Theos-Talk Archives (December 2000 Message tt00046)

I thought I would post the following article as I hadn't seen it 
before... I'm unfamiliar with the Tibet Society Bulletin. I have to 
admit to being a "Rampa fan"... enjoyed his books and recall 
reading many of them. The theosophical section is later in the 
article and since we were mentioning the "Mahatmas" thought it 
would be of interest. I'm unsure i subscribe to everthing the 
writer says but some of it is of interest to those of us who may 
not be familiar with his views...

- Art




Fictitious Tibet:
The Origin and Persistence of Rampaism 
by Agehananda Bharati
Tibet Society Bulletin, Vol. 7, 1974

Let me first of all stake my claim and explain some terms in the 
title: an apparently unexterminable tradition of sheer fiction taken 
as holy fact originated in Europe and America slightly before the 
turn of the century — the brainchild of some fertile writers and 
orators, a number of core tales about inaccessible Tibetan and 
Himalayan mystics took shape in contrivedly esoteric writings 
which gained steady momentum until its culmination in Lama 
Lobsang Rampa's, alias Mr. Hoskins', fantastically fraudulent 
output beginning with The Third Eye and its sequels. I call this 
whole phony tradition "Rampaism" after its phony consummator, 
Rampa-Hoskins, and his all-too-numerous followers in North 
America and Europe. This depressing crowd of partly 
well-meaning, totally uninformed, and seemingly uninformable 
votaries holds something like this as its modal view: that there 
is, somewhere hidden in the Himalayas (invariably mis-stressed 
on the penultimate 'a'), a powerful, mystical, initiate brotherhood 
of lamas or similar guru adepts, who not only know all the 
mysteries of the world and the superworld, who not only 
incorporate and transcend the teachings of Buddhism, 
Hinduism, and Christianity, but who also master all the occult 
arts — they fly through the air at enormous speeds, they run 400 
miles at a stretch without break, they appear here and there, and 
they are arch-and-core advisors to the wise and the great who 
hide these ultimate links to supreme wisdom and control. In 
addition, they know all their previous incarnations, and can tell 
everyone what his incarnations were and are going to be. 
Geographically, the area where these supergurus reside is 
nebulously defined as "Tibet," "Himalaya," and it often includes 
the Ganges and India. This, very briefly, is the somewhat 
autoerotic creed of a large, and unfortunately still growing, crowd 
of wide eyed believers in the mysterious East, apropos which my 
colleague Professor Hurvitz at the University of British Columbia 
sagaciously remarked that "for these people, the East must be 
mysterious, otherwise life has no meaning." To put this 
somewhat less succinctly and more technically, the enormous, 
pervasive alienation of Euro-America from the religious themes 
of the Western world, matched with the general disgruntlement, 
with the superciliously religious in the established churches, the 
surfeit with scientific models which seem to generate war and 
destruction, and most recently the proliferating fascination with 
the exotic for its own sake — about which later in greater detail 
— all these contribute to the desperate quest for ideas, rituals, 
and promises that are different from those of the West, that are 
distant from the West, and that are easily accessible, without any 
intellectual effort, without any discursive input.

