“The Great God Pan” was created by Arthur Machen and first appeared in an early form in The Whirlwind (Dec. 13, 1890, and then in its fuller form in The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light (1894). Machen (née Arthur Llewellyn Jones, 1863-1947) was a Welsh novelist, short story writer, and translator. He is well-regarded by connoisseurs of horror and supernatural fiction but not as well-known outside the field as he deserves to be.

“The Great God Pan” begins when Doctor Raymond summons his friend Clarke to his house. Raymond has a certain experiment he wants to carry out, and he wants his friend to be there to witness it. Raymond believes that there is an “unutterable, unthinkable gulf that yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit,”¹ [1] and that the human mind as it is currently constituted prevents humans from seeing the world of spirit, the “real world.” Raymond proposes to operate on the brain of his adopted daughter Mary so that certain nerve-endings currently misunderstood by science will fulfill their real function, allowing Mary to see the real world. Mary is willing to undergo the operation, so Clarke does not express his reservations over Raymond’s callous approach. Raymond says: “I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think her life is mine, to use as I see fit.”²Clarke dozes off as Raymond is preparing for the operation and has a dream in which he sees “a presence, that was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all form.”³ The operation does not go as Raymond planned:

Suddenly, as they watched, they heard a long-drawn sigh, and suddenly did the colour that had vanished return to the girl’s cheeks, and suddenly her eyes opened. Clarke quailed before them. They shone with an awful light, looking far away, and a great wonder fell upon her face, and her hands stretched out as if to touch what was invisible; but in an instant the wonder faded, and gave place to the most awful terror. The muscles of her face were hideously convulsed, she shook from head to foot; the soul seemed struggling and shuddering within the house of flesh. It was a horrible sight, and Clarke rushed forward, as she fell shrieking to the floor.⁴

Three days later Raymond took Clarke to Mary’s bedside. She was lying wide-awake, rolling her head from side to side, and grinning vacantly.

“Yes,” the doctor said, still quite cool, “it is a great pity; she is a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be helped; and, after all, she has seen the Great God Pan.”⁵

Years pass, and Clarke’s horror at what happened to Mary fades, and his taste for the outré and the Fortean returns. Clarke reads for the tenth time an account about a young girl, “Helen V.,” who was adopted by a family in a small village on the border of Wales. Helen liked to walk in the woods, but one day a young boy saw her playing on the grass with a “strange naked man.”⁶ The boy ran home screaming for his parents, and for days afterward he would wake in the night, crying “the man in the woods! Father! Father!”⁷His horror faded after three months, but then, when he saw the head of a satyr which had been dug from a Roman ruin, the boy went mad. Five years later Helen went walking into the woods with Rachel, a beautiful girl of her own age. After some of these excursions Rachel would return with a different manner, “languid and dreamy,” and one night she told her mother, “Why did you let me go into the forest with Helen?”⁸ One day Helen disappeared after walking in a meadow.

Sometime later Villiers of Waldham, a well-to-do young man and “practised explorer of such obscure mazes and byways of London life,”⁹ is accosted by a beggar who turns out to be Charles Herbert, one of Villiers’ college friends. Villiers, astonished, asks Herbert how he was reduced to beggary, and Herbert tells Villiers a story about how Herbert’s wife, Helen Vaughn, corrupted his soul. Later Villiers asks his friend Austin about Herbert and is told a story about how a man who had died of fear had been found outside of Herbert’s house. Austin mentions how those who saw Helen Vaughan described her as beautiful and repulsive and frightening. When Villiers visits the house he finds it to be “full of horror,” though not in any way he could articulate or define except that his body rebelled against being inside it. Villiers shows his friend Clarke a sketch which he had taken from the Herberts’ house. Clarke goes pale on seeing the sketch, thinking first that it is Mary and then later that it is frighteningly similar to Mary’s face, only with something new and evil added to it. Clarke advises Villiers to abandon the search for Helen. Later, Austin tells Clarke about a Mrs. Beaumont, fresh from South America and a favorite of London Society. Austin also tells Villiers about the death of his friend, the noted artist Arthur Meyrick, who died in Buenos Aires; Meyrick sent Austin a packet of sketches. The paintings are of dancing fauns and satyrs and “ægipans” (a goat-headed woodland spirit of Greek mythology) but one of the sketches, a woman’s face alone on a white page, is of Mrs. Herbert, a.k.a. Helen Vaughn. Then the suicides begin: wealthy and successful young men killing themselves, one after another, and all immediately after they have visited Mrs. Beaumont’s house. Villiers goes searching for information on Helen Vaughn and finds it, in some of the worst section of London. She appeared a few years ago and took up residence in a bad part of town:

I should be wrong in saying that she found her level in going to this particular quarter, or associating with these people, for from what I was told, I should think the worst den in London far too good for her. The person from whom I got my information, as you may suppose, no great Puritan, shuddered and grew sick in telling me of the nameless infamies which were laid to her charge.¹⁰

