Lam
Lam is the name given to an entity that British occultist Aleister Crowley claimed to have contacted during a series of magical rituals known as the Amalantrah Workings in 1917. Crowley produced a portrait of the being from memory, depicting an entity with an ovoid skull, enormous dark eyes, a vestigial nose, and a minimal mouth — bearing a striking morphological resemblance to the Gray alien archetype that would not become widespread in UFO culture for decades.
Crowley's Account
The Amalantrah Workings were a series of sexual magick rituals Crowley conducted in New York City in 1917–2018, reportedly designed to establish contact with extra-dimensional intelligences. Crowley described Lam as an entity contacted across space and dimensions during these workings. His pencil portrait, signed and published as a frontispiece to a limited magical publication in the early 1920s, shows a being whose proportions and features are effectively indistinguishable from the modern Gray description, including the large cranium, dark wrap-around eyes, and minimal facial features.
Relationship to Gray Alien Archetype
The Lam portrait predates the Roswell Crash (1947) by thirty years and the publication of Whitley Strieber's Communion (1987) — which cemented the Gray image in popular culture — by sixty-five years. Several interpretations exist:
- Coincidental similarity: The resemblance is coincidental, and the Gray archetype is culturally derived from independent sources.
- Shared contact: Lam and Gray aliens are the same non-human intelligence, and Crowley made genuine contact with it decades before UFO encounter reports began.
- Cultural transmission: Crowley's image circulated in occult and esoteric communities and influenced subsequent descriptions of alien beings, creating a feedback loop.
Crowley's subsequent magical successors, particularly Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard in their 1946 Babalon Working rituals in Pasadena, California, are noted by some researchers as forming a connection between Crowley's tradition and the early UFO era — both Parsons and Hubbard were subsequently connected to early rocket science communities and early UFO lore.