Years ago, the Arthur Machen Society published an essay by me, Dale Nelson, in their journal
Avallaunius, the Spring 1991 issue, called "Clarke's Dream in 'The Great God Pan': Two Classical Allusions" (pp. 19-24). I don't suppose it's easy to come by, so I'm going to share here some of what I reported there for the interest (perhaps) and discussion (maybe) of Eldritch Dark folk.
The three Machen stories -- "The Experiment" in "The Great God Pan," "The Inmost Light," and "The Novel of the White Powder" -- are about the horror of the violation of the human being. The violation is profound. The human being, we've seen, in a formulation familiar to Machen, is triune, made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), the Trinity. If the divine nature in the human being is violated, that's, from this point of view, a dreadful thing indeed.
With that in the back of our minds, let's look again at "The Experiment." What do you make of the cry, in Clarke's dream: "
Let us go hence"?
It may seem obscure, but I wonder if it was obscure to the readers Machen had in mind, that is, people who had grown up with books in the 19th century.
Machen's contemporary John Buchan, the famous thriller writer, referred to Sir Walter Scott's varying her reading of the Bible with the writing of the Roman historian Josephus, "that portentous author whom few Scottish children in older days escaped" (Buchan,
Sir Walter Scott, 1932, pp. 29-30).
Flavius Josephus was the son of a Jewish priest, but had opposed the Jewish revolt against Rome in AD 66. He became an interpreter on behalf of the emperor's son during the siege of Jerusalem. The William Whiston translation (1736) seems to have remained in print ever after its original publication. It's still in print. A children's version has been reprinted in recent years.
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It's likely enough that there was a copy of the Whiston translation in the rectory in which Machen grew up. He may have heard his pastor father refer to it and browsed in it himself. Coleridge thought about writing an epic poem on the subject (see his letter to Hugh J. Rose of 25 Sept. 1816). De Quincey alluded to Josephus in the 1856 version of
Confessions of an English Opium Eater. They didn't feel that they had to explain their mentions of Josephus.
Josephus was particularly noted for his account of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, under the emperor Vespasian's son Titus. Josephus describes strange phenomena leading up to the catastrophe -- armored warriors in the sky, etc. (This phenomenon as a portent of calamitous war was once widely accepted; cf. Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar, etc.) But here's the vital passage. "At that feast which we call Pentecost, as the priests were going into the inner [court of the] temple, as their custom was, to perform their sacred ministrations, they said, that, in the first place, they felt a quaking, and heard a great noise, and after that they heard a sound as of a great multitude, saying '
Let us remove hence.'"
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So reads the Whiston translation.
I suppose that Machen was recalling this passage of Josephus when he wrote "The Great God Pan," & that he could assume that the allusion would affect his readers. They might not, perhaps, remember just where or when they had heard something like that before.
Josephus doesn't specifically interpret "Let us remove hence." He might have understood them as a supernatural warning to the inhabitants of the city of Jerusalem to flee if they could.
But the voice was heard as the priests were in, or about the enter, the most sacred precinct of the Temple. It seems likely that the Voice was that of the Divine Presence Itself, preparing to depart from the most sacred place. "Us" could suggest the royal plural. To a Christian reader, it suggests the Trinity. (See Georges A. Barrois,
The Face of Christ in the New Testament, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1974, p. 162.)
So Clarke's dream evidently recalls Josephus. Remember how Machen described it -- when the presence of Pan became manifested, "in that moment, the sacrament of body and soul was dissolved, and a voice seemed to cry, 'Let us go hence', and then the darkness of darkness beyond the stars, the darkness of everlasting."
Nothing more is said of Clarke's dream. I think readers pick up the first part, the terrible presence of Pan, and I will write more about that before long, I expect. But this sentence by Machen -- perhaps often not really pondered -- may be a key to understanding not only "The Experiment" in "The Great God Pan," but the other two Machen stories at hand.
Remember that, after this catastrophe, Mary is left a "hopeless idiot." The body of the baptized Christian is "the Temple of the Holy Spirit" (1 Corinthians 6:15-20), but now she is a ruin -- a ruin, we might suggest, like the Temple after the Divine Presence departed and the structure was demolished by the Romans.
(c) 2019 DN