THE GREATEST HORROR STORY EVER TOLD BY SHAWN MACKEY

7/3/2022

I was introduced to Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan in HP Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” This was right after reading Lovecraft’s complete works, and in search for more weird fiction, I figured a good place to get recommendations was one of the genre’s best authors. I highly recommend the essay. Everything mentioned in it is worth reading.

It wasn’t just Lovecraft’s high praise for the story that interested me. As a lover of Greek Mythology and the horror genre, it sounded like an intriguing combination of the two. Here’s Lovecraft’s own words regarding the author: “Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen; author of some dozen tales long and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness.” Nearly all of Lovecraft’s works capture a similar “cosmic fear” and “hidden horror” presented in Machen’s stories, and though they certainly come close to its level, nothing compares to the terrifying implications hinted at in the Great God Pan.

The story opens through the perspective of a man named Clarke called upon by an old friend named Raymond to witness an experiment. This experiment requires “a slight lesion in the gray matter” so minor it would “escape the attention of ninety-nine brain specialists out of a hundred.” The technical details are waved away by Raymond, who explains to Clarke that so-called modern breakthroughs had already been realized by Raymond himself a decade prior. Though it’s glossed over, it’s important to note that means he’s only slightly ahead of the curve. He warms a vial of green liquid that let’s off an earthy smell and causes Clarke to enter a trance, bringing to mind more of an occult ritual than scientific enterprise.

This is made even more apparent with the purpose of the experiment. With “a trifling rearrangement of certain cells” a whole new world of perception opens up. In Raymond’s words: “a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents and islands, and great oceans in which no ship has sailed (to my belief) since a Man first lifted up his eyes and beheld the sun, and the stars of heaven, and the quiet earth beneath.” Despite the pseudo-science garbed in romantic language, this brings to mind the biblical tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However, this fruit is almost a reversal of that to a more primitive state, when man knew no good or evil; a sort of return to the perceptual innocence of Eden. It does raise some interesting questions if such a procedure was possible: Did our early ancestors see the world differently than us? Did we evolve to ignore trans-dimensional entities? It’s almost like an evolutionary spin on the Catholic doctrine on the Fall of Man. Rather than sin, it was more of a survival mechanism, meaning matters of spirit and piety are vestiges of necessary instincts to appease these beings. Whatever the scientific or theological implications of the somewhat silly theory, the concept at least stirs the imagination.

The experiment is performed on a young woman named Mary wearing all white. Clarke looks away for a few moments while Raymond performs the surgery and conveniently looks back just as a bandage is finished being bound to her head. Shortly after, Mary wakes up and blissfully reaches out to something unseen by Clarke, only for her to erupt into a fit of terror before passing out. The experiment was a success, according to Raymond. Mary had gazed into true realm and seen the Great God Pan. The symbolism between the pure, virginal Mary and the devil-horned Pan is immediately obvious.

Much time passes and the rationally minded Clarke cannot forget the incident or the terror of Mary’s face, finding himself attending fraudulent séances and other hokey occult gatherings in the hope of convincing himself the experiment was just an elaborate hoax. He puts together a compilation of second-hand stories called “Memoirs to prove the devil exists” and hides it from his friends out of shame, not wanting to look irrational or superstitious. During his search for odd accounts of the supernatural, Clarke comes across a story about a girl named Helen, who recently arrived at a rural village. One day, a farmer is startled when his young son flees from the woods in fear, claiming to have seen a strange naked man with Helen. The event drives the boy into irrecoverable insanity. Six years later, Helen is involved in another strange event with a girl named Rachel. The two are close friends. One day, Rachel followed Helen into the woods. She later returns to her room with her clothes torn, cursing her parents for letting her go with Helen. However, Rachel returns to the woods by some compulsion and is never seen again.

The story moves away from Clarke’s perspective to another man from London, yet Helen remains the focus. Using primarily second-hand accounts proves to be one of the novel’s strongest points. Not only does it provide an air of mystery, but allows it to tell far more than it could from merely showing due to the method of the telling. Even at the end, despite being the focus, Helen never directly interacts with the chapter’s current point of view as she mingles and corrupts a decadent London high society.

To summarize, her interactions lead to the death of many men of supposedly good reputation. However, like Clarke’s memoirs, they all have their secrets, only some of them revealed directly to the main characters, such as Meyrick’s grotesque drawings of satyrs, fauns, and aegipan that appear lifelike. Among these sketches is a portrait of Helen, who is described as simultaneously repulsive and enchanting, frequently compared to a devilish statue. At this point, it’s easy to connect Helen to Mary and Pan. Though it isn’t told until the end, Helen’s age matches the time her mother saw Pan. The method of the impregnation is never explicitly stated. Perhaps it was the terror Mary experienced at the sight of Pan that impregnated her. It would be appropriate given the god’s notoriety for causing blind panic to soldiers amidst war, said to cause even brave men to flee from battle. After all, the word panic comes from Pan. Why wouldn’t his spawn be the product of a mind-shattering scare? It’s only a theory; the impregnation of a supernatural being likely wouldn’t be natural.