Villiers then confirmed that this woman was Helen Vaughn, a.k.a. Mrs. Beaumont, and further that she was providing evil entertainment for her “choicer guests.” Villiers tells Austin about Pan and shows Austin a length of hempen cord which he has purchased to put an end to Mrs. Beaumont: either she will hang herself or he will summon the police. Austin wants nothing to do with this, so Villiers visits Vaughn by himself. After Vaughn commits suicide a doctor tends to her, but her body melts and dissolves, and when the transformation is complete the doctor sees something which gives him “great horror and loathing of soul.”¹¹ Clarke writes to Raymond to tell him about the death of Helen Vaughn and about his trip to the forest where Rachel died, which was near a Roman ruin dedicated to “the great god Nodens...on account of the marriage which he saw beneath the shade.”¹² Raymond writes back to Clarke expressing his remorse for what he did to Mary and telling Clarke about how Helen Vaughn was Pan’s child, fathered on Mary that night, and that when Helen was “scarcely five years old I surprised it, not once or twice but several times with a playmate, you may guess of what kind,”¹³ forcing Raymond to send Helen away.

“The Great God Pan” is one of Machen’s best, most chilling works. It is not without some flaws. Machen’s style is not perfect in the story. His text is dense, less conversational and more descriptive. The story lacks the flow and momentum of more modern writers, such as M.R. James (see: “Canon Alberic’s Scrap Book,” “Count Magnus”). The influence of Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights is pronounced, and Machen suffers in comparison, as his style is not as precise or economical as Stevenson’s. But “The Great God Pan” is a fine example of why Machen was the dominant writer of supernatural horror of the fin-de-siècle, following Stevenson and preceding James and Algernon Blackwood, and why Machen’s name deserves mention with Robert W. Chambers (see: King in Yellow) and Ambrose Bierce (see: “The Damned Thing,” “The Death of Halpin Frayser”). Though not the wordsmith that James was, Machen often came up with phrases designed to deliver the most fright to the reader. His visual descriptions are good, and his dialogue is nicely modern and realistic.

It is in creating an atmosphere of horror that Machen is at his best. One of the major varieties of modern horror is cosmic horror, of the kind H.P. Lovecraft made famous in his “Cthulhu mythos” stories. The underlying idea of cosmic horror is that reality--true reality--is so terrifying that the human brain can’t deal with it, and that what humans perceive as reality is a delusion and/or our mental defense mechanisms at work. Even non-aficionados of horror are at least familiar with this concept thanks to Lovecraft’s work, which has become surprisingly widespread and has even been published in a Library of America edition. But Lovecraft was not the first to write this sort of horror. One major early author of cosmic horror was Lord Bulwer Lytton, especially in Zanoni. Robert W. Chambers, in The King in Yellow, did cosmic horror well. But Machen did it the best, better than Lovecraft, more subtly and with more style, something which Lovecraft himself acknowledged.

Machen sets out his premise and philosophy in the excellent first section of “The Great God Pan” and then uses the rest of the story to flesh out the philosophy and bring home the real horror of the premise. One significant difference between the way Lovecraft conveys cosmic horror and the way Machen does it is that Machen has few direct descriptions of the horror of Pan and of what makes Helen Vaughn so frightening. Machen concentrates on the effects and consequences of their evil, so that the reader becomes frightened by seeing what Pan and Helen do to others. But the specifics are left vague–the story is full of deliberate, careful omissions and gaps–and this ambiguity adds to the fright. Moreover, Machen manages a level of realism which Lovecraft never achieved. The events in “The Great God Pan” take place over the space of years and involve a number of protagonists; by showing the reader a web of relations between the main characters and spacing out the chronology, the events and the characters take on a more heightened level of realism, a feeling of credibility and verisimilitude, than Lovecraft’s narrators usually managed. Before his unconvincing repentance in the final section of the story Doctor Raymond is as cold and frightening a mad scientist as exists in nineteenth century fiction. Lastly, “The Great God Pan” is as charged with sexuality, from Mary’s rape by Pan to Rachel’s post-coital, “languid and dreamy,” state after walking in the woods with Helen, to Helen whispering awful things in bed, as Dracula itself. This sexuality adds a compelling level of symbolism to the story and makes Helen one of the most sexual of the 1890s Fatal Women.

