Amalantrah Working

The Amalantrah Working was a series of magical rituals conducted by Aleister Crowley and his partner Roddie Minor in a residence on West 9th Street, New York City, between January and June 1918. The purpose of the rituals was to contact and communicate with discarnate or extra-dimensional intelligence through a mediumistic sex magic protocol derived from the system of Thelema and the O.T.O.. The entity contacted — known as Lam — is described by multiple researchers as morphologically identical to what is now called a Grey alien, a resemblance that has made the Amalantrah Working a central reference point in theories connecting occultism with the UFO contact phenomenon.

The Entity Lam

During the sessions, Crowley made contact with an entity he named Lam, producing a portrait that depicts a tall, hairless being with a large, egg-shaped cranium, vestigial facial features, and a small closed mouth. Crowley first introduced the Lam portrait publicly in his 1919 commentary on the Voice of the Silence by Theosophical founder Helena Blavatsky, displaying it as the frontispiece without detailed explanation. The portrait predates by roughly 30 years the widespread Grey alien iconography that entered public consciousness following the Kenneth Arnold sighting (1947) and the Roswell incident (1947), and by nearly 50 years its popularization through Whitley Strieber's Communion (1987).

Kenneth Grant, Crowley's acknowledged successor who knew him personally, analyzed Lam at length and concluded that the entity represents a genuine alien intelligence — not an internal psychological projection but an exterior non-human mind that accessed Crowley's ritual working as a functional communication channel. Grant placed Lam within the Typhonian tradition — his own extension of Crowley's Thelema — and associated the entity with the Mauve Zone, a liminal trans-dimensional space in Typhonian cosmology through which non-human intelligences purportedly traverse into contact with human adepts.

Nature and Phenomenology of Lam Contact

Magician and ritualist Brian Butler, who performed the Lam Statement as written by Grant — a meditative contact protocol designed to invite Lam communication — described the encounter in terms consistent with classical Grey alien abduction phenomenology: "It was a long-term process that took maybe a year. You're dealing with non-human intelligence, an elemental or 'alien,' whatever it is. It proceeded like a slideshow, it was in my sleep, they were showing these projections and it took me a while to figure out that's what was happening." Butler described the intelligence's essential character: "It's a very cold, mechanical kind of computer-like intelligence. It's what we perceive as artificial because it's not incarnated and it never was. So it doesn't have empathy or doesn't relate to that at all." He further noted: "It's eternal. It's ancient. And it's also futuristic. It's from a dimension that's beyond what our perception of time is."

This description matches in almost every detail the account of Grey alien contact offered by abductees in the modern UFO literature: cold, intellectual, emotionally detached, timeless, operating outside normal spatial-temporal constraints, and initially terrifying.

The Portal Hypothesis

A minority of researchers propose that the Amalantrah Working did not merely contact an existing entity but actively opened a dimensional gateway through which Grey-type beings began more systematic access to the Earth plane. Supporting evidence cited for this view includes the sharp post-1947 acceleration in reported UFO sightings and abductions, the temporal correlation between Crowley-lineage workings and major extraterrestrial contact events, and the VICE summary: "Ever since Crowley's Amalantrah Working lots of people in the US started reporting visitations, or 'abductions,' with creatures that looked very similar to Lam." Kenneth Grant cited Crowley's 1918 contact as the earliest documented modern portal-opening to the class of intelligence later called Greys, providing the template for subsequent Thelemic interdimensional work.

The word "Lam" is also the Sanskrit mantra associated with the Muladhara (root chakra) — the energy center linked to survival, grounding, and the physical plane — which some Tantric-informed researchers interpret as an additional indicator that the entity operates at the boundary between material and non-material existence.

Connection to Jack Parsons and the Babalon Working

Jack Parsons, co-founder of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a leading figure in the Agape Lodge of the O.T.O. in Pasadena, California, conducted a ritual sequence called the Babalon Working in 1946, explicitly drawing on Crowley's precedents including the Amalantrah Working. Parsons stated his goal as opening a portal through which Babalon — the archetypal feminine divine of Thelema — could manifest in human form, thus permanently altering the occult environment of Earth. L. Ron Hubbard, then Parsons's houseguest and later founder of Scientology, participated as a scrying assistant during the Babalon Working sessions — an association that remains a subject of controversy in both Scientology historiography and UFO-occult research.

