Toward the end of 1929, something surprising happened: a peaceful portuguese poet received a letter from an extravagant english magician, initiating a short but prolific correspondence that resulted in one of the most curious incidents of the early 1930s in Lisbon, which became known as "The Mystery of Hellmouth".
The poet was none other than Fernando Pessoa, then 40 years old, and the magician Aleister Crowley, writer, mountaineer, chess player, painter and occultist of 50 years who had gained fame among his countrymen as “the most evil of the world ” because of his eccentric, excessive lifestyle, with excessive use of drugs and different sexual partners, and, in the opinion of many, depraved.
The story of how these two men, so different with only one common interest - esotericism - met, is fascinating and has inspired, over the years, books, music and films. Not only for being who they are, but above all for the aura of mysticism that they created around the meeting, with sudden appearances and disappearances forged to confuse the newspapers, their readers and the police.
The highlight of this strange friendship, which led Crowley to board a ship to Lisbon in September 1930, was the news of his apparent suicide in Boca do Inferno, in Cascais. After 90 years, much remains to be explained, namely the real reasons that led the founder of two esoteric orders, who called himself “To Mega Therion”, “The Great Beast”, faking death itself. However, there is no doubt that Pessoa played a fundamental role in the farce that he tried to deceive the Portuguese authorities.
The writer was responsible for many of the details and for spreading the story in Portuguese newspapers, with the indispensable help of his friend and journalist Augusto Ferreira Gomes. Why, it also remains to be explained, especially when one realizes that the personal interest in Crowley was almost none - it was Pessoa who put an end to the correspondence, after almost two years of letters exchanged with the magician and several of his friends and collaborators , in England and abroad.
These letters were first published in 2001, with an edition and comments by Fernando Pessoa's nephew, Luís Miguel Rosa Dias, and reissued almost ten years later, in 2010. Both editions are currently unavailable on the market. A new one, more complete and presenting for the first time all the fragments of The Mouth of Hell , the policeman Pessoa began to write in September 1930 about the events surrounding the alleged disappearance of Aleister Crowley in Portugal, by the label Tinta da China, with a very clear objective - “to reconstruct the true intentions that led Crowley to organize, at the end of August 1930, a very busy trip to Lisbon”, through the philological and chronological presentation of “all related documents, directly or indirectly, with the Pessoa-Crowley meeting ”, explained researcher Steffen Dix, responsible for the edition.
This trip started in late August. On September 1, 1930, at 8:30 am, when he was trapped in Vigo because of the fog, Aleister Crowley lamented: “We are going to have cold albatrosses for breakfast. Trapped behind rocks where the Highland Pipers had an accident last year”he wrote in the diary. The Alcântara boat was late one day and the bad weather on the Galician coast did not seem to stop. Navigating in the middle of a thick fog, like Dracula aboard the Demeter , Crowley did not arrive at the Lisbon pier until the following day, in the afternoon. A tall, thin writer with round glasses and a small mustache was waiting for him. The story was about to begin.
Chapter I. A peaceful Portuguese poet meets an extravagant English magician
The story of the strange friendship between Fernando Pessoa and Aleister Crowley began on November 18, 1929, when the portuguese poet contacted London publisher Mandrake Press showing interest in acquiring the first volume of the autobiography The Confessions of Aleister Crowley , which had just ended to be published. Weeks later, on December 4, acknowledging receipt of the first part of Confessions, from another book he had ordered, and announcing the sending of a “£ 2.7 check” for payment, Pessoa asked Mandrake officials to alert Crowley that his horoscope was incorrect. “If he thinks he was born at 11pm. 16m. 39s., on October 12, 1875, will have Aries 11 as its Medium Coeli, with respective ascents and cusps. He will find his directions more accurately than he will have found so far,”he said, warning that it was “a mere speculation” and apologizing for “disturbing this purely fanciful meddling in what is, at heart, just a letter from business".
