If You Go Looking

Lam

META/2/O

Crowley's portrait

An occult drawing from 1919 that later looked like a Grey.

In 1919 Aleister Crowley published a portrait he called Lam, linked to a series of magical workings he had carried out in New York the year before: a hairless, domed head with a narrow face. From the 1950s the occultist Kenneth Grant built a practice around contacting it, and once the Grey became familiar the resemblance was hard to miss. It is looser than often claimed (Lam has narrow eyes, not the large black ones of the Hill era), but it is the clearest point where Western occultism and the modern alien image meet.

If you go looking

Contact with Lam is a modern ritual practice, and the cautions on deliberate contact work apply in full.

Who should be careful

Reading the code

META/2/O

Outside the system · embodiment 2 of 5, energetic or subtle · source: occult system · key

Dates

Published: 1919

Grant's work: from the 1950s

Related

The resemblance to the Grey is the reason it is here. Contact through ritual links it to the channelled collectives; a being built up through repeated practice links it to tulpas.

Greys →Higher-dimensional collectives →Tulpas and thoughtforms →

Terms used on this page

META: outside the system

Origin code

Not a being to sit alongside the others. A framework that reframes the whole catalogue, a tradition that travelled in the opposite direction from the rest, or an intelligence people say they made rather than met.

Degree of embodiment: 2, energetic or subtle

Scale, 1 to 5

5 is an ordinary biological body. 4 is physical but manifests oddly. 3 comes and goes. 2 is energetic or subtle. 1 is consciousness with no persistent form. Note that this tends to fall as a tradition ages.

O: occult system

Source code

Produced by an esoteric school that organised inherited material into a scheme: Paracelsus, Theosophy and their descendants.

Aleister Crowley

Occultist, 1875–1947

English occultist and founder of Thelema, whose magical workings and writings shaped much of twentieth-century Western occultism.

Deliberate contact work

Read this first

The hazard in this subject attaches to the method, not to which name you aim it at. Ouija work, invocation, sustained channelling, induced hypnagogia, deliberate sleep deprivation and hypnotic regression are the practices associated with difficulty, and a session aimed at a benevolent civilisation is not safer than one aimed at something considered lower. What raises risk is doing it alone, doing it repeatedly, doing it while sleep-deprived, and doing it with an existing vulnerability to psychosis, mania or dissociation. People who get into trouble here overwhelmingly got there through practice, not through reading.

Who should be careful

Practice-side

Anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis, bipolar disorder or dissociative conditions, anyone in acute crisis, and anyone isolated from people who would notice a change in them. Intensive contact practice is destabilising by design (that is what it is for), and destabilisation lands hardest on people already close to an edge.

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