Foil Hat Ninja

Note: You don’t have to read the previous post, Crowley Invoked a Little Lam, for this one to make sense, but it wouldn’t hurt.

“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

Okay, that title is a little melodramatic. The UFO invasion hasn’t come yet…at least not in a sci-fi, War of the Worlds kind of way. The sordid tale of these two men and what they were up to in the mid-1940s may be no more than that, but it is interesting. It’s the true story that Xenu and your thetans don’t want you to know.

Jack Parsons was an honest-to-Cthulhu rocket scientist and one of the founders of Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena in 1943. He became intrigued with Aleister Crowley’s occult organization the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) when he was invited to and attended a performance of the Gnostic Mass in 1939. He joined the Agape Lodge in Southern California shortly thereafter in 1941 and soon came to be regarded as one of their golden boys by ranking members of the Order, including Crowley himself, who called Parsons “the most valued member of the whole Order, with no exception!” It was at Crowley’s request that Parsons took over leadership of Agape in 1942 when he had been a member for less than two years. What Parsons was not good at was keeping his occult interests a secret as The Book of the Law advises. He was frequently heard reciting Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan” for good luck before rocket tests. That sort of thing doesn’t go unnoticed and caused some concern among his coworkers. They tolerated it for a while because he was really good at his job, but that didn’t last.

At some point in 1945, Parsons was asked to leave JPL because of his “disreputable” association with the OTO. He soon began renting out rooms in his house to artistic types, which is how he met Hubbard. It wasn’t long after L. Ron moved in that he was banging Parsons’ girlfriend Sara Northrup, which was technically okay because the OTO strongly recommended a polyamorous lifestyle. Nevertheless, Parsons was reportedly extremely jealous of Sara’s infatuation with Hubbard, but she wasn’t alone. Parsons was also fascinated by Hubbard and they became friends despite the fact that Sara clearly preferred her new boyfriend to her old one. This clear case of cognitive dissonance must have taken a toll on Parsons’ mental state, because he began experimenting with non-OTO sanctioned forms of black magic that reportedly resulted in poltergeist-like activity around the house that included sightings of apparitions, glowing orbs and disembodied voices. There was also a supposed instance of howling banshees appearing outside all the windows of the house one night.

Since all of this wasn’t getting him whatever it was that he wanted to get, he decided to embark upon a series of magickal operations that he seems to have devised on his own called the Babalon Working. The purpose of this was ostensibly to create a physical manifestation of the divine feminine archetype, and one with a strong sexual aspect. What it sounded like to me when I first learned of this was that Parsons was trying to use magick (the preferred spelling for Crowley devotees) to create himself a new girlfriend. Honest to Goddess, the first thing that popped into my mind when I originally read about this was that it had to have been the inspiration for the movie Weird Science. To be fair to Parsons, his stated reason for performing this operation was more noble.

The present age is under the influence of the force called, in magical terminology, Horus. This force relates to fire, Mars, and the Sun, that is, to power, violence and energy. This force is completely blind, depending upon the men and women in whom it manifests and who guide it.The catastrophic trend is due to our lack of understanding of our own natures. The hidden lusts, fears, and hatreds resulting from the warping of the love urge, which underlie the natures of all Western peoples, have taken a homicidal and suicidal direction.This impasse is broken by the incarnation of another sort of force, called Babalon. The nature of this force relates to love, understanding, and dionysian freedom, and is the necessary counterbalance or correspondence to the manifestation of Horus.

Considering that this was being done in the wake of all of the horrors and atrocities committed by both sides during World War II, I’m inclined to give Parsons the benefit of the doubt about his motivations. If he happened to get a new girlfriend in the process, what was the harm in that? Anyway, he got Hubbard to assist him in these efforts, primarily to record the results, and it seems to have panned out, at least in Parsons’ mind.

Following one performance of the Babalon Working that took place in the Mojave Desert on January 18, 1946, Parsons had an epiphany that his efforts were a success. He returned home to find that Marjorie Cameron, a friend of one of his boarders, had dropped by for a visit. He immediately determined that she was Babalon and enlisted her as his partner to complete the Working, meaning that they performed sex magick rituals in the desert while Hubbard looked on and took notes. The fact that Cameron didn’t mysteriously appear out of nowhere didn’t seem to be a problem, so Parsons must have been satisfied that it was just the spirit of Babalon that had been invoked and not an actual new Earthly inhabitant. The fact that she was willing to perform ritualistic sex acts with a man she just met while another man watched indicates to me that she was not the sort of girl that you bring home to mother. Nevertheless, she and Parsons were married later on that year.

