CROWLEY, ALEISTER (1875–1947), was a British poet, novelist and occultist, infamous throughout England and the United States as "the wickedest man in the world." Reviled as a drug fiend and debauchee and proclaiming himself the "Great Beast, 666," Aleister Crowley was also one of the most important figures in the revival of modern Western occultism in the twentieth century. Although seldom taken seriously by most scholars today, Crowley was not only an accomplished poet and mountain climber, but one of the first Western students of yoga and a major influence on the rise of Neopagan witchcraft in Europe and the United States.

In many ways, Crowley might be said to embody some of the deepest tensions in late Victorian English society as a whole. The son of a preacher in the highly puritanical Plymouth Brethren sect, Crowley would later turn to the most extreme forms of sensual excess...