THE LIVERPOOL DAILY POST

Liverpool, Lancashire, England

2 December 1947

(page 1)

“MYSTERY MAN”

Death of Aleister Crowley

Edward Alexander (Aleister) Crowley, seventy-two-years-old author, poet, explorer, mystic, and mountaineer, died suddenly yesterday at Hastings, Sussex. His body will be cremated at Brighton on Friday.

Mr. Crowley, in the years between the wars, was the centre of fantastic stories, and began a series of autobiographical articles in a Sunday newspaper in 1934 by saying: “They have called me the ‘worst man in the world.’ They have accused me of doing everything—from murdering women and throwing their bodies into the Seine to drug-peddling.”

One of his magical claims—he was once called “the mystery man of Europe”—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 forty “no feat of strength was too great for me.”