The poet referred to the map that appeared on the first pages of Confessions . Pessoa was dedicated to astrology at least since 1914, when he began to regularly prepare horoscopes and astrological calculations. The portuguese writer even went so far as to describe himself as an astrologer in some of his papers, including some referring to the case of Boca do Inferno, and even publicly. After studying Crowley's horoscope “attentively”, Pessoa came to the conclusion that “he was wrong because he was born just before the time he supposed”, he admitted in a text where he synthesized the beginning of contact with English. Crowley was not sure about the time of his birth, having only the information that it would have happened between 11 pm and midnight. "Faced with this uncertainty, and perhaps stimulated by his immense curiosity, Pessoa uses his deep technical knowledge in astrology and tries to find the real time of the birth of the British occultist", pointed out the astrologer Paulo Cardoso, in the book on the astrological charts of Fernando Pessoa. “In a letter to the Mandrake Press, dated December 4, 1929, Pessoa suggests a possible corrected birth time, '11 pm. 16m. and 39s. ', with a Medium of Heaven at 11º of Aries'. ”
Crowley would have been happy with the time correction - Pessoa personally replied a few days later, in a letter dated December 11, initiating an exchange of correspondence that would last roughly two years. Interestingly, the suggestion of a possible trip to Portugal appeared in the second letter. On December 22, Crowley, who had received the brochure 35 Sonnets and the three volumes of English poetry from 1921 from Fernando Pessoa , said, in a paragraph added later the pen, that he had considered the arrival of his poetry “really” as “a clear Message that I would like to explain in person ”, asking if the poet would be in Lisbon in the following months. “If so, I would like to visit you: but without telling anyone. Please inform me on return from the mail. ” Pessoa was available to receive the magician, suggesting that the meeting be scheduled for the following March. He did, however, request that he be notified of his arrival in time, as he used to travel regularly to Évora, where his sister, Henriqueta Madalena, married to Francisco Caetano Dias, an army officer then posted in that city, lived.
Crowley quickly changed his mind. After New Year's Eve, he said that perhaps it would be better if Pessoa were to go to London before, because he had “many matters to put in order”. The portuguese poet definitively dismissed this possibility on February 25, stating that he did not intend to leave Lisbon in the near future. The answer to this statement came only in April, when Aleister Crowley's secretary, Israel Regardie, informed him, on the 9th, that the magician would not be able to leave England for some time “due to certain business commitments to which it was necessary to attend ”. "His plan is to take a trip to Germany, and then - I think his plans are still a bit vague for now, but he will communicate with you more closely once he has formulated more defined projects," explained Regardie. In Steffen Dix's opinion, these "commitments" would be a woman that Crowley had met at a dinner at the house of the painter Hans Steiner, who lived in Berlin. This German, Hanni Larissa Jaeger, for whom Crowley fell in love, would come to play a key role in the events that would lead to the "Mouth of Hell".
Crowley, who still insisted on the trip, seemed genuinely interested in keeping in touch with Pessoa. The Portuguese, for his part, seemed to have no desire to meet him. A May 29 letter was followed by a three-month silence, broken on August 28, when Fernando Pessoa received an unexpected telegram that announced that the English magician would arrive in Lisbon soon, on the English packet Alcântara. "Please find," read the message. “It probably would have been a shock and a surprise, since Fernando Pessoa had not received any letter since May 19,” commented Luís Miguel Rosa Dias, Pessoa's nephew (he was the son of Henriqueta Madalena) in the first edition of the correspondence with Crowley, published in 2001 and reissued in 2010. At the time of the telegram's arrival, only seven letters had been exchanged.
