Aleister Crowley

Born in 1875 to a wealthy Plymouth Brethren family in Warwickshire, Edward Alexander Crowley shed fundamentalist Christianity at Cambridge, where he turned to mountaineering, poetry, and Western esotericism. In 1898 he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and trained in ceremonial magic; six years later, honeymooning in Cairo with his wife Rose Edith Kelly, he wrote down The Book of the Law - dictated, he said, by a supernatural entity named Aiwass - which became the sacred text of Thelema and announced the Æon of Horus. He co-founded the A∴A∴ in 1907, later led the British O.T.O., and in 1920 established the Abbey of Thelema in Sicily, a libertine commune that scandalized the British press and got him evicted by Mussolini's government in 1923. He spent World War I in America painting and publicly supporting Germany - his biographers later said he was feeding intelligence back to Britain - and his last two decades drifting between France, Germany, and England, writing and preaching Thelema until his death in 1947.