The Encyclopedia Of Demons And Demonology

48 curse
CHORONZON. Crowley was inspired to incorporate sex
into the ritual, and he became convinced of the power of
sex magic. By 1912, he was involved with the Ordo Templi
Orientis sex magic occult order, and in 1922 he was
invited to head the organization in Britain. He took the
magical name BAPHOMET.
Lam In 1918, the same year that Mathers died, Crowley
conducted a sex magic ritual called the Almalantrah,
with Roddie Minor, known as Soror Ahitha. The working
created a portal in the spaces between stars, through
which the entity Lam was able to enter the known physical
universe. Since then, other entities are believed to
enter through this widening portal, and to be the basis
for numerous contact experiences with UFOs and
extraterrestrials.
One of the revelations of the working was the symbolism
of the egg. Crowley and Soror Ahitha were told, “It’s
all in the egg.”
Crowley believed Lam to be the soul of a dead Tibetan
lama from Leng, between China and Tibet. Lam is Tibetan
for “Way” or “Path,” which Crowley said had the numerical
value of 71, or “No Thing,” a gateway to the Void and
a link between the star systems of Sirius and Andromeda.
Lam was to fulfill the work initiated by Aiwass.
Crowley drew a portrait of Lam and said that gazing
on the portrait enables one to make contact with the entity.
Some consider Lam to be a demon and the portal to
be one accessed by other demons.
See BLACK MASS; SIX-SIX-SIX.
Lam, an entity summoned by Aleister Crowley (© RICHARD
COOK)
FURTHER READING:
Crowley, Aleister. The Holy Books of Thelema. York Beach,
Me.: Samuel Weiser, 1983.
———. Magic in Theory and Practice. 1929. Reprint, New
York: Dover, 1976.
Hillyer, Vincent. Vampires. Los Banos, Calif.: Loose Change,
1988.
King, Francis. Megatherion: The Magickal World of Aleister
Crowley. London: Creation Books, 2004.
Michaelsen, Scott, ed. Portable Darkness: An Aleister Crowley
Reader. New York: Harmony Books, 1989.
Stephenson, P. R., and Regardie, Israel. The Legend of Aleister
Crowley. St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1970.
Sutin, Lawrence. Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley.
New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000.
Symonds, John, and Kenneth Grant, eds. The Confessions of
Aleister Crowley, an Autobiography. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1979.
curse A SPELL or action to harm, often done by invoking
the help of DEMONs, other spirits, and deities. In
Christian tradition, a curse can cause demonic problems,
including POSSESSION. The person who makes the curse
ultimately suffers the effects of it. The term curse is
derived from the Anglo-Saxon word cursein, the etymology
of which is not known, which means “to invoke
harm or evil upon.”
Cursing is common in magical practice and outside
Christianity may be considered part of a system of justice
in which powerful evil spirits are invoked. The Greeks
and Romans used curses as a part of daily life, to gain advantage
in business, politics, sports, and love. The Egyptians
wrote curses on magical papyri, a practice adopted
by Greeks and Romans. From about the fifth century B.C.E.
to the fifth century C.E., curse tablets (tabellae defi xonium)
were especially popular in the Hellenistic world.
Tabellae defi xonium refers to tablets that fix or pin
down, especially in the sense of delivering someone over
to the powers of the underworld. The curse tablets were
thin pieces of lead (and sometimes other materials) on
which were inscribed the victim’s name, the curse, magical
symbols, and names of various deities or the more generic
DAIMONES invoked to carry out the curse. The tablets
were buried near a fresh tomb, a battlefield, or a place
of execution, all of which were believed to be populated
by spirits of the dead en route to the underworld. The
curses gave the spirits the power to assault the victim.
Curse tablets also were fixed with nails and were thrown
into wells, springs, or rivers, also inhabited by spirits.
Curses were made for all manner of purposes, including
preventing rival athletes from winning competitions, as
in this late Roman Empire curse for a chariot race found
in Africa:
I conjure you, daemon, whoever you may be, to torture
and kill, from this hour, this day, this moment, the
horses of the Green and the White teams; kill and smash
the charioteers Clarus, Felix, Primulus, Romanus; do