Today would have been the birthday of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, who grew up in a Tibetan monastery, had a hole drilled in his forehead to activate his third eye and give him mystical insight, and encountered both yetis and his own mummified body.
Apparently.
The hole was made in his head on his 8th birthday, and
allowed him to see auras. After the surgery… he met privately with the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. Lobsang was reminded of the great work that lay before him in preserving the wisdom of Tibet for the world
He was promoted to lama after passing some exams at 16. In the words of Ogden Nash:
A one-‘L’ Lama, he’s a priest,
A two-‘L’ Llama, he’s a beast
And I will bet a silk pajama
There isn’t any three-‘L’ Lllama
I digress. He was then sent out into the world by the Dalai Lama himself, with the words:
The ways of foreigners are strange and not to be accounted for. As I told you once before, they believe only that which they can do, only that which can be tested in their Rooms of Science. Yet the greatest Science of all, the Science of the Overself, they leave untouched. That is your Path, the Path you chose before you came to this Life.
Eventually, he made his way to Britain and set his extraordinary life story down on paper. It was turned down by a number of publishers before he met Fredric Warburg of Secker and Warburg, who sent the manuscript to 20 experts, most of whom doubted it was genuine.
So, at a later meeting…
Either Warburg was entirely convinced by this magnificent explanation, or fat advances for absolute charlatans are nothing new. IT CAN’T BE THE LATTER, OBVIOUSLY. Either way, Rampa got £800 (about £18,000 in today’s money) and they printed it.
Reviewers were not impressed. One called it “a shameless book”, and Heinrich Harrer — who may have looked disappointingly unlike Brad Pitt, but had famously spent seven years in Tibet — wrote a review so scathing that the book’s German publisher threatened a libel suit.
The Telegraph talked of “innumerable wild inaccuracies” and “indifferent juvenile fiction”, so naturally — proving that publishing decisions like that make business if not ethical sense are also not new — the book became a worldwide bestseller.
If anyone asked to speak to or interview Rampa, however, Warburg turned down their requests. When asked to produce a Tibetan passport, Rampa did what any sensible, honest person would do and ran off to Ireland.
Harrer, or all the Tibetologists collectively, hired a private detective — who discovered that the world’s most famous Tibetan (indeed, at the time, only famous Tibetan) was, in fact, called Cyril and came from Devon.
When the media found Cyril Henry Hoskin, irregularly employed son of a Plympton plumber, they confronted him with the facts and he confessed: yes, that was his name at birth, but his body was now occupied by the spirit of the late Lama.
He went into detail about how this happened in his third book, The Rampa Story. He had been up a tree in Surrey, you see, photographing an owl, when he fell out and banged his head. When he came round, a monk in saffron robes arrived and took over his body.
Oh, that old chestnut.
Lobsang wrote 19 books in the end, one of which was — well, of course — dictated to him telepathically by his cat, Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers.
…but eventually he grew tired of the press calling him a fraud and moved to Canada.
Still, he may have been a well-remunerated charlatan (as if there’s any other kind), but he did raise the profile of Tibet. And he did like cats. He made the people who published his My Visit to Venus without permission give 10% of the profits to New York’s Save a Cat League.
And if you think that’s ridiculous, a Guardian article as recently as 2020 said The Third Eye:
remains the UK’s bestselling book on Tibet.
