The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen
Welsh novelist and mystic Arthur Machen wrote The Great God Pan in the late 1800s. I originally met him through the incredibly unsettling short novel The White People, which is why I was impacted by this – regarded as a horror classic.
It is centred on themes found in his later writings, such as an occult world that exists in the background of this one and is both enigmatic and hidden but also somehow more real. The 1890 novella begins with a young woman willingly taking part in a dubious medical experiment carried out by a doctor determined to enable humanity to directly experience the mystical realm.
The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen
6 used from $4.30
Free shipping
Amazon.com
- Used Book in Good Condition
The novel opens with a research surgeon doing an experimental surgery on a girl’s brain in the hopes that it will let her see the world more accurately than human conditioning has taught her to. “Seeing the Great God Pan,” he refers to this as. The Greek god of nature is “Pan.” The experiment starts a chain of happenings that will last for years. As the plot develops, we meet additional characters who are dragged into a mystery in different ways. The puzzle pieces don’t fit together until the end. There is a ton of occult imagery, but the genius of the story is that the devilry is vague enough to work with almost any worldview. Simply said, it’s a terrifying encounter.
He claims to have discovered the part of the brain that blocks simple access to the spiritual world—what he refers to as “seeing the god Pan”—but oddly, he makes no comments on why nature would have thought it necessary to do so.
In order to bridge the “unthinkable chasm that yawns profoundly between two universes, the world of matter and the world of spirit,” he surgically changes the young woman’s brain. He has some measure of success. She appears to have a moment of mystical insight after waking up from anaesthesia, but the wonder soon vanishes and is rapidly replaced by horror; in his words, she is now forever relegated to the status of a “hopeless moron.”
It was published during a time when spiritualism, the idea of an afterlife, or other worlds was highly popular. There was a sense that there was more to life than just the material world—the world of the enlightenment and industrial capitalism. The Great God Pan is more appropriately classified as an occult than a spiritualist book. It does, however, make use of spiritualist terminology. Arthur Machen employs the metaphor of pulling away the curtain. You would discover entirely new vistas of reality if you could only pull back the curtain.
