Highly recommend W. Sommerset Maughm's "The Magician" for a treatment of Crowley's personality and influence. The occult is full of tedious charlatans, and yet they reappear in history in influential forms like Machiavelli, Rasputin, Crowley, Mesmer, Bernays, Marcuse, and other literal mesmerists, with lesser lights as 20th century cult leaders, and I think Klaus Schwab and his transhumanist hokum is the current equivalent to these prior figures. His cohort has been clever enough to outlaw the mockery they so richly deserve.

Oddly, the marjority of Issac Newton's writing was esoterica, and his contributions to physics and maths were almost incidental to his huge body of work on occult topics. What fascinates me about the occult personally is that it's a fundamentally inferior ontology - where it's what you believe when you don't have belief. Its ideas manifest in cults, but also in theory, where Marxism and its consequent gobbledygook(s) are predicated on similar occult and gnostic premises. Before we had ideology, we had superstition, and the priesthood of superstition was these magical thinkers, imo.