Gnostic poet, painter, writer, and magician Aleister Crowley arrived in Berlin on April 18, 1930. As the prophet of his syncretic religion 'Thelema,' he sought to be among the leaders of art and thought, and Berlin, the liberated future-gazing metropolis, welcomed him. He would live there until his hurried departure on June 22, 1932, as Hitler was rapidly rising to power and the black curtain of intolerance descended upon the city. Known affectionately to his friends as 'The Beast,' Crowley witnessed the closing lights of Berlin's artistic renaissance during the Weimar period, when the city hosted many of the world's most outstanding artists, writers, filmmakers, performers, composers, architects, philosophers, and scientists, including Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht, Ethel Mannin, Otto Dix, Aldous Huxley, Jean Ross, Christopher Isherwood, and many other luminaries of a glittering world soon to be trampled into the mud by the global bloodbath of World War II.

Drawing on previously unpublished letters and diary material by Crowley, Tobias Churton examines Crowley's years in Berlin and his intense focus on his art, his work as a spy for British Intelligence, his colorful love life and sex magick exploits, and his contacts with German Theosophy, Freemasonry, and magical orders. He recounts the fates of Crowley's colleagues under the Nazis as well as what happened to Crowley's lost art exhibition—six crates of paintings left behind in Germany as the Gestapo was closing in. Revealing the real Crowley long hidden from the historical record, Churton presents 'the Beast' anew in all his ambiguous and, for some, terrifying glory, at a blazing, seminal moment in the history of the world.