Let me now present an historical sketch of the increasing 
ingress of pseudo-Orientalia, and specifically of 
pseudo-Buddhica and pseudo-Tibetica into Europe and 
America. During my research into ideological change in the 
Buddhist clergy in Sri Lanka in 1971, I marveled at a painting in a 
temple in the southernmost part of the island. In a long 
subterranean corridor, some two hundred vignettes depicting the 
phases of the dharma from its inception under the Bodhi-tree in 
Buddhagaya to the foundation of the particular temple, the last 
one showed a white woman kneeling and bowing down before 
the image of the Tathagata and two monks administering sil (the 
five precepts of Thervada Buddhism) to her; behind her, several 
white men in tropical hats and western suits, one of them 
bearded. These, so the monk who showed me around informed 
me, were Mme. Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott embracing 
Buddhism. This is historically quite correct. The well-meaning 
American Colonel Olcott and the Russian-born Mme. Blavatsky, 
founders of the Theosophical Society, did indeed undergo that 
ceremony of initiation in that shrine in Sri Lanka. Annie Besant 
became a convert to Mme. Blavatsky, rather than to Buddhism, 
about a decade later. Leadbetter and other founding members 
formed the incipient caucus of the Society which still survives, 
albeit in highly modified and in a largely reduced form when 
compared to the initial thrust into the religious ideological world 
of the early 20th century. Now we must distinguish between the 
genuine and the spurious elements in the movement as it 
relates to Buddhism. Annie Besant was no doubt a sincere 
woman; one of the British Empire's most powerful orators, 
cofounder of the Indian National Congress, and a fine mind, 
genuinely annoyed at the inanities perpetrated by and 
constituted in the missionary scene. Col. Olcott was a genuine 
person, too, concerned with human affairs, and strongly 
cognizant of religious options other than those of Christianity. But 
I think Mme. Blavatsky and Leadbetter were frauds, pure and 
simple. My definition of a fraud or phony does not quite coincide 
with the usual dictionary meanings of these terms. A phony does 
not necessarily doubt the theses he or she propounds — in fact 
they can be full believers themselves. But what makes them 
phonies is their basic attitude of refusal of matching their tenets 
with those of a genuine tradition, and of imitating lifestyles which 
are alien to them, by doing things that superficially look part of 
the lifestyle they imitate, or of imitational lifestyles which simply 
do not exist in any cultural body, except as idiosyncrasies. 
Leadbetter wrote about the kundalini, the secret serpent power, 
and a melee of things exoteric and other which he had picked up 
from Indian sources in early translations. He never learned any 
of the primary languages — Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan; neither did 
Besant, Olcott, and Blavatsky. Leadbetter was an aggressive 
homosexual, and there is no doubt in my mind that he used his 
esoteric homiletic to seduce young men — some of them very 
famous indeed in later days. Now I don't object to homosexuality 
— I think the Gay Freedom movement is well taken and should 
succeed. But I do object to utilizing bits of theological or other 
religious doctrinal material to support one's own aesthetical and 
sensuous predilections. Hindu Buddhist Tantric texts do indeed 
use sexual models and analogues in their esoteric tracts, so it is 
quite in order if scholars and practitioners use these texts in 
support of their sexual behavior, because the support is 
objectively there. But no Tantric text implies any but heterosexual 
relations in its corpus. The most recent authentic presentation of 
the place of sexuality in Tibetan Tantrism (1) should suffice as a 
document for the rejection of the esoteric innuendos in 
Leadbetter's writings. H.V. Guenther, of course, is a valid empire 
of Buddhist Tibetan studies in and of himself, and it may not be 
even necessary to quote so exalted a source as his prolific 
writings in order to dismantle the Blavatsky-to-Rampa type 
fraudulence; a very average familiarity with Buddhism would do 
the job.

Mme. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, a multivolume work, is such a 
melee of horrendous hogwash and of fertile inventions of inane 
esoterica, that any Buddhist and Tibetan scholar is justified to 
avoid mentioning it in any context. But it is precisely because 
serious scholars haven't mentioned this opus that it should be 
dealt with in a serious publication and in one whose readers are 
deeply concerned with the true representation of Tibetan lore. In 
other words, since Blavatsky's work has had signal importance 
in the genesis and perpetuation of a widespread, weird, fake, 
and fakish pseudo-Tibetica and pseudo-Buddhica, and since no 
Tibetologist or Buddhologist would touch her writings with a long 
pole (no pun intended, Blavatsky is a Russian name, the Polish 
spelling would be Blavatski), it behooves an anthropologist who 
works in the Buddhist and Tibetan field to do this job. I don't think 
that more than five per cent, if that many, of the readers of 
Lobsang Rampa-Hoskins' work have ever heard about 
Blavatsky, but Lobsang Rampa-Hoskins must have read them, 
cover to cover or in excerpts — his whole work reeks of 
Blavatskyisms; and of course, he doesn't quote sources — fakes 
never do. Long before Rampa, the whole range of 
quasi-mathematical spheres, diagrammatic arrangements, 
levels of existence of consciousness, master-and-disciplehood, 
hoisted on a style of self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing rhetoric, 
was more or less created by Blavatsky. Medieval Christian 
writers, the Hermetics and a large number of kindred thinkers 
and their products had indeed presented a wide vista of 
quasi-mathematical, impressionistic imaginary structures; 
earlier, of course, Jewish mysticism with kabbalistic, Talmudic, 
and earlier medieval Rabbinical moorings might have set the 
example for the medieval Christian writings of this kind, unless 
the Christian writers were — or were also — inspired by 
whatever filtered through to them from the Greek and Hellenic 
esotericists, the Pythagoreans and a large number of 
neo-Pythagorean writings spread through the Hellenic world. 
Medieval Christian scholars did not read Greek, and whatever 
they did know about these esoteric systems they obtained 
through Latin translations. Nobody knows to what degree 
Blavatsky was familiar with any of this. As an anthropologist, I 
believe in the perennial possibility of independent invention — 
people get similar ideas without any necessary mutual 
communication or diffusion. Be that as it may, Blavatsky's Secret 
Doctrine and all the subsequent writings of the Esoteric section 
of the Theosophical Society, later on rechristened "Eastern" to 
forestall criticisms of mystery-mongering and the pervasive 
tendency to identify the esoteric with the erotic, rested heavily on 
such quasi-structural schemes.

