🎙️ Join the live conversation
Tonight I’m sitting down with researcher and author Jamie Hanshaw Dyer for a full forensic breakdown of The Shadow of the Dalai Lama — the doctrine, the associations, the Kalachakra machine, and what it all means for how the West has been spiritually managed for the past forty years.
📅 Friday, April 10, 2026 🕔 6:00 PM CT / 7:00 PM ET / 4:00 PM PT 📍 LIVESTREAM LINKS — Substack — YouTube
There is a version of the Dalai Lama that Richard Gere built, that Steven Seagal endorsed, that Time magazine put on its cover, and that the U.S. Congress funded. He is the world’s most beloved spiritual leader — a living symbol of compassion, nonviolence, and the tragic dignity of an exiled people.
Then there is the version that two German researchers spent years documenting, cross-referencing against Tibetan primary sources, tantric commentaries, Vajrayana initiation manuals, and the Dalai Lama’s own published statements and recorded remarks.
Victor and Victoria Trimondi — the pen name of Herbert and Mariana Röttgen, former Munich publishers who once worked closely enough with the Tibetan exile community that Herbert helped organize a major European appearance by the Dalai Lama in 1982 — published The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhismin German in 1999. The English translation by Mark Penny followed in 2003. It runs 585 pages across seventeen chapters in two parts.
It is not, despite a quarter-century of availability, a book most Western readers have ever encountered. Mainstream American media has never seriously engaged it. The handful of academic responses that exist have largely treated it as a polemic to be set aside rather than an argument to be answered. The book has not been translated into the conversation about Tibetan Buddhism the way it was translated into English.
That gap is the story I want to walk through today, because the Trimondis are not Christian apologists, they are not Chinese surrogates, and they are not outsiders taking shots from a distance. They are former insiders. And the case they assemble — even where you want to push back on their interpretations — keeps returning to documents and meetings and statements that the Dalai Lama and his organization have not denied.
Their thesis, in one sentence: the Western image of Tibetan Buddhism as a peace religion is a public-relations construction layered over a doctrinal system whose foundational texts mandate the ritual instrumentalization of women, encode a coming holy war against non-Buddhist civilization, and have repeatedly attracted figures from the darkest corners of twentieth-century occult fascism — not in spite of the spiritual content, the Trimondis argue, but because of it.
Let’s walk through what they actually documented.
