The Chain of Evidence

There is a drawing that most people have never seen. It was made in 1918 by Aleister Crowley during a series of rituals he performed in a New York apartment — a working he called the Amalantrah Working. The drawing depicts a being he named Lam, from the Tibetan for "Path" or "Way." The figure has a large, ovoid, hairless skull. A narrow, delicate jaw. Large, dark eyes set wide apart in a face that is almost featureless below them. A small, fragile body.

In 1918, this image had no cultural context. The word "alien" did not yet carry its modern meaning. The archetype of the grey extraterrestrial — the slender being with the vast cranium and the impenetrable gaze that would eventually saturate science fiction, tabloids, and the testimonies of abductees — did not exist in the popular imagination. It would not exist for decades.

Crowley published the drawing in 1919 as a frontispiece to his commentary on Madame Blavatsky's The Voice of the Silence. He said almost nothing about it. He did not claim Lam was an alien. He did not claim Lam was a demon. He called it a preter-human intelligence — a being beyond the human, of uncertain nature and uncertain origin.

This is where Part II begins: not with theology or metaphysics, but with a timeline.

I. The Timeline That Cannot Be Dismissed

The Aiwass encounter in Cairo, 1904. The Lam drawing in New York, 1918. These are the earliest modern Western cases of a specific kind of contact experience: a single individual, in an altered or ritually prepared state, receiving information from an intelligence that presents itself as non-human, superior, and concerned with the transmission of knowledge.

For decades, these remained isolated incidents in the literature of occultism — known only to specialists, dismissed by mainstream culture.

Then, in 1947, something changed. A civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine unusual objects moving at extraordinary speed over Mount Rainier in Washington State. The report was garbled in translation — Arnold had described the objects' motion as like "a saucer skipping over water," referring to their flight path, not their shape. Newspapers reported "flying saucers." The image lodged in the cultural imagination. Two weeks later, something crashed near Roswell, New Mexico.

What was recovered at Roswell remains contested. The United States military offered three different official explanations over fifty years. What matters for our purposes is what happened after Roswell: the rapid crystallisation of a specific imagery. Beings recovered at crash sites were described, in unofficial accounts that circulated through the 1950s and 1960s, as small, grey, with large heads and large dark eyes.

Crowley's Lam, drawn thirty years earlier, looked like this.

In 1987, Whitley Strieber published Communion — a first-person account of what he described as abduction and contact with non-human intelligences. The beings he described were small, grey, with large eyes. The book sold millions of copies. The image became globally ubiquitous.

The sequence: Crowley draws Lam in 1918. The grey alien enters popular culture in the 1940s–50s. The grey alien becomes globally dominant in the 1980s. In every case, the core features remain consistent: large skull, dark eyes, small body, non-verbal or telepathic communication, the sense of a vast and alien intelligence.

There are three possible explanations for this consistency. First: the image spread culturally, and later experiences were shaped by prior exposure. Second: all reports describe the same hallucination pattern generated by specific states of consciousness, independent of cultural influence. Third: all reports describe, with varying degrees of accuracy, the same actual phenomenon.

None of these three explanations is fully satisfying on its own. The first fails to account for Crowley's 1918 drawing, which preceded the cultural archetype by three decades. The second raises more questions than it answers — why this specific form? The third requires us to take seriously a category of experience that mainstream science has not yet developed adequate tools to study.

What we can say with confidence: the pattern is real, even if its cause remains unknown.

II. Frederic Myers and the Subliminal Self

To understand what the neuroscience eventually found, we need to go back to a Victorian classicist and poet who spent twenty years trying to build a scientific framework for exactly these kinds of experiences — and came closer than anyone before or since to bridging the divide between the mystical and the empirical.

Frederic William Henry Myers was born in 1843 and educated at Cambridge, where he excelled in classics. In his thirties, he underwent a personal crisis of faith — the conventional religious certainties of his upbringing could not survive intellectual scrutiny, but he found the materialist alternative equally unsatisfying. He decided to do what a trained scholar does when faced with an unanswered question: he went looking for evidence.

In 1882, Myers co-founded the Society for Psychical Research in London — the first organisation to apply systematic, scientific methods to the study of phenomena like automatic writing, trance mediumship, telepathy, and apparitions. The SPR attracted serious intellectuals: William James, the philosopher and psychologist, was among its most engaged correspondents. The physicist Oliver Lodge was a member. So was Arthur Balfour, who would later become Prime Minister.

Myers' central hypothesis, developed over two decades and published posthumously in 1903 as Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, was the theory of the Subliminal Self. His argument, in essence: what we call the conscious mind is only a small fragment of a much larger psychological entity. Below — or beyond — ordinary waking consciousness lies a vast subliminal region that normally has no direct access to our awareness, but which can, under certain conditions, break through. These breakthroughs manifest as automatic writing, mediumistic trance, creative inspiration, precognitive dreams, and — at the extreme — encounters with what seem to be external intelligences.

The crucial move Myers made was to refuse the binary between "it's real" and "it's imaginary." He proposed instead that the subliminal self might have access to information and capacities that the ordinary conscious mind does not. Whether those capacities reached genuinely beyond the individual, into some shared or transpersonal domain, he could not determine. But the experiences themselves were real, followed patterns, and those patterns revealed something fundamental about the architecture of mind.

William James, in his memorial essay on Myers, called the problem of the subliminal self "the problem of Myers" — and said it "still awaits us as the problem of far the deepest moment for our actual psychology."

It still does.

III. What Happens to the Brain — And What the Brain Cannot Explain

In 1990, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico named Rick Strassman received government approval to conduct clinical research on dimethyltryptamine — DMT — a powerful endogenous psychedelic compound found in hundreds of plants and, significantly, produced naturally by the mammalian brain.

