QI The Book of the Dead

prefaced it with a statement saying that many of the author’s stories were ‘inevitably hard to corroborate’. On one occasion, to test his veracity, Lobsang Rampa’s editor at Secker & Warburg, read out some phonetic Tibetan to him, to which he didn’t react. When he was told that he had just failed to understand a single word of his ‘own language’, Lobsang Rampa threw himself on to the floor, apparently writhing in agony. His excuse was that that he had been horrifically tortured by theJapanese during the war and had blocked out all knowledge of Tibetan through self-hypnotism.
    In fact, he had done no such thing. Tuesday Lobsang Rampa was Cyril Henry Hoskin, a plumber’s son from Devon. There was a stark contrast between his actual character and his literary alter ego: Hoskin had never been outside England and didn’t even have a passport. Exposed by the Daily Mail in 1958, based on information acquired by a private detective in the pay of Heinrich Harrer (author of the classic travelogue Seven Years in Tibet ), Hoskin was unrepentant. He explained that the spirit of a Tibetan monk had possessed him after he fell out of a tree in his garden in London while trying to photograph an owl.
    Some of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa’s disclosures must stretch the credulity of even the most devoted fan. He claimed to have had a splinter inserted into his pineal gland in Tibet, which had activated his ‘Third Eye’. The operation took place when he – or the monk who possessed him– was eight, he said, and was accompanied by a slight ‘scrunch’ as the splinter went into his skull and a ‘blinding flash’. He learned from the monk who carried out the procedure that this would enable him to ‘see people as they are, and not as they pretend to be’. Whether this, or some other gift, was responsible, ‘Lobsang Rampa’ went on to produce another eighteen books. In Doctor from Lhasa , he tells how he learned to fly a plane, was captured by the Japanese during the Second World War, spent time in concentration camps as the official medical officer, and was one of very few people to survive the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In The Rampa Story , he describes journeying through Europe and the USA, enduring further capture and torture, before transmigrating into the body of Cyril Henry Hoskin. His first name, ‘Tuesday’, marked the day of the week onwhich his ‘reincarnation’ took place. Nor did he restrict himself to mere terrestrial travel, recounting a visit to Venus aboard a space ship and meeting two aliens – helpfully named ‘the Tall One’ and ‘the Broad One’. His fifth book, Living with the Lama , he admitted, was not Lopsang Rampa’s work at all: he had taken dictation from Mrs Fifi Greywhiskers, his Siamese cat.
    To avoid continual public ridicule, Hoskin left England in the early 1960s, settling first in Ireland and then Calgary in Canada. When he died in 1981, he left much of his fortune to his beloved cats. His Lobsang Rampa series had sold more than four million books, and they continue to sell.
    Hoskin insisted to the end that he really was ‘Lobsang Rampa’ inside, and the books have an undeniable energy to them. But they are complete fakes, as little to do with real Buddhism or life in Tibet as Psalmanazar’s book was with Formosa. Like Cagliostro’s elixir of life, they are a beguiling attempt to give people what they want – versions of a strange, mystical East, where ancient sages hold all the universe’s secrets, where the laws of time and space don’t hold, and where the tawdriness of the modern world – of life under the kitchen sink – holds no sway.

     
    It’s safe to assume that when eighteen-year-old Archibald Belaney (1888–1938) left Hastings in Sussex for the wide-open spaces of Canada, he had no plans to become an impostor. Like so many of the other people in this chapter, his early life was marked by rejection and abandonment. His father was a drunken wastrel, leaving his mother for a new life in America when Archie was only thirteen, and dying some years later in a bar-room brawl. His mother, Kitty, had already taken herself off to London,leaving Archie to be raised by his two viciously disciplinarian aunts. He grew up a self-absorbed child, playing at Red Indians alone in the nearby woods and keeping a menagerie in his room, with a strong distaste for authority and the petty snobbishness of English suburban life. After attending Hastings grammar school, he