9525: Alexandra David-Néel, Digne-les-Bains, and Siegfried

Flight 9525 departed just after 10 a.m. Tuesday, March 24, 2015, from Barcelona, Spain, for Dusseldorf, Germany, with 144 passengers -- among them two babies -- and six crew members. It went down at 10:53 a.m. (5:53 a.m. ET) in a remote area near Digne-les-Bains in the Alpes de Haute Provence region. All aboard are presumed dead.

One of the pilots on Germanwings Flight 9525 was locked out of the cockpit when the plane crashed Tuesday, a senior military official told The New York Times, citing evidence from the cockpit voice recorder.

Dugne-les-Bains is an intriguing location for this plane to have crashed.

First of all, Bain relates to Bane (poison; fatal cause of mischief; death; destruction; killer; slayer; curse), and in Scottish legend, the Bain Fairy is a death fairy who is the keeper of the Bain Bridge.

Bane does have a longer history. An English and French origin of the surname Bain is from the occupational name of an attendant of a public bath house. This name is derived from the Middle English, and Old French baine, meaning "bath." One French derivation of the surname Bain is from a topographic name, for someone who lived near a Roman bath. This name is derived from the Old French baine, meaning "bath."

The northern English surname Bain is sometimes derived from a nickname meaning "bone," which probably referred to someone who was exceptionally tall, or lean. This nickname is derived from the Old English ban, meaning "bone." In northern dialects of Middle English, the a was preserved, but in southern dialects the a was changed to o (the southern form became the standard).

In other cases, the northern English surname is derived from a nickname of a hospitable person. This nickname is derived from the northern Middle English beyn, bayn, which mean "welcoming," "friendly"; these are in turn derived from the Old Norse beinn, meaning "straight," "direct".

The Scottish surname Bain is derived from a nickname for a person with fair-hair. This name is derived from the Scottish Gaelic bàn, meaning "white," "fair". The name was common in the Scottish Highlands, and is first recorded in 1324 in Perth. The surname can also be, in some cases, a reduced form of the surname McBain. The Scottish Gaelic form of the surname Bain is Bàin (masculine), and Bhàin (feminine).

The name may also be a variant spelling of the north German surname Behn.

In the case of Digne-les-Bains, the name relates to the "baths" in the area.
(See more here, and more sources here, about "Bain.")

Also, Dugne-les-Bains is a site strongly associated with Alexandra David-Néel. On Monday, March 23, I was being interviewed by a reporter, Todd DePalma. I gave this answer to one area of his questioning: "In my first two books (with Jerry Clark), The Unidentified (Warner Books, 1975) and Creatures from the Outer Edge (1978), I discussed these creatures in terms of the Jungian point of view. I also pinpointed the Yetis as creatures who some humans say live in a spiritual context (as thought forms), as per Magic and Mystery in Tibet by Alexandra David-Néel, 1929."

I had not talked about Alexandra David-Néel in years. It seemed an unusual side note. But then Flight 9525 crashed, and it became a personal sync.

Alexandra David-Néel, French explorer, spiritualist, writer, in Lhasa in 1924.

Alexandra David-Néel, born Louise David (24 October 1868 – 8 September 1969), was a Belgian-French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist and writer. She is most known for her 1924 visit to Lhasa, Tibet when it was forbidden to foreigners. David-Néel wrote over 30 books about Eastern religion, philosophy, and her travels. Her teachings influenced beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, philosopher Alan Watts, and esotericist Benjamin Creme. Alexandra continued to study and write at Digne-les-Bains, till her death there at the age of nearly 101. According to her last will and testament, her ashes and those of Yongden were mixed together and dispersed in the Ganges in 1973 at Varanasi, by her friend Marie-Madeleine Peyronnet.

When Alexandra David-Neel journeyed through Tibet, one of the many mystical techniques she studied was that of tulpa creation. A tulpa, according to traditional Tibetan doctrines, is an entity created by an act of imagination, rather like the fictional characters of a novelist, except that tulpas are not written down. David-Neel became so interested in the concept that she decided to try to create one. (See more on how I, Loren Coleman, and Jerome Clark moved the tradition of tuplas into the Fortean awareness, in 1975 and 1978, here: Tulpas.)

Worthy of mentioning, too, are the opera singers who died abroad Flight 9545, and their links to their last spiritual performance.

Barcelona’s Liceu opera house said late Tuesday [March 24, 2015] that two singers who had been performing in [Richard] Wagner’s Siegfried were on board: the baritone Oleg Bryjak and the contralto Maria Radner. Ms. Radner was traveling with her husband and baby, said Joan Corbera, a Liceu spokesman. Source.

A contralto, Radner played the goddess Erda in her debut at the Liceu opera house and Bryjak, a bass-baritone, played the evil dwarf Alberich.

Siegfried, WWV 86C, is the third of the four operas that constitute Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), by Richard Wagner. It premiered at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on 16 August 1876, as part of the first complete performance of The Ring. This part of the opera is primarily inspired by the story of the legendary hero Sigurd in Norse mythology. Sigurd (Old Norse: Sigurðr) is a legendary hero of Norse mythology, as well as the central character in the Völsunga saga. The name Sigurðr is not the same name as the German Siegfried. The Old Norse form would have been Sigruþr, a form which appears in the Ramsund carving that depicts the legend. Sivard is another variant name of Sigurðr; these name forms all share the first element Sig-, which means victory.

The crash site is within the Massif des Trois-Évêchés and is close to Mount Cimet, where Air France Flight 178 crashed in 1953.

The 1953 crash involved a Lockheed L-749A Constellation.

The 9525 crash happened in what the International Business Times calls a "freakishly close" location near the village of Barcelonnette. On September 1, 1953, an Air France Lockheed L-749A Constellation crashed into Mont Cimet, less than a mile away from the Germanwings site, as it prepared to land in Nice, NBC News reports.

The plane had left Paris for a long journey that would have included stops in Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, and India on the way to Vietnam. Investigators concluded that the flight "had deviated from the planned course for unknown reasons," according to the Aviation Safety Network. All nine crew members and 33 passengers—including famous violinist Jacques Thibaud—were killed.