THE BIRMINGHAM DAILY GAZETTE

Birmingham, Warwickshire, England

2 December 1947

(page 3)

Death of “Mystery-man of Europe.”

MIDLAND-BORN

Mr. Aleister Crowley

Edward Alexander (Aleister) Crowley, 72-year-old author, poet, explorer, magician, mystic and mountaineer, sometimes described as “one of the mystery men of Europe,” died suddenly yesterday at Netherwood, a guest house in Hastings.

Mr. Crowley, whose last book “Sixty Years of Song” [Olla] was published this year, was much in the public eye in the years between the wars. He claimed to have been born in Leamington in 1875.

He was the centre of fantastic stories, and commenced a series of autobiographical articles in a Sunday newspaper in 1933 by saying “they have called me the ‘worst man in the world’: they have accused me of doing everything from murdering women to throwing their bodies into the Seine, to drug peddling.

“Some well-known journalists have delighted in attacking me in print. James Douglas described me as ‘a monster of wickedness.’ Horatio Bottomley branded me as a degenerate cannibal—everything he could think of.”

Birthmark of the Buddha

In the same article Crowley said it was impossible for a magician to be a man of bad character. “We magicians,” he said, “are misunderstood and blackguarded all our lives.”

He said he was the son of Edward Crowley, who was a colleague of John Nelson Darby, the founder of the Plymouth Brethren.

“At birth I had three of the distinguishing marks of the Buddha,” he wrote in 1933.

“Over the centre of my heart I had four hairs curling from left to right in the exact form of a swastika.”

In 1934 he lost a libel action against Miss Nina Hamnett, author of “Laughing Torso,” and the book publishers and printers.

Described Kaiser as “Angel of God”

He complained that in the book Miss Hamnett said he had a temple at Cefalu, in Sicily, where he was supposed to have practiced black magic. The defendants were given costs and a subsequent appeal was dismissed.

During cross-examination he declared that his experiments were in “white magic,” and agreed that he believed in the efficacy of “blood sacrifice.”

Asked whether he had in 1915, described the Kaiser in an article as “an angel of God sent to save the Fatherland from savage foes,” he replied: “I did, and I’m proud of it.”

In 1942, however, he said he hated the Germans, “although at one time I had a quite a following in Germany.”

No Feat of Strength “Too Great”

In 1933, Crowley was awarded £50 libel damages against a bookseller who exhibited a notice saying that Crowley’s first novel was banned.

One of his magical claims was that he “had found the key to illimitable knowledge and power.” He also declared that he had prepared the elixir of life, and that when he first took it, at 40, “I worked like a madman. No feat of strength was too great for me.”

Among the many stories about him was one that he had been received by the Sacred Lamas of Tibet, another that he had walked across China and nearly ascended the Himalayas.

He was made bankrupt in 1935 with liabilities of £5,000. A first and final dividend of 2d. in the £ was declared in 1939.

Eighteen years ago he was refused the right to continue living in France.