Aleister Crowley, who called himself the Beast 666, was one of the most extraordinary personalities of modern times--novelist, poet, magician, accomplished mountaineer, chess master and founder of an abbey of Do What Thou Wilt.  To his followers he was the creator of a new religion called Crowleyanity.  He was born in 1875, the son of a brewer and evangelizing Plymouth Brother.  By the time of  his death in1947 his career and writings on occultism, psychology and sex had become legendary.  His best-known works are his Confessions and his great book on magic, Magick.