Aleister Crowley: A Visual Study

Book excerpt: The infamous occult practitioner, Edward Alexander "Aleister" Crowley has cast a long shadow over the history and culture of the 20th century. The information included in Aleister Crowley: A Visual Study illustrates this fact. As the foremost accumulator of occult knowledge in the late 19th and early 20th Century, Crowley based his writings upon prior magicians, writers, and philosophers, incorporating their ideas, and his own, into a new religion for a New Age. This book details Crowley’s progression from a self–described childhood in hell, to notorious magician, to drug-addled middle age as the Great Beast, and on to his final years living in an upscale boarding house in southern England. As this visual study confirms, a copious amount of photographic and newspaper evidence still remains concerning the Beast 666-Aleister Crowley.