Alien Gurus and The Mother of the Soul: On the Etymology of the Tibetan Word Lama and Why More Occultists Should Learn to read Tibetan

I’ve written about LAM, the according-to-some extraterrestrial entity which English ritual magician Aleister Crowley is supposed to have contacted, in an earlier article about ‘Tibetan aliens’ which I shared on this blog before. The term LAM is synonymous with a specific drawing which Crowley produced, and which some occultists say is a portrait of a specific spiritual/alien entity. Now, occultists have many different opinions about who or what LAM is or was, about whether this picture is even a picture of an entity at all, and about the extent to which whatever entity or spiritual principle the image may represent is important or interesting. Some claim the image of LAM is Crowley’s spiritual self-portrait, others that it is a picture of Crowley’s Guru or Holy Guardian Angel. Some say it a portrait of Lao Tzu or another Taoist sage, of a disincarnate Tibetan lama, or the likeness of some other sort of priest or sorcerer. Others argue it is a stylized representation of penis-in-vagina (ritual?) intercourse, while yet others claim that it is one of the earliest representations of the now stereotypical ‘grey alien’ extraterrestrial (this last position seems to have gone especially viral online in the late 90s and 2000s).

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Tibetan Master Meets Theosophical Mahatmas: Gendun Choepel’s Reflections on Blavatsky and Theosophy

gendun choepel

(Celebrated ex-monk Tibetan intellectual Gendun Choepel)

I was recently reading through Donald Lopez’s excellent book “The Madman’s Middle Way’ on the contributions of controversial and brilliant early twentieth century Tibetan intellectual Gendun Choepel (1903-1951), and I came across something I had missed before, namely, Gendun Choepel’s reflections in Tibetan on the popularity of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) and the nature of her new religious movement Theosophy, as found in his ‘Serki Thangma’ or ‘Field/Surface of Gold’. This travelogue (which has been fully translated into English by Lopez and Thupten Jinpa) constitutes an extensive autobiographical account of the ex-monk’s wanderings in the 1930s and 40s throughout India and then Ceylon/now Sri Lanka. It is chock-full of fascinating insights about British empire, comparative religion, gender, and science as seen through the eyes and experience of an extremely gifted and innovative Tibetan scholar, poet, and artist.   Continue reading