3: The Mask of Lam

Red-gold mask 'inlaid' with faux abalone-shell & copper leaf, archaic gilt bronze effect decorations and gilt solar-lunar emblem.

The third of my Seven Masks presents the face of 'Lam' as an ancient cult object of an unknown origin and uncertain provenance, perhaps looted from a recently discovered tomb of a long forgotten civilization.

The apparent use of gold and copper alloy, gilded bronze decorations and inlay of highly-prized materials such as the nacreous abalone shell of the forehead all suggest a rich and highly sophisticated culture. The golden emblem combining sun and moon symbols that adorns the mask suggests that the object had some religious or ritual use. But, like other beautiful objects removed from the archaeological context in which they were discovered, the mask's original significance has been lost and its origin the subject of speculation.

Bronze Age cultures such as the Dian and Zhang zhung certainly emerged from pre-history and flourished in ancient Yunnan and Tibet. But, in this case, the mask is not an ancient work of art. It is a contemporary work of artifice, its carefully created verdigree patina as spurious as the 'secret books' in an archaic script that Blavatsky claimed to have seen in Tibet.

In the Blue Equinox, Crowley correctly uses the Tibetan term 'Lam', meaning 'path' or 'way', in the caption to the frontispiece to The Voice of the Silence. He does not use it as a name. Nor does 'Lam' occur as a name of any specific entity with which he was in contact in the surviving record of the Amalantrah Working.

Grant's identification of the 'sitter' in Crowley's drawing with the name 'Lam' removed it from the context in which he found it. In Cults of Shadow (1975), LAM is given as a 'Tibetan word meaning god or extra-terrestrial Intelligence'; an intelligence with which 'Crowley established contact c.1919' (Nightside of Eden 1977). Work of other magicians revealed that 'Lam' was a 'Great Old One', a 'Magus of Maat' not only 'linked with the Atlantean Mysteries' but now 'known to be a link between the star systems of Sirius and Andromeda' (Outside the Circle of Time 1980). In Hecate's Fountain the 'Lama of Leng' established the 'Cult of the Thunder Dragon' on Lovecraft's fictional plateau some 12,000 years ago. Disassociated from the other oriental 'faces' that Crowley assumed, 'Lam' became an increasingly distant figure, remote in terms of both time and space from its original context. It was not a 'Magus of Maat' that returned from Esopus Island, but a Yellow Adept.