Skeptical Scientists and the Paranormal — Part 4, Linda Tucker and the White Lions
This is the last in a series of articles about individuals grounded in the worldview of conventional science, but who undergo a conversion to an alternative following a paranormal experience. The first was the story of Brian O’Leary, who was a member of the astronaut programme during the 1960s. The second was psychotherapist Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer. The third was a female client of the psychologist Carl Jung (part 1 and part 2). Here I’ll tell the story of Linda Tucker.
I’m slightly stretching a point in my title because she was not actually a scientist. At the time of her ‘conversion’ she had a career in fashion and advertising. She was, however, educated at the University of Cambridge, which has something of a reputation for skepticism and atheism. She had studied symbolism in dream psychology and medieval literary texts there.
I first came across her story in The Return of Collective Intelligence: Ancient Wisdom for a World out of Balance by Dery Dyer¹. She was on some kind of safari holiday with friends in Africa when one night they were confronted by an angry pride of tawny lions. They were in great danger, but were suddenly rescued by a local shaman, Maria Khosa, who seemed able to communicate with the lions. She subsequently became Tucker’s teacher, and introduced her to another shaman, Credo Mutwa. He was Africa’s Lion High Priest, and he initiated her into the mysteries of lion shamanism.
Dyer says: “Fearing the ridicule of her academic colleagues, the Cambridge-educated Tucker initially struggles to fit her ‘paranormal’ experiences and the information she is receiving from her native teachers into the accepted norms of Old Paradigm science”. In Tucker’s words: “Coming from a skeptical academic background, I was at first resistant to the wisdom Maria shared with me, but finally I succumbed to its evidential and profoundly accurate truth. And having done so, more and more secret knowledge was entrusted to me”. These are my reasons for including her in this series.
Tucker tells her story in Mystery of the White Lions: Children of the Sun God². I’d never heard of a white lion species, so when I first saw that title I assumed that they were some kind of mythical creature. It was surprising to learn therefore that they are real animals inhabiting the Timbavati region of South Africa, although they were under threat of extinction because of hunters. As she discovered, they are very special animals indeed — the title is intended quite literally.
As is the rule in Mystery traditions, Credo Mutwa was sworn to oaths of secrecy. The hidden story of Africa is known as Umlando, ‘the Great Knowledge’, which is “a tradition of oral history, fiercely guarded through the ages, which remains intact within the memories of an élite band of initiates. The highest-ranking shamans are known as Sanusis. Of these, a select few are entrusted as tribal storytellers, and honored as the so-called Guardians of the Umlando. Credo Mutwa was such a guardian” (p 31). However, he broke these oaths in order to teach Tucker, because he recognised that she had been specially chosen, and was therefore on a Divine mission to pass these teachings on to the modern world, and that the future of human civilisation depends on this. He says that he will tell her the story of the White Lions: “It has never before been recorded. It must not be changed by a single word” (p 83). He says that Amarava, a primal goddess and his spirit guide, is telling him that “now is the time to deliver the Great Knowledge to the world before it is too late”. He believes that the White Lions are “symbolic custodians of a message specifically intended for humankind at this particular time” (p 80), “a symbol of how we might save our planet” (p 90).
He was condemned and ostracised for doing this by others within his tradition. He “had broken the blood oath that bound initiates to their secret oral traditions. In doing so, he had brought upon himself a lifetime of ill fortune… From the moment… he began committing the ‘ancient memory’ to writing, he was labeled Vusamazulu, ‘the Outcast’. What followed was one appalling tragedy after another, among them the cold-blooded murder of his son — the heir to his shamanic tradition” (p 33).
Many friends of mine would tell you that I have a tendency to believe weird things, or what they perceive to be weird. (I’ve had paranormal experiences of my own.) I have to confess, however, that I found quite a lot of material in this book difficult to believe, but fascinating nevertheless. Here are a couple of examples.
1. Tucker is surprised to discover that she has been singled out to convey the message of the White Lions to the world. However, Mutwa subsequently tells her that her “personal story goes back a very long way in Africa — for many, many lifetimes” (p 175). She is told that she must remember who she is. To help her remember, she receives a message from a channeled spirit that she had once been a “Sirian light-being” who had come to earth “in the shape and guise of a White Lion”. This lion was killed, but its spirit transmigrated into a human being, “but (Tucker) retained the soul of the White Lion” (p 241). Maria tells her that “all the animals in Timbavati know of your return”, since she has lived there many times before.
2. Tucker met her personal lion ancestor in her dreams, which was at first a terrifying experience. However, Maria explained that this indicated that her lion guardian had arrived as her teacher. This later turned out to be also a real lion, which Tucker met. This was the sign that Maria had been waiting for, and she then named Tucker as “Keeper of the White Lions”. (This is a role that she and her partner are ably fulfilling, since they “are guardians of the land occupied by the White Lion prides they rescued and successfully re-wilded in their ground-breaking scientific reintroduction project”³.)
I don’t want to go into details here of what Tucker was taught; I hope readers will be encouraged to learn more about her from her website, and read her book. Briefly, however, it is a story which involves:
- paranormal powers
- communication with animals and plants
- a technologically advanced, multiracial global civilization in the far distant past, unknown to conventional historians, which may be the same as an ancient seafaring civilization
- much information about the Sphinx at Giza including its true age
- connections between the Giza pyramids and the stars of Orion’s belt and Sirius, and the connection between the White Lions and the constellation of Leo
- ancient aliens.
Tucker’s book should therefore be fascinating reading for anyone already interested in the ideas of Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, Adrian Gilbert, John Anthony West, Robert Temple, Andrew Collins, and others similar.
I was previously familiar with the ideas on that list. New ones to me were:
- a longitudinal line, “laid out with the precision of a draftsman”, connecting Timbavati in South Africa, the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, and the Sphinx at Giza, all of which are linked to the mystery of the White Lions
- a connection between lions and the evolution of humanity
- an underground river, related to the Milky Way, not acknowledged by scientists
- that the course of the river Nile is not natural.
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Anyone familiar with my writing on Medium will know that I am strongly opposed to Darwinian evolutionary theory, fascinated by the similarities between the findings of quantum physics and spiritual ideas, and very interested in the Jungian concept of synchronicity. I was therefore pleased to discover that Mutwa:
- doesn’t “subscribe to the theory that man was once an ape… It is a theory with so many loose things on it”. “There are things which I know and have seen that demolish the theory of evolution — as the scientists present it” (p67)
- agrees with the quantum physics viewpoint “that everything around us is part of one great and interconnected whole” (p73).
It was also interesting that Tucker had “a sense of being ‘guided’ toward the right information… the usual pieces of insight I was being handed were not the product of my own academic endeavors, but rather ‘gifts’ of a guiding will over and above my personal intent… synchronistic connections that seemingly began to drop out of the heavens” (p213).
As I said above, I found a lot of material in Tucker’s book hard to believe. It was interesting to note, therefore, that John Anthony West advised her: “You are going to lose a lot of friends when you go public with this material. They’ll think you’ve gone crazy — while you know that it is they who are crazy and you have only taken the preliminary steps on the long (and perilous) road to sanity!” (p197)
That is what paranormal experiences can do to you!
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here).
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Footnotes:
1. Bear & Company, 2020
2. Hay House, 2010
3. a quote from her website: https://www.lindatuckerfoundation.org/linda-tuckers-life-story/
