“The Great God Pan” (1894)

Arthur Machen’s long story involves more or less, or maybe not really, the mythical Greek half-goat “god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, rustic music and impromptus, and companion of the nymphs” (Wikipedia). Among other things it set off a trend in horror stories that lasted 20 or 30 years and still recurs today, the gods among us, and nasty. It is thoroughly rooted in a 19th-century literary style I think of as “furniture-moving,” also seen in numerous H.P. Lovecraft stories, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and arguably even William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. In the furniture-moving narrative, most of the themes occur at the edges of the action, with large blocks of narrative devoted to developing them indirectly (“showing”), one at a time. The narrative hangs back a little too much for me here, nibbling at the edges instead of going to the heart. It starts in the first of eight sections with an experiment that drives a woman named Mary mad and results in her pregnancy by the randy ancient god. Mary—a bold choice of name. Each section details some further aspect of the presence of this god on Earth with a cast of rotating peripheral characters and various mysteries and bizarre events associated with them. They tend to be worried men of science and/or authorities attempting to piece together the clues of some enormous and unspeakable horror™. It’s a little confusing, we don’t learn key details until late and are left to surmise a lot of the direct action from the wreckage left behind. At one point, for example, various pleasure-loving aristocrats begin committing suicide in a notably gruesome way. For all of Machen’s pains to keep it subtle the reveal at the end finally spells out the horror specifically. The ever-intriguing mystic and Welsh writer Arthur Machen was attacked as vulgar, verging on blasphemous, to put sex with a god so blatantly into this story. In many ways it’s not that different from vampire stories as the specific miscreant here—known variously (and confusingly) as Helen Vaughan, Mrs. Herbert, and Mrs. Beaumont—basically rampages British society terrifying people and killing them by fear. The objection, in late Victorian terms, was that Pan, even with his Greek origins predating Christianity, is somehow a pagan functionary of the biblical Satan, who has his own goat connections in European medievalism. I associate Pan more with libertines and healthy lustful sexuality, but apparently (and not at all surprisingly) healthy lustful sexuality was considered sinful and evil in 1894. So, for the most part, I’m a little indifferent to the lengthy verbose horror exercises in Machen’s tale. He would get much better by my lights—see “The White People” from 10 years later. But he may be best known for “Pan.” H.P. Lovecraft notably loved this story and in some ways it can produce the same mysterious effect on me as Lovecraft’s stories—often boring as I read, requiring patience I don’t always have, but then penetrating this apathy somehow to produce a sense of unease, sometimes long after reading. I might not be as willing to call “The Great God Pan” essential, as some others do, but yeah, maybe you should get to it—and Machen—sooner rather than later.

Foundations of Fear, ed. David G. Hartwell
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