He followed up the Babalon Working, which was concluded on March 4, 1946, by deciding that it was time to create a moonchild – a kind of messiah of the Aeon of Horus. Up until then, this whole concept existed only as the plot of Crowley’s 1917 novel of the same name. Parsons must have thought that the idea was at least somewhat plausible and that there was enough information in the book to allow him to make it a reality. What was Crowley’s take on this attempt to bring his novel to life? In a letter to Karl Germer, his future successor as head of the OTO, he wrote “Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but he needn’t have worried.

Some have said that Marjorie’s failure to become pregnant was a clear indication that Parsons failed to produce the intended messiah. Others say that this is a misinterpretation of what Parsons was doing and that the moonchild could have been born from any woman anywhere in on Earth. The lack of any great messianic figures appearing in the world over the next several decades would seem to me to be a better indication that his efforts failed.

While many seem to enjoy pointing out Crowley’s insulting comments made to others regarding Parsons and Hubbard’s activities, in communications with Parsons he was supposedly supportive of their efforts. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s Crowley, so anything is possible. He never liked Hubbard though. He considered him to be nothing more than a con man. For his part, Hubbard later claimed that he had been hired by military intelligence to infiltrate the OTO. Considering that Caltech was said to be a hotbed of OTO activity, that certainly seems plausible, especially considering the number of defense related projects underway there and at JPL at the time. It is also a fact that the FBI and the military were well aware of Parsons’ involvement with the OTO, and they were none too happy about it, which is of course what led to his dismissal.

Not long after they completed their magickal collaboration, Hubbard hatched a plan to either make both of them some fast cash or screw Parsons out of his life savings, depending on who you believe. Hubbard wanted Parsons to purchase three yachts in Florida and then he would sail them to California and sell them at a profit. Despite warnings from his friends that Hubbard was trying to swindle him, Parsons agreed to go along with the plan. Hubbard and Sara headed off to Florida with $10,000 of Parsons’ money to make the deal. It wasn’t until he got word that Crowley now considered him a fool who had let a scam artist make off with his money and his girlfriend (to be fair, his ex-girlfriend at that point) that Parsons had a change of heart and flew to Miami to stop them. When he got there, L. Ron and Sara had already set sail, but they were forced to return to port when they hit an unexpected squall. Parsons later claimed that it was a combination of spells that he had cast once he discovered that they were gone that caused them to turn back. There were reasons to believe that their destination was not California, and they were compelling enough that a court dissolved their partnership and ordered Hubbard to reimburse Parsons. Any intentions by Parsons to pursue further legal action were squashed by Sara, who reminded him that she was only 17 when their affair began and that he could still be prosecuted for statutory rape. So ended the relationship between the rocket scientist and the future founder of one of the world’s most controversial religions.

Parsons died in an explosion in his home laboratory in June of 1952. Though the police deemed it an accident, some were dissatisfied with their conclusions and suspect that he was murdered. A few others claim that it was suicide. I wasn’t there, so I have no idea what happened. After Parsons’ death, Marjorie went on to become a fixture in the Los Angeles art scene, partly because of her association with Parsons and the OTO, which I guess made her mysterious and therefore interesting.

As for Parsons’ scientific legacy, he has not been treated well. Watching scientists today try to distance themselves from Parsons is pretty amusing. Anything that backs up that fast should have a beeper on it. Depending on who you ask, he was one of the big shots at Caltech at the time. Others claim that he had little to do with it and was mainly attached to Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Early scientists at JPL joked that this acronym actually stood for Jack Parsons’ Laboratory. The ones there today, or at least some of them, minimize his contributions to rocket science despite the fact that he has a crater on the moon named after him. Okay, it’s just a crater, not a quasar or a comet or anything cool, but it’s still more than most people get. And for those of you who say that people who get involved in the occult aren’t exactly rocket scientists, well…

What became of Hubbard has been the subject of so much coverage and controversy that I need not try to summarize it here. And although I’m no fan of his, it’s only fair to point out that most of the more salacious accusations about the level of depravity in Hubbard’s personal life and philosophy came from his son Ron Jr. in an interview that he did with Penthouse. Junior clearly had a massive axe to grind with his father, so there’s plenty of room for doubt about the accuracy of his claims concerning his old man.