90 years after the arrival of Aleister Crowley in Lisbon, there are still doubts as to the reasons that led the Englishman, then 55, to decide so abruptly to embark on a ship bound for Portugal, a country where he had never been and where he did not know anyone besides Pessoa. As Steffen Dix pointed out in the afterword of his edition of The Mouth of Hell, Crowley's interest in meeting Pessoa live was very evident. It was "possible that he had in mind the foundation of a kind of branch of one of his secret orders in Lisbon", he said, a hypothesis already pointed out by other authors. However, “the fact that Pessoa himself was caught off guard leaves questions about the chosen moment. One can consider the possibility that the trip allowed the Englishman to hide some personal problems ”, namely the financial difficulties of Mandrake Press, which would end up being extinguished that same year, the sad state in which some of his friends were in and the constant discussions with the woman, Nicaraguan Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar, who would have psychiatric and alcoholic problems. On August 25, Crowley wrote in his diary: “London is hell.Each depressed as before (...) More and more eager to go to Portugal on the 29th ”.
Chapter II. The“Besta” lands in Lisbon
The “Grande Besta” arrived in Lisbon on the afternoon of September 2, one day late due to the dense fog that was felt in the area of Vigo, in Galicia. He was accompanied by “Monstro”, his young German lover, Hanni Larissa Jaeger. Their names, ages and occupations were recorded in the Alcântara seamen's board book. Little is known about Hanni. Born in Germany, she lived during a period in the United States of America, where the family emigrated in 1924, thus obtaining American nationality. He later returned to Berlin, being only certain that he was in the city on April 30, 1930, when the English magician had dinner at Steiner's house, for whom he served as a model, and met her. Hanni would have ambitions to become an artist. The relationship between the two will have started at that time,the young woman leaving with Crowley for England and from there to Portugal. They separated not long after, in October 1931, when the “Monster” suddenly disappeared without a trace. Hanni Jaeger killed himself a few years later, on March 19, 1934, at the Hotel Alhambra, in Palma de Mallorca.
The couple was welcomed at the pier by Fernando Pessoa (at 3:35 pm, according to Crowley), who would have been impressed by Hanni, whose beauty and loose sexuality would have contrasted strongly with conservative Lisbon society. In the diary of his stay in Lisbon, disclosed for the first time by Marco Pasi in 2012, Crowley described Person as a "very nice man." The “Jade Princess” (another of Hanni's nicknames) will also have liked him. Lisbon, on the other hand, made the worst possible impression on the magician: “ Lisbon, judging by the noise, is a kind of Greater London. Like a boiler factory with all its workers trapped in the machinery. Squalid, badly paved, dirty, narrow, boring. Like a super radio in a cafe: literally a hell of noise”. Crowley first settled at the Hotel de l'Europe, in Praça Luís de Camões, moving the next day to the Hotel Paris do Estoril, more to his liking: “A perfect beach (…) The weather seems to be what Riviera wanted to have it, but he doesn't, ”he noted in his diary, taking the opportunity to complain once again about the Portuguese capital:“ God tried to wake Lisbon up once - with an earthquake; gave up after realizing it was not worth it ”.
Although the trip to Portugal happened because of Fernando Pessoa, the poet will only have met Aleister Crowley three times - once to receive him at the Lisbon pier. The scarcity of meetings helps to reinforce the idea that Pessoa was not so enthusiastic about the Englishman's visit. The poet, moreover, seems to have tried to avoid as much as possible a direct contact with Crowley. This is what suggests a note sent by Hanni: “What happened to you? We were so hopeful to see you last week. We are going to Lisbon, on Monday, on the 2:07 pm train. Will you be able to meet us at the station or at the [Agency] Cook a little later? ”Asked the German on 14 September. They hadn't seen each other since 7, when she, Crowley and Pessoa had lunch in Estoril. In the reply, sent three days later,the poet explained to him that he was still "in treatment" and that he would therefore have to postpone another meeting. It is unknown what treatment this would be. Would that be another excuse?
