Aleister Crowley, "LAM, or The Way." Pencil on paper, 1919. Source.
"Crowley included the portrait of Lam in his Dead Souls exhibition held in Greenwich Village, New York, in 1919. In that same year it was published as a frontispiece labeled 'The Way' to Crowley’s commentary to Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence." Source.
"Crowley's portrait of Lam passed into the hands of Kenneth Grant circa 1945 following an astral working in which he and Crowley were jointly involved. Grant, who was authorized in the early '50s to work the first three grades of the OTO, is now widely perceived as Crowley's natural heir and successor (what a can of worms that statement opens.--ed). His interest in CETI (Contact with Extraterrestrial Intelligence)-type phenomena is of long-standing duration. In 1955 for instance, he announced the discovery of a trans-plutonian planet called Isis, and simultaneously established an order called the New Isis Lodge OTO for the purpose (among others) of contacting higher intelligences. A similar situation arose some 30 years later in the late 1980s, when Grant allegedly received 'strong intimations' to the effect that Crowley's portrait of Lam "is the present focus of an extraterrestrial -- and perhaps trans-plutonic-- energy which the OTO is required to communicate at this critical period..." I have no idea as to the nature of these 'intimations', besides which, writing about magic is a dubious enterprise at best, fraught with semantic difficulties. Perhaps the best option in an article as necessarily as brief as this, is to quote directly from The Lam Statement, a text circulated among OTO initiates with a view to "regularizing the mode of rapport and constructing a magical formula for establishing communication with Lam." We are told first of all that:
"It has been considered advisable by the Sovereign Sanctuary to regularize and to examine results achieved by individual members of the OTO who have established contact with the magical entity known as Lam. We are therefore founding an Inner Cult of this dikpala for the purpose of amassing precise accounts of such contacts...
The portrait of (Lam) which is reproduced in The Magical Revival may be used as the visual focus, and can serve as the Yantra of the Cult; the name Lam is the Mantra; and the Tantra is the union with the dikpala by entering the Egg of Spirit represented by the Head. Entry may be affected by projecting consciousness through the eyes..."" Source.
