Who really was Alister Crowely?

Answer 1

Aleister Crowley was a complicated character and no 5 minute post would do justice to the intricacies, so, here are the bullet points:

• He was an occultist who lived from the late 1800's to the mid 1900's.
• He was heavily into Qabalah (a form of Jewish mysticism)
• He joined (and later led) The Golden Dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis
• He created his own magical group called the A.A
• He was an experimenter with various drugs and MAY have suffered from rather severe addiction later in life
• He was an avid mountaineer
• He was an author of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and magic/occult books
• He was bisexual, or at least primarily heterosexual (he married women repeatedly throughout his life) and was known to experiment with men from time to time, usually for occult/magic reasons (or so he claimed)
• He deliberately played up the reputation given to him by British papers as "The Wickedest Man on Earth" mostly because he enjoyed the celebrity, but he was an opponent of Christianity.
• He was extremely intelligent and well known for his wit and very tongue-in-cheek sense of humor

Like I said: bullet points. If you're interested in learning more, I strongly suggest you look out for any of the number of biographies written about him over the last half centruy. I would warn you though. There is a tendency to either totally demonize the man or make him out to be a complete saint. He was neither. He was just a man. Don't take anything written about him TOO seriously and always look for conflicting opinions to try to figure out who the man really was.