Helen never directly causes the death of her many victims. She seduces and ruins men like a fem fatale from a noir movie, but the reality is her role is clearly that of a priestess inducting decadent aristocrats into the mysteries of Pan. This is where the brilliance of the second-hand accounts comes in. One of Helen’s former associates is found with his neck tied to a noose by a servant. This is only one of a string of suicides of perfectly sane men. Like the young boy in Helen’s youth, the natural implication is that they were drawn into irrecoverable madness by the woman. This is clearly the case, but due to the surrounding vague circumstances, much could have been omitted for the sake of decency. Not just by Machen, but by the characters themselves. Perhaps the servant left out that his employer was discovered not only with his neck in a noose, but nude. Accounts of autoerotic asphyxiation go back further than the writing of The Great God Pan. Upon the story’s publication, the novel was denounced for its sexual implications, hurting Machen’s reputation enough that his writings became somewhat obscured. One of the stories defenders was Oscar Wilde, author The Portrait of Dorian Grey, which depicts similar themes of aristocratic decadence and was likely well-aware of Machen’s real-life comparisons if they were present. Considering the frequency of the accusations and parodies attempting to label Machen as a decadent artist, it comes across more of a means of discrediting and turning potential readers away than mere mockery. The London elite likely didn’t appreciate a story that made them turn a mirror on their own secret lives.

If the story merely meant to bring to mind sexual acts that were never spoken of outside whisperings, it would deserve a fate of obscurity. Along with its occasional comparisons of Pan to the devil, the Great God Pan represents change in the spiritual paradigm. Like the mad scientist Raymond, Machen, who was a member of occult circles, sensed change coming to Victorian London. Just as GK Chesterton called the proclamation: “The Great God Pan is dead!” the end of the paganry and the ushering of the Christian era, Machen’s novel proclaims “The Great God Pan has arisen!” with a sense of utter dread and despair. Helen is its prophetess. Even when she is reduced to a shape-shifting thing grasping at some sort of form in its death throes, only when she is reduced to goo is Helen truly revealed. The villain in the Great God Pan is akin to the Neo-Platonic concept of matter, which was devoid of form and idea, opposite of the eternally radiant and ever-flowing Good. As a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Machen would’ve been familiar with Neo-Platonic thought due to their theurgical practices, which had deeply influenced Western occult.

This is not to say the story is strictly Christianity versus paganism or good versus evil. That’s only a one layer. At its core, The Great God Pan announces the failure of promises made by the Enlightenment and modernity. Mankind stumbled through the vast darkness with the dim candle of reason, no better off than when they cast off the so-called shackles of religion and superstition for science and rationality. Any attempts to understand the evil presented in the story will inevitably lead to madness because that candle cannot cast its light on the void. The entity is called Pan, yet that’s only a mask. Much like the statue of Pan and Helen’s uncanny human visage, it’s only a veil over an enduring principle: life, with all its savagery and brutality laid utterly bare, is closer to eternal darkness than the light of the Good. Not only the fear of death, but eradication in the spiritual sense is ever present and the curse of matter. The further removed we are from the light of the Good, the closer we come to being undone.

Its why there’s an apocalyptic atmosphere to the story. The Victorian Age was coming to a close. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to the reader. Though not explicitly stated, it was obviously dreadful to the author. And why wouldn’t it? Whatever Machen stood for, it was the time period he lived in. To him, it was existence.

The Great God Pan is worthy in the company of horror classics such as Frankenstein and Dracula just based on its influence on subsequent authors in the genre. Though Helen lacks the magnetism of Dracula and the story lacks the dramatic punch of Frankenstein, its atmosphere more than makes up for it. The death of Helen may seem anti-climactic because it’s essentially meaningless. The evil in The Great God Pan no longer needs a bodily form. The essence of her message would soon spread through all mankind, best expressed in the inscription Clarke writes into his memoirs: “ET DIABOLUS INCARNATE EST. ET HOMO FACTUS EST.” which roughly translates: “And the devil was made incarnate. And he was made man.”

And this is why The Great God Pan deeply changed the way I viewed the horror genre. Modern works don’t focus on spiritual malaise and tend to either ignore or depict religious and spiritual practices as insane or evil. It’s why many don’t stick to your soul like Machen’s writings. He depicted evil as not only existing, but something simultaneously alien and intrinsic to mankind.

This World of Love and Strife
by Shawn Mackey

It is the duty of the Vanguard to protect the world from unseen demonic forces.
But what if the organization falls to corruption? Their reformation is up to Cato, a disgraced former member who discovers many of the elite using their powerful positions and martial skills for ill-gotten gains rather than fulfilling their true purpose: aiding mankind in a secret war against their eternal foe.

Aldous is a Vanguard who fell from grace after being stricken with vampirism by a mysterious figure known as the White Lady. His increasingly vile appetites are tolerated because his knowledge as an alchemist is vital in the Vanguard's battle against the demons. When those desires lead to the abduction of the woman Cato loves, Cato wages a one-man war against Aldous and his werewolf henchmen.

SHAWN MACKEY

Bio

Living in New Jersey for all his life, Shawn Mackey has been writing since childhood. Though his favorite genre is horror, he has a deep appreciation for fantasy influenced by mythology and science fiction that questions the modern world and its future.

Websites

https://mackeywriting.wordpress.com/
https://www.dxvaros.com/this-world-of-love-and-strife-presales