After that, it is known for sure that Fernando Pessoa met Crowley in Lisbon, on September 18, but Hanni was not present. However, there may have been a fourth meeting, although, to date, no evidence of this has been found. On the 9th, Crowley went to Lisbon with Hanni to pick up some postal parcels that were going to arrive on a Royal Mail Steam Packet Company boat. He had lunch for 400 escudos and met Raul Leal , an eccentric Portuguese writer who had participated in number two of Orpheu magazineand who had been involved, in the 1920s, in the scandal of the so-called “Literature of Sodom”, which involved António Botto and Fernando Pessoa himself. With strong tendencies towards mysticism (he believed to be the reincarnation of the prophet Henoch), Leal was very enthusiastic about some passages from Confessions that Pessoa translated (he had little knowledge of English, but spoke fluent French) and decided to write to Crowley, with whom he arrived exchanging some letters hoping to be initiated by him during his visit to the Portuguese capital. Although the magician did not like the author of Divinized Sodom ("I don't like him. There is something really wrong about him," he wrote in his diary), he started him, on the night of 9, in the mysteries of his esoteric order. This initiation ritual took place on the floor of Rua das Salgadeiras, in Bairro Alto, where Leal lived.
According to Raul Leal, Fernando Pessoa will have been at his home to prepare the meeting with Crowley, but it is not known if he attended the initiation. Another question that remains, as Marco Pasi pointed out in the Plural Person article where he made Aleister Crowley's diary known, is whether Hanni also attended the ceremony. What is certain is that, one day after Leal's initiation, Pessoa wrote a poem about a female figure, “tall, of a dark blond”, which some authors have associated with the young German woman. The text, which the poet dated September 10 , ends by saying:
“It feels like a boat
Wish, when do I embark?
O hunger, when do I eat? ”
Chapter III. The disappearance of Hanni, the “other Mouth of Hell” and the departure of Crowley
On September 17, after a night of sexual magic (whose practice would now be taking on “increasingly uncontrolled proportions”, Dix considered) and the ensuing hysteria attack (which forced the intervention of the Hotel Paris manager and when the couple moved to the Hotel Miramar), Hanni suddenly disappeared, leaving only two lines written in pencil, which said “I'll be right back”. Concerned, Aleister Crowley wrote that day to Pessoa asking him to call as soon as he could. The next day, still without news of her, Crowley returned to l'Europe in Lisbon and met, in the afternoon, with Pessoa. They went to the police and the poet presented the case to the second commander, Major Joaquim Marques, of whom he was a friend, asking him to do his best to find the German. The Englishman recorded this meeting in the diary: “With Pessoa all afternoon. I saw the second police commander ”. At 19, still with no sign of Hanni, he confessed: "I won't be able to get over this - unless she comes back."
The “Jade Princess” returned in the afternoon to inform Crowley that she was leaving the next morning. I was going to board the SS Werra, from Lloyd's, in northern Germany, to Bremen, where he would take a train to Berlin. She had met with the American consul in Lisbon, Lawrence S. Armstrong, who had advised her to return home. The English magician was not happy, but he had no choice but to accept Hanni's irrevocable decision. On the date of his departure, 20 September, he moved to the Hotel Europa, in Sintra, where he will have spent at least one day and from where he wrote to the woman asking for a divorce that would never happen. At 21, he recorded in his diary: "I developed a plan to use the local scenario - see September 12th". This entry, which accounts for the birth of the idea for his famous disappearance in Boca do Inferno, a well-known place of suicides, seems to confirm the theory that he was motivated by the departure of his lover.In the opinion of Marco Pasi, it may, however, not be so. In the article published in number one ofPlural Person , the investigator defended that the idea of forged suicide may be much earlier.
One of the narratives that tries to explain the “Mistery of Hell's Mouth” says that it was after Hanni embarked, during a tour in Cascais, that Aleister Crowley remembered to stage his death. This version of the facts is based on an alleged passage from his diary, which is quoted in the biography of John Symons: “I decided to fake a suicide to upset Hanni. Combine the details with Person ”. This quote had never been questioned until 2012, when Pasi published Crowley's personal notes for the first time in Portugal and found that it does not exist. In addition, the only reference that exists to Boca do Inferno is from September 12th and concerns a tour that the magician took with “Princesa Jade”, which immediately throws the theory that everything would have appeared on the day 21. This “little discovery”, as Pasi called it, slightly changes our understanding of events. "Without this quote, it becomes less evident that the false suicide case was mainly the result of Crowley's strained relationship with Hanni." On the other hand, it is more difficult to say why Crowley decided to fake his own death and convince Fernando Pessoa to embark on the adventure.
