"I never killed Raoul Loveday with a magical spell". Aleister Crowley, otherwise known as the Beast 666, shared membership of the Golden Dawn with W B Yeats, and publishers with D H Lawrence. Now in a beyond-the-grave autobiography, he recounts his own vocation, his practice of sex magic, and his bruising encounters with his contemporaries. The great magus, whose own world-conquering creed The Book of the Law was written in Cairo in 1904, was according to him, no murderer, but a prophet and practitioner of all kinds of sexual freedom and new magical systems.

You are forewarned that ownership of this magickal tome is forbidden. Enter here and suffer the wrath of existence. This is the realm of the beast revealed through the sacred number of evolution 666, "Scraps from the masters table for all to find in the shadows of the gates of hell". The secrets revealed in this text transcend the concepts of mortal consciousness. No more potent a talisman has ever been granted to magickians and laymen alike. Therefore prepare yourself seeker, nomad, taker, to find the primrose of lucifers garden planted throughout the soilwork of these hallowed pages. Within this book you will find various occult subjects such as magick, ancient Egyptian knowledge, Tree of Life, taro, iching, The book of the law, numerology, etc. It is in essense a system of magick to be used in all areas of ritual, divination, invokation and evokation, consecration, and attributes for all of your personal knowledge. There are the secrets of stardguardians, being from ancient realms sent to guide humanity through the course of nature. The misery of the slave-Gods will not visit this hall of truth and all will be witnessed by the mark of the beast.

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) poet, painter, novelist, explorer, mountaineer, chess master, classical scholar and drug addict was the founder of a religion called thelema, which, he claimed, had superceded Christianity. He was totally at odds with the morality of his time, as this account of his life clearly shows; but avoided confrontation with the authorities by always managing to find sufficient followers to sustain him in his beliefs. Reviled in his lifetime, his fame following his death has risen steeply: he made the pages of the Dictionary of National Biography; and his Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, from which in 1923 he was ignominiously expelled, has been bought by the city of Cefalu as a tourist attraction. John Symonds is Crowley's literary executor, and his biography og Aleister Crowley is the fullest account of the life of this most bizarre Englishman. The present edition has been considerably revised and augmented, and will remain the standard work on Crowley.