Question: Who were Joan Didion and Aleister Crowley?

Context articles: Rites of Eleusis
Joan Didion
The White Album (book)
The Magical Revival
Richard Kaczynski
Libri of Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley
Collected Works of Aleister Crowley 1905-1907
The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
Blue Nights

The Rites of Eleusis were a series of seven public invocations or rites written by British occultist Aleister Crowley, each centered on one of the seven classical planets of antiquity.
 They were dramatically performed by Aleister Crowley, Leila Waddell (Laylah), and Victor Benjamin Neuburg in October and November, 1910, at Caxton Hall, London.
 This act brought Crowley's occult organization the A∴A∴ into the public eye.
Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism.
 Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation.
 A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.
The White Album is a 1979 book of essays by Joan Didion.
 Like her previous book "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", "The White Album" is a collection of works previously published in magazines such as "Life" and "Esquire".
 The subjects of the essays range widely and represent a mixture of memoir, criticism, and journalism, focusing on the history and politics of California in the late 1960s and early 70s.
 With the publication of "The White Album", Didion had established herself as a prominent writer on Californian culture.
 As one contemporary reviewer stated, "California belongs to Joan Didion."
The Magical Revival is a book written by British occultist Kenneth Grant, first published in 1972.
 It is the first of his "Typhonian Trilogy", which comprises this work and two others—"Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God" (1973) and "Cults of the Shadow" (1975).
 In this work, he first introduced his theory that American horror author H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos was psychic revelation presented as fiction, an idea which he would elaborate and extend further in his later works.
 This idea - that what is ostensibly presented as fiction is often a vehicle masking deeper realities - has precedence in the inclusion by Aleister Crowley of many works of fiction in the official reading syllabus of his mystical and magical order, the Argentum Astrum ; Grant's recognition of Lovecraft's value may be seen as simply a detailed continuation, an "updating" of this basic idea using material which Crowley simply hadn't had the opportunity to read.
 Grant also claimed in this work that there was an unconscious connection between Lovecraft and occultist Aleister Crowley, arguing that both of them channeled their work from the same occult forces, although Lovecraft was not consciously aware of the alleged otherworldly sources of his literary inspirations.
Richard Kaczynski is an American writer and lecturer in the fields of social psychology, metaphysical beliefs and new religious movements.
 He is known for his biography of the occultist Aleister Crowley, "Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley", described by "The Times Literary Supplement" as "the major biography to date", and by the Norwegian daily "Aftenposten" as the best biography of Crowley.
The Libri of Aleister Crowley is a list of texts mostly written or adapted by Aleister Crowley.
 Some are attributed to other authors.
 The list was intended for students of Crowley's magical order, the A∴A∴.
Aleister Crowley ( ; born Edward Alexander Crowley; 12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947) was an English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist, and mountaineer.
 He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century.
 A prolific writer, he published widely over the course of his life.
The Collected Works of Aleister Crowley 1905–1907 was originally a trilogy of books published by Aleister Crowley during his early career as student of magick.
The Confessions of Aleister Crowley : An Autohagiography, by Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), is a partial autobiography by poet and occultist Crowley.
 It covers the early years of his life up until the mid-late 1920s but does not include the latter part of Crowley's life and career between then and his death in 1947.
Blue Nights is a memoir written by Joan Didion first published in 2011.
 It is an account of the death of her daughter, Quintana, who died in 2005 at age 39.
 Didion also discusses her own feelings on parenthood and aging.
 The title refers to certain times in the "summer solstice [...] when the twilights turn long and blue."
 "Blue Nights" is notable for its "nihilistic" attitude towards grief as Didion offers little understanding or explanation of her daughter's death.
 Writing for "The New York Review of Books", Cathleen Schine said,