What seems to be certain is that this was not the first time that Aleister Crowley thought to pretend he had died. According to Marco Pasi, Crowley would have thought about it at least twice before and always at complicated times in his life. “In August 1923, when he was in Tunis after the expulsion [by the fascist government of Mussolini] from Italy [where he had established a community of followers in Cefalù, Sicily in 1920], he had the idea of organizing a modeled false suicide in the myth of Empedocles, with the aim of drawing public attention to the 'unfair' measures taken against him by the Italian government and protesting the attacks of the British pink press [which had declared him 'the meanest man in the world '].”It says that the legend that Empedocles, a pre-Socratic philosopher and the creator of the theory of the four elements (air, fire, earth and water), died when throwing himself from Mount Etna so that they believed that his body had disappeared and that he had become immortal like the gods. This idea would not have left the magician's head, since, in March 1929, when he was about to be expelled from France for his libertine conduct, he tried to convince journalist Francis Dickie to help him force his suicide. The latter refused to do so.
Crowley will have returned to Lisbon on 22 September. He was seen walking in Bairro Alto in the company of the porter of l'Europe, a Swiss native of St. Galen (and he wrote that down in his diary). He left Portugal the next day, on a Sud-Express bound for Paris. The plans for his false suicide were thus agreed with Pessoa between the 21st and the 22nd. According to his own notes, he left Lisbon at 11:30 am, crossing the border in Vilar Formoso at 7:00 pm. After crossing France, he arrived in Berlin on the 25th, at 6 pm, to be reunited with the “Monster”.
Chapter IV. An Englishman disappears and leaves an “exotic” cigarette case and a hallucinated letter
On September 27, when Aleister Crowley was already comfortably installed in Berlin, there was a news item in the Diário de Notícias that reported the disappearance of Lisbon from the “celebrated English writer”, “leaving a mysterious and hallucinated letter in 'Boca do Inferno' ”. This was the first of several journalistic pieces published in Lisbon about the strange case, which was fed by the journalist Augusto Ferreira Gomes with the help of Fernando Pessoa. One of the poet's closest friends, Ferreira Gomes was a key character in the unfolding of the events that followed Crowley's departure for Germany. He was the journalist for Diário de Notíciaswho, in a stroke of luck, found, on the afternoon of September 25 “in 'Boca do Inferno, next to the opening known as' Mata Dogs'”, Aleister Crowley's suicide letter. At least, that was what he said.
In the short play of 27 September, it was said that the “comrade in the press Augusto Ferreira Gomes”, visiting the site, had found, on the afternoon of 25, a “paper that was on the edge of the great cut in the rock that is wait". “Approaching, he saw that it was a letter”, reported the Lisbon newspaper. The note, written on the letterhead of the Hotel de l'Europe, was under “a curious and extraordinary cigarette case”. Picking up the objects, the journalist “verified that the envelope was addressed to a foreign lady, with an indication in English, which meant: 'Please send'”. The lady was Hanni Jaeger and, as Ferreira Gomes discovered when he went to l'Europe, he had been staying in Lisbon with the “writer Edward A. Crowley”. “Now, this name immediately evoked that of Edward Alexander Crowley, known throughout the world by the name of Aleister Crowley and as one of the strangest men of recent times - chief, during the war, of English counterespionage in America, a remarkable poet , climber, painter, beast hunter, chemist; who calls himself a magician and an astrologer and… 'the worst man in England' - according to recent campaigns by English newspapers and especially the great London weekly John Bull ”, continued the Diário de Notícias . Ferreira Gomes learned at the hotel that Crowley had left on the 23rd, at 11 am, on his way to Sintra, where he was not staying anywhere.
