Here, if anyone's interested, is a place to discuss these two classic horror stories. I believe that the essence of the horror is that each concerns the violation of the inmost, spiritual nature of man -- perpetrated, as it happens, not by magicians but by men of science upon women, men who fail to revere Man and who fail to cherish these women, one like a daughter, the other a wife.

I will probably try to show, eventually, that a passage about the Fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple under the Emperor Titus was likely in Machen's mind and supplies a key to the stories.

"The Experiment" is the first, and I would argue self-contained, chapter of "The Great God Pan." "The Great God Pan" and "The Inmost Light" appeared together in The House of Souls… which is, itself, an interesting title.

The stories may be read here:

[www.gutenberg.org]

[www.gutenberg.org]

But let's see if there's interest in discussing these two stories together.

The Great God Pan is a marvelous story, one of my most favourite ones.

I agree, Minicthulhu.

So far as I am aware as of now, the first chapter of "The Great God Pan" wasn't written, or ever published, as a complete story in itself -- or was it?; but I believe that the "experiment" of reading "The Experiment" as just that will be rewarding. It has, it seems to me, a sublime horror that most or all of the rest of the story doesn't attain, and it doesn't need the rest in order to be complete.

Again, so far as I know, the four stories of The House of Souls were written as independent works and were not from the beginning conceived as the four parts of a greater whole, sort of like parts of a symphony. Nor do I see The House of Souls thus -- not exactly; and yet we might want to consider the possibility that there is a greater unity here than would be suggested by the notion that this book is simply a collection of Machen's weird stories.

If we entertain this idea -- that the four stories might belong together for more than the sake of convenience -- we'll see that the placement of "A Fragment of Life" first may be intentional. This is the story of a young married couple who, at first, accept the conventional notions and structures of life, but gradually become who they, really, are, something far more wonderful, which has been obscured by the norms of a commercial, bland, materialistic society. This supposed "fragment" concludes with the evocation of love and joy. "Fragment" could be the positive expression of something that two, at least, of the remaining stories will deal with in a negative way.

"The Experiment" in "The Great God Pan," and "The Inmost Light," are also, like "A Fragment of Life," about familial relations. In "The Experiment," Mary is a sort of daughter and a sort of bride to Raymond; in "The Inmost Light," we have another married couple. (Thus, only "The White People" is not about some kind of family -- and perhaps some would contend that "White People" is about the girl-diarist finding a diabolical family.)

I wonder, by the way, about the book's title. I don't remember seeing any discussion of it. If it had been The House of the Soul, well, of course we'd have thought that referred to the body. The Houses of [the] Souls would have been more obscure that The House of the Soul, but The House of Souls seems more uncertain still, and I don't know that I'll be attempting to unpack it. It is an interesting title for a gathering for one wonder-tale and three horror stories.

At least we can say this -- Machen's book's title indicates that he deals here with the soul. A lot of horror fiction doesn't. The horrors might be ghastly, all right, but they are, finally, threats to the body, and to the mind understood naturalistically (the "mind" being, apparently, conceived as something "produced" by the physical organ we call the brain, and ceasing to exist if the brain is destroyed). A werewolf, a shoggoth, an Innsmouth dweller, a nasty supernatural clown in Maine might get you, but then so might a group of gang members, or enemy soldiers, or a disease, or a car crash. These are all dangers to the body and potentially traumatic to one's psychology, but we don't feel, reading those stories, like using the words soul or souls; but Machen uses Souls on his title page.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 9 Oct 19 | 08:48AM by Dale Nelson.

Notes after a rereading of "The Experiment," the first chapter of "The Great God Pan."

Page references are to the Knopf book The House of Souls.

pp. 171. 173: It's likely that Dr. Raymond's professional ethics and whatever decency he may possess are damped down by ambition and, worse, a sense that Mary's life is his to do with as he wishes.

One recalls "The Birthmark," by Hawthorne, an author whom Machen admired. The protagonist of that story is also a man of science. He married a beautiful woman and, until she was his wife, her small birthmark didn't bother him. Many people though it charming. but after she is his, her imperfection bothers him, more and more. In other words, his ego is at the root of things -- as it is with Raymond. Neither Hawthorne nor Machen is necessarily, on the evidence of these stories, simply opposed to science, but both are wary of the pride, vanity, cold curiosity, and other traits in human beings that can affect their judgment, and the scientific method in and of itself supplies no brake whatsoever upon such. It can't. Gather all the scientific knowledge you wish, but you will never arrive at ethics and morality. These you must bring to the scientific quest as to other spheres of life. (Thus, the Japanese researchers of Unit 731 may have been conducting scientific research using the established methods of science. The fact that they committed unspeakable crimes against humanity doesn't show that "science" is bad, only that it cannot supply conscience if conscience is lacking. In questions of what we ought to do or not do, "science" by itself is useless. [en.wikipedia.org])

"The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse." -- C. S. Lewis

Dale Nelson

Notes on "The Experiment" continued.

