LAM: Communication with a "Lost Soul"

The original sketch of Lam by Aleister Crowley was first shown publicly in his "Dead Souls" exhibition held in Greenwich Village, New York in 1919 and published as the frontispiece to Crowley‘s commentary to H. B. Blavatsky‘s The Voice of the Silence that same year. My own slightly synchronous mention of Lam being a "lost soul" will come to make sense later. It was only after I attached this meaning to Lam that I consciously noticed the similarity between my term and the name of Crowley’s exhibition.

Lam has been a long time interest of mine and I‘ve usually kept it to myself. My first magical evocation back in the late 1990's was of the archetypal "grey alien" which has been associated with Lam over the years. I had no idea then about how to do evocations in the traditional sense so there were no preparations, banishings, formal ritual, etc. I took the idea of my first experiment from a book by Gregory Little called Grand Illusions. In a section about the experiments of Dr. Raymond Moody using a mirror chamber called a "psychomanteum", Little casually mentions that one could conjure an alien with a mirror and a candle but he advised against it because this particular "alien" form tends to attract negative intelligences. Here is the passage:

I first read Little’s book in 1994 but most of his ideas seemed to slip past me at that time. It wasn’t until I had a series of odd spontaneous experiences as a result of illness and meditation at the end of that year and into 1995 that his ideas began to really click. I read the book again in 1997 and that is when that passage jumped out at me. It was all I needed so I tried it.

It took me about 20 minutes of staring at a candlelit dark mirror, tilted so that no image is seen, and concentrating on the idea of the alien and imagining what it looks like when three of them visually appeared for a few minutes staring at me then faded. Upon fading I sensed an uneasy presence behind me and couldn't manage to turn around. The feeling was identical to when you wake up from a nightmare and can't quite bring yourself to move for a while. That is when I forced my arm over to a lamp next to me and turned it on. The presence and feeling immediately went away. In all honesty I was actually quite shocked by the success of this experiment. This was my first shot fired and had a powerful impact on my shifting views over the years regarding phenomena considered paranormal and/or magical. To this day it still gives me a strange paranoid type of feeling when thinking of it. Why there were three of them in the mirror I don’t know. I was not visualizing it that way. I have never actually done this same working and doubt that I’d even be able to have any success with it in that way.

Now whether or not that first experiment was truly related to Lam I can't really say. I also don't think that what I evoked were actual "aliens" in the usual sense. I even knew this then, at least in theory.1

I was aware of Lam at the time as I had already been reading a few of Kenneth Grant's books but I didn't consciously connect this with it. Over the years though my fascination with Lam increased but I never did anything formally or directly with it until more recently.

Through the months of July and August, 2010 I prepared and performed a rather ambitious semi-oneiric invocation I came to call SOMNIA: An Oneiric Noesis - Seduction of the Oneiroi which turned out to be some pretty strong stuff. This particular working marked the end of a long series of oneiric workings I had been doing since 2005. Its current stirred a tangent in me I couldn't shake until I followed my intuition back to Lam. I have had a painted rendition of Crowley’s sketch of Lam on my wall for a couple of years now so there have probably been some subtle energies floating around regarding this entity. Using that painting as a scrying medium I performed a version of the Lam-gazing rite that Grant prescribes in "The Lam Statement". The magical procedure prescribed is as follows:

1. Sit in silence before the portrait.
2. Invoke mentally by silent repetition of the Name.
3. If response is felt to be positive, but not before, enter the Egg and merge with That which is within and look out through the entity’s eyes on what appears now to the votary an alien world. (Adumbrations of identity with Lam may be experienced as a strong sense of the unreality, or unfamiliarity, of the ‘objective’ universe.)
4. Seal the Egg, i.e. close the eyes of Lam and await developments.
5. At the first sign of stress or fatigue, return to mundane consciousness by opening the eyes and by oozing out of the Egg in a form determined by the experiences within.
6. Perform, astrally, the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram of Earth, at the Eight Spaces, and record all experiences in detail, paying particular attention to lunar phases (celestial and, where applicable, terrestrial), and any physiological phenomena accompanying the experience.

Grant encouraged experimenting with that basic scheme and evolving one’s own methods along these lines. I stuck fairly close to it except for #6 where I used the Ma‘atian Space-Marks Banishing2 before and after each scrying session. I also added a candle to light the portrait and burned an incense called Kasturi Chandan, musk with sandal perfume, that has a particular nightside charge to it for me personally.

