian seasons, based on a lunar (moon) cycle and the sun and familiar seasons. Christian holidays are based on formerly pagan holidays.
What would a Vernal Equinox or Summer Solstice mean to people who come from this Soviet land? There are places in the Soviet Union where you can see the sun rise and set at the same time! There are vast areas where there are two seasons: light and dark! Yet the Dark Doctrines, doctrines about a Great Blackness or Darkness as a Deity, (Tantra, Taoism and indigenous versions of Shamanism including the Slavic) and a keen feeling for this non-centralized Deity concept arose from these peoples and NOT from the agrarian societies of Europe or the Middle East. The most advanced form of this Dark Doctrine can be seen in "On Contradiction," by Mao Tse-tung. (See an annotated version of this here)
This is not dualism, nor is it some worship of an archetypal being, god or goddess that exists "up there" or "down there." Dialectical Materialism IS the Doctrine as applied to practical life! The only hint of this Doctrine existing within any agrarian societies (which all became vast imperialist empires at one time or another) is in the Esoteric cults that lived amongst them and this was all due to remnants of the Naga People, the "Serpents": Turanians as can be seen by the ancient mask of Hermes, and an ancient Indian drawing of a Naga person. They have a distinct "Tatar look."
What others made of these doctrines, either by trying to outright co-opt them or pieces of them, or by trying to incorporate pieces into their own superstitions, seems to have always become either a dualism or the worship of a "Being." The closest the real Slavs come to believing in a Being, and only when they were Christianized, can be seen by the Mother Mary cults and the Dionysian, orgiastic Pan-like cults (as like Rasputin) that existed in a small portion of the Soviet Union. Their name for the Christian Devil was Peron. However, the indigenous name for their Dark Deity is "Charnaya Bog!" This Charnaya Bog is not a centralized deity-concept at all and is WHOLLY UNLIKE AND UNKNOWN TO any stream of Indo-European or Semitic thought. Bog means God in Russian, but the word is of Tatar-Tungusic ("Altaic") origins. Some argue and say it comes from India - but India was Shivaite at that early time. Likewise, the Turanian or Turkic concept of Allah, which exists in a larger portion of the Soviet people (due to becoming Islamized) is wholly unlike the Semitic concept; and their manner of living based on the Koran is unlike the manner of living in the Middle East amongst the Afro-Semites. In Tatar language, Boga means "wise person" and is similar to the Bog Woman of the Celts in their PRE "God of the Light" days. And again, the manner of Buddhism practiced by these same Turko-Tatars is nothing like the Buddhism of India or Tibet - it is wholly Shamanic in character and is recognized as "not Buddhism" by theological experts. The rest of the population is Shamanistic but this is not to be understood in the sense that Western writers think they understand it.
--End.
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
