English occultist, artist and writer Aleister Crowley was BOTD in 1875. Born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, his father was heir to a brewing fortune who converted to the conservative Protestant sect the Plymouth Brethren. He studied at Cambridge University, rejecting his Christian upbringing and joining a cult of pagan magicians. In 1897, he had an affair with fellow student and cross-dressing aesthete Herbert Pollitt, living with him “as his wife for some six months” and crediting him for “making a poet out of me.” They separated soon after, over an argument about Crowley’s pagan beliefs, but remained friends, maintaining shared interests in the occult, erotic literature and transvestism. (Later in life, Crowley recalled the end of their relationship as “a lifelong regret”.) He left Cambridge without completing a degree, he lived off his trust fund, mountaineering in the Himalayas and travelling through Mexico, India and Egypt. While on his honeymoon in Egypt in 1904, developed an occult philosophy called Thelema, setting out his ideas in The Book of the Law, which he claimed had been dictated to him by a divine being called Aiwass, including his much-quoted maxim “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Returning to England in 1905, he became a prolific writer of poetry, novels and occult literature, calling himself “the Beast 666”, practising “magick” and promoting Thelema throughout Europe. During World War One, he lived in the United States, where he contributed to the pro-German periodical Fatherland. After the war, he established a commune in Cefalù, Sicily, where he wrote the biographical novel The Diary of a Drug Fiend. The death of one of his followers, allegedly after participating in pagan rituals, led to denunciations of Crowley in the British press as the “wickedest man in the world” and to his expulsion from Italy in 1923. He lived an itinerant life for the next two decades, shocking bourgeois society with his drug use, bisexuality and outrageous public appearances. Crowley was married twice, and had three children, including a daughter, Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith Crowley, who died in infancy. Though primarily heterosexual, he had a penchant for rent boys and was an enthusiastic sexual submissive and masochist. Having burned through his inheritance, his final years were spent in poverty and obscurity. He died in a boarding house in England in 1947 aged 72. His work became highly popular during the 1960s counter-culture movement, inspiring the work of filmmaker Kenneth Anger, whose films  Invocation of My Demon Brother and Lucifer Rising were based on Thelema philosophy; pop band The Beatles, who included his photograph in the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover; and rock band Led Zeppelin, whose co-founder Jimmy Page purchased Crowley’s former home in Scotland.