After Hubbard’s split with the Order, OTO members claimed that he had taken their methodology, which they say was designed to free the mind, and twisted it around into a system to enslave people. This method was, of course, Scientology. You can make your own determinations about the value of his religion and whether or not it enslaves people. Matt Stone and Trey Parker are probably working on a script for the play as we speak.

How all of this Babalon/moonchild business ties in with Lam and UFOs is still far from clear to me, other than that Crowley and the OTO were involved in both. There are those who insist that what Parsons and Hubbard were doing tore open a rift that connects our world with the world of Lam and the UFOs and that it was a hole that they could not close, for better or worse. I’m not sure why this would be, unless Babalon and Lam come from the same place (the collective unconscious?). The primary source for these assertions would seem to be Parsons and Hubbard’s own notes, which I haven’t seen and so can’t personally verify. What is clear is that Kenneth Grant, who was undeniably fixated on Lam and his apparently extraterrestrial brethren, “credited” Parsons and Hubbard with bringing about the current age of the flying saucer which officially began in 1947 with Kenneth Arnold’s sighting over the Cascade Mountains, although I must point out that pilots on both sides during WWII reported encountering UFOs on a fairly regular basis. The slang term used by American pilots for these objects was “foo fighters,” and both sides thought that they were an enemy secret weapon until after the war when it became apparent that neither side possessed this sort of technology. This indicates to me that Grant was trying to attribute a measure of OTO responsibility to a phenomenon that likely has nothing to do with them, although he would probably counter with the argument that Crowley originally opened this portal years before with the Amalantrah Working. Parsons and Hubbard just tore it wide open. I remain skeptical.

Great. Now I’ve got the Scientologists and the OTO pissed off at me. It’s been nice knowing you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them”—Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice

 

In 1918, the famous (or infamous) occultist Aleister Crowley was living in New York and had shacked up with a married woman named Roddie Minor, whom he used as a medium in some of his esoteric experiments. Minor – who Crowley refers to as “the Camel” in his writings on the subject, a sobriquet that I can’t believe any woman would take as a compliment – seemed to have a knack for accessing the astral plane. Using both hash and opium for visualization facilitation, she would enter a trance state where she had a number of encounters with some rather interesting inhabitants of that realm, including a wizard who called himself Amalantrah. Much of the content in Minor’s visions centered around the symbol of the egg, along with Amalantrah’s exhortations “It’s all in the egg,” and, concerning the egg, “Thou art to go this way.”

To many, all of this can easily be dismissed as drug induced hallucination, and it’s difficult to argue otherwise. However, Crowley was by no means the first or last person to assert that hallucinogenic substances can actually open the mind to non-ordinary states of consciousness where it is possible access other levels of reality. Shamanic traditions from all over the globe would back him up on this. So would some scientists who have done research in this area.

At this point in the story, things get a little hazy. We know that Crowley soon headed back to Europe. We also know that using techniques obtained during sessions with Roddie Minor that came to be called “the Amalantrah Working,” Crowley was able to achieve contact with a being called Lam. It is unclear whether this was a purely psychic connection or if Lam actually materialized. We don’t even know if this being said that its name was Lam or if that’s just what Crowley decided to call him. “Lam” is the Tibetan word for “path,” while “lama” is “one who is on the path.” Further still, we don’t even know what they talked about. What we do know is that at some point Crowley drew a sketch of Lam, and its resemblance to what we now refer to as the gray aliens has gotten some attention of late.