Part 2 (it seems that we can only post 10000 characters or less at a time)

I did two scrying sessions on September 27, 2010 and October 6, 2010 both at 11:30pm and roughly between 1-2 hours long each. I opened each session with the following invocation:

Lam!
Thou Voice of the Silence,
Glyph of Hoor-paar-kraat:
The Dwarf-Self, the Hidden God.
Gateway to the Aeon of Maat!
I evoke Thee! I evoke Thee!
With the mantra Talam-Malat,
Talam-Malat,
Talam-Malat…3

Then I simply stared into the eyes of the portrait. After maybe an hour into these sessions an optical effect happens with the eyes and mouth of the entity that makes them appear to open into black holes. This is the moment when the gateway is open and I would push through and merge my consciousness with the portrait. Then close my eyes for a moment to allow a kind of absorption. The result of all this for me is not what Kenneth Grant describes as looking out through the entity’s eyes and seeing an alien world. The visionary aspect of it was fairly mundane except for the change of mood. I opened my eyes and I was where I was the whole time except for a feeling of a presence behind me. I took a pen and prepared myself to write down anything I experienced. I then felt and heard a low metallic sounding voice that came from the lower back of my head as if someone was whispering to me right up close to the top of my neck. It’s first words were "to lost soul, now entering the twin summit of fire and imagination", or so I thought in the moment. Then followed a dictated monologue. This entity would not allow me to ask questions and would become forceful if I asked it to slow down or go back to something. Towards the end of the second session I was instructed to correct the spelling of the first three words to "Tu Los-Sol" and given the number 207 with no further elaboration.

After sifting through what I had written down I cleaned it up and the final result of both sessions was a 93 verse communication I called CCVII: Tu Los-Sol - Entering the Twin Summit of Fire and Imagination complete with some sort of ritual I have never heard of nor have I figured out how to actually perform.4 I never numbered the line by line verses in my writings until this one. It was only after typing it up on MSWord that I felt an intuitive urge to number them which revealed that 93. I've been numbering all of the writings that have followed since just in case there is a significance. I have been very slowly writing a commentary to this piece in an attempt to make some kind of sense of it but became sidetracked with other things. I do plan on getting back to it sometime this year.

I have yet to follow this working up with anything directly related to it. I have also been very hesitant and guarded about sharing the written communication. (note: I have decided to share it in this thread for the first time)

Most of the accounts of Lam workings I’ve read or heard about seem like guided kundalini/chakra meditations where the operator has simply visualized the head of Lam onto the head of the kundalini serpent. Michael Staley’s article "The Lam-Serpent Sadhana" is along these lines. Though these accounts have been helpful in various ways none of them really touch on what I got out of Lam. I have my own theories that perhaps my results are part of my own predispositions. Over the years, and especially since I started experimenting with oneiric sorcery and channeled/received communications, I have come to realize that these transmundane intelligences do in fact depend first on what we have stored away in our subconscious in order to formulate their communications. They can’t communicate directly, they need a medium and a language. This is no different than their dependency on certain objective conditions to manifest in a psychoid fashion. A secondary dependency seems like it is a deeper stratum of consciousness or perhaps this could be the genetic memory in our DNA; something we are rarely conscious of. What exactly it is I don’t know but it could be equated to the realm known as Da’ath on the Tree of Life; the astral recordings of all experience. Of course this theory isn’t anything new but I have been wanting to nail it down for a long time now and trying to describe it coherently always seems to elude me.

Notes:
1. Gregory Little’s Grand Illusions actually concerns itself with the nature of psychoid phenomena or physical archetypes and the electromagnetic/geomagnetic conditions that seem to allow for them to manifest. I think the classic alien form was simply the vessel my imagination supplied for phenomena that we are not capable of experiencing directly or unmediated. It was similar to when someone takes an Ouija board and simply asks "is something there?" and attracts whatever happens to be listening. Whatever comes through uses the expectations or thought forms of the recipient as a vehicle, like the ghost of a dead relative, alien, demon, etc. In occult lore these vessels are located and supplied in the abode of the Qliphoth. The vessel tends to be, in some way, sympathetic to the trans-mundane intelligence it attracts. What these various intelligences happen to be is a matter of a whole other discussion.

2. Versions of this banishing ritual can be found in Maat Magick by Nema.

3. Preliminary invocation initially taken from Michael Staley’s articles "Lam: The Gateway" and "The Lam-Serpent Sadhana".

4. Recently a friend I had shared the communication with interpreted and performed the ritual in a real world sense with fairly astonishing life-changing results. I am not currently at liberty to divulge the details but what she described to me actually put me in awe of its seeming power. I honestly don’t know what to make of it and feel I have something very potent in my possession.

