The largest part of this book was originally written between 1993 and 1994. For a scholarly work, this is of course a long time ago. Almost twenty years are more than enough to make a book outdated with current research. This is why I had to thoroughly revise it and update it for its earlier editions: the Italian one in 1999 and the German one in 2006. When the moment came to prepare the present edition in English, I decided once again to update, revise and expand it. The result is now for me a strange mixture of old and new. If I had to start now writing on the topic of this book, I would probably do it in a very different way. But I believe that when I began working on this book, it was a pioneering enterprise and that its value – great or small it is not for me to decide – has remained intact even today. One of the reasons is that it was one of the first attempts to interpret Aleister Crowley not simply as an eccentric adventurer or even a malicious fraud, but as an intellectual and ideologist, who belonged to a particular cultural climate and had to be understood on the basis of the education he received, the ideas that influenced him, and the persons he frequented during his life. The particular angle that I chose for this research was politics, and I still believe it is one of the most interesting ones when applied to Crowley, but it could have been another as well, such as literature or art.