The Great God Pan is an 1894 horror and fantasy novella by the 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 newspaper The Whirlwind in 1890. Machen later extended The Great God Pan and it was published as a book alongside another story, "The Inmost Light", in 1894. The novella begins with an experiment to allow a teenager named Mary to see the supernatural world. This is followed by an account of a series of mysterious happenings and deaths over many years surrounding a woman named Helen Vaughan.
On publication, it was widely denounced by the press as degenerate and horrific because of its implied sexual content, and the novella hurt Machen's reputation as an author. Beginning in the 1920s, Machen's work was critically re-evaluated and The Great God Pan has since garnered a reputation as a classic of horror. Literary critics have noted the influence of other nineteenth-century authors on The Great God Pan and offered differing opinions on whether or not it can be considered an example of Gothic fiction or science fiction. The novella influenced the work of horror writers such as Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King, and has been adapted for the stage twice.
Plot In mid-19th century Wales, Mr. Clarke, a businessman from London, agrees to witness an experiment performed by his friend, Dr. Raymond. Raymond is to perform minor brain surgery on his ward, Mary, who is about seventeen. He believes the surgery will open her mind to the spiritual world, an experience he notes the ancients called "seeing the great god Pan". She awakens from the operation awed and terrified but quickly becomes "a hopeless idiot".
Twenty-three years later, Clarke is writing a book entitled Memoirs to Prove the Existence of the Devil. He recounts a story he has been told of a beautiful but sinister girl named Helen V., reportedly an orphan, who, at age 12, had been sent by a distant relative to live with a family in a Welsh village. She spent much of her time in the woods near her house, and sometimes took other children on her prolonged rambles. One day, a young boy stumbled across Helen "playing on the grass with a 'strange naked man'". The boy became hysterical and later, after seeing a Roman statue of a satyr's head, was left with a permanent intellectual disability. Helen later formed an unusually close friendship with a neighbour, Rachel, whom she led several times into the woods. On one occasion Rachel returned home distraught and half-naked. She told her mother what happened in the forest, but Clarke finds it too monstrous to reveal. Rachel subsequently died a "terrible death".
Clarke's acquaintance, Mr Villiers, happens across his old friend Herbert, who has become a vagrant since they last met. When asked how he has fallen so low, Herbert replies that he has been "corrupted body and soul" by his wife, Helen Vaughan, who fled with his fortune. Villiers's friend Austin later tells him that a well-to-do gentleman had died of fright after seeing something in Herbert and Helen's home. Herbert is later found dead. Clarke connects Helen Vaughan with Helen V. and advises Villiers to drop the matter for his own happiness.
Villiers and Austin learn that Helen was in Buenos Aires with Austin's friend, the painter Arthur Meyrick, who has died mysteriously. She returns to London under the pseudonym Mrs. Beaumont and engages in acts worse than "the dread and horror of death itself". Soon afterwards, a series of rich, carefree gentlemen in the city commit suicide. The last person known to have been in the presence of each of them was Mrs. Beaumont. Villiers learns Mrs. Beaumont's true identity, and he and Clarke, bringing a noose, confront Helen in her house. They tell her she must hang herself or they will expose her. Helen does so and starts transforming between human and beast, male and female, dividing and reuniting, before turning into a jelly-like substance and finally dying.
Clarke writes to Dr. Raymond, telling him of his visit to the Welsh village where Helen had lived. In a nearby museum he saw the remains of a pillar honouring the Celtic god Nodens. The Latin inscription on the pillar reads, "To the great god Nodens (the god of the Great Deep or Abyss), Flavius Senilis has erected this pillar on account of the marriage which he saw beneath the shade." He writes that historians are puzzled as to what the inscription refers to. Raymond replies, revealing that Helen was the child of Mary, who died shortly after her daughter's birth. Mary became pregnant after his experiment caused her to see the god Pan.
Background
Machen's lifelong fascination with occultism began after he read an article on alchemy in an edition of Charles Dickens's periodical Household Words belonging to his father, a clergyman. In his 1922 autobiography, Far Off Things, Machen wrote that The Great God Pan was inspired by the times he visited the Usk, a Welsh river, and the Welsh towns of Caerleon on the Usk and Caerwent as a boy; all of these places had been settled by the Romans. He wrote that "strange relics" were frequently found at Caerwent from the ruined temple of "Nodens, god of the depths".
In writing the novella, he tried to "pass on the vague, indefinable sense of awe and mystery and terror that [he] had received" while visiting those ruins. Machen felt that he had "transliterated [the feeling] clumsily" in The Great God Pan, elaborating: "I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil; again, I say, one dreams with fire and works in clay." Dennis Denisoff said that Machen's decision to make Helen Vaughan the child of a Welsh woman and a pagan figure "parallels Machen's own authorial self-identity as one arising from not only his Welsh ancestry but also pagan myth."