Over five years, Strassman administered approximately 400 doses of DMT to nearly 60 human volunteers. What he found surprised him so profoundly that he devoted a substantial portion of his subsequent career to trying to make sense of it.

More than half of his volunteers reported contact with non-human beings. Not visual hallucinations of abstract patterns or distorted versions of familiar things — contact. Interaction. Communication. The beings were described variously as entities, guides, helpers, aliens, insectoids, and beings of light. They appeared to have independent intention. They seemed aware of the subject. They sometimes transmitted what felt like information of profound importance.

Strassman himself wrote: "I was neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared for the frequency with which contact with beings occurred in our studies, nor the often utterly bizarre nature of these experiences."

The neuroscience here is genuinely strange. DMT is produced by the human body. Its concentrations in the brain are comparable to those of serotonin and dopamine — established neurotransmitters. Levels of endogenous DMT rise measurably in dying mammals. Some researchers have proposed that spontaneous release of endogenous DMT during near-death experiences, extreme stress, or deep meditative states might account for reported mystical experiences.

The temporal lobes — the regions of the brain associated with religious experience, a sense of presence, and the perception of meaning — are among the areas most activated by psychedelic compounds. Temporal lobe stimulation, even by non-chemical means, can produce vivid experiences of presence, of voices, of encounters with apparent intelligences. This is the neurological basis for what the neuroscientist Michael Persinger called the "sensed presence" — the overwhelming conviction that someone, or something, is in the room.

But here is what the neuroscience cannot explain: the consistency. Why do people who have never met, from different cultures, with different expectations, encountering this state through different means — ritual, psychedelics, meditation, near-death experience, temporal lobe stimulation — describe the same phenomenology? The voice from the corner of the room. The sense of an intelligence both alien and intimate. The transmission of what feels like crucial information. The body of fine matter.

Terence McKenna, the ethnobotanist and psychedelic philosopher, offered a formulation that has proven more durable than it first appeared: "We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses."

This is not mysticism. It is a psychological observation of startling precision: the form of the Other — the Visitor — may be the only form in which the deeper self can present itself to the ordinary conscious mind without being immediately dismissed.

IV. The Kabbalistic Map

The Western esoteric tradition, working centuries before neuroscience, developed its own cartography for these territories — and the map it produced is worth examining seriously, because it was built from the accumulated testimony of practitioners who spent lifetimes navigating exactly these states.

The Etz Chaim — the Tree of Life of the Kabbalistic tradition — is at first glance a diagram of the structure of creation: ten Sefirot, or divine emanations, connected by twenty-two paths, each corresponding to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. But for the Golden Dawn and its inheritors, the Tree of Life was equally a map of the psyche — a precise topography of the inner worlds encountered in ritual, meditation, and the states the tradition called Travelling in the Spirit Vision.

What is relevant to our inquiry is the concept of the Qliphoth — the "shells" or "husks" — the inverse of the Sefirot, located in what the tradition called the Sitra Achra, the Other Side. The Qliphoth represent the same structure as the Sefirot, but inverted — consciousness turned away from its source, intelligence without integration.

Crowley consistently located the beings he contacted — Aiwass, Lam, and the entities he encountered in other workings — not in the orderly upper regions of the Tree of Life, but in the Abyss and below: the regions that separate the personal self from the transpersonal, the known from the unknown. These were not comfortable territories. They were the zones where the coherent self dissolved, where ordinary categories of experience ceased to apply, and where — if one maintained enough awareness — something else became visible.

Kenneth Grant, Crowley's secretary and the founder of the Typhonian Order, spent decades developing what he called the Typhonian Trilogies — a body of work mapping the relationship between Crowley's magical entities, particularly Lam, and the extra-dimensional intelligences he believed were attempting contact with humanity. Grant was eccentric, and his work is difficult. But his central intuition — that the beings contacted in deep magical practice inhabit a dimension adjacent to ordinary consciousness, accessible through specific altered states, and that their nature cannot be reduced to either pure hallucination or literal extraterrestrial physicality — anticipates, in its structure, the framework that both Myers and Strassman arrived at through entirely different routes.

Three different methods. Three different vocabularies. The same territory.

V. The Question the Evidence Leaves Open

We are left with a cleaner version of the question we began with — not simpler, but more precisely formulated.

The evidence supports the following: a specific kind of contact experience — characterised by encounter with an apparently non-human intelligence, transmission of information, and a quality of absolute reality that survivors consistently describe as more real than real — occurs across cultures, centuries, and methods of induction. Its phenomenological features are remarkably consistent. Its causes are not understood.

The neuroscience tells us that the brain, under specific conditions, generates experiences of this kind — but cannot explain why those experiences are consistent across individuals who have had no contact with each other, or why the content of what is received sometimes exceeds what the subject could have known by ordinary means.

The psychological tradition, from Myers through Jung, tells us that the unconscious mind contains resources that the conscious mind has no ordinary access to — but cannot determine whether those resources are entirely contained within the individual, or extend into something larger.

The esoteric tradition tells us that these territories have been visited before, that they can be navigated, that they have a structure — but was built by practitioners whose methods and ontological assumptions cannot be straightforwardly evaluated by external observers.

The Visitor keeps arriving. It has been arriving for as long as there are records. And each time it arrives, whoever receives it reaches for the most extreme vocabulary their culture makes available — because ordinary vocabulary is not adequate to describe what happens when the membrane between the known and the unknown becomes, for reasons we do not understand, briefly permeable.

Part III will examine what happens to those who open that membrane deliberately — and what three men who stand at the intersection of this history can teach us about the difference between the navigator and the shipwrecked.