Encouraged by a fascinating article in edition 130 of Sacred Hoop Magazine by the Danish explorer Henning Haslund, I bought his first book, In Secret Mongolia, first published in 1934 as Tents in Mongolia. The article ‘Witness to a Soyoto Healing’ is a chapter taken from the book titled ‘The Shaman’, in which Haslund recounts a shamanic healing in northern Mongolia by a Soyoto Shaman from the Siberian frontier.  Knowing very little about Mongolia, I enjoyed his account and felt inspired to learn more about the people and about his travels around the country.

A hundred years ago, Haslund became an intrepid explorer when he joined his military school friend, Dr Carl Krebs, on an expedition to establish a Danish butter farm in a remote corner of northern Mongolia. The book traces their incredible journey from Denmark to Peking by sea, and then on foot across Mongolia’s inhospitable landscape to the far north-west.

The story begins after Krebs assisted a Danish Princess in the Crimea, and later worked to improve the war prisons of Siberia, until the Bolsheviks forced him to flee south across the Mongolian border. During his long horseback ride to Peking, he crossed the desert and wide expanse of the northern Steppes and discovered an unspoiled pocket of land at Bulgun Tal, also known as Sable Plateau.

Haslund recalls how Krebs described it as being ‘lovelier than anything he had seen’, and how he was ‘greatly captivated by this idyllic scene, the memory of which persistently remained with him’.

Back in Denmark, Krebs showed Haslund his Russian General Staff map, which marked the existence of two Russian houses on the site. He noted that ‘all the rest of the country lay undisturbed by the activities of white men, as it had done for no one knows how many hundred years. Only the nomads moved about it with their vast herds of horses, cattle and sheep, just as they had done in the days of Israel’.

Krebs encouraged a small group to travel with him to set up a farm at the houses by describing the area, known as Urianhai, as ‘now more than ever a lordless land’ with ‘gold and asbestos discoveries and other things awaiting men who would come and take possession of it’.

After much preparation, Haslund, Krebs and four others finally set out in 1921, intending to investigate the possibilities for an ‘eventual colonisation on a larger scale’ and for ‘establishing a new dairy farming country’.

Haslund paints an evocative picture of the landscape and the lives of the people, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading about his adventures through Mongolia, a world that was virtually unknown to Westerners at that time. He comes across as an intelligent, amiable man who was much loved by the local Mongolian people. His interest in the land and its culture is unmistakable, yet it seems at odds with the expedition’s purpose.

I was shocked by how ignorant the group seemed in imagining they could turn this unspoiled landscape into a farm. Krebs even admitted he was drawn to the area’s beauty, yet he also wanted to establish a foreign community within it—one that would inevitably destroy the very thing he admired.

Once the expedition reached the two derelict houses, they proceeded to erect stables and barns, fencing off land, and planting fields of Danish crops, putting pressure on the local animal population by reclaiming its natural habitat.

They also chose to make money by selling furs collected by local trappers to foreign corporations supplying the Western fur trade. Haslund romanticises the idea of pretty Western women wearing them, with little apparent thought for the animal population or the local people who depend on those animals for survival.

Until then, the nomadic Mongolians had worn marmot, squirrel, and fox pelts and made sleeping bags from them out of necessity to keep warm. The Danish expedition encouraged the trappers to kill more animals, including squirrel, sable, fox, and ermine, which put pressure on the population.

For thousands of years, the Mongolian nomadic herders moved with the seasons, taking what they needed, and moving on, leaving places to recover. Their shelters were temporary, made from felt from the wool of their sheep, and their footprints were light. Their way of living required intimacy with nature: reading weather patterns, animal movements, and plant cycles, rather than seeking dominance over it.

I don’t believe the Danish expedition intended to destroy the land and the nomadic way of life, but their capitalist way of thinking seems fundamentally different from that of the Mongolian people, many of whom still lived in harmony with the land at that time.

The book reveals a disconcerting split in outlook between the white Westerners and the indigenous tribal people: one group sought to profit from nature, while the other took only what it needed to survive.

And herein lies the fundamental problem facing mankind today: the dominant group has shifted its perspective so far away from living in harmony with nature that it is destroying the very land that once abundantly supported life. Treating it as a resource to be managed, controlled, and made predictable rather than a place to belong.

The mindset I saw on those pages is not confined to the past. The sad thing is that this ignorance did not end with farming. While we were all distracted by the pandemic, a group of heartless beings erected acres of solar farms now suffocating our Mother Earth, an increasing number of mobile phone masts emitting natural electromagnetic frequencies that affect the bees, and miles of wind turbines, which kill birds and create waste that will never decompose.

This book has led me to ask: What is this destructive sickness that has ravaged the Western population? Is it the Wetiko Dream Spell?

Haslund-Christensen, H. ‘Witness to a Soyoto Healing’, Sacred Hoop Magazine, Issue 130, 2025. www.sacredhoop.org
Haslund, H. In Secret Mongolia. Adventures Unlimited Press, 1995.

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