What is now the first chapter of the novella was published in 1890 in a magazine called The Whirlwind, while what is now the third chapter of the book was published in the same magazine the following year as a standalone short story called "The City of Resurrections". Machen only viewed the two works as connected after they were finished. Once he decided the two stories were connected, Machen wrote the rest of The Great God Pan in a single evening save for its final chapter. Machen did not think of an ending for the tale for months, and in that time believed that the novella would remain unfinished forever. The last chapter was completed in June 1891. Machen sent the novella to the publisher Blackwood, who rejected it, deeming it a clever story that "shrink[s] ... from the central idea". It was accepted by John Lane and published in 1894. When published as a book, The Great God Pan was accompanied by another Machen tale, "The Inmost Light", which also features a mad scientist and elements of science fiction. The book's cover was illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley.
Analysis Genre Joe Sommerlad of The Independent views The Great God Pan as a work of Gothic horror. According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the story is "typical of Victorian [science fiction] horror at about the time [science fiction] was beginning to shed its Gothic elements into a separate Horror/fantasy genre". Aaron Worth writes that The Great God Pan superficially resembles science fiction due to its depiction of Dr. Raymond as a mad scientist, but it cannot be seen as an example of the genre as it posits that occultism is superior to science. The novella has been classified as Decadent literature as well, as it features hallmarks of the genre such as "occultism, paganism, non-mainstream eroticism, sexual diversity, the femme fatale, violent and strange deaths, and the simultaneous investment in and disavowal of bourgeois identities". Pan has also been described as fantasy literature and as a cautionary tale against men mistreating women the way that Raymond mistreated Mary.
Influences
Pan was an ancient Greek god, primarily worshipped in Arcadia, who was associated with shepherds and their flocks and with nature. He was believed to lurk in caves, mountains, and other lonely, isolated locations. In some stories, he inflicted his enemies with sudden terror (i.e., panic). The phrase, "the great God Pan" comes from an ancient Greek folktale recorded in Plutarch's De defectu oraculorum (On the Decline of Oracles), which claims that a Greek sailor near the island of Paxi during the reign of Emperor Tiberius (ruled 14–37 AD) heard a voice cry out, "When you are arrived at Palodes, take care to make it known that the great God Pan is dead."Plutarch, Moralia, De defectu oraculorum 17 Early Christian commentaries suggested that this event occurred at the same time as the death of Christ and that the "death" of Pan represented the transition from a pagan to a Christian world.
This story had particular resonance with Victorian literary audiences. In 1844, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote her poem "The Dead Pan", an adaption of Plutarch's story which insisted that proper Christian literature should abandon Greek mythology, with each stanza ending in the words "Pan, Pan is dead." As a member of the Decadent movement, Machen sought to subvert traditional themes and transgress literary boundaries, an agenda which made Pan a particularly appealing figure. The title of The Great God Pan appears to have been specifically derived from Browning's later poem "A Musical Instrument" (1862), in which the first line of every stanza ends with the words "the great god Pan". Machen's use of Pan in the novella may have also been influenced by Robert Louis Stevenson's essay "Pan's Pipes" (1878) and Algernon Charles Swinburne's poem "A Nympholept" (1894), in which Pan is portrayed as the "emblem of the delicious combination of ecstasy and terror".
In a review of the novella for Black Gate, Matthew David Surridge hypothesized that Machen took inspiration from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) in his portrayal of Dr. Raymond as a mad scientist akin to Victor Frankenstein. The works of Robert Louis Stevenson, especially his 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, were among Machen's most significant influences when writing The Great God Pan. John Gawsworth saw Machen's novella as reminiscent of the horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Sheridan Le Fanu. Aaron Worth noted similitude between the death of Helen Vaughan and the theories of alchemist Thomas Vaughan, who is the character's namesake, and Helen's disintegration recalls the alchemical concept of the prima materia. John C. Tibbetts observes similarities between Helen Vaughan and Ayesha, the sexually liberated demonic priestess from H. Rider Haggard's She: A History of Adventure (1886). Machen wrote that several critics felt that Joris-Karl Huysmans's novels À rebours (1884) and Là-bas (1891) had inspired The Great God Pan, though he did not read either book until after Pan was published. Upon reading the two novels, Machen concluded that "my critics had not read them either".
Religious themes
The novella is characteristic of a late nineteenth-century interest in paganism in general and Pan in particular that is found in the works of Florence Farr and Kenneth Grahame. According to the British scholar of modern literature Roger Luckhurst, Raymond expresses a typical Neoplatonist view of reality in which the true object of study is the revelation of a "higher, hidden spiritual world". He is therefore "an occultist rather than a materialist scientist". Neoplatonism is also commonly regarded as the last school of pagan philosophy and Raymond's views therefore relate back to the recurring theme of the death of Pan.