The letter left by the magician was, according to the newspaper, "written in a brief tone, although hallucinated and accompanied by mysterious signs", "incomprehensible". Addressed to “LGP” and signed “Tu Li Yu”, it said, in English:
erno will catch me - it won't be as hot as yours! Hjsos!"
“What is it about?” Asked the newspaper, informing that “comrade Ferreira Gomes” was going to hand it over to the police “so that it can investigate”, which ended up happening that same afternoon. It was the director of the Criminal Investigation Police who listened “attentively” to the journalist's report, then informing him that Crowley had left the border of Vilar Formoso on 23 September. “The case was apparently fixed. If Crowley had left, it was because he wasn't here ”, Ferreira Gomes thought to his buttons. Meanwhile, Fernando Pessoa appeared at the police station. “Knowing from the Diário de Notícias what happened, he came to give some explanations”, continued Ferreira Gomes in a report published in the weekend supplement Notícias Ilustrado, on October 10 (the month in which Pessoa made the greatest number of efforts to divulge the story of the alleged disappearance of the English magician).
What the poet truly intended was to provide data that would feed the case and allow an investigation to be opened. Reporting how he had started contacting Aleister Crowley because of the horoscope published in his autobiography, “in November last year”, Pessoa explained that the magician had decided to leave England “for health reasons”, having chosen “Portugal - or, more precisely, Costa do Sol - for a rest resort ”. At no point in the correspondence between the two is mentioned the need for Crowley to rest. Even so, Pessoa's account of his arrival in Lisbon by Notícias Ilustrado (which he himself wrote, as indicated by some documents of his estate) corresponded more or less to the truth. As he told the police and the newspaper,he met Crowley and Hanni “only twice after arrival - once in Estoril, on the 7th; again in Lisbon, on the 9th. After the 9th, I didn't see Miss Jaeger again ”, he declared. This version, although not reliable, seems to confirm Raul Leal's version that it was Pessoa himself who introduced him to the English magician on the day of his initiation, since there is no record in Crowley's diary of a meeting in that day.
Pessoa reported the sudden disappearance of Hanni Jaeger - whom the police knew had left Portugal on September 20 - and how Crowley was concerned about the young woman's “very heavy heredity”, who had a “proclaimed tendency towards suicide and conviction” of that she was being "pursued by a black wizard named Yorke". In the version of Notícias Ilustrado , the Portuguese writer said goodbye to Crowley, who was going to spend a few days in Sintra, on 23 September, outside the cafe Martinho da Arcada, in Terreiro do Paço. He never spoke to him again, but he saw him again, "him or his ghost", on the morning of the 24th, "around the corner from Café La Gare to Rua 1.º de Dezembro".That day, but in the afternoon, she saw him “or his ghost” again when he crossed Praça Duque da Terceira. The magician was going to “enter, with another individual to the Tabacaria Inglesa. In none of the cases was there time, or even reason, to speak to him, nor was I really surprised that an individual who was in Sintra would come to Lisbon ”, admitted Pessoa.
“On the 25th, passing through the Hotel de l'Europe, I asked the doorman if mr. Crowley was actually in Sintra. He said yes, and that it would take until the weekend. I told him I had seen Mr. Crowley, the day before, near the Cais do Sodré Station; to this the porter replied verbatim, 'is that he must have gone to Estoril yesterday with a friend he has in Sintra'. This, as you can see, confirmed my impression - whose fairness I had no reason to doubt - of having seen Crowley twice on the 24th. The International Police say he crossed the border on the 23rd. If so, it is so ; and in that case it was not him that I saw on the 24th. ” Fernando Pessoa refused, however, to accept that everything was a “mystification” because of “a circumstance contained in the letter”,written in the English magician's handwriting and placed under a cigarette case that belonged to him, as he himself proved (the cigarette case was actually the poet's brother-in-law, Caetano Dias, who would have bought it in Zanzibar).