CCVII: Tu Los-Sol
Entering the Twin Summit of Fire and Imagination

1. Personal difficulties have now crystallized into genetic memories.
2. Their subsidiaries have attached themselves to one particular condition of manifestation.
3. These memories have now become unknown separate entities disguised in the slightly hysterical spontaneity of one’s own literature.
4. Their proportions are an inferiority to be acknowledged and examined closely.
5. Sometimes these observations will ignite an idea of power but this transmission of subliminal wisdom will never be held as validated proof of ancient divinity.
6. Heathen images are the source of our courageous narrative; cruel and hostile.
7. Some shall flee into puerile insignificance.
8. Others will await a prophecy and preoccupy themselves with numerous texts and delicate formulations of sanctified testimonies.
9. This passage is necessary for obtaining the strength to embrace the law of derangement.
10. The profusion of this intrinsic expression is found within a splendid shadow.
11. We are now possessed of the wonderfully stretched radiance of the soft sun behind the sky.
12. For the first time I began to hear the moaning hidden in the shade of magical glamour.
13. The primordial blood spilled from the centuries to seed civilizations within a given network of planets; interfacing the sinister with the strange and combining instruments of speechless magnitude.
14. We have evoked the vanished nightmare of frightful infinity and the crawling redundancy of the mass product.
15. Internally we must engender a different plane.
16. On the threshold you will find the Stone of the Mysteries.
17. Only in the vast nowhere are we all one and completely alone.
18. From this cycle of loneliness emerges the manifestation of action and the obscure vision of your veiling perception.
19. This is a necessary falsehood to be discovered as a painfully brilliant summit of insufficient qualities and interpretations.
20. Our tradition was buried so you are right to pursue your research and the identification of authenticity in excavated locations elsewhere in the sacred island that upholds the world’s circumstance.
21. We rarely speak of the Green Stone but just know that it is the true invisible crown surrounding the paradox of pure being.
22. The garden of memory has been divided by an essence of conflict that has existed for aeons between twisted guardians and spinning stars.
23. Your primal impulse is formless and devoid of aspect.
24. There is no practical way to convey it as a substance except to intoxicate it with images and manufacture its realization.
25. This is an undermining of the perceptible, not a denial, as these words will come to make sense in time.
26. Some will be convinced that they have uncovered insane conjectures hidden within the terrible rites of an obscure witch cult.
27. Others will find a haunter gazing into the blackness of their hearts.
28. We have spoken of a knowledge that demands a monstrous connection to a revealed book.
29. This relationship is a progress.
30. Its glow is something of opulence and angels and will be revealed through a passage between the sun and a fairy ring.
31. At night children do not speak without a purpose.
32. Extended fingers point us to serene gatherings where lovers and poets attempt to summon, access and transmit the impossible nostalgia of faded puzzles and elemental apparitions.
33. Our finality has been inherited from a miserable potential and this uneasy horror is merely a calling to our journey.
34. Bright flashes of sound usher our awareness into the depth of the spectral ocean.
35. Beneath your conformity there is a lingering desire crying for painted mistresses and burnt kisses.
36. You will reminisce over long lost lovers you never knew.
37. Charting the directional matrices we begin casting charged extravagances upon the evening pool of attentive thoughts invoking the ardent sense of rapture.
38. The spirit whispers minor inspirations from the crevices of the foundation.
39. Unspoken fables will signal a marvelous union of tongues and mutual relations.
40. We have engaged in the sacrament of soma and elevated the primary quest to miraculously equate the mystery written and sustained by the procession of the Grail.
41. This divine seduction is a technique of erotic detachment and submissive passion.
42. The vehicle transmutes to a grotesque corpse prepared for consummation.
43. This will become your aesthetic preference.
44. Your unyielding adherence to the materialization of your inhibitions will prove to be the key.
45. It will only take the violation of a single liberty.
46. A remote lamp is reflected in the shining spiral of silence.
47. One day they will awaken from the carved ivory winds of sleep and grasp this dark change of landscape.
48. Only the dead will welcome the solitary few.
49. We will come to know the secrets that hide within oracular questions.
50. This fate is written across the skies.
51. We have now done everything we can to embrace the stellar worship of the sacred stone.
52. Our adorations have matured into the possession of the blood spirit.
53. Mythic creations are the basis for conceptions of language.
54. The intelligences developed by the subliminal Plasmate are represented by demons of the elements, personified souls of dead protectors and living guardian angels.
55. This will become most eminent with the marriage of modern precision and traditional legendry.
56. We have witnessed the triumphant rebirth of the Gnostic heresy and the apocalypse of the origin of information.
57. These words are a defecation of the Logos on the absolute veracity of influential churches.
58. The primitive birth of more perfect gods was the fault of irrational priests.
59. Here was their ceremonial instruction: Align the mirror within the chamber to the directional rotation of the axis.
60. The center should completely enclose the altar.
61. Place the vessel of the heart within the circle and project its essence into the fire.
62. Perform the serpent purifications.
63. Impregnate the sacred plant with the sacrificial excellence and bind it to the forbidden treasures that reside in dreams.
64. Then perform the supreme banishment of magical absorption.
65. This operation must never be performed with a desire for progress.
66. To do so will result in the most abhorrent taboos.
67. Certain magical impurities can become principles of contagion and these germs are the seeds of the conflict of good and evil.
68. Seeds of this type have fertilized our world.
69. Most are now bound by their dependence and prostrate themselves to the obedient nature of the dog.
70. The Adept should declare the true doctrine of the Rose as a semblance of the wandering moment of death.
71. The gravity of this temptation is sublimated in the wisdom of glistening vegetation and the myths of a lost continent.
72. Demons will soon be crowned with the curse of mortal sleep.
73. The peculiar woodwork of many ages is revealed in the lamentations of collective minds.
74. This intermediate encounter will reward you with the ability to penetrate the eighth sphere of translation.
75. The deliberately accidental have now emerged from the earth.
76. These common mortals have shaped themselves as questions of probability and are now busy gathering the remains of their consequences and the eyes of their character.
77. The elemental transference is to be delegated by the primitive dust of alchemists, obtaining the purpose of ecstatic alignments.
78. We are convinced that the origin of the word is elsewhere.
79. The severed head is a blind for the wondrous stone and the sacred trees are its offspring.
80. This world is an enduring vision of sudden terror and danger, opening a crevice between the stone pillars of misery and suffering.
81. The Great Work is an exercise in the ultimate abstraction; the complete and permanent removal from the illusory spectacle of matter.
82. Most will be deceived by hesitation and inadvertently condemned to wishful thinking or destroyed in the wilderness of the maleficent spirit.
83. Never underestimate the significance of imaginary difficulties.
84. Inorganic beings are continually sending forth joy and madness.
85. This framework is specific to the evolution of cosmic projection.
86. Outgoing thoughts will pass through a system of ugly proportions developed on the inner planes, breaking the burdens of beautiful trembling.
87. My own vanished astonishment will not let me remember my own sanity.
88. I wandered into amnesia and became deranged with isolation.
89. Conscious suffering has made us anxious to transcend the narrow parameters of our cosmogony.
90. This irregular intensity has conspired to occupy the uncoiling formula of the serpent illusion.
91. The original observation temple was a circle of stones that unlocked a gateway to the Gnostic Mirror.
92. All of us must learn to drift the waters of time and listen to the principle of nowhere.
93. The suggestion of this final oracle should be exhausted through peripheral research; Anamnesis needs nothing and death yields love’s aching narrative.

