Alexandra David-Néel (1868–1969) was a French-Belgian explorer, spiritualist, and writer who became the first European woman to enter the forbidden city of Lhasa, Tibet, in 1924. A lifelong student of Eastern philosophy, she spent fourteen years travelling across Asia, studying with Buddhist masters, practising meditation in Himalayan caves, and witnessing rituals and phenomena that no Western observer had documented before.

With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet is her most celebrated work — part travel memoir, part spiritual investigation. David-Néel describes encounters with hermits, oracles, and adepts of tumo (inner heat yoga), telepathic communication, and the creation of thought-forms (tulpas). Written with the sharp eye of a scholar and the wonder of a genuine seeker, the book remains one of the most vivid firsthand accounts of Tibetan esoteric practice ever published.