It was the Person who was responsible for making an interpretation of Crowley's letter, which, being full of astrological symbols, could only be understood by a true astrologer. The poet, as he himself admitted in Notícias Ilustrado , fit this description. “I explain as far as I understand, and I leave the important to the end,” he began by saying, then suggesting that “LGP”, to whom the letter was addressed, must be “Miss Jaeger's“ mystical name, ”or his initials. 'Hisos' also doesn't know what it is, but, also because of the placement, I suppose it is a 'magic word', understood only by the two. 'Tu Li Yu' I know what it is, because Crowley once told me about it: it is the name of a Chinese sage, who lived some three thousand years before Christ, and whom Crowley said was the present incarnation ”. None of this was true, with the exception of "LGP", which would be perhaps the name given to Hanni by Crowley. “Hjsos” would be the acronym for “Hanni Jaeger Save Our Souls” (“Hanni Jaeger save our souls”) and the signature, written vertically, a joke - a homophonic expression of “tooley-oo” , London slang meaning something like “bye-bye”. The most important in the note found in Boca do Inferno was the date: Year I4, in Balança; that is, 18 hours and 36 minutes of September 23, that is, after Aleister Crowley allegedly crossed the border. The Portuguese poet immediately dismissed the hypothesis that the dating was false, because "no astrologer, for reasons that it is not lawful to reveal, would dare to do, is to falsify a date written in signs of the stars".
Although little makes sense in this story, the Portuguese police will have given importance to the letter found by Augusto Ferreira Gomes, because, as Steffen Dix said in his edition of The Mystery of the Mouth of Hell, "On the back of the copy (the destination of the original is unknown) you can see an official stamp, which indicates that the document has been submitted for analysis to the Censorship Commission". At least at first, it would be easy to conclude that Crowley would, in fact, have committed suicide, since he said in the letter to the “Jade Princess” that he could not continue to live. “Furthermore, the corpse had not been found, something that was not surprising, given the physical circumstances of Boca do Inferno. Everything pointed, therefore, to a suicide ”, emphasized Dix. But the lack of evidence will have ended up dictating the end of the investigation. Although the case was not preserved, it is not difficult to imagine that the Portuguese police eventually came to the conclusion that Crowley was not dead, but alive, in good health and living in Berlin.
In a last attempt to prevent history from falling into oblivion, Fernando Pessoa published, in the inaugural issue of Girassol, in December 1930, an interview with himself. In a letter dated February 13, 1931, the poet explained to Aleister Crowley (who was keeping informed about the news in Portugal about his alleged suicide) that he had been approached by the weekly for a conversation “about any aspect that might exist ”. “There was possibly something new - the possibility that you were murdered. It was based on the interview, which I wrote in its entirety, to avoid the usual mess that journalists and printers make of each other. ” It is curious to note that, as Pessoa was working on the story of Crowley's disappearance, it became more complex and detailed, even being transposed to the literary universe.
The possibility of a murder had been put forward by the English daily Oxford Mail (the story had some repercussions in England and France) which, on October 15, published a short story entitled “Aleister Crowley 'murdered'. 'Spiritist revelations to a London medium' ”that Fernando Pessoa quoted in Girassol : “ In a small, poorly lit room in Bloomsbury, last night, mr. AV Peters, a London-based medium, went into a trance to obtain some indications about the whereabouts of Mr. Aleister Crowley, writer and wizard.(…) Mr. Peters stated that, during the trance, he had been told that Mr. Crowley was dead, and 'had been pushed down the rocks by an agent of the Roman Catholic Church'. 'Catholics had previously attacked Mr. Crowley ', said mr. Peters, 'and he was waiting to be attacked' ”.