A first glance might make you think that the head is about right, but where are the big black eyes? A closer inspection reveals that, while Lam does have beady little eyes, the contours of his skull are suggestive of the size and shape of the eyes of the standard description of the grays. Okay, so dents in the forehead aren’t eyes. Fair enough. That hasn’t stopped people from multiple camps, including the Typhonians (see below), from concluding that Crowley was the first to connect with these beings and may be responsible for their presence here now. Superimposing Lam’s picture over the cover illustration of Whitley Stieber’s Communion does show a marked resemblance, eyes notwithstanding. Another point that I find to be of interest is that Strieber has said that the only major flaw in the artist’s rendering of the creature that he encountered is that her eyes were actually much larger, which Crowley’s sketch clearly indicates would be the case if Lam’s cranial indentations were replaced with eyes. The beings described by some abduction experiencers back in the 1960s and 70s seem like a hybrid between Lam and the more current description of the grays. Their abductors had the same large heads and eyes, but the eyes were more like ours with irises and pupils, which is also the case with Lam.

Crowley was a member, and later the Outer Head (their term for CEO), of an occult order known as the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). The OTO is widely regarded as the “bad boy” of occult orders, even by some other occultists. However, the accusations that they are Satanists are unfounded as far as I’m concerned. These are usually leveled by conservative Christians who are appalled by some of the Order’s practices which they find morally scandalous. Crowley absolutely loved this. Outraging Christians was one of his favorite pastimes, and he was really good at it. If it was an Olympic event, he would’ve won the gold. I point all of this out because there is no shortage of people who have branded Crowley as a Satanist and Lam as a demon, which is untrue in the case of the former and only one possibility in the latter. Okay, so he did call himself the Great Beast and used 666 as his magical number, but the reasons for that are more complicated than what it seems on the surface. Crowley may have been an amoral narcissist, and he was certainly no Christian, but he was also no Satanist.

Anyway, Crowley never mentions Lam in his magical diary of the time. He mentions Amalantrah and the symbolism of the egg a number of times, but nothing about Lam. It’s possible that Crowley decided to forget about him and instead focus his energies on spreading the message of The Book of the Law, which is widely considered to be his greatest occult contribution. But Crowley was reportedly not immediately impressed with this book. According to Israel Regardie, it was not until many years later that he came to embrace most of it, though there were still parts that he reportedly considered distasteful ’til the day he died. So why keep quiet about so significant an event as contact with an otherworldly being? This makes even less sense when you consider that this magical diary was later published as The Magical Record of the Beast 666 in 1972. It was edited by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant, and in an afterword they state that Crowley was so unguarded in these writings because he never thought that anyone else would read them. It seems almost impossible to believe that he would have excluded Lam even from his own personal notes.

Then again, maybe he didn’t. One of these two editors, Kenneth Grant, was given the drawing of Lam by Crowley in 1945. There’s no record that I’m aware of concerning what they may have discussed at the time, but Grant went on to form the New Isis Lodge within the OTO not long after Crowley’s death. The manifesto for this lodge so annoyed Karl Germer, Crowley’s successor as Outer Head of the OTO, that he kicked Grant out. Grant responded by announcing that he was the new Outer Head, which caused a split within the order, which happens with some regularity in these types of organizations. When Germer died in 1962, it would seem that Grant’s position as Outer Head was solidified. He then went on to found the Typhonian Order, which while still dedicated to previous OTO doctrine, was focused primarily on establishing contact with “praeter-humans” like Lam. Grant clearly considered this to be of the utmost importance, and this is most likely what got on Germer’s nerves to begin with. It’s possible that Crowley did write about his contact with Lam, but Grant decided to edit it out as being too sacred to be so publicly displayed before the profane masses in a book. This isn’t that farfetched a notion. Occult fraternities are very secretive about most of their doctrines and practices. They are, after all, secret societies.

But we do have a fairly detailed set of instructions on how to connect with Lam. It came not from Crowley in the early 1900s, but from Kenneth Grant in a 1987 communique entitled “The Dikpala (stop snickering) of the Way of Silence: The Lam Statement.” I’m not going to go over the process for making contact here, partly because it’s easy enough to find on your own if you so desire, but mostly because I don’t want to be even partly responsible for any negative consequences of people playing around with things that they don’t understand. Grant warned that this is a dangerous procedure and cautions that the operation should only be attempted by IX° initiates of the OTO, which I‘m assuming that most of you are not. Your guess is as good as mine as to why they later chose to post this text on their website.

