For more than half a century, the name of Aleister Crowley has drawn approbation, derision, vitriolic hatred or begrudging respect. Once labelled The King of Depravity and The Wickedest Man in the World by the tabloid press, he was for thirty years one of the most vilified men in Britain.
Born in 1875 in Leamington Spa into a well-to-do Victorian brewing family, he was inculcated with Christian idealism but rebelled against it. Whilst a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, he inherited a fortune from his father and embarked upon a self-indulgent life that was to grow increasingly bizarre.
An early Himalayan mountaineer, inveterate world traveller, poet, essayist and novelist, Crowley was also a drug addict, bisexual seducer, profligate and ego-maniac. He came to believe he was a god, a teacher sent to instruct humanity in the control of the True Will. Yet he was an important freethinker, an esoteric philosopher well ahead of his time . . .
This is a detailed and extensively researched biography, a uniquely unbiased study of one of the 20th century's most charismatic, misinterpreted and controversial figures, a brilliant polymath whose considerable intellect and talent were crushed by his self-destructiveness.
