Why Are They Here?
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Why Are They Here?

by Donald Michael Kraig

Did Aleister Crowley's 1904 occult practices summon today's abducting aliens?

According to Jerome Clark's May 1992 FATE column, _UFO Reporter_, people who came in contact with aliens used to see human-looking entities. He writes that "...prior to the current 'abduction era' of ufology (starting in the mid-1960s following the publication of the famous Barney and Betty Hill story) a significant plurality of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (CE-3) reports concerned purely human-like entities." Clark goes on to contend that such sightings go back to the early 1900s.

Clark, and other ufological researchers and organizations, try to investigate the facts to the best of their abilities (and, regret- fully, usually limited resources). Investigations by such people answer two questions:

Until the aliens sit down and have a conversation with a researcher, the question of why they are here cannot be answered. Some of the speculations are reasonable (they may be researchers and explorers themselves) while some, by researchers who may be going too far with their extrapolations of the data, are highly questionable (they are here to conquer us, make deals with the government so they can experiment on humans, etc.).

Other answers to this question come from those associated with some sorts of "New Age" spirituality, who see the aliens as saviors of our world.

To them, the aliens have replaced the coming Jewish Messiah or the returning Christian Christ. This interpretation, however, may have more to do with inner archetypes than with alien entities. Some people who, for various reasons, no longer accept the religion in which they were raised, may still long for a savior figure. This can be found in the idea that the aliens are coming to save an elect. There are several such UFO cults around, and they tend to give ufology a bad name or simply make the real students of UFOs look silly.

It is clear, though, that the ufologists cannot answer why the aliens come to our planet, and the answers from the UFO cultists and pseudo-ufologists are unacceptable. We are still left pondering the, question, then, "Why are they here?"

E.T. phone home

In Spielberg's megahit, _E.T., the Extraterrestrial_, the ugly-cute creature from the stars, who was accidentally stranded on Earth, had to cobble together a device to contact his people so they would pick him up. He called them. Although it seems preposterous, is it not possible that some person, or group of people have called the current crop of aliens? While this is admittedly all conjecture, it may actually be the case. And the group that has called the aliens is a group of dedicated occultists.

This story goes back to contemporary occultism's original bad boy, Aleister Crowley. Crowley (nee Edward Alexander Crowley) was born in 1875. He was an expert mountain climber (he was involved in an attempt on K2, the world's second-highest mountain), a brilliant chess player, and a poet whose writings ranged from terrible and embarrassing to magnificent and breathtaking.

His voluminous writings on the occult, although considered by many to have snares and traps for the unwary, are frequently found in the libraries of occultists all over the world. People who are pathologically anti-occult have labeled him a Satanist, although there is no evidence to support this claim. He was licentious. He was bisexual. He experimented with drugs (as did most of the literati of the late 19th and early 20th centuries). He was addicted to heroin, but the drug had been prescribed by his physician as a remedy for his terrible asthma. This was one of the early uses of the drug before its addictive properties became well known.

In 1904, while in Egypt with his new wife, he "received" a book which has come to be known as _The Book of the Law_. It is not exactly clear how this book was received. Some say it was uttered by his wife while he wrote it down. Others say he heard the voice which dictated it, one hour a day for three consecutive days. Still others say that Crowley heard it in his mind. Detractors, pointing to the fact that some of the material seemed very close to Crowley's personal philosophy, as well as quoting Rabelais, doubt the validity of the whole thing.

Crowley was unsure of it himself and forgot about it for years. Eventually he came to accept it and the idea that the entity who dictated it was not human.

Lam, an extra-terrestrial
Intelligence with whom Crowley
was in astral contact in 1919.
This drawing by Crowley
appeared in an exhibition held
in Greenwich Village, New York,
in the same year

Crowley came to have other alleged non-human contacts, including one which interests us with an entity he calls Lam. He contacted this entity and later painted a picture of it This painting, drawn in 1918, was originally displayed and published in 1919.

The similarities between the two illustrations ["Lam" and a modern "space alien" -B:.B:.] are striking: they have the same head shapes, the same tiny noses and the same, slit-like mouths. The major differences between them are two: Lam has slit-like eyes and no neck, while the modern-day alien has an elongated neck and large eyes. I cannot explain the difference in the necks. It may be that Crowley, through his occult abilities, only saw Lam's head and created an almost neckless body to finish the illustration. It may simply have been due to the angle at which he saw Lam. As to the difference in the eyes, that will become clear in a moment.

Who Is Lam?

Crowley believed that our world is going through a series of cycles called Aeons. The current Aeon, supposedly associated with the archetype of the Egyptian god Horus as the "Crowned and Conquering Child," is believed by his followers to have begun with Crowley's "reception" of the Book of the Law in 1904. (Followers of Crowley, known as Thelemites, frequently date their communications in Roman numerals with 1904 as year one.)

