Ben Edair in 1958 (left (from Der Stern) and today (right)
In early February 1958 a drama played out in a house called Ben Edair on Balscudden Road in Howth, a small village outside Dublin. In the house lived a man calling himself Dr Carl Ku’an, who had written a book called The Third Eye under the pen-name Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. [For convenience I’ll refer to him as Rampa in this blog.] The book, an international bestseller, is meant to have earned him the equivalent of £1 million in royalties. The Third Eye was sold to the public as the autobiography of a Tibetan Lama.
Rampa got on well with his neighbours in Howth and if he and his wife were a little eccentric, well, they were foreign. They were friendly and also very generous. Rampa was meant to be writing the sequel to The Third Eye, which had the working title, A Medical Lama. Living with them was a pretty young Englishwoman called Sheelagh Rouse, who was sometimes referred to as Rampa’s secretary.
When the Irish photographer Pat Maxwell visited the Rampa household in late January 1958, he came under false pretences. The Rampas were wary of him, but he said he was a freelance photographer and that the photographs he took would be useful for general publicity purposes. But when he got back to his offices, Maxwell sent them off to the Daily Mail. And while he had been out he had missed a request from Time magazine in America to take some photos of Rampa for them as well. So Maxwell went back to the Rampas at Ben Edair and, saying that the first photos hadn’t come out properly. He was allowed to take a few more.
Elsewhere, Medlicott quotes Mrs Rampa telling him that The Third Eye was a work of fiction—that her husband had tried to get a number of jobs without success, and so was persuaded to write the book for money. The Rampas would later claim that the various quotes attributed to them were made up. Tabloid newspapers don’t have a reputation for honesty and integrity, but it is likely that the Rampas were flailing around for a plausible explanation for the position in which them found themselves.
Mrs Rouse, the Secretary, is meant to have said: ‘We were prepared for snoopers to come and pry out the facts. I have seen the real Dr Kuan but I will not tell you where he is.’
The Rampas must have been suspicious about what might be about to be written in the newspapers. Medlicott had been conducting a number of interviews with friends and family of the Rampas, and word may well have got back to them.
On the morning of 1st February there was a large exposé of Rampa in the Daily Mail. Sheelagh Rouse’s picture took up more space than did Rampa’s, in a blatant effort to suggest something sexually untoward (this was never claimed directly). It was revealed that Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, was not a Tibetan Lama at all, he wasn’t even somebody called Dr Ku’an, the name he had been using, or even Kuan-Suo, another adopted name—he was actually, as Medlicott had suggested, a man called Cyril Henry Hoskin, the previously unemployed son of a plumber from Plymton in Devon.
The Third Eye had been such an international bestseller that the world’s press turned up in Howth, outside the Rampas’ house, demanding interviews and photographs. The writer Eric Newby was sent as an emissary for Rampa’s publisher, Frederic Warburg, and he remembers reporters with mirrors on sticks, trying to see in through the upstairs windows. They were even going through the Rampas rubbish bins. Newby himself had problems gaining entry.
Newby wrote: ‘The Lama, his wife said, was dying . . . and it was unlikely that he would live for more than a couple of days.’
Whenever Rampa was asked awkward questions, he was often contracting incurable health problems, was on the very edge of death, or at the very least out of the country when he patently wasn’t. He was undoubtedly quite an unwell man for much of his life, but he would go on to live until he was seventy.
By the time Eric Newby came back the next day, Rampa had come up with an explanation that he had hitherto not thought to share with anyone before. Through a process called transmigration, he said, the Tibetan medical lama, Tuesday Lobsang Rampa had taken over the body of Cyril Henry Hoskin from Plympton in Devon.
Rampa
had thus written the book, and Hoskin was just the vehicle! In modern occult parlance, Ramps was a ‘walk-in’. There was quite a lot of
extraneous detail in Rampa’s explanation about owls and falling out of trees,
and this was tidied up and streamlined in later accounts. And no, none of it
fits with earlier suggestions that the book was
fiction, or had been written for money, or had been written for somebody else called Dr Ku’an. It didn’t
explain why he had been calling himself by other names, or why he seems to have
claimed academic and medical distinctions (Rampa’s, presumably) before the transmigration in June 1949.
It doesn’t explain why Rampa made so many mistakes about everyday life in Tibet, many of which were tidied-up pre-publication, although many more remained in
his text. And, being a medical lama in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition doesn’t
explain why so many of his spiritual beliefs and claims, as would be made over
a series of another eighteen books, appear to owe nothing at all to Tibetan Buddhism,
and everything to the writings of Madame Blavatsky’s highly dubious
Theosophical Society. Of course, anyone with sufficient interest could ask the
authorities in Tibet about the lama who had transmigrated, but on at least four
occasions the Dali Lama was asked about Rampa and declared him a fraud, although he was thanked for provoking interest in the Tibetan cause.
For the next twenty-two years of his life, Tuesday Lobsang Rampa does not seem to have ever come out of character. He refused to enter into discussion about his past, preferring to address criticism only through his books, in which he simply claimed that everything he said was true. He would go on to live a peripatetic life in Canada, accompanied until his death by his wife and Sheelagh Rouse (the two women don’t seem to have liked each other overmuch). He maintained correspondences with people, but he broke off with the only friend he had on record, Alain Stanké, because Stanké refused to make a public statement saying that he believed Rampa’s story of transmigration.
There are people today who still believe Rampa, whether he is claiming to talk about Buddhism (which is rarely), or the hollow earth, life on Venus or many other pseudo-scientific beliefs that defy the laws of physics, the laws of probability, or simple common sense. Some, of course, do not know his background. Others, presumably, delight in knowing secrets and wonders denied to the rest of humanity.
To know a great deal more about the Rampa story, you will need a copy of T. Lobsang Rampa and Other Characters of Questionable Faith, published by Tartarus Press.
