kaos

the ritual, it was an occult bookseller who declined to come up on hearing Mr Grant
was present. This bookseller, and some of the others present at the ritual, according to
Grant, died under mysterious circumstances shortly afterwards for interrupting and killing
the ritual, or, if you believe Doreen Valiente’s version of events in The Rebirth of Witchcraft,
no, actually, they didn’t, that’s a bit of a fib.
[Ed’s note—The rite referred to in Nightside of Eden (1977) took place on the site of
what is now the Centre Point tower block, London wc1, which Grant (p 124) likens to
an immense penis rising up from the abortive ritual. The Post Office Tower is similarly
likened by Grant to the phallus of MacGregor Mathers, whose magical workings took
place in the vicinity.
Most of Michael Staley’s essays on Lam from Starfire can be found on the Internet:
http://www.cyberlink.ch/~koenig/staley.htm.
There is a 1989 photograph of Grant in Beyond the Mauve Zone (1999) standing in
his lounge with Jeffrey D Evans in which the picture of Lam can be seen in the
background in an oval frame on the wall. In this book Grant has elevated Lam, rather
predictably, to the status of leader of the Greys (p 9). On pages 284 and 323 he claims
that Lam was the leader of a party of aliens who crashed their spacecraft in China
thousands of years ago, known as the “Dropas” in contemporary ufo folklore, a supposed
crash first written about in the Soviet journal Sputnik in the early 1960s, which the ufo
loony Hartwig Hausdorf wrote about in his 1998 book The Chinese Roswell. Grant’s
source of information on the Dropas appears to have been the awful book by Robert
Charroux, Masters of the World (1967), which generally propounds the idea that the
world is controlled by beings from Venus. Grant writes in his glossary: “Research has
revealed Lam’s identity as leader of the Dropas who visited Earth from outer voids.”
Another of Grant’s favourite sources for “research” is Gerald Massey, whose massive
testimony to wasted time The Natural Genesis (1883) I once threw across the room in a
fit of disgust on reading his comparision of the supposed pronunciation of an Egyptian
hieroglyph with an obscure dialect word from Norfolk.]
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