I do not doubt that in her earlier years, Blavatsky must have been 
a highly eclectic, voracious reader. But as with all nonscholars in 
the field of religious systems, she did not unmix the genuine 
from the phony; she obviously regarded all sources as equally 
valid. Not knowing any of the primary languages of the 
Buddhist-Hindu tradition, she had to rely on whatever had been 
translated. And, as an epiphenomenon to the awakening interest 
in oriental studies, a large number of unscholarly writings 
emerged, produced by people who thought, or pretended, that 
they could get at the meat of the newly discovered wisdom of the 
East by speculating about it in their own way rather than by being 
guided by its sources, or by seeking guidance from authentic 
teachers in those eastern lands.

Blavatsky, Besant, and the other founders of the Theosophical 
movement were of course familiar with other translations then 
available. The I Ching had just about then been translated into 
French for the first time, though Richard Wilhelm's classical 
translation into English was published after the Secret Doctrine. 
This whole quasi-mathematical, highly self-indulgent 
speculation, of course, was part of the emotional packet of the 
Renaissance and the late Middle Ages in general. There is no 
doubt that esotericism was, always is, a reaction against the 
official ecclesiastical hierarchy and against the official doctrines. 
In India and Tibet, esotericization never took to this kind of 
pseudo-geometrical-mathematical model, since those models 
were already part of the official, scholarly traditions available. In 
these two countries, esotericization used what I call 
psycho-experimentation models, including the erotic, as 
instruments of opposition and criticism of the official religious 
establishments. It is quite obvious that Mme. Blavatsky very 
much identified with this European tradition of opposing the 
occidental religious belief system by esoteric, i.e. 
quasi-mathematical, pseudo-scientific speculations and by 
writings that encompassed diagrammatic representations of a 
secret universe. The Secret Doctrine and much of the older 
"Esoteric" (later "Eastern") sections of the Theosophical Society 
generated a welter of phantasmagoria of a spherical, cyclical, 
graphic overlay type; the vague acquaintance with mandala 
paintings in India added zest to these creations.

I am just not sure whether Mme. Blavatsky read the serious 
Hindu and Buddhist literature in translation and commentary 
available in her days, particularly the Sacred Books of the East, 
created by Max Mueller in the 80's of the last century. If she did, 
little of it showed in her writings. One of the most annoying 
features in the "M Letters" (M for Master) is her use of 
semi-fictitious names, like "H Master K" (Koot Humi). There is, of 
course, no such name in an Indian language or in Tibetan. But in 
the Upanishads, there is a minor rishi mentioned by the 
obviously non-Indo-European name Kuthumi. Just where she 
picked it up I don't know but I suspect she might have seen R.E. 
Hume's Twelve Principal Upanishads which was first published 
by Oxford University Press in the late '80s of the 19th century. The 
silly spelling "Koot Hoomi" was probably due to the occidental 
mystery peddlers' desire to make words sound more interesting 
by splitting them into a quasi-Chinesse series of letters. The 
Master Letters signed "K" are quite clearly Blavatsky's own 
invention; no Indian or Tibetan recluse talks or writes like the 
European feuilleton writer of the early 20th century. In a passage, 
"K" (for Koot Hoomi) criticizes a writer for saying that "the sacred 
man wants the gods to be properly worshipped, a healthy life 
lived, and women loved." "K" comments "the sacred man wants 
no such thing, unless he is a Frenchman." The inane stupidity 
that must have gone into the early converts actually believing that 
an Indian or Tibetan guru would use these European 
stereogibes is puzzling. Yet again mundus vult decipi, and if the 
average Western alien feels she or he can get to the esoteric 
goods, she or he tends to lower the level of skepticism to a 
virtual zero.

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