LAM Current

BLACK TO GREY:

AC, KG, & The LAM Current.

Born into a successful brewing family of Victorian Middle-Class respectability, the Englishman who called himself AC (1875-1947) was certainly one of the most notorious characters of his day, and is very likely one of the most influential – though still controversial – figures in the world of Ritual Magic, a veritable Picasso of the Modern Occult Revival. Self-styled ‘The Great Beast xxx’ and Prophet of the Aeon of Horus – his defiant, libertarian New Age, with its Message of “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole of the Law” – he was dubbed by the press of his day “The Wickedest Man in the World.” Aleister Crowley was, if nothing else, an adventurer – in mind, body, and spirit – and a seeker after new sensations, new insights and new experiences. An inheritance as a young man left him free to devote himself to a life of travel and exploration, in the realms of sex, drugs, and occultism as much as the geographical. 

Crowley sought to put forward a new approach to magic which he felt was better suited to the fast-developing Modern Age of the Twentieth Century, and to this end founded his own Order, the Argenteum Astrum, with its ‘Journal of Scientific Illuminism’, The Equinox (motto: “We place no reliance on virgin or pigeon, our method is science our aim is religion.”) He would write in a letter to a disciple – later included in the collection eventually published as Magick Without Tears – the following statement of position: 

My observation of the Universe convinces me that there are beings of intelligence and power of a far higher quality than anything we can conceive of as human; that they are not necessarily based on the cerebral and nervous structures that we know, and that the one and only chance for mankind to advance as a whole is for individuals to make contact with such Beings. 

So, as well as a pioneer in the realms of magic & mysticism, many things can and have been claimed by and for Aleister Crowley: without doubt he was an arch drug-fiend and psychedelic pioneer (it is alleged he introduced Aldous Huxley to mescaline, in which case his impact on the Sixties was incalculably more profound than just appearing on the cover of Sgt. Pepper) – Free Love proponent and omnivorous bisexual athlete – big game hunter, record breaking mountaineer, and world-class chess champion – painter, philosopher, poet and pornographer – and perhaps even spy . . . 

. . . but can we now add “AC, Alien Contactee” to the list? 

New Year, 1918, and Aleister Crowley is living in furnished rooms in Central Park West, New York City, when he decides to embark on a series of experiments in order to contact “higher intelligences” with the help of his then-mistress and magickal partner, opium- smoking pharmacist and former suffragette, Roddie Minor. [NB: Crowley spelt his ‘magick’ with a ‘k’ to distinguish it from the magic of parlour tricks, but also to indicate – by means of Qabalistic code relating to the letter ‘k’ – the consciousness-expanding basis of his approach, through yoga and ritual augmented by the use of sex and drugs.] His biographer, Richard Kaczynski, writes in Perdurabo concerning what would become known as ‘The Amalantrah Workings’: 

As the Workings progressed, Crowley increasingly incorporated the IX⁰ [code within Ordo Templi Orientis to indicate sex for ritual purposes], anal sex, Anhalonium Lewinii [more commonly known as Peyote], and hashish in order to improve the connection. 

The Workings typically proceeded with Minor acting as a medium, having visions and clairaudient communications, which Crowley would rigorously interrogate for any symbolic meaning, and then interpret. At least one ‘intelligence’ may even have come through to some level of manifestation: the enigmatic being that has come to be known as LAM.

Also at this time in New York, Crowley indulged his recently revived passion for painting, exhibiting a selection of his works in Greenwich Village under the title of ‘Dead Souls.’ Crowley was a decidedly self-taught artist, and his work is often crude, generally naive, but certainly vivid. One drawing in the show was the portrait of a figure with a large, domed head, looking remarkably like what would become the standard image of the ‘Grey’ Alien in later UFO lore – except for the eyes, which are fairly narrow slits rather than the more usual reptilian ‘ray-ban’ look. Crowley also included the drawing as a frontispiece, titled simply ‘The Way’, to an edition of founder of Theosophy Madame Blavatsky’s enigmatic work, The Voice of Silence, to which he had added a Commentary, which he published the following year, 1919. The caption underneath the picture read: 

LAM is the Tibetan word for Way or Path, and LAMA is He who Goeth, the specific title of the Gods of Egypt, the Treader of the Path, in Buddhistic phraseology. Its numerical value is 71, the number of this book. 

