10 Historically Important Figures With Extra Colorful Personal Lives

Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat, revolutionary, and writer. He's most famous for bringing explicit material to people in a time when showing off your ankles was scandalous.

Marquis de Sade became famous for his libertine sexuality and lifestyle, much of which he vibrantly portrayed in his novels. Sade is also credited with inventing S&M.

In fact, the term sadism - in which one gets pleasure from inflicting pain - comes from Marquis de Sade's own name. Moreover, masochism is first seen in some of Sade's more Gothic-inclined sexual novels, where, for example, the female character is bound, tormented, and fondled, and develops a kind of attraction to her tormentors. 

In one of Sade's tales, he describes an experience with his wife, wherein the two imprisoned five young women and one young man in their house. For six weeks, the duo used their victims for sex. Sade would even lure young women from the surrounding village by drugging them with "Spanish fly" and then raping them.

Marquis de Sade spent the last 14 years of his life in an asylum; he passed in 1814.

Aleister Crowley was a British writer, prophet, magician, well-known occultist, and the original sex magick practitioner.

Crowley rendered himself the prophet of a polytheistic religion he developed and called Thelema. As one of the main tenants of the religion, Crowley encouraged his followers to abandon their egos and abide by none other than their "True Will." 

His followers also believed that the 20th century would usher in a new ethical code. This code Crowley summarized with the following quote: "'Do what thou wilt' shall be the whole of the Law."

Crowley not only founded a religion based on magick, but he also founded something called "Sexual Magick." In essence, the practice entails using climax, arousal, and sexual fluids to place a spell.

James Joyce was an author responsible for seminal works like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. He is widely considered one of the greatest Irish writers of all time. 

Joyce is one of the most remembered figures of the modernist movement and helped usher in a new way of writing language. His writings experimented with structure in ways that have never been done before and changed the way people experienced literature.

Joyce's works were visceral and endearingly honest. Take the following passage from a letter he wrote to a lover, Nora "F*ckbird" Barnacle, for example, in which Joyce describes her flatulence during intercourse:

[I]f I gave you a bigger stronger f*ck than usual, fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I f*cked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole.

Henry VIII was the King of England from 1509 to 1547. He is known for separating the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church, dissolving the monasteries, and overseeing the legal union of England and Wales.

King Henry is also famous for being married six times and taking countless other women as lovers on the side. Never satisfied with any of his wives, he had them slain if they could not produce a male heir. This behavior was widely considered reprehensible at the time, but nonetheless, King Henry never faced prosecution.

When Henry passed in 1547, he was suffering from a variety of diseases.