Esoteric thinkerAleister Crowley (1875–1947)
aka Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) · Crowley · Aleister Crowley · Lam · Amalantrah Working
English occultist and ceremonial magician; founder of Thelema (the *Liber AL vel Legis* received in Cairo, April 1904); head of the Ordo Templi Orientis from 1925. His 1918 "Amalantrah Working" produced the drawing of an entity he named "Lam" — a large-headed, slit-eyed humanoid figure whose visual resemblance to the later "grey" abduction iconography has been remarked on widely (notably by Whitley Strieber and Kenneth Grant).
English occultist, mountaineer (twice attempted Kangchenjunga and K2), and prolific writer. Founder of Thelema, the religious-philosophical system based on the text Liber AL vel Legis (the Book of the Law), which Crowley dictated in Cairo over 8-10 April 1904 from what he reported was the speaking voice of an entity calling itself Aiwass. From 1925 until his death in 1947 Crowley led the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), the magical fraternity of which Thelema is now the organizing religious framework. He published extensively: Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), The Equinox journal (1909-1919), The Book of Thoth (1944), among many others.
The reference point for the modern UFO-adjacent literature is the “Amalantrah Working,” a series of ceremonial magical operations Crowley conducted in New York City over January-June 1918 with his student Roddie Minor. The working’s documentation includes a frontispiece drawing Crowley executed of an entity he labeled “Lam,” presented as a Tibetan teacher. The Lam portrait shows a hairless, large-headed, almond-eyed humanoid figure with a small mouth and narrow chin. The morphological resemblance to the iconographic “grey” of post-1987 abduction literature — popularized through Ted Jacobs’s cover illustration for Whitley Strieber’s Communion (1987) — has been noted across multiple lineages. The connection was developed most extensively by British Thelemite Kenneth Grant in The Magical Revival (1972) and Outside the Circles of Time (1980), in which Grant explicitly framed Lam as a contact-entity opening “extraterrestrial” trans-mundane gateways. Strieber discussed the Lam-grey resemblance in Communion and later works.
The historical sequence — Crowley’s 1918 portrait predating both the 1947 disk-wave and the modern grey iconography by decades — is undisputed; what the sequence means is contested. The skeptical reading is that Strieber, with his deep familiarity with occult literature, retroactively absorbed Lam’s morphology into his account. The Grant-and-after reading takes Lam as evidence of a continuous “contact” tradition that ceremonial magic, indigenous shamanism, and modern abduction reports are all partial registrations of. Crowley’s broader legacy in counterculture and the occult is independent of UFO discourse, but the Lam image is the single most-cited Crowley reference in the modern esoteric-UFO literature.