The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light by Arthur Machen (John Lane editions, 1894)

“Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchards, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed beds by the river. You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things - yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet - I say that all these are but dreams and shadows: the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these ‘chases in Arras, dreams in a career,’ beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another’s eyes. You may think all this strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan.”

Clarke shivered; the white mist gathering over the river was chilly.

“It is wonderful indeed,” he said. “We are standing on the brink of a strange world, Raymond, if what you say is true. I suppose the knife is absolutely necessary?”

-----

Although unburdened for the most part by conventional literary merit, the fifty pages of Arthur Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’ somehow remain unique, and indeed shocking, reading, over a century after they were composed.

Now clearly I don’t ACTUALLY own an original edition of ‘The Great God Pan’ with Aubrey Beardsley cover illustration, but the great Welsh mystic writer has been on my mind a lot this week, so it seems a good opportunity to post some covers to his work that are more worth looking at than the volumes I do own.

Firstly, I was thinking on Machen because I’ve been reading S.T. Joshi’s The Weird Tale, which begins with an essay on his work. A nice drive through the rolling hills of Brecon and Herefordshire on the way to hunt books in Hay On Wye brought him to mind again, and upon arriving, I actually managed to grab a copy of a Joshi-edited Machen collection, incorporating both ‘The Great God Pan’ and his much sought after (by me, at least) weird novel ‘The Three Imposters’.

This collection (The Three Imposters and Other Stories) is published by the fiction wing of Call of Cthulhu role-playing game magnates Chaosium, a circumstance which initially seems bizarre given how little of Machen’s wider work has even the vaguest connection to Lovecraftian horror. One overnight re-read of ‘The Great God Pan’ later however, and the fact that Machen’s legacy is largely kept alive by Weird Tales freaks, despite his authorship of endless, rambling stories in which nobody does anything more exciting than go for a nice walk, suddenly makes perfect sense.


Aside from anything else, the vast influence the story must have held over H.P. Lovecraft as he created his Cthulhu Mythos tales is self-evident. Machen’s fragmentary structure, full of aimless digressions, portions of letters and detailed descriptions of drawings and architecture, his flat, utilitarian characters, his ‘nameless horrors’ that immediately drive men to madness and suicide, and above all, his endless dark hinting, hinting, hinting, bursting occasionally into orgiastic stretches of purple prose – all of these devices will be intimately familiar to Lovecraft fans, however baffling and poorly realised they must seem to outsiders.

Beyond that though, ‘The Great God Pan’ provides a perfect example of my frequently spouted notion that the best literary horror stories are always those that spring from unsound minds. For, moreso even than Poe or Lovecraft, Arthur Machen was, shall we say… a complicated man.

I first read ‘The Great God Pan’ in the Dover edition where it is printed alongside his later work ‘The Hill of Dreams’(1907), a thinly veiled autobiographical novel which, perhaps uniquely for a weird tales author, manages to be even more strange and upsetting than his horror stories, as he speaks in naive and almost self-delusionary terms of his deep loneliness and confusion with life, of his obsessive hatred of modernity, of his endless faith in finding transformative spiritual ecstasy within the landscape around him, and, most worryingly, of what modern readers can only interpret as his ‘punishment’ of his errant sex drive through frequent self-flagellation.


All of these themes can of course also be found bubbling away under the surface of Lovecraft’s writing, but the difference is that for Machen, the metaphysical ideas he made central to ‘The Great God Pan’ were actually very dear to him. Whereas Lovecraft’s cosmic horrors – though still incredible – were gradually formalised in his later stories into a kind of grand, archaic science fiction, Machen’s conception of the material world as merely a ‘veil’ that could be lifted from the eyes of man revealing the shining face of the ‘true’ universe were key to most of his life and work.

What is terrifying about ‘The Great God Pan’ then is the way that it sees Machen’s pure spiritualism perverted (by the author himself, or by the imperfect human beings in the story?) into terms of chaos, insanity, darkness, mad science, deformity and Luciferian evil, with the monstrous sexuality implied by the figure of Pan looming large, if never explicitly referenced.

In fact, it could be said that the enduring power of ‘The Great God Pan’ lies in the fact that VERY LITTLE is explicitly referenced. Beyond the shortcomings of the story’s muddled narrative, Machen’s understanding of the power of suggestion is necessarily masterful, managing to coerce readers into drawing the threads together themselves, providing just enough leathery yarn for us to construct ourselves one ugly lookin’ pentagram, while Machen stands outside, his conscience ‘clean’, reminding us that HE never used any dirty words.

Perhaps Machen was even TOO successful in achieving this effect, as he still saw his tale roundly condemned as decadent garbage upon publication, with a reviewer for the Westminster Gazette memorably dismissing ‘The Great God Pan’ as “an incoherent nightmare of sex”, despite the fact that Machen is at pains not to make so much as a single reference to sexual relations or human physicality in the whole book. (Machen's early work actually attracted so many negative or baffled reviews that years later he published a whole volume of them, under the title “Precious Balms”.)


Nonetheless though, there is a lot more at stake in ‘The Great God Pan’s avoidance of direct explanation than mere Victorian prudishness. The central idea underlying the story is so vast in metaphysical scale, whilst its earthly expression in Machen’s imagination has become so cruel and sickening, that when the author commences his ‘dark hinting at nameless things’ routine, he is genuinely tiptoeing around ideas that he either wouldn’t (for fear of ridicule of his deeply held beliefs), or couldn’t (for fear of censorship and public disgust), state explicitly.

This genuine fear of revealing the story’s ‘truths’ is a rare thing indeed in horror fiction, where writers are more usually assumed to glory in their dark revelations, and Machen’s simultaneous fascination with, and repulsion toward, his own subject matter, itself the result of his obsession with atavistic mysticism crashing headfirst into his deeply buried sexual repression, makes ‘The Great God Pan’ stand out, for all its technical faults, as one of the foremost Cosmic Horror stories of all time.