Customer Reviews

The Serpent Rising

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A real life spiritual thriller! Such a frank and wholly engaging account of such

a remarkable 'spiritual journey' to India has seldom been written. This can be

said with confidence because it is shatteringly frank. It takes 'seekers of the

spiritual' on a vicarious tour of the mystique of yogis, gurus, swamis and their

kind, without personally having to go through the accompanying betrayals and

horrors that happened to Mary Garden and which so often occur. The extraordinary

psychic and paranormal experiences, which are almost invariably also a baited

hook, were also had by Mary Garden in plenty. For me this account represents

a broad and experientially-founded rebuttal of much of what the vast New Age

literature builds up in groping for spiritual solutions to living and following

fraudulent gurus, and not least the search for transcendental experiences of

any kind at all costs. The dangers she encountered were great and her survival

of them and the intense physical and mental-emotional sufferings involved shows

how the human spirit can recover from the direst of abuses.

Mary Garden's marathon through seven years of inner and outer heaven and hell

began after arriving in India in the early 1970s at the ashram of the self-declared

'avatar' or Incarnate God of all Gods, Sai Baba of Puttaparthi in South India.

The experience of staying in the ashram after having entered into an inner spiritual

bond with this self-proclaimed avatar are recorded with great accuracy, a fact

to which I can attest because my wife and I experienced or observed all the described

kind of events there 12 years later, so little of real import had evidently changed.

The teaching for self-brainwashing was already firmly in place and at that time

the sinister aspects of a dangerous cult were already present, later to become

known only when sexual abuses and cold-blooded murders were impossible to suppress

successfully. Mary Garden eventually realised the fraud involved when she was

told frankly about Sai Baba's homosexual abuse of young men in the name of God

by an American lady who lived and worked in Bangalore and who was not under the

delusions shared by all Sai followers.

This episode, bad enough in itself, was as nothing compared to what was to come.

.. from the frying pan into the actual fire, with another 'pure yogi' with undoubted

powers of an extraordinary nature who turned out to be a seducer of women and

many a worse quality. That it was anything like an 'ordinary trip' would be a

huge understatement… but the reading of the book itself alone can convey

what is to be learned from it. Meanwhile, throughout the long agon, the anachronistic

time capsule that is India becomes almost sensually present, like virtual reality… but

one where unearthliness mixed with the direct social reality rules so much of

the lives of its inhabitants.

<strong>Robert Priddy</strong>, retired researcher and lecturer in philosophy and sociology at the University of Oslo. Former member and national leader of the Sathya Sai Organisation in Norway.

Mary Garden's memoir of going on a spiritual quest to India and then being drawn under the spell of two gurus is remarkable in the way it brings the reader into her world and shows the true elation she experienced at times even as she was being sexually exploited by the second guru, and how he got her to love him in spite of his rages and cruelty. As a former follower of a different cult leader (Sun Myung Moon), I could understand her difficulty in breaking free of him. At one point she totally renounced him, only to be drawn back. The writing is excellent throughout and the feeling of the world she lived in is conveyed powerfully.

As an Indian skeptic, I was very disappointed and angry at the westerners who flock to India in search of "spiritual enlightenment." When Indians were first exposed to the European philosophies and scientific world view, they became quite embarrassed by their own religion and started making reformations: For example, the Arya Samaj and the Brahmo Samaj are the two of the well known reform movements. However, such reformations stopped when raw hindu shamanism got the admiration of westerners. This made the task of Indian skeptical and rational movements extremely difficult. So I have always disliked all the western nut jobs who flocked to India for "enlightenment." They were validating a system of thought which must go if Indian masses are to live like human beings. Mary Garden's book is a heart-wrenching memoir in which she vividly describes her travails in India. Her guru -- who preached the virtues of celibacy to his male disciples -- secretly had sex with his female devotees and forced them to have abortions. It looks like the some people under, certain conditions and certain stages of their life, are vulnerable to exploitation by religious conmen. The challenge for all rationalists/humanists is to inoculate our young people against such weaknesses. This book is a tool for that.