During the period between the two world wars, Aleister Crowley was known in the popular press of England as the "wickedest man in Britain." This was surely stretching his evil deeds beyond a reasonable limit. However, Crowley had a positive genius for outraging respectable society in England and America.

Born on October 12, 1875, into a wealthy family of the Plymouth Brethren Christian sect, Crowley respected but never really got to know his father, who died when Crowley was still quite young. He loathed his mother, who one day declared with perfect seriousness that he was the Antichrist. He learned to hate the Brethren for their intolerance, bigotry and severity against any behavior they perceived as sinful, which was almost any normal, healthy activity that a boy might enjoy.

Crowley was the despair of a string of tutors hired by his mother and her brother to keep him in line. Very early in life he learned how to drink, smoke, gamble, and whore. All of these activities, he loved with a passion. He attended Cambridge, where he did well in some subjects such as poetry, thanks to his brilliant intellect, but he failed to graduate due to his disinclination to submit to the discipline of regular studies.

He intended to become a professional poet, and might have succeeded reasonably well in this occupation, but after his spotty university years he suddenly became interested in the field of ritual magic, and joined the occult organization known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He had always felt an attraction for mysticism, and had possessed an unshakable sense of his own great destiny. Magic must have appealed to both these inclinations in his nature.

The Golden Dawn taught Crowley the basics of ritual magic. He was its star pupil, although most of the other members of the Order were repelled by his vulgarity and what they perceived as his lack of reverence for spiritual values. Crowley worshipped the leaders of the Order, MacGregor Mathers and his beautiful wife Moina, as divine beings incarnate. Then he discovered that the basis upon which the Golden Dawn had been founded was a sham, and that Mathers had deceived him. His reverence turned to disgust, and his love to hatred.

He went forth to found his own occult school, taking with him the secret documents of the Golden Dawn, the majority of which had been written by Mathers. Crowley published some of the more important Golden Dawn papers in a periodical called The Equinox, despite Mathers attempts to block their publication in court.

To the foundation of the Golden Dawn teachings, Crowley added a practical knowledge of physical and spiritual yoga, which he acquired from his mentor in the Golden Dawn, the Buddhist Allan Bennett. These skills were supplemented with the secret ritual teachings of the German Ordo Templi Orientis after Crowley was made its head in Great Britain, and subsequently its supreme world leader. The OTO teachings involved sex magic, an area of study for which Crowley was eminently suited, and for which he possessed a natural affinity.

In 1904, while in Cairo, Egypt, viewing the antiquities in the Cairo Museum, Crowley received an inspired dictation from his Guardian Angel, a spirit called Aiwass. This dictation, received in three chapters on three consecutive days, is known as The Book of the Law. It in, Crowley is declared to be the Great Beast of the biblical Book of Revelation, and the herald of the dawning Aeon of Horus, which will sweep away all traces of Christianity on a river of blood and fire. In the Book of the Law the coming of the Antichrist is foretold. The Antichrist is identified with Horus, the Egyptian god of war. Crowley believed that the Antichrist was to be his son. At first he thought that a physical child would be born to one of his mistresses; when this child failed to appear, he believed that he would be in some manner or other the spiritual father to the Antichrist.

The words of his hated mother often came back into his mind. She had been close to the truth. The Book of the Law taught that he was not himself the Antichrist, but was the Great Beast who would herald the coming Destroyer of the old aeon. In the Book of the Law is written: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." This became Crowley's mantra. It was the phrase he used throughout his life to greet everyone with whom he came into contact. It is still popular today in occult circles, where it is often shorted to "Do what thou wilt."

The words are misunderstood by most people. They do not give license to everyone to do anything they feel like doing, but refer to the central theme of Crowley's cult, human free will. Do what thou wilt means to fulfill your destiny in life, as dictated by your own true will. Only an individual can determine what he or she is designed to accomplish in his or her lifetime -- no other person can say what another's true will may be. According to Crowley, it is the duty of everyone to seek out his or her true will, and having discovered what it is, to devote body and soul to its accomplishment. Only through the accomplishment of true will is the life of any individual fulfilled. By the same token, an individual who fails to pursue the accomplishment of his or her true will is a mere shell or husk, without value.

Crowley spent the rest of his life spreading the word of Thelema, or Will, which became the name for his personal cult. The Book of the Law is the bible of Thelema. Those who believe that it is a prophetic book call themselves Thelemites, in accord with the book's instructions: "The word of the Law is Thelema. Who calls us Thelemites will do no wrong." In obedience to the Law of Thelema, they believe they have an obligation to crush the weak, to be without pity or charity, and to experiment with drugs (all these things are mandated in the Book of the Law). Thelemites are the shock troops for the great battle that will overthrow the age of Christianity, which valued charity and mildness, and also obedience. Horus is a war god, and his worshippers are warriors, although you would not know this to look at some of them.

Aleister Crowley died on December 1, 1947, a hopeless heroin addict. In the course of his life he had taken every illegal drug known to mankind, had been a world traveler, a mountain climber, a prodigious womanizer, a sexual athlete with men, women, children and animals, and the herald for a new age. He managed to survive his escapades remarkably well, thanks to an iron constitution, but he had a distressing habit of driving mad anyone who stayed in his company for more than a few weeks. His numerous wives and mistresses either went raving insane, became alcoholics, drug addicts, or killed themselves. Only a handful out of dozens of women and men escaped one of these fates.

In spite of his personal extravagances, which the modern world is more inclined to forgive than Crowley's contemporaries, he was the greatest magician of the twentieth century. From the time he left Cambridge and entered the Golden Dawn, to the day of his death, Crowley remained before everything else, a practitioner and teacher of magic. His entire life and soul were consumed with the practice and study of this ancient art. In his own way, Crowley was as dedicated to his higher calling as any medieval monk of the Church.

He had been instructed in the text of the Book of the Law that he must teach the basics of magic to anyone who asked him, but he had also been told that he need not make the learning experience easy, or pleasant. Arguably Crowley was more responsible for the spread of ritual magic in the modern world than any other individual, with the possible exception of the leader of the Golden Dawn, Crowley's loved and hated teacher, MacGregor Mathers. Decades after his death, his many books about magic continue to teach new generations. He lived up to his personal motto, "I will endure to the end."