One year after marrying Béla Szepes on 2 January 1931, she accompanied him to Berlin, where they lived until Hungary's German occupation towards war's end.

Her first novel The Red Lion was written in a hideout during World War II and became a worldwide bestseller of esoteric literature.

Driven by a monomania fed by persistent rumors of an Elixir of Immortality, he becomes an apprentice of a mysterious physician and alchemist.

However, instead of listening to the Alchemist's compassionate counsel and warnings, Burgner is driven by feverish greed to murder him; in this way, he acquires the Elixir while he is still spiritually unprepared, and is cursed thereby.

This is the starting-point of a journey through the centuries: while Burgner can physically die, the Elixir enables him to retain the full memory of his previous lives as he repeatedly reincarnates into a variety of different circumstances.

He is first an initiate and Aspirant, eventually attaining the perfection of human personality which characterizes the Magus, or spiritual Adept.