The Great Beast

Lovely night, isn't it?  :\

On this Halloween, I would like to turn your attention to a man who should be of interest to anyone who dabbles in the paranormal or who likes the just plain weird.  Issues of time and space prohibit me from giving even the most superficial treatment of this man so I will be providing links for further information at the end of the post.

His name was Aleister Crowley.  He was an occultist.  A mystic.  A philosopher.  A hedonist.  A “magician.”  A man despised by his own mother so much that she called him “the Beast.”  The name stuck.  He was a member of the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and supposedly a high-level Freemason, though that latter organization denied any affiliation.  He founded his own religious philosophy, Thelema and lived by a credo of “Do What Thou Wilt.”  Hmm.  Sounds more like he was a pioneering libertarian than a demon “beast,” but we’ll move on.

His life even left ripples in popular culture.  In Dennis Wheatley’s novel, The Devil Rides Out, the Satanic cult leader is said to be modeled after Crowley.  There are Crowley-like figures and even cameos by the Beast himself in works such as Rosemary’s Baby and From Hell.  The great Ozzy Osbourne even wrote a song about Crowely, having the unintended effect of further linking Ozzy falsely to Satanism:

Given these areas of research that he was passionate about and the fact that he lived out his days in the Victorian era, Crowley was not without his share of controversy.  British press at one point dubbed him “the wickedest man in the world.”  Allegations of Satanism surrounded him.  Viewed in retrospect, Crowley has been called a racist, a drug addict, sexist in the extreme, and really more of a sensationalist and a carnie showman than any sort of spiritualist.  I’ll leave that debate to others.

What interests me about Crowley is the fact that he claimed to have been in contact with an entity called “Lam.”  Crowley claimed to have been working with ceremonial magic (or “magick” as he called it) in an effort to contact “higher intelligences.”  In doing so, he purported to have encountered Lam, an extradimensional being with gray skin, a large and bald head, and slit-like eyes.  Sound like anyone discussed around here?

Of course it does.  Lam can and has been easily accounted for as a “Grey” alien by many, including spiritualists and Crowley followers who claim to have made contact with Lam themselves.  Interestingly enough, Crowley was neither abducted by nor experimented upon by Lam as so many others report being by the Greys.  Instead, Lam was a mentor to Crowley, a spiritual guru whose teachings Crowley infused into his own philosophies.

I have no idea as to the veracity of Crowley’s claims and really don’t care to get into any kind of tussle over them.  There is still more for me to read.  Yet given Crowley’s uncanny description of Lam, I cannot help but wonder if he made alien contact or at the very least, I wonder what Crowley would have had to say about the entire alien abduction phenomenon.

So I need to get through the night.  Hopefully the trick or treating won’t be so bad.  Wish I had the time and resources to establish some sort of laser perimeter defense outside the house.  Or at the very least, to post an ElmoSapien.

The Aleister Crowley collection at the University of Texas

Wicked: A Gallery of Aleister Crowley at Life Magazine


Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets