Hanni Larissa Jaeger

Born: circa 1910.

Died: circa 1933.

Hanni Larissa Jaeger was the youngest of three daughters born circa 1910 to Hermann Jaeger (1879-1961) and Martha (1882-1966). She, like her two older sisters named Kaethe and Else, was blue-eyed and blond. Her father had immigrated to the United States in August of 1923 and settled in Santa Barbara, California. The following year, on 4 August 1924, his wife and children sailed to America aboard the S.S. Deutschland out of Hamburg. Hanni was thirteen at the time. As an aspiring artist and model she would later become the lover of the local artist Hans Steiner (1885-1974). He was born in Berlin and had also relocated to Santa Monica. On 4 December 1928 he traveled back to Berlin with eighteen-year-old Hanni as his guest aboard the S.S. Cleveland.

Aleister Crowley met Hanni for the first time on 24 April 1930 and quickly fell in love with her. Crowley slept with her for the first time on 4 August 1930 and unsuccessfully tried to hide his affair with Hanni with his wife at the time, Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar.

In September of 1930 Crowley and Hanni visited the poet Fernando Pessoa in Portugal. Later that month Crowley faked his own suicide in a scheme to sell copies of his books. Shortly after Crowley joined Hanni in Germany.

Her increasing problems with illness, both physical and mental, led to them separating in January of 1931.

On 22 November 1931 Hanni boarded the S.S. St. Louis in Hamburg, Germany, and arrived in New York on 3 December. She then headed home to her family in Santa Barbara. The official 'Report of Death of American Citizens Abroad' showed her as deceased in 1933, some presume by suicide.

Portrait by

Aleister Crowley

School Card