"The Literature of Occultism" by Arthur Machen

This essay strikes me as rather weak - I don't feel very well informed by it, except maybe to get a couple of titles for books for future recording. And not because he gave me any useful info about the titles, I had to go look that up myself, rather he just game me some names to look up.

W.T Stead was a British newspaper editor and pioneer of investigative journalism who died in the sinking of the Titanic

spagyric: pertaining to alchemy

Nicolas Flamel: 14th century French scribe. Apparently also a character in Harry Potter? I don't know, didn't read it (or watch it), but in searching for info about him a lot of Harry Potter stuff comes up. If you recognize the name only from HP, now you know he was an actual historical person besides!

Thomas Vaughan: 17th century Welsh clergyman, philosopher, and alchemist.

Silurist: a native of Brecknockshire in Wales, or a member of the ancient Silurian tribe. The two things are related, but I don't know anything about Vaughan or his writings to know which way its usage here is intended.

The brother who is the Silurist would be Henry Vaughan

Lumen de Lumine, by Thomas Vaughan, subtitled: A new magicall light discovered and communicated to the world by Eugenius Philalethes.

Magia adamica, by Thomas Vaughan, subtitled: or the antiquitie of magic, and the descent thereof from Adam downwards, proved. Whereunto is added a perfect, and full discoverie of the true cœlum terræ, or the magician's heavenly chaos, and first matter of all things. By Eugenius Philalethes.

Ashmole's "Fasciculus Chemicus": Elias Ashmole was a 17th century English antiquary, politician, officer of arms, astrologer and student of alchemy. Also a founding fellow of the Royal Society. "Fasciculus Chemicus", or Chymical Collections. Expressing the Ingress, Progress, and Egress, of the Secret Hermetick Science out of the choicest and most famous authors is an anthology of alchemical writings compiled by Arthur Dee in 1629 while resident in Moscow as chief physician to Czar Michael I of Russia, and translated into English by Ashmole in 1650.

Denys Zachaire: 16th century French alchemist

Payne Knight: English scholar, archaeologist, and numismatist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. MP for Leominster, and then Ludlow. "A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus" was his first book, published in 1786.

A.E. Waite: British poet and mystic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His "The Real History of the Rosicrucians" was published in 1887.

Hargrave Jennings: 19th century British Freemason and Rosicrucian. It's unclear which work Machen is referring to here, Jennings did write a fair bit, but we do find a book entitled "The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries" from 1870 which seems like a fair guess.

Joris-Karl Huysmans: 19th century French novelist. Là-bas was published in 1891. It is a work on Satanism in contemporary France.

Gilles de Rais: French Baron of the 15th century, friend of Joan of Arc, and convicted serial killer of children.

Léo Taxil: 19th century French writer and journalist. His story is rather complicated, being raised a Jesuit, then becoming anti-Catholic, then becoming Catholic again, writing various hoaxes, saying his conversion to Catholicism was a hoax, it's quite a story in its own right.

Henry De Vere Stacpoole:late 19th and 20th century Irish author. Sounds like rather a Dutch name to me, but he was born and raised in Ireland, near Dublin.

The pictures used are:

Ouija board

Painting of John Keats by William Hilton

Contemporary artwork depicting Babylon at the height of its stature, by Bazil Amin, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en).

Photo of William Thomas Stead taken in 1905 by E.H. Mills

Flamel as represented in 1402 on the portal of Sainte-Geneviève des Ardens (from Étienne François Villain, 1761)

Henry Vaughan - apparently Thomas and Henry were twins. I couldn't find any pictures of Thomas specifically, but there seems to be a portrait or two of Henry, but given they are twins...

Restoration of a late antique ceiling painting, depicting prose writer Apuleius. Bischöfliches Museum (Bishop's Museum), Trier, circa 330 AD

Folded-out engraving showing witches' sabbat, by Laurent Bordelon (1710), from the University of Glasgow Library, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/).

the Rosy Cross as used by Rosicrucianism, by RootOfAllLight

Painting of Sir Walter Scott by Thomas Lawrence in the 1820s

Sketch of Margaret Oliphant by Frederick Augustus Sandys in 1881

Alfred Percy Sinnett

M. P. Shiel

Henry De Vere Stacpoole

Arthur Machen