It seems likely that Crowley must have told Grant something that he found compelling when he received the Lam sketch. It would be hard to fathom a reason why Grant became so fascinated with Lam otherwise. Also, the methods Grant made known for contacting Lam were in practice decades before he released them to the general OTO public. It’s unlikely that he just pulled them out of thin air in the 1960s. It seems logical to conclude that both he and Crowley knew more than either of them were letting on.

What is clear from this document is that Grant is certain that the egg which was featured so prominently in the Amalantrah visions is Lam’s head. Going into the egg means literally getting into the mind of Lam and looking out through his eyes* upon “an alien world.” 1987 just happens to be the same year that Whitley Strieber’s Communion came out, a book that many consider to be about extraterrestrials, though Strieber himself is less convinced. Grant shares this lack of certainty as to the extraterrestrial origin of Lam. In “The Lam Statement,” he writes

Whether these visitors are regarded as visitors from outer space, or as welling up from the depths of some inner space, is neither here nor there. The dichotomy of ‘inner and outer’ is purely conceptual, arising from the dualist notion of an individual being somehow separate from the rest of the universe, which is somehow ‘out there.’ There is in fact nothing outside consciousness, which is a continuum.

This should be a familiar theme by now to those of you who are regular visitors to this site. It’s also made clear in this document that by the term “Lam,” Grant does not necessarily mean a specific, singular entity but rather all entities of this nature.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, ”visitors” is the same term Strieber uses for the beings he writes about in Communion. Since I have no exact date for the release of “The Lam Statement,” it’s possible that Grant read Communion before he wrote it. Maybe the success of Communion is what prompted him to write it in the first place. Whether it’s a coincidence or not, it is clear that many consider Lam and his ilk to be the same intelligence encountered by Strieber and other UFO contactees.

More importantly, Michael Bertiaux, a member of the OTO, claimed to have had great success in contacting Lam using the techniques not mentioned above in the 1960s. He is reported to have said that he considers contact with Lam to be the next step in our evolution of spiritual growth. Strieber has said repeatedly that he believes that the “visitors” may be a force of evolution and that whatever it is that they’re doing with us is all about the soul.

Another notable similarity between the UFO experience and seeking contact with Lam is in Grant’s warning that this operation may lead to a feeling of disconnectedness from reality or a sense of the unreality of the objective universe. The sensation of being in some sort of trance or dream state is not uncommon in those who report having had a UFO related experience, and it doesn’t have to be a full-blown “alien contact” scenario, although it is almost universal in these instances. Sometimes people who merely report seeing a UFO say that they felt as if they were in some kind of altered state of consciousness.

Finally, although I’m not at all sure what to make of this, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Grant claimed that Lam was a gateway to the Void. The numerological value of “Lam” as calculated by Crowley is 71, the meaning of which is “No Thing.” In 1959, two Naval Intelligence officers allegedly made telepathic contact with a being that claimed to be from Uranus. This being said that its name was Affa. In the Enochian language communicated to Dr. John Dee by “angels” in the 16^th century, “Affa” means “nothing” or “the void.” Bizarre coincidences do tend to pile up in Chapel Perilous.

I’d love to tell you more, but that’s all I know. Maybe Amalantrah and Lam were both just drug induced hallucinations and Crowley got lucky with the similarity between his sketch and the grays. Maybe Lam was just an image that Crowley somehow pulled out of the collective unconscious and that’s why he had nothing substantive to say on the subject. Make of it what you will.

For those of you who would like to know more about Crowley, I refer you to Israel Regardie’s biography The Eye in the Triangle. I’ve been told that there are other good biographies of Crowley as well, most notably John Symond’s The Great Beast, but I haven’t read them. The only person I’ve ever read more than one biography of was Jesus, and that’s because all four of those are pretty short.

Tune in next week when we’ll take a look at a supposedly related series of events, although I’ll be damned if I can find the connection. Maybe it will come to me as I delve a little deeper into them.

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*Could the larger eyes seen today be somehow symbolic of this? Maybe having others look through your eyes makes them larger. I’m being somewhat facetious here, but you never know. The grays have shown themselves to be big fans of communicating symbolically. Or maybe I’m looking for connections where none exist.