M.J. Rose

I have always been very interested in accounts of Jesus’ life in the East. So many of these stories ring true for me. What is your sense about this mystery?

Pilgrim’s Progress, by Mandakini Gahlot

A small Buddhist town perched on the steep cliffs of the Himalayas celebrates history

In his controversial 1894 account of Jesus’s lost years La vie inconnue de Jesus Chris (The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ), Russian journalist Nicolas Notovitch claimed that it was in Hemis, a tiny town about 40 km from Leh, that a previously unknown Gospel, “Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men,” originated. The gospel is said to be an account of Jesus’s travels in India and east Asia. While the town’s links to Christianity have never been proved, over the last 400 years, it has become one of the most important centres for Mahayana Buddhism in the world.

At an altitude of 12,000 feet, the journey to Hemis is not recommended for the faint-hearted. About two kilometres before the monastery, all traces of a motorable road disappeared. Our driver informed us that from thereon it would have to be on foot. For those fond of trekking, the climb up to the monastery is exhilarating. For others, the steep slopes and pebbled paths can prove to be exhausting.
Over the years, Hemis has become synonymous with the monastery. Most of its local population choose to reside in Leh and the surrounding villages located at a lower altitude of 11,000 feet. The only inhabitants are 350 monks who live and train here in austere simplicity. There is little by way of comfort, and the temperatures border on the extreme…

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A compelling book tells the story of human sacrifice in North America. It seems the natives were not always the peaceful teepee dwellers we’d like to think they were…

Sacrificial virgins of the Mississippi
Archaeologists are slowly unearthing the ghastly secrets of Cahokia, an ancient city under the American heartland

By Andrew O’Hehir

Ever since the first Europeans came to North America, only to discover the puzzling fact that other people were already living here, the question of how to understand the Native American past has been both difficult and politically charged. For many years, American Indian life was viewed through a scrim of interconnected bigotry and romance, which simultaneously served to idealize the pre-contact societies of the Americas and to justify their destruction. Pre-Columbian life might be understood as savage and brutal darkness or an eco-conscious Eden where man lived in perfect harmony with nature. But it seemed to exist outside history, as if the native people of this continent were for some reason exempt from greed, cruelty, warfare and other near-universal characteristics of human society.

As archaeologist Timothy Pauketat’s cautious but mesmerizing new book, “Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi,” makes clear, Cahokia — the greatest Native American city north of Mexico — definitely belongs to human history. (It is not “historical,” in the strict sense, because the Cahokians left no written records.) At its peak in the 12th century, this settlement along the Mississippi River bottomland of western Illinois, a few miles east of modern-day St. Louis, was probably larger than London, and held economic, cultural and religious sway over a vast swath of the American heartland. Featuring a man-made central plaza covering 50 acres and the third-largest pyramid in the New World (the 100-foot-tall “Monks Mound”), Cahokia was home to at least 20,000 people. If that doesn’t sound impressive from a 21st-century perspective, consider that the next city on United States territory to attain that size would be Philadelphia, some 600 years later…

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