Multiple researchers in the Crowley-UFO overlap literature hold that the Parsons Babalon Working in 1946 represents an intentional amplification and extension of the channel first opened during the Amalantrah Working in 1918 — and that the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 1947, occurring barely a year after the Babalon Working's conclusion, marks the effective public beginning of the modern UFO era as a consequence of that opening.

The Typhonian OTO and Lam Worship

Kenneth Grant founded the Typhonian O.T.O. (later the Typhonian Order) as a distinct successor lineage to Crowley's A∴A∴ and O.T.O., centering its practice on trans-dimensional contact work along the lines of the Amalantrah Working. Within Typhonian practice, Lam is treated as a real extraterrestrial or trans-dimensional intelligence whose communication is actively cultivated via the Lam Statement — a short ritual text published in Grant's The Magical Revival (1972) and later reprinted in Outside the Circles of Time (1980). Grant maintained that Lam is one of a class of beings called the Forgotten Ones — entities outside the human sphere who nonetheless seek to influence human evolution from beyond the abyss of the Qliphoth.

Grey Alien Identification

The morphological identity between Crowley's 1919 Lam portrait and standard Grey alien descriptions — ovoid skull, large dark almond-shaped eyes, vestigial nose and mouth, slender neck and body — has been extensively documented by researchers including Peter Moon, Jim Keith, and Michael Hoffman II. The portrait was produced nearly three decades before the first widely reported modern alien contact descriptions, making independent invention the null hypothesis critics must defend. The competing explanation — that Crowley's portrait influenced later abductee descriptions through cultural diffusion — requires the portrait to have been widely known decades before it was republished or widely discussed, a timeline that does not fit the historical record.

The Collins Elite and the Ritual-UFO Link

The connection between the Amalantrah Working and the post-war UFO phenomenon was not limited to independent researchers. According to Jason Jorjani, U.S. government agencies that had been surveilling Jack Parsons due to his security clearances and involvement in occult rituals became "increasingly convinced that some of these UFO manifestations were the result of the Satanic rituals that Parsons and his associates had been engaging in — that they had succeeded in summoning some kind of entities." This produced an informal interagency group with representatives from the Air Force, the nascent CIA, and the Navy, known internally as the Collins Elite, who concluded over time — drawing on biblical interpretation — that the entities contacted through the Crowley-Parsons ritual lineage were demonic in nature and that disclosure of the phenomenon would precipitate an apocalyptic crisis for human civilisation. Jorjani framed the entities engaged through the Amalantrah and Babalon workings as a "trickster entity" — a genuinely non-human or superhuman intelligence that manifests across phenomena including Mantis encounters and Men in Black, and whose engagement through ritual constituted an intentional act of contact rather than mere delusion. In a separate account, Jorjani describes the Collins Elite as "evangelical or traditionalist Christians" in the CIA, Air Force, and Naval Intelligence who had privately concluded "since the 1940s in the era of Jack Parsons" that the occult-UFO phenomenon is demonic in character — a conclusion that made disclosure of the Amalantrah Working's implications a theological as much as a national-security question.

Alchemy, Prima Materia, and the Astral Contact Tradition

Researchers situating the Amalantrah Working within the broader history of Western esotericism note its connection to the alchemical tradition of the Prima Materia — the primordial substance described by alchemist Martin Ruland the Younger in the late 1500s using fifty synonyms, three of which are particularly noted: "angel," "violet light," and "Lucifer." In this reading, the entities contacted by Crowley through the Amalantrah Working are continuous with the "off-world intelligence" that alchemists claimed to tap in order to enable material transmutation — the Azoth, described as the animating spirit hidden in all matter. The shift from physical encounters with alien beings in antiquity to astral or dimensional contact in the modern era — of which the Amalantrah Working represents a pivotal moment — is understood in this tradition as a change in the contact modality, not the source.

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