Asking himself about what could be concluded from the Oxford Mail note , Pessoa replied that “nothing”, but pointed out that it was curious that this story should arise when no conclusion had been reached. At Girassol , the poet ensured that there was still no news of Aleister Crowley's whereabouts. Both his secretary, who was in England, and a close friend, who was in Germany, did not know where the English magician was. Both seemed not to be convinced of the suicide, "but also" seemed to "not know" what they were "to be convinced of".Another interesting fact added by Pessoa in this report was the presence in Lisbon of two English researchers. According to the writer, one of them arrived just on September 29, just two days after the first news of Crowley's disappearance was published in the Diário de Notícias. “One of them appeared here, in this office; he came with a transparent verbal disguise, so much so that not only me, but a friend of mine, English, who happened to be here, immediately distrusted the 'language teacher' who had appeared to us. I later learned, from a great source, that this was not an official police officer, but a private investigator, who was dealing with another matter here, and received special instructions to deal with this one. This explains its immediate appearance in the news of the newspapers. And I also learned later, through a verbal lapse by an Englishman my friend, and in this case voluntary informant, that later another individual - this one without a doubt official - came here to investigate the same subject ”, revealed Pessoa.
This detail is interesting because, in the personal estate, there are fragments of a policeman never finished with the title The Mouth of Hell , that is, The Mouth of Hell, which Steffen Dix reproduced entirely in his edition of Fernando Pessoa's correspondence and the “Great Beast”. The novel, which was written in September 1930, describes the investigations that an English private detective, whose name is never mentioned, conducted in Lisbon, Estoril, Cascais and Sintra to find out what actually happened to the English magician in the last days of the your stay in Portugal. “The fragments testify to a high sense of irony and humor, also giving the precise mirror of the pleasure of mystification - or, even better, of deception - that Pessoa undoubtedly shared with Aleister Crowley, especially if we look at what the two planned together , and, in detail, Crowley's false disappearance in Hell's Mouth, ”wrote Dix. More than a simple joke,Pessoa seemed to be interested in capitalizing on the story of the “Mistery of Hell's Mouth”. On the back of a copy of the suicide letter, he wrote in English: “This story is expected to pay 200 pounds, American rights only. Inventing a romantic story ”.
Chapter V. The last letter and the end of the story
Fernando Pessoa's interest in the “Mistery of Boca do Inferno” began to wane in the late 1930s. On January 4, 1931, Crowley, who wrote to him wishing a good new year, regretted the little news, of not having received the promised police soap opera and asking for “some astrology”. He only got the first ones, but a month late - on February 10, Pessoa wrote to him admitting the silence and explaining that it was not due to the disease, as the magician had suggested in the previous letter, but to a certain state of mind. : “Yes, for some time now, no news of mine has dripped to Berlin through the fingers of Luck; it keeps us tightly closed sometimes. It's been really mean to me lately. No, illness is not the explanation, unless a forgotten wilderness is a sick wilderness.In these last few months, I seem to have been asleep somewhere inside myself, and I would like to know where that comes from ”. At 13, he wrote again to inform Crowley of the interview withSunflower that I had forgotten to mention in the previous letter. This missive was followed by a new eight-month silence, always with the Englishman asking for news and regretting the lack of it.
This was Pessoa's last letter to Crowley. The englishman also replied to him, on November 29, 1931, lamenting that the poet had not "followed up" the letter of October 5 and that he had not sent him the promised horoscope, as his life did not go by the smallest. "I look forward to knowing if I am still going to stop at an asylum for the lunatic poor - as my wife was in mid-July." Like Rose Edith Kelly, Crowley's first wife, Maria Teresa also ended up in a mental hospital. The Nicaraguan entered a spiral of alcoholism and paranoia when her husband started his relationship with Hanni Jaeger, who has since disappeared. The problems that Crowley complained about in the last messages to Pessoa, would remain until the end of his life. Poor, with few friends and even fewer followers, he later returned to England, where he died on December 1, 1947, at the age of 72. Fernando Pessoa died in 1935.
Article written by Rita Cipriano, Observador, 28 Set 2019
Unrevised Google translation
https://observador.pt/especiais/o-misterio-da-boca-do-inferno-quando-fernando-pessoa-ajudou-aleister-crowley-a-forjar-o-seu-proprio-suicidio/