The moralities of Machen and Lovecraft are different in certain respects as well. Lovecraft was a creature of the twentieth century, and the Machen of “The Great God Pan” was very much a Victorian. So Lovecraft’s universe is careless of humanity if not hostile toward it, and human society is a delusion, and Lovecraft’s stories are about this awful state of affairs. Machen’s universe, his greater reality, is as terrible as Lovecraft’s, but the actions of creatures like Helen are still evil, which is a word that has no meaning in the stories of Lovecraft. And “The Great God Pan” ends with Helen being defeated and Doctor Raymond admitting that what he did to Mary was reprehensible, both writerly acts of sentiment which Lovecraft would have had little time for. Lovecraft took several things from Machen; it might reasonably be supposed that Lovecraft took not just the idea of cosmic horror from “The Great God Pan” but also the format of multiple documents, each a mini-story which combines to form the greater story, which is the format of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.”

Machen’s Pan is not the jolly satyr of Greek myth. The Pan of “The Great God Pan” is something which humans cannot look on and remain sane. Villiers describes Pan:

We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current...Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?¹⁴

Machen’s Pan is one of the foremost examples of the Victorian and Edwardian portrayal of Pan not as innocently lustful but as something that too often is dangerous to witness. “The liberations of Pan, seemingly, come at a high price, even for those who encounter them indirectly.”¹⁵

“The Great God Pan” also plays into the Victorians’ Fin-de-Siècle Unease, portraying “contemporary fears of degeneration, vivisection, and unethical medical practice.”¹⁶ Too, “the emergence of Welsh feminine evil in London is the Celtic equivalent of the appearance of the Romanian Count Dracula on the streets of the capital; this is reverse invasion, since it manifests as a kind of Welsh nationalist violence against London degeneracy.”¹⁷ In both Romantic and Gothic literature and thought, the rural areas of England and the “Celtic fringe [were seen as] zones of the weird, examples of an atavistic, irrational, primitive and child-like otherness out of step with modernity.”¹⁸ Some of the writers on this “Celtic fringe” responded to this dynamic by

writing back, challenging the very notion of such ontological boundaries between colonial Self and degenerate Other. Regional Gothic feeds on, even while challenging to the limit, the versions of historical progressivism emanating from cosmopolitan centres; if, in part, it endorses then, then it also operates as a warning that what has been lost is valuable, and that in losing it modernity has left its citizens open to invasions, reverse colonisations and ‘degeneration’.¹⁹

Machen, of course, was from the “Celtic fringe” (Monmouthshire, in Wales) and privileged geography over genealogy.

“The Great God Pan” flows out of the nineteenth-century “dangerous-science” genre that includes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “The Birthmark,” and Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Like these predecessor works, “The Great God Pan” articulates a vision of insidious destruction, in this case sexual. The female child fathered by Pan of a human mother is a consuming seductress, a femme fatale in the dark tradition of the lamia— not in its Keatsian manifestation, but in the horrific version of Stoker’s White Worm. In this we may rightly understand Machen’s work on one level as a Victorian cautionary tale, a tempering of scientific enthusiasm with the reminder that human moral and psychological capacity is not keeping up with technological achievement. Yet Machen’s choice of Pan as the avatar of this underlying reality— an avatar present only indirectly in the story, a frequent characteristic of Machen’s tales— points to the deepest concerns of much of Machen’s best fiction, for his choice of a pre-Christian deity, elemental in its significance and its consuming, disruptive power, is the token of Machen’s interest in exploring a dark world external and prior to the human. Unlike Hawthorne or Stevenson, unlike Le Fanu or Stoker, unlike the Freud-influenced horror writers of the early twentieth century, Machen eschewed the psychological for the myths and parables of destructive power and cosmic mystery.²⁰

“The Great God Pan” is excellent cosmic horror and one of the best horror stories of the 1890s.

Print: Arthur Machen and Aaron Worth, The Great God Pan and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford University, 2018.

¹ Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan,” The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light (Boston: Roberts Bros, 1894), 6.

² Machen, “The Great God Pan,” 8

³ Machen, “The Great God Pan,” 12.

⁴ Machen, “The Great God Pan,” 15.

⁵ Machen, “The Great God Pan,” 15.

⁶ Machen, “The Great God Pan,” 23.

⁷ Machen, “The Great God Pan,” 24.

⁸ Machen, “The Great God Pan,” 27.

⁹ Machen, “The Great God Pan,” 31.

¹⁰ Machen, “The Great God Pan,” 88.

¹¹ Machen, “The Great God Pan,” 101.

¹² Machen, “The Great God Pan,” 106.

¹³ Machen, “The Great God Pan,” 109.

¹⁴ Machen, "The Great God Pan,” 92-93.

¹⁵ William Hughes, The Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 197.

¹⁶ Hughes, The Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature, 178.

¹⁷ Jarlath Killeen, History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825-1914 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 111.

¹⁸ Killeen, Gothic Literature 1825-1914, 109-110.

¹⁹ Killeen, Gothic Literature 1825-1914, 110.

²⁰ Jack G. Voller, “Arthur Machen (1863-1947),” in Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller, and Frederick S. Frank, ed., Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide (Westport, Ct: Greenwood Press, 2002), 279.