Name: The Great God Pan
Rating: 3.411764705882353 (17 reviews)
ISBN: 9781688253049

Arthur Machen

The Great God Pan is a horror and fantasy novella by Welsh writer Arthur Machen. Machen was inspired to write The Great God Pan by his experiences at the ruins of a pagan temple in Wales. What would become the first chapter of the novella was published in the magazine The Whirlwind in 1890.

The Great God Pan

First published in 1894, this is Machen's first, and greatest, opus of Decadence and Horror. With his singular eye for the bizarre and macabre, Machen unfurls this tale of a young girl cursed by her supernatural parentage to become a creature of shape-shifting, polysexual, demi-human of evil. A classic of fin-de-siecle erotic malevolence.

Tim Pendry

Arthur Machen created a minor masterpiece of decadent horror with 'The Great God Pan' in 1890 (expanded for publication in 1894). Its appeal lies in part in its construction. The narrative is only resolved by pulling together what appear to be a series of disconnected tales into a coherent whole. The core of the tale is a woman who is the offspring of a demonic force (the chaotics of the Great God Pan) and a young woman who is the subject of a highly unethical scientific experiment by one of the 'gentlemen' of the story aimed at connecting with the occult underpinnings of reality. Firmly set in the upper class of London society, the protagonists are leisured young gentlemen experimenting with experience and being brought low - in several cases to suicide - by the indirect influence of the pagan god of the chaotic (Pan) and directly by his avatar, Helen Vaughan. The obvious comment is that the story is an expression of a misogynistic fear of women often found in symbolist and decadent art and literature at the end of the nineteenth century. While reading it, I thought it might be a good subject for a feminist re-envisioning from the point of view of Helen, the villainess of the story. I understand that this was done by Rosanne Rabinowitz about five years ago. This misogyny is undeniably present but more important is a much greater fear of the unstable nature of reality that predates Lovecraft and undoubtedly influenced him. A cultural and sexual fear of unbridled female lust and depravity thus merges with uncertainty about what underlies the real to create a very disturbing story although it would be infinitely more disturbing to the late Victorians who read it than it is to us. It is a tale of insidious and manipulative evil (though we are unlikely to share the assumptions behind the designation today) with a ground-breaking suggestion of gender fluidity in the resolution. Chaos is the breaking down of order and that includes sex and gender. The implication throughout is that the order that needs to be preserved is a material one. It is the Great God Pan that exists lurking in the shadows and not the Christian God. Is this one of the first manifestations of dark materialism? Machen pulls together late Victorian anxieties about reality, mental stability and sexuality with a conservative message ultimately derived from Faust that it is best for scientists to draw a red line in their investigations of the material world to avoid its penetration by chaos and evil. Evil is eventually banished but not by scientific means. In fact this is the weak link in the book since it is not entirely clear how it is done so easily. Evil seems to be susceptible to social shame which strikes this reader as more implausible than that it exists as demonic reproduction. The book has to be seen in its context - a revival of interest in paganism and in Pan as representative of a spirit that was extremely attractive to young libertarians chafing under the burden of a fairly rigid social structure. Upper class homosexuals in particular constructed an ideology of paganism that referenced back their public school reading of the permissibility of forbidden ephebophiliac love in Hellenic literature that was otherwise generally admired as providing exemplars for virtue. Pan is thus the necessary source of hidden evil creating the red line that was required in the reading of the Classics which were accounted essential to the self worth and virtue of the English upper class. Women too must not challenge the established order of things. Whereas one worships God by going to Church (no longer deemed necessary by young urban aristocrats and intellectuals), one avoids being destroyed by Pan by not doing things (notably asking too many questions) rather than doing things. It is quite definitely a classic of supernatural fiction and has the same narrative feel of tales such as 'Jekyll and Hyde' (1886) and 'Dorian Gray' (1890), also stories that tell of breaches in the natural order with dire consequences. Their popularity alone is instructive. Late Victorians were experimenting with ideas of transgression without wanting actual transgressions to affect the structure on which they depended. We might call these novels attempts at confirming boundaries by exploring what lay behind them and then warning us off. Both 'Jekyll and Hyde' and 'Great God Pan' are particularly about scientific boundary crossing - what might be regarded as going where only God has been. Darwin's 'Origin of Species' was only a third of a century past. Clearly Victorians remained nervous of what the death of God might mean. Replacing the pre-Darwinian God with the pagan Pan as devil allowed late Victorians to have their cake and eat it. Science could replace God in terms of structuring the material world but could also be contrasted with the retention of evil as the place where men breached moral boundaries. Although treated in cavalier terms in the story, the initial scientific experiment that sets the story in motion is morally suspect not only on the grounds of its attempt to look behind the veil of material reality but also in its treatment of a young woman, Mary, who is treated as an object. Moral conservatism thus involves not only not asking too many questions but also showing due regard to persons as persons, especially those in a state of dependency. Very conservatively, English gentlemen are subtly reminded that their inferiors are not objects or slaves. The story caused a lot of negative comment on publication as dissolute and degenerate. In fact, it is highly moral, a stuffed Victorian shirt covered in a great deal of lace. Its style appears a-moral but its content is quite the opposite.

The Great God Pan

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