Apart from that, there is no further commentary on the picture by Crowley – or anybody else, for that matter – until the picture passes into the hands of Kenneth Grant.

Kenneth Grant (1924-2011) was an English occultist and writer who met Aleister Crowley in the last years of The Great Beast’s life, when the ailing and wizened Magus was slowly dying from the cumulative ravages of a lifetime of excess in the somewhat unlikely setting of a guesthouse in Hastings, on the South Coast of England. After corresponding, the young Grant was invited to go and stay with the aged Crowley as a kind of informal secretary-cum-personal assistant. There has been much arguing back-and-forth and bitter wrangling over just how much Grant’s time with the Beast can be counted towards the claim that he was Crowley’s successor, particularly where the vexed matter of the title to his Ordo Templi Orientis is concerned, but that is not really of relevance here. What is of significance is that at some point before his death in 1947, Crowley presented the drawing of LAM – or “the Lama” as he referred to it, which he said he had “drawn from life” (!) – to Grant, planting a powerful magickal seed in the young man’s imagination. Drawing on his apprenticeship with Crowley, Grant would go on to form a version of the O.T.O. – which would eventually become known as “The Typhonian Order” to distinguish it from the so-called ‘Caliphate’ O.T.O., which has incorporated as a copyright and legal entity in the U.S.A. – starting with his New Isis Lodge, which Grant wrote was: 

. . . evolved by the present writer during the years 1955-1962 . . . for purposes of traffic with the Outer Ones. – Kenneth Grant, Outer Gateways (1990) 

The godfather of Modern Wicca, Gerald Gardner, had been part of Grant’s circle in London, as was occult artist Austin Osman Spare and alchemist David Curwen – both of whom had been mentors in their way to Grant – and also Surrealist painter Ithell Colqhuoun.

Apart from his invaluable personal memoirs of Crowley and Spare, and some fine volumes of occult fiction, Kenneth Grant is probably best known for the nine volumes of his three ‘Typhonian Trilogies’ written between 1972 and 2002. One of the few interviews ever given by Grant, for the Skoob Occult Review in 1990, includes the following exchange: 

Q: What is the purpose of your books?
KG: The main purpose is to prepare people for encounters with unfamiliar states of consciousness.
Q: Do these include extraterrestrial encounters?
KG: Yes, extra-, sub-, and ultra-terrestrial encounters. 

Grant has included Crowley’s portrait of “The Lama” in a number of his books, referring to him in his Outside the Circles of Time (1980) as an “extra-terrestrial and praeterhuman Intelligence” and also asserting that: “Lam is now known to be a link between the star systems of Sirius and Andromeda.” He also points out an interesting resonance with the number 71, which Crowley originally attributed to Lam in 1918: 

. . . I note that Jacques Vallee cites an entity calling itself 7171 who claimed to be connected with UFOs. (UFOs: The Psychic Solution, p.83). 

Grant also sees meaning in the fact that 1947, “[T]he year of the first massive UFO sightings”, was also the year that Aleister Crowley passed from this life . . . 

As a result, a ‘Cult of Lam’ has evolved within the Typhonian Order – which continues since Grant’s death under the custodianship of his former right-hand-man, now successor, Michael Staley. Experimental yoga-based methods involving mantra, meditation and visualisation have been developed for ‘making contact’ with Lam, or the Current he represents. Doubtless the work continues, in hope that at least some of us can be prepared, for as Kenneth Grant stated: 

If man is able to integrate these new experiences into his psyche he must begin NOW to think in terms at least of extraterrestrial encounter. If he does this the rest may follow . . . the faculty of intuitive insight may be awakened and aligned with such alien concepts.

Matthew Levi Stevens, January 2016.

                                        AC’s portrait of LAM.