Another occult dictionary, this one by the fakir of fakers, Tuesday Lobsang Rampa! Rampa was in a class of his own for occult scam artists. This purported Tibetan monk who had traveled the astral plane and seen wonders beyond imagining was really a lifelong resident of Devon, UK, and was unmasked not long at all after his smash hit "biography" The Third Eye:
Rampa’s wild claims – not to mention his West Country burr – led Tibetologist Heinrich Harrer to hire a private detective. What this gumshoe uncovered surprised even his employer. Not only had Rampa never been to Tibet, he didn’t even own a passport. He was a former plumber from Devon called Cyril Hoskin who damaged his back by falling out of a tree while owl-spotting. During convalescence he had, it seems, settled on a drastic career change.
The media was scandalised; Hoskin was unrepentant. Cheerfully admitting that he’d never been to Tibet, he now claimed that as he lay semi-conscious at the bottom of a tree that fateful afternoon, half-strangled by his binoculars, an elderly lama (monk) had floated by on the astral plane and the pair had agreed to swap bodies. (Whether, in 1950s Tibet, an elderly lama ever claimed to be a West Country plumber remains unverified.)
Rampa's later books contain many peevish snipes at the media and the "press campaign" out to smear him for bringing enlightenment to the Western masses. Even here he gets some licks in with his dedication to his loyal readers who know better than to believe the lying press, and his entry for "proof" which claims that Tibetan culture is above such shallow Western things. Ironic indeed that the fake lama falls back on some moth-eaten Orientalism to defend his counterfeit mysticism. Rampa could be shameless when wriggling out of his lies:
On a subsequent occasion, Warburg greeted the lama with a foreign phrase, only to receive a blank look in return. When informed that he had been addressed with the Tibetan for “Did you have a pleasant journey?” Rampa fell to the floor in apparent agony, rising to explain that during the war, in order to prevent himself from divulging secrets to the Japanese, he had hypnotically blocked his own knowledge of Eastern languages. To that day, the sound of his native tongue was enough to reinflict their tortures. When Warburg confronted Rampa with the scholars’ objections, offering him the option of publishing the book as a work of fiction, Rampa continued to insist that it was entirely factual. Secker & Warburg then issued the book with a preface that began, “The autobiographical account of the experiences of a Tibetan lama is such an exceptional document that it is difficult to establish its authenticity”
It's astonishing now that readers believed in Rampa's authenticity in the first place, as his prose is laden with classic English treacle, forced whimsy that curdles to condescension. The startling secret knowledge he promises consists of moldy old standards like the Akashic records and astral traveling, making it clear that so much of our psychic seeking resolves into navel gazing, and that what we grasp for in the great outside is nothing more than our own reflection.
Someone at Award Books may have been feeling cheeky, as the book ends with an ad for The Talbott Agreement, a novel about an American spy who undergoes irreversible plastic surgery to look Chinese!
Available to read and download at archive dot org.
Award Books, 1970
That scamp, Rampa.
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