Page 177: Machen underscores the pathos and horror of what is about to happen by giving the girl the virginal name Mary. Her innocent trust will be terribly betrayed. She is dressed in white, like a bride, and blushes; that's significant; Machen could have had her looking white with uneasiness, for example, but no. Note that Raymond says to Clarke, "You are my witness." It's as if Clarke is not only a witness that Mary, as a competent young adult, has consented to the operation, but as if he is a witness at a marriage ceremony of a sort.

Raymond seeks to reassure Clarke, and perhaps to delude himself, by a reductive explanation of what is going to occur; after all it's just a little incision in the "grey matter." For the sake of exact knowledge within certain limited spheres, researchers may focus solely on the measurable, quantifiable aspects of nature -- if they are restrained by sound morality. Raymond is deluded by what we now can call scientism, the notion that all you have to do to understand anything is "follow the science" and that science potentially offers all we need for a complete understanding of existence. But the scientific method only works on some, not all, planes, and our humanity includes more than physics, chemistry, biology, or even psychology as usually conceived. Hence poor Mary is set up for disaster.

I expect to say something about Clarke's dream later.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 9 Oct 19 | 08:55PM by Dale Nelson.

Does anyone want to try to make the case the "The Inmost Light" -- which it will be seen seems largely a reworking of ground covered in "The Experiment" (I'm assuming "The Experiment" was written first) -- has something new to offer?

If I were to try to make the case, I'd start with the amateur detective element, which recalls the manner and style of that grand old storyteller Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. We think of "Sherlock Holmes's London," and London is a key presence in "The Inmost Light." Indeed, for me that element is one of the main attractions of the story. The horror of the face at the window is also memorable. It might owe something to Doyle's "Man with the Twisted Lip" --

------While she was walking in this way down Swandam Lane, she suddenly heard an ejaculation or cry, and was struck cold to see her husband looking down at her and, as it seemed to her, beckoning to her from a second-floor window. The window was open, and she distinctly saw his face, which she describes as being terribly agitated. He waved his hands frantically to her, and then vanished from the window so suddenly that it seemed to her that he had been plucked back by some irresistible force from behind.----

Raymond in "The Experiment" comes across pretty much as a scientist, but Dr. Black comes across, to me, as a magician. He already knows what will happen when he finishes his own experiment: he will force his wife's soul from her body and a demon will occupy it. The development of this idea is, perhaps, a bit perfunctory as compared with the leisurely unraveling of the mystery -- the preposterous wadded-up paper, the chance-meeting with Dr. Black, etc. By the way, though I object to the paper-wad as a blatantly contrived plot device -- soon followed by the coincidental meeting of Dyson and Black -- I like the episode the London rain shower itself, and the writing on the wadded-up paper is intriguing enough. But the story feels like a pot-boiler that's entertaining to read and reread -- as I must have done quite a few times over the years.

Now, a confession. When I started this thread, to put "The Experiment" together with another story, the other story that it turns out I had more in mind was "The White Powder," although I was thinking of the husband-wife relationship in "Inmost Light." Where Raymond wickedly betrays his trusting ward Mary, Dr. Black betrays his wife -- and she knows that he is doing so, too.

I've been critical of "The Inmost Light," which might have been called "The Inmost Darkness," less effectively, but getting at the matter of why Black does what he does. He does it because he has gone so far, that he can't bring himself to turn back. This, we have to admit, is (remotely) like something most of us are acquainted with in our own lives. We're not enjoying the book, but we have read so many pages that we force ourselves to go on though there's no good reason to do so. David Robson's The Intelligence Trap mentions the "sunk cost fallacy" (p. 126). Suppose you've driven halfway to a solitary vacation destination. You know you're ill and know it would be nicer to be home resting for this weekend. You feel compelled to go on, though, since you have already driven halfway... (If you want a more literary example, I think there's a passage in Macbeth, in which the protagonist muses: He has never had any joy from his treacherous conquests, he's needlessly shed a lot of blood... but he feels it's too late to stop now. (I don't think the context indicates that he resolves to go on this, because feels he has to keep killing in order to save his own life. He doesn't even have that excuse in mind.)

I'll probably write about "The White Powder" before long. Is anyone else reading these familiar weird classics?

Dale, this is all very high-quality scholarship, in my "layman's opinion".

Even if I do not participate directly, I read most of your stuff. I'm the better for it, and thanks for sharing.

--Sawfish

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thanks, Sawfish!

One thing I dislike about "The Inmost Light" is the conclusion, in which the beautiful "jewel" is shattered and a rather nasty-sounding yellowish smoke, and then a "thin white flame," briefly appear. As I read it, these, or perhaps just the flame, are meant to be Mrs. Black's soul. The crudeness of the conception -- unless I'm misunderstanding what I have read more times than I recall -- is bathetic.

I suspect, however, that Robert E. Howard was influenced by this scene when he wrote "The Tower of the Elephant."

----And suddenly [the sorcerer Yara] sank into the very heart of the jewel [the "Heart of the Elephant'], as a man sinks into a sea, and Conan saw the smoky waves close over his head. Now he saw him in the crimson heart of the jewel, once more crystal-clear