8. The Twentieth Century Magician Prophet
Aleister Crowley (1875 – 1947), born Edward Alexander Crowley, was an English occultist, novelist, poet, painter, and a mountaineer who also claimed to be a magician. Not the stage tricks pull a rabbit from a hat or doves from a coat kind of magician, but the warlock, spells and sorcery type. An L. Ron Hubbard type before there was an L. Ron Hubbard, Crowley also founded a religion in the early twentieth century, Thelema, whose prophet he asserted himself to be.
From the preceding, it goes without saying that Crowley was as bizarre as bizarre gets. As the prophet of the Thelema faith, Crowley declared that he was entrusted with guiding mankind to the “Aeon of Horus”. A fundamental principal of Thelema was that the twentieth century would usher in the age of Horus, which would overthrow all existing codes of morality and ethics. In the new age, people’s “True Will”, which they would discover via magic, would be all that matters.