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THE SUNDAY SUN Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland, England 16 November 1930 (page 17)
“SUICIDE” FOUND ALIVE.
Drinking Tea With A Pretty Girl In Berlin.
HIS “SPIRIT” MESSAGE.
From Our Own Correspondent. Berlin, Saturday. How do you do, Mr. Crowley?
What does it feel like to commit suicide?
Thus I addressed an elderly man who was sitting with a pretty girl [Hanni Jaeger], in a leading Berlin café.
The man denied the suggestion at first. But there is no doubt that Alistair [sic] Crowley, the English writer and adventurer, who has been expelled from France and Italy on account of his strange conduct, and whose suicide in Portugal some six weeks ago was reported, is living in Berlin under the name of Germer.
On September 23, a letter was found on a rock on the shore near Cintra in Portugal addressed to “L.G.P.” and signed “Tu Li Yu.” It read.
“I cannot live without you. The other ‘Boca de Inferno’ will get me. . . . it will not be as hot as yours!”
The Boca de Inferno, or Mouth of Hell, is a furious whirlpool among ragged rocks, some 20 yards away from where the letter was found.
BODY WASHED ASHORE.
Several facts point to the author of the letter as being the Englishman, Edward Alexander Crowley, better known as Alistair Crowley, who, with a German-American girl artist, had been staying at a Lisbon hotel. The girl, it appeared, had left for Bremen on September 19. Crowley had vanished on September 23.
“L.G.P.”, it was stated, was a conventional form of address of the girl who had accompanied Crowley. A few days later a body was washed ashore. It was horribly disfigured by gashing wounds. In the pockets of the clothes were found private papers belonging to Crowley.
Crowley had dabbled extensively in spiritualism, and a medium claimed to have got in touch with the dead man at a séance. The spirit of the dead man, he stated, had told how he had been pushed over the cliff into the Boca de Inferno by “an agent of the Roman Catholic Church.”
There was Crowley presumed drowned, his body recovered, and his spirit talking to a London medium—what more could be wanted from the deadest of dead men? Yet here was Alistair Crowley the other afternoon in the flesh, sipping tea with lemon in Berlin café with a girl.
FILM HOPES.
“Yes,” he said, “this girl went into hysterics in that Portuguese hotel one night, and tried to throw herself out of the window. Then she had a great row with the American Consul, and shipped off to Bremen.”
The girl paints excellent pictures, and is suspected of having film ambitions. Likewise, she claims to be “spiritually in love” with “The Master”—the Master being Alistair Crowley.
Crowley had a ready explanation of events.
“I am a twin,” he declared. “Our Brethren, and, since there is some passage in the Scriptures that is directed against twins on principle, they registered the double birth as a single one. That explains how I was educated simultaneously at two different public schools, how I was climbing the Himalayas at the same time as I was lecturing in the States, and many other things.
“When I (the real I, not my dead twin who was swallowed up by the Boca de Inferno), was in London last, I was told that I was supposed to have murdered Paris women by the dozen and to have thrown the bodies into the Seine.
“Life is a complicated affair, but I have one complication less, since my twin is dead. And I have a great consolation in my companion. She is wonderful. Are you not, dear? And do get some photographs made of yourself. You will need them for film work, to impress the managers.” |