ABSTRACT
In the final months of 1895, two writers who would become major figures in English Gothic published horror stories with strong magical elements. One was M. R. James, Dean of King's College Cambridge and director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. The other was Arthur Llewellyn Jones, better known as Arthur Machen, the son of a Welsh clergyman whose hopes of university had been dashed by familial poverty but who had achieved some notoriety with his "shocker", The Great God Pan in 1894. Laura Horos was clearly conversant with Theosophy and some forms of ceremonial magic, as the "initiation" undergone by her victims drew explicitly on the ceremony used by the Golden Dawn. The version of Crowley created by British newspapers during and after the Cefalu episode was the one that established his fictional persona and placed black magic at the centre of English Gothic fiction.
