Why Are
They Here?
Sub-Figura vel Liber Caeruleus
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:
Have
aliens visited us? The evidence seems to necessitate a yes answer.
What do they look like? There are many forms, but the most popular
form, as Clark wrote,
"...is perfectly
expressed on the cover of Whitley Strieber's 1987 best-seller
Communion, which shows the face
of a humanoid with an oversized head, big, slanted eyes and a
slit-like mouth... Beings of this type are short in stature, and
have thin, frail-looking bodies with long, skinny arms."
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.
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 (image
below), 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 of 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:
-
Lam was first
contacted in 1918, shortly after the beginning of humans
seeing aliens.
-
The second
publication of the illustration of Lam took place in the
1960s, the same era marking the beginning of the "abduction
era" of ufology.
-
There has been an
increase in sightings of aliens who look like Lam in the
past decade.
-
Instructions for
summoning Lam appeared 12 years ago.
-
The request by
Grant for people to contact Lam occurred in the same year
that Communion was published.
-
According to
Grant, Lam is associated with the coming Aeon.
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,
...to name just a few.
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