Rastafarianism and Tibetan Buddhism (as received in the West) share a number of curious traits that are worthy of examination. The contemporary West is a liberal, technological and democratic society in which traditional religion and authority have been in decline since the intellectual triumph of reason during the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Yet the Enlightenment’s shadow, the Romantic movement, which championed emotion, instinct, and experience over the philosophes’ rationality and empiricism, continued to exert power in the late capitalist marketplace of the West. The Romantic fascination with ‘exotic’ culturesand authentic spiritualities has led to modern, secular, individuals championing hierarchical, radically undemocratic societies, and valorising and defending hereditary rulers, when these phenomena manifest in a religious context, and present as precious cultural and spiritual heritages threatened with extinction. This article examines two new religions, Rastafarianism (which originated in Jamaica in the 1930s after the coronation of Haile Selassie I as Emperor of Ethiopia) and Western Tibetan Buddhism (which emerged in the wake of the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the departure of the Dalai Lama and many Tibetan monks forthe West in 1959) with a view to demonstrating common themes of ‘orientalist’ fascination with remote theocratic states, hereditary rulers who are also religious leaders, and the value of the exotic religions they represented. That both Haile Selassie I (1892-1975) and Tenzin Gyatso (b. 1935) became exiles after their realms were brutally invaded by totalitarian regimes, went on to have prominent roles as defenders of human rights and advocates of peace due to that exile, and became venerated by devotees in the West in ways that were substantially different to how they were understood in their original religious contexts (the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the traditional Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism) further sustains the argument that these leaders, their exotic homelands, and the spiritual values they embody, have undergone similar processes of reception and religious transformation, resultant upon their physical translation from Ethiopia and Tibet to the world stage.