The Book of the Dead

actually genuine. Trebitsch then set off for Italy to campaign for the fascists, but they didn’t trust him an inch and threw him out. As a deportee from the United States, Britain, Austria, and Italy, he was becoming quite famous: Time magazine called him “the man no country wanted.”

Trebitsch didn’t care. He chose a country where no one had ever heard of him and went there: China. Calling himself Puk Kusati, he dabbled in forged passports and worked for three different warlords as an arms dealer, dashing off a few pieces of anti-British propaganda in his spare time. Then in 1925, after a revelatory epiphany, Trebitsch Lincoln surprised everyone by suddenly converting to Buddhism and becoming a monk. As Chao Kung, he was an assiduous student, meditating for six years and rising to the high rank of bodhisattva. He had his shaven head branded with the twelve circular symbols from the Buddhist wheel of life and became the first Westerner to found his own Buddhist monastery in the East. But old habits die hard: On entering the sacred portal, initiates were required to hand over their worldly goods to Abbot Chao Kung, and he passed the evenings seducing nuns. His Shanghai monastery would be the closest thing he had to a settled base for the rest of his life. In 1931 he published an autobiography in which, despite having written an earlier book entitled Revelations of an International Spy, he denied ever having had any involvement in espionage. He wrote only of his newfound passion for Buddhism and his vision for world peace.

The outbreak of World War II spurred the old Trebitsch back into action once more. The city of Shanghai was also the base of the Far Eastern section of the Gestapo. Trebitsch contacted the bureau chief, Joseph Meisinger, the “Butcher of Warsaw,” who had ordered the execution of thousands of Jews. Like many an anti-Semite before him, Meisinger was completely taken in by Chao Kung/Trebitsch. Under the guise of a peace mission, Chao Kung offered to deliver every Buddhist in the East to the German/Japanese cause. His price was a face-to-face meeting with Hitler, where he would prove his power by conjuring three Tibetan sages out of thin air. Incredibly, both Rudolf Hess and von Ribbentrop enthusiastically endorsed this plan, which only foundered when Hess flew to Scotland in 1941. Two phials of sacred Tibetan liquid were found in his plane. Shortly after that, Chao Kung did something entirely out of character: He wrote to Hitler denouncing the Holocaust. It was to prove his death warrant. When the Japanese invaded Shanghai in October 1943, he was summarily arrested. He died a few days later from “a stomach complaint,” poisoned on the instructions of the Nazi high command.

What are we to make of Trebitsch Lincoln? The very least one can say of him is that he never wasted a day. The range of people he persuaded to trust him is amazing—Yorkshiremen, Nazis, Buddhists: None of them is especially noted for their gullibility. Like Cagliostro, he seems to have had an almost magical talent to impress and inspire people that he himself wasn’t fully able to control. And it is just possible that his final religious conversion— to Tibetan Buddhism—marked some sort of genuine spiritual homecoming.

In 1925, the year of his mystical experience, he had tried to return to England to see his twenty-three-year- old son, John, who was awaiting execution for murder. John Lincoln was a British soldier who had bludgeoned a traveling salesman to death while drunkenly trying to burgle his house. Despite a petition with more than fifty thousand signatures asking for the hanging to be delayed so that Trebitsch could visit his son for the last time, the authorities went ahead as planned. They even refused him a temporary entry visa to go to the funeral. When informed of John’s death as he waited for a boat at The Hague, he broke down and wept, exclaiming in despair: “My sins have been visited on my son!”

No one reads Trebitsch Lincoln’s books these days, but it is curious to discover that the author of the twentieth century’s bestselling books on Tibetan Buddhism was yet another impostor: Tuesday Lobsang Rampa (1910–1981). He rocketed to fame in 1956 with the publication of The Third Eye, a riveting account of growing up in Tibet. Despite having been rejected as an obvious hoax by several publishers and receiving horrendous reviews (only the Times charitably called it “almost a work of art”), it became a massive international bestseller. The publishers, Secker & Warburg, admitted that they, too, had had doubts about its authenticity but thought it would make a good read anyway. They 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 the Japanese 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 World War II, 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 United States, enduring further capture and torture, before transmigrating into the body of Cyril Henry Hoskin. His first name, Tuesday, marked the day of the week on which 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 in Calgary, Canada. When he died in 1981, he left much of his fortune to his beloved cats. His Lobsang Rampa series had sold more than 4 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, having as little to do with real Buddhism or life in Tibet as Psalmanazar’s book had to do 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 the United States when Archie was only thirteen, and dying some years later in a barroom 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 managed a short stint in a timber yard before being sacked for detonating a homemade bomb in the works chimney. In exasperation, his aunts allowed him to pursue his dream of moving to Canada to study farming.

Archie at once fell in love with the wild, unspoiled Canadian outback. He also fell in love with, and married, a Native American woman, Angele Egwuna, an Ojibwa from northern Ontario. His affinity for the land, and for its indigenous peoples, took firm root and, gradually, Belaney began to abandon his English background. He worked as a trapper and guide and soon took to using an Indian name—Washaquonasin, translated into English as Grey Owl, or Walks-in-the-Dark. But dogged by the shadow of his past, in 1912, like his own father before him, he left Angele and their two little daughters, Agnes and Flora, and moved in with Marie Girard, with whom he had a son, Johnny.