The next Aeon is associated with the Egyptian goddess Maat [MA-at...? -B:.B:.]. One of the chief believers in this Aeon was a Crowley follower named Charles Stansfeld Jones who used the name Frater Achad.

Some believe that this Aeon has begun while others believe it is yet to be. This latter point is interesting, because in some ways the Aeon of Maat may have some relationship to the so-called Aquarian Age which we are entering ("This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius..." says the song.)

One of the current writers about Crowley's theories and techniques is the Englishman Kenneth Grant. He has been referred to as every- thing from a genius to a wild ranter.

His books, now mostly out-of-print, demand high prices among occultists. He writes in _Outside the Circles of Time_ (p.4) that "...it is surely significant that Crowley, when he published his comment on [H.P. Blavatsky's] _The Voice in the Silence_ ...[in 1919, placed -- as a frontispiece thereto -- his portrait of LAM, the ET ...particularly relevant to the Aeon of Maat."

My contention is that by placing this picture into the psyches of occultists all over the world (since it is mostly they who read his books) he began the process of summoning or evoking "Lam, the extraterrestrial" to physical appearance.

Why did it take so long? The truth is that Crowley was never very popular during his own day. He was vilified by the British press -- especially those similar to U.S. supermarket tabloids -- as the "Evilest man on Earth." It would have taken a long time for this drawing to be disseminated. From 1919 through the 1960s, there had been only one reprint of the book which published the illustration of Lam.

In 1972, in Grant's The Magical Revival, the illustration was published for the third time. But it was not until 1980 and his Outside the Circles of Time that another step in the evoking of Lam came about. On page 153, Grant gives explicit instructions on how to get in touch with Lam. He says, "Gaze at the portrait until drowsiness supervenes. The gaze will naturally rest upon the eyes; these will appear to enlarge..." Thus, the view of the typical modern-day alien matches Lam with enlarged eyes. In 1987, Grant asked people to contact Lam and report on the contact, as later republished in the British magazine Starfire (1989, Vol. 1 #3). The 1987 date for the original publication of this document was the same year Strieber's Communion was published.

In Grant's request for people to contact Lam, he wrote that this was the beginning of a "Lam Cult." Here he used the term "cult" not with the usual negative meaning but with the idea of it being a small, dedicated group. About this he wrote that, "The Cult has been founded because very strong intimations have been received ...to the effect that the portrait of Lam...is the present focus of an extra-terrestrial-and perhaps trans-plutonic [from beyond our solar system] Energy ...It is our aim to obtain some insight not only into the nature of Lam, but also into the possibilities of using the Egg [part of the method given for contacting Lam] as an astral space-capsule for travelling to Lam's domain..."

Lam, the New Age and the aliens

Admittedly, all that I have presented is circumstantial evidence. Yet, it is hard not to see the links:

Have aliens been summoned by occultists following in Crowley's footsteps? I don't know. The evidence, while circumstantial, is intriguing. It implies that occultists have summoned ETs to help us move forward into the next Aeon of human development (perhaps that is why they are allegedly examining humans and leaving implants). Or is it all psychological? Perhaps the image of Lam/aliens represents some archetype hidden deeply within our psyches.

We will not know until the U.S. government finally releases its secret UFO data or until the aliens -- whatever and whoever they are -- make contact with a wider group of humans. Until then we can only look at the sky in wonder and awe ...and wait.

The above article appeared in the January, 1994 Fate Magazine -- a Llewellyn publication, interestingly enough -- a tabloid-style little journal in which we have been surprised to discover a number of articles both by and about such UFOlogical notables as Hal Puthoff (w/ Targ & Swann), Bruce Macabee, John Alexander and Rose Guilley, to name just a few.

In our continuing cross-cultural unet experiments we have noted the odd reactions from the warring camps incited by articles of this nature and Ken Grant's (et al) writings in general -- the UFOlogical community deeply resents the injection of mythological/ folkloric/magickal elements into the delicate underbelly of it's odd breed of pseudo-scientific belief whilst the Magickal community abhors Club UFOlogy and all it stands for.

Yet is it not conceivable, my Dear Brethren of the Internette, that thy noble valour in staunchly defending thy Sacred Turf may carry with it the vestigial narrowmindedness and blindness inherent in all dogma?

"Let he who is without sin cast the first spell."

Or something like that.

-Brother Blue, B:.B:., 33ø, XIø, 10ø=1ø, OT-VIII, Ph.D., etc.
E Pluribus Caeruleus -- "Out of many, THAT WHICH IS BLUE"