THE SUNDAY MERCURY

Birmingham, Warwickshire, England

23 November 1930

(page 1)

SUICIDE BY PROXY.

Two Alastair Crowleys.

Alistair Crowley explains

his return from the dead.

Berlin, Saturday.

“How do you do, Mr. Crowley? What does it feel like to commit suicide?”

A slightly corpulent gentleman, sitting at a table in a leading Berlin café, with a singularly pretty girl [Hanni Jaeger], rather resented the inquiry.

But there was no mistake. Alistair [sic] Crowley, English writer, noted adventurer, who has been expelled from France and Italy, and whose suicide in Portugal some weeks ago was circumstantially reported in the Press, is living in Berlin under the name of Germer.

On 23 September, a man strolling along the seashore near Cintra, in Portugal, found a letter on a rock, held down by a cigarette-case, chased with an Egyptian design.

The letter was written on notepaper of the Hotel de l’Europe, Lisbon, and dated in astronomical terms. It was addressed to “L.G.P.,” and signed “Tu Li Yu.”

The text was in English, “I cannot live without you. The other ‘Boca do Inferno’ will get me. . . . it will not be as hot as yours!”

A Complete Suicide.

The Boca do Inferno, or Mouth of Hell, is a furious whirlpool encased in jagged rocks, some 20 yards away from where the letter was found.

Several facts pointed to the author of the missive being the strange Englishman, Edward Alexander Crowley, better known as Alistair Crowley, who had been staying at a Lisbon Hotel. He had apparently vanished on 23 September, the day of the find, which was also, an astrological expert indicated, the date affixed to the letter in cabalistic terms.

“L.G.P.,” the inquiry elicited, was a conventional form of address of a girl friend of Crowley.

Presumption of death was fortified a few days later by the discovery of a body washed ashore, terribly disfigured by lashing wounds, in the pockets of whose clothes were found private papers belonging to Crowley.

Among his numerous activities, the (presumed) deceased had extensively dabbled in spiritualism, and his work in this direction was particularly well known at Oxford, where he was some time ago prevented from lecturing on the subject of a mediæval magician.

A London medium, Mr. A. V. Peters, organized a séance and claimed that the spirit of a dead man had manifested itself and described how he had been pushed over the cliff into the surging boiling “Boca de Inferno” by an agent of the Roman Catholic Church.”

Drowned, the body recovered, the spirit talking to a London medium; what more could be wanted from the deadest of dead men? Yet here was Alistair Crowley in the flesh, sipping tea with lemon in a Berlin café.

Two in One.

The living Crowley had a ready explanation. An explanation that has the merit, not only of settling this dead or alive controversy, but also of washing him clean of many strange imputations.

“I am a twin,” he declared. “Our parents belonged to the Plymouth 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 besides, of which I daresay you have heard.

“It also, I believe, explains why I am such a constant source of trouble to Scotland Yard. When I (the real I, not my dead twin who was swallowed up by the Boca do Inferno), was in London last, I was told that people, some of them prominent people, came to the Yard three or four times a week and told gruesome stories about me.

“I was supposed to have murdered Paris women by the dozen and thrown their dead bodies in the Seine. Of course, they did not believe that, but they did suspect me of trafficking in drugs. Which I never dreamed of doing.

“You see, life is a complicated sort of affair. Well, I have one complication less, since my twin is dead.”

Then he turned to his fair companion saying: “Shall we go now, dear. You must have some photographs taken. You will need them, you know, for your work on the films.”