A biographical history of Aleister Crowley’s activities in Berlin from 1930 to 1932 as Hitler was rising to power

• Examines Crowley’s focus on his art, his work as a spy for British Intelligence, his colorful love life and sex magick exploits, and his contacts with magical orders

• Explores Crowley’s relationships with Berlin’s artists, filmmakers, writers, and performers such as Christopher Isherwood, Jean Ross, and Aldous Huxley

• Recounts the fates of Crowley’s friends and colleagues under the Nazis as well as what happened to Crowley’s lost art exhibition

Gnostic poet, painter, writer, and magician Aleister Crowley arrived in Berlin on April 18, 1930. As prophet of his syncretic religion “Thelema,” he wanted to be among the leaders of art and thought, and Berlin, the liberated future-gazing metropolis, wanted him. There he would live, until his hurried departure on June 22, 1932, as Hitler was rapidly rising to power and the black curtain of intolerance came down upon the city.

Known to his friends affectionately as “The Beast,” Crowley saw the closing lights of Berlin’s artistic renaissance of the Weimar period when Berlin played host to 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Drawing on previously unpublished letters and diary material by Crowley, Tobias Churton examines Crowley’s years in Berlin and his intense focus on his art, his work as a spy for British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.

Tobias Churton is Honorary Fellow of Exeter University, where he is faculty lecturer in Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. He holds a master’s degree in Theology from Brasenose College, Oxford, and is the author of many books, including Gnostic Philosophy and Aleister Crowley: The Biography. He lives in England.

Foreword: Degenerate Berlin
by Frank van Lamoen Assistant Curator, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Acknowledgments

Dramatis Personae -- WHO’S WHO IN THE BEAST IN BERLIN

ONE -- SCOOP!

TWO -- Selling Aleister Crowley

THREE -- The New Age in Germany
Theosophy in Germany
Aleister Crowley Meets the German New Age

FOUR -- Karl Germer and the Weida Conference
Arrival at Hohenleuben
Karl Germer
Thelema Verlag
Dr. Peithmann
Return to Hohenleuben

FIVE -- Cosmopolis--City of the Future

SIX -- Good-Bye to All That
Hello Again to All That

SEVEN -- Kings in Exile Are Always Beggars
The Stunt Hits the Fan

EIGHT-- Quantum Magus
“Nick” Carter and the Case of the Reappearing Wife

NINE -- An Old Master
Modern Art in Berlin
The Artist in the Beast

TEN -- Hanni Jaeger, Save Our Souls

ELEVEN -- Thoroughly Modern Magus
The Ninth Degree (IX°)

TWELVE -- The Last Summer of Freedom
Blunderstorm
Flechtheim
Werner Alvo Konstantin August von Alvensleben

THIRTEEN -- Toward the Exhibition
The World from Below
Marcellus and Margo Schiffer

FOURTEEN -- Porza!
Mali and Igel

FIFTEEN -- Hope of Harvest
The Great Crowley Movie Connection

SIXTEEN -- Spying
Ethel Mannin

SEVENTEEN -- Last Orders
Jean Ross
Discovery of the Neutron

EIGHTEEN -- Lost Time
Lost Paintings

NINETEEN -- Lost People
Before Hitler Was, I Am

TWENTY -- Rebirth--The Spirit Can Return

Notes

Bibliography

Index