La Gran Bestia. The life of Aleister Crowley is the most complete biography of the person who, possibly, was the last magician of the West. Edward Alexander Crowley (1875-1947), better known as Aleister Crowley, was a poet, alpinist, traveler and writer, but also a vanguardist painter, drug addict, bisexual and practitioner of magical techniques, heiress of the Hermetic Hermandad of the Golden Dawn, who earned the title of "the most perverted man in England".