The hidden kings of Shambhala

[stefanie_bean]

silent_lorelei, who is an expert on godhoodery, writes:

5) The Tibetans, who continue to make the world more awesome through wacky perceptions of it, believe in a race of spirit-kings who rule the world from the sidelines without most temporal rulers knowing anything about it. They reside in a magical kingdom that has never been found called Shambhala - more recognizable to those of us in the West as the corrupted name Shangri-La.

6) In fact, these guys totally have the history and disposition of Shambhala and its kings down to an exact science. Each king apparently rules for exactly 100 years before making way for his successor. For those who are wondering, we're currently in the reign of King Aniruddha until the year 2027.

7) They're also very helpful about providing the exact year of the end of the world (2354 AD). This will come about because an evil earthly king will finally discover Shambhala and lay siege to it. He won't win, because the spirit-kings have such mad spiritual powers that they can defeat things like guns and bombs (not lying, the Tibetans are very good about keeping their myths updated), but the world will end in the struggle and Shambhala's victory will usher in a new age of peace for the next thousand years.

8) The Tibetans also have a dude named Gesar, who is so possessed of giant brass balls that he has his own epic. He's supposedly hanging out in Shambhala, King Arthur-style, waiting to awaken and emerge in time to save Buddhism in its our of greatest need. Like a boss.

Man, that is so half the plot of LOST. Well, not the exact details like 100-year reigns, but the general points still hold.

Oh, just for fun - in this episode Hurley wears a yellow shirt with a crown embroidered on the breast pocket. And Reyes in Old French means "king."

Comments

[silent-lorelei.livejournal.com]

How is it that I don't notice typos until someone quotes me? Then the embarrassment sets in.

I have to admit you are intriguing me about this Lost thing. I was already kind of considering it just on the strength of someone telling me that there was a statue of Taweret involved.

[stefanie-bean.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I didn't mean to be pedantic. I compose in Open Office and it points that stuff out; I just automatically correct it w/o thinking.

You might really enjoy it, or most of it. The producers stretched the show out to six seasons; in reality it could have been done in three. There's a LOT of filler, and some dropped plot threads.

You would have two advantages as I see. First, you're a scholar of mythology, and so you'd get a lot of the fun references (which really are as much a part of the narrative as the dialogue and action) off the bat.

Second, you'd (most likely) be seeing it free of a lot of fan drama, the biggest of which was "is LOST an afterlife story?" If you ignore what the viewers (including me!) and the creators said about the epic during its airing, and just look at it "fresh," you might find it productive and interesting.

But fannish interpretation has a way of becoming very didactic, very quickly. (Anyone interested in the anthropological evolution of religions should study fandom!) It's not possible to completely detach oneself from that, but IMO LOST is a kind of story in which everyone kind of writes their own interpretation, based on what they need, find useful, etc. So watching it *after* it's been concluded can be more helpful, I think.

And yeah, Tarawet is important to the story.

[silent-lorelei.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, you're fine! I'd rather it be corrected than not. :)

Yeah, I think I may just move it on up the ol' Netflix queue. The fan community is a little scary-looking (the major reason I didn't pick it up when it was actually airing, since there were a lot of people gushing about it all over the place and I was oversaturated), but it sounds like it could be a lot of fun.