Encounters with Renata Caddy

“Encounters with Babaji” is a book by Renata Caddy, the wife of Findhorn co-founder Peter Caddy. The book is published by Findhorn Press.

The Caddys were devotees of a mysterious Hindu guru, Babaji, who lived in the Himalayan village of Herakhan in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. Babaji claimed to be a Mahavatar (supreme incarnation) of the god Shiva. He supposedly appeared on the top of Mount Kailash (a peak in Tibet associated with Shiva in Hindu mythology) in the early 19th century in a ball of light. Later, he was known as Herakhan Baba. The book contains a photo of this person, taken in 1911. In 1922, Herakhan Baba transformed his physical body into a body of light and disappeared, in front of his awed disciples. However, Babaji promised to return, which he did in 1970, when a handsome young man of about 25 years of age mysteriously appeared in a cave below Mount Kailash. It seems he later moved to Herakhan (or Haidakhan), on the Indian side of the border… This appealing story is, alas, very different from the one retold in Yogananda's “Autobiography of a Yogi”, the classical account of Babaji and his exploits. Indeed, Yogananda's devotees (the SRF) don't acknowledge the claims of the Herakhan-based Babaji. Is he an impostor?

There is *something* strange about Babaji (the one in Herakhan), at least if you take Renata Caddy's accounts at face value. Babaji didn't disappear in a ball of light, but rather died a natural death in 1984, being buried rather than cremated. His sickness and death was a sacrificial act, during which Babaji took upon himself the pain and suffering of the entire world, in order to transmute it. His body was a precious gift to the Earth, containing a sacred substance which healed it. In a vision, Caddy saw how the Mother Goddess was liberated from the bowels of the Earth, rising to the skies after Babaji's sacrificial death. In another vision, she saw Babaji on a white horse, waving a flag with a red cross, descending into the dark interior of the Earth, liberating the spirits in prison (a kind of harrowing of hell). Babaji's mission is to transmute matter into light through a process of cosmic alchemy. He is the Grail King. His personal sign is a cross and the letters OM. Even stranger, one of Babaji's closest aides is a reincarnation of Christian Rosenkreutz!

If this sounds familiar, it should. It is, of course, the message of Christianity, seen through the esoteric lens of Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy. Why would an obscure Hindu guru in a small Himalayan village preach *this* message? No idea. It's interesting to note that Renata Caddy was a devotee of Aurobindo and The Mother before joining Babaji's entourage. She also worked with one Oscar Marcel Hinze, the founder of the Academy of Phenomenology and Integral Science, of which I unfortunately know next to nothing. Her husband, Peter Caddy, was a co-founder of the Findhorn collective, with a message freely based on Theosophy and Anthroposophy. Here's a wild guess: the esoteric-Christian message attributed to Babaji in the book, is really *Renata Caddy's* message. After all, some of it is explicitly based on her own visions…

Otherwise, I must say that Babaji comes across as a rather typical authoritarian guru. He even ordered his devotees whom they should marry! Caddy writes: “Basically, all marriages inspired by Babaji were full of explosive material – sometimes beautiful Karma and sometimes very doubtful Karma”. In other words, Babaji wrecked the lives of some of his devotees. He also had the somewhat bad habit of slapping them in the face when he thought them disrespectful or inattentive. True to form, the Himalayan Mahavatar had an apocalyptic message. Soon, a New World will arise from the ashes of a thermonuclear war. The vagaries of Indian foreign policy seems to have reached even the outskirts of Uttarakhand, since Babaji ordered a day of mourning when Soviet leader Andropov died in 1984. (India had good relations with the Soviet Union, while its traditional adversaries Pakistan and China had good relations with the United States.)

I'm not sure how to rate this peculiar book, but since it made me do some detective work, I suppose I have to give it three stars.