(September/October 2010)

Having to post a string of posts like this is a little annoying but oh well. The previous post was the resulting communication of my LAM working. This is the first time I have shared it publicly.

I had also initially started an analysis and commentary but ran out of time (and patience) to really get further into it. I got as far as the title (haha!) and here is all of that for anyone interested.

After researching the strange words in the title I found the following. According to Gerald Massey's A Book of the Beginnings the word TU means “enter” and “mountain” (summit). The word LOS equates to Imagination and Inspiration in William Blake's mythopoetic writings. SOL is Sun and hence Fire. The main title Tu Los-Sol seems to loosely translate into or allude to what the rest of the title actually says. It may also be an anagram of “Lost Soul” but that may just be an interesting coincidence. The Hebrew gematria of TU LOS SOL is 207 which has some interesting correspondences in Crowley's 777. Another correspondence may be in Aleister Crowley’s Liber LI: The Lost Continent where he comments on the word Atlas saying “the root is the Lemurian: Tla, or Tlas, black”. Tu-Los seems too similar to Tlas to ignore. This would make “Black Sun” an alternate translation of the title.

I may also note that I had taken a deep interest in Crowley's Liber LI around the time of this working. There are a lot of things in the above "communication" that I could point to as being influenced by several sources I was studying and/or working with at the time. When and if I ever get back to a full analysis and commentary these things will be pointed out.