There was a postscript to the final Golden Dawn debacle with a couple of chancers named Theo and Laura Horos, an American couple who ran a short-lived, shady cult at 99 Gower Street. They mixed a smattering of occultism, picked up from their Golden Dawn contacts, with a further emphasis on sexual magic. Mrs Horos was a woman of about sixty who also went by the names of Swami Vive Ananda and Marie of the Commune (the 1870 Paris Commune), but under a pile of aliases her earliest name seems to have been Ann or Editha Salomon. Mr Horos was about thirty years younger and may have been an unfrocked priest; his real name seems to have been Frank Dutton Jackson.
Their most impressive fraud was perpetrated on Mathers, when they stayed with him in Paris and infiltrated his magical group; he believed them to be initiates of a previously unknown Golden Dawn temple in America, and Madame Horos managed to convince him that she was, in fact, the missing Fraulein Sprengel (which is to say Sprengel spoke through her; Mathers told Yeats she was “the most powerful medium living”). He was also impressed by the way she seemed to have knowledge of a conversation he'd had with the late Madame Blavatsky, when he had visited Blavatsky in Denmark Hill, suggesting Blavatsky could also speak through her. But gradually he became suspicious, not least of Madame Horos's claim that she was the illegitimate daughter of Lola Montez (a dancer and international courtesan who had been the mistress of Ludwig I of Bavaria) and Pope Pius IX.
Crowley was very aware of the Horos case, and his particular take on them was that they were “vampires” (by which he meant that they practised oral sex, supposedly taking energy from the recipient, or ‘victim’).1 In a more prosaic form of vampirism the Horoses sponged hospitality and money from Mathers – who had hoped they might be moving money in the other direction, towards him – along with ritual documents which helped their later career.
In September 1901 the Horoses were arrested and appeared in Marylebone Police Court as Frank and Edith Jackson, charged with fraud, theft, and procuring young women for immoral purposes. They had been running a cult called The Order of Theocratic Unity at 99 Gower Street, and victims Vera Croysdale, Olga Rowson and Daisy Adams, a sixteen-year-old whom Frank Jackson was accused of raping, had come forward. Vera Croysdale remembered Frank had told her he was Christ, and that any sin with him would be an act of piety. She had also undergone an impressive initiation ritual beginning “I, Vera Croysdale, in the presence of the Lord of the Universe and in the Hall of the Neophytes in the Order of the Golden Dawn…”
It transpired that girls were being hypnotised, drugged, and given whisky for breakfast. This was the first that the great newspaper-reading public had heard of the already disintegrating Golden Dawn, and it did the Order's reputation no favours. Suddenly it, or its Horos version, was even being celebrated in comic songs (“Way down upon the Swami River…”). The public galleries at the trial were packed, and the Horoses provided rich entertainment by conducting their own defence; at one stage Mr Horos turned to the gallery and shouted “Keep quiet, you reptiles!”. The trial moved to the Old Bailey, where Mrs Horos – the prime mover – received seven years and her unfortunate husband fifteen.