Book Review; The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

Machen, Arthur. The Greqt God Pan. Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kemp and Company Inc., 1916

     Pan was a minor Greek deity. In the form of a satyr, he represented nature, lust, and fear. Pan’s name itself is the root of the word “panic”. He has emerged from time to time in various eras of Western history. The Christians turned Pan, with goat horns and legs, into Satan or the Devil. Renaissance painters rediscovered his sexual ways as they mined Pagan myth for new subject matter. Some sectors of the counter-culture movements of the 1960s and 1970s embraced the old god with Neo-Pagans making Pan a representative of the Horned God and Satanists embracing his image. Pan also played a role in Tom Robbins’ lust-for-life novel Jitterbug Perfume. The occult and esoteric movements of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries took interest in him too. This is where Arthur Machen’s novella The Great God Pan enters the picture.

     By the 1890s, the dawn of modernism had begun. Great Britain was emerging from the Victorian era, possibly the most sexually repressed time in European history. The Industrial Revolution produced more wealth than any society had ever seen before and as material comfort levels grew, so did leisure time and the desire to explore alternative ideas. The field of psychology was tapping into the strange world of the human unconscious, people began undoing old ways of life and experimenting with the new, and a renewed interest in nature took hold in response to the ugliness of factories and Darwin’s fledgling theory of biological evolution. The Welsh bohemian occultist Arthur Machen easily became a part of this milieu.

     The Great God Pan tells the story of an exotic woman who emerges into London’s socialite scene. Helen Vaughan is a beautifully enchanting femme fatale who seems to fascinate every man she meets. At least that is what we are told; the narrative shifts from Clark, an author writing a book on the history of evil to Villiers, a nicely-dressed gourmand who tries to learn who she really is. A couple other story tellers take up the narrative along the way. Villiers first learns of her when he meets a friend from his younger years; the man is homeless and poor. It turns out he had married Helen Vaughan but she took all his money and abandoned him to die. As Villiers pursues her, he finds a string of corpses. One man after another dies either from being scared to death or suicide. Each one had spent time in private with her and each one saw the face of Pan while they were alone. The old relationship between eros and thanatos gets expressed here yet again. Those with a talent for reading between the lines will fully understand what went on.

     Machen’s story is a great example of narrative technique. The language flows evenly and lightly like flutes playing in a gentle breeze. The pursuit of Helen Vaughan and her secrets work as a gentle hook that grabs the reader and leads them along effortlessly. The building of suspense puts Machen almost in league with Alfred Hitchcock and Dashiell Hammet (but not quite). When writing this kind of book an author can easily err by revealing too much or, contrarily, not saying enough to make the story interesting; Machen comes close to the latter but does not actually fail. His is a prose of subtlety; there are no elaborately detailed monsters or sadistic indulgences in gratuitous gore. Nothing is in your face. The horror is reserved for those with a sensitive enough mind to feel the eerie moods and enough imagination to engage with the quiet terror of Helen Vaughan’s victims. Only an elite few with a certain type of maturity will have the sensibilities to appreciate the deeper emotions of this book.

     The end of the Victorian era in England saw a time when sexuality began to come out of its hiding places, into the public eye. With that debut came a certain degree of anxiety. Another paradigm shift in the collective human psyche had begun as modernism took hold. It was time for Pan to make another appearance. Arthur Machen was there to bring literary form to the Pagan Horned God once again.