Wandering Souls: Tibetan Visions on the Plym

Wandering Souls: Tibetan Visions on the Plym

Dr Hannibal Taubes, University of Manchester

In November 1956, a forty-six year old surgical fitter from Plympton named Cyril Hoskin embarked on an extraordinary literary career. Claiming to have been possessed, after a severe head injury, by the disembodied soul of a Tibetan monk named Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, his prolific publications described his life as a Himalayan Buddhist in vivid, convincing detail. “Lama Rampa’s” publications have been alternately ridiculed and read with fascination by generations of spiritual seekers, but what is the truth behind them? Dr. Hannibal Taubes was trained as an academic Tibetologist, and has been sometime resident of Plymouth since 2021. In this talk, he conjures the stranger-than-fiction worlds of Asian religion and European esotericism that underlie Hoskin’s account, tracing wondrous transmigrations from ancient Indian monks to feuding visionaries in medieval Tibet, eccentric Victorian lady-travellers to the thriving Buddhist communities of contemporary Plymouth