Aleister Crowley
 1875-1947

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 ( ikke helt færdig !!!! )

 An abortive quest for supernatural powers

 From poetry to sexual magic, by way of drugs,
Crowley spent his life in a fruitless search
for supernatural powers.

 Born into an upper middle-class puritan
family, Crowley first became interested in the
occult while an undergraduate at Cambridge.
Always a controversial figure, the press first
took to task for his advocacy of eroticism in
his White Stains.  By way of reply, he gave a
lecture in his mistress's home on `sexual
poverty in Britain'.  He then joined the Order
of thee Golden Dawn, a secret society of which
the poet W.  B.  Yeats and Bram Stoker, the
author of Dracula, were also members.  Crowley
became the society's grand master and formed a
homosexual partnership with Allan Bennet,
known as Iohi Aour, another of its members.
The two of them abandoned themselves to magic
and Crowley declared his wish to become a
`saint of Satan' and to be known as the `Great
Beast' or `the wickedest man alive'.

The Great Beast

 In 1900, Crowley was expelled from the Order
of the Golden Dawn for extreme practices.  He
founded his own order, the Silver Star, and
set out to travel the world.  Crowley settled
for several years in Sicily with a group of
disciples, but rumours of drugs, orgies and
even sacrifices led to his expulsion from
Italy.  His travels also took him to Ceylon,
where he met up again with Bennet, who had
become a Buddhist monk, and to Madras where he
was initiated into Tantrism.  In Paris, he met
Rodkin, Rilke, Somerset Maugham and finally
Rose Edith Kelley, his `scarlet woman' whom he
was to marry.  It was in Cairo that a medium
in a trance revealed the `ultimate mysteries'
of sexual magic to the young couple and urged
them to set up the order of the Silver Star.
 Rose died an alcoholic, leaving a daughter
called Night my Athatour Hectate Sappho
Jezabel Lilith, who was to die in tragic
circumstances.  Crowley, who lived for some
time at Boleskine, on the shores of Loch Ness,
continued to travel, surrounded by women.
With Victor Neuburg, he journeyed into the
Algerian desert to meet the spirit of evil.
The two men were later found half-dead with
exhaustion.  Crowley finally came to believe
he was a vampire, began to inject heroin, and
adopted a wildly promiscuous lifestyle.  When
war broke out, he offered Churchill an
infallible magic method to achieve victory.
Churchill declined the offer!

Mystical marriage
 In Magic in Theory and Practice, Crowley set
out his ideas on eroticism.  The book was
written so that `so that all should realize
their full potential'; the best prayer,
according to Crowley, was `ritual drama' and
he preached `Dionysiac ceremonies'.  This was
in fact a `Gnostic mass'.  After the introit
Crowley, dressed as a priest, prayed to the
`four elements' and blessed `cakes of light'
for the communion of the faithful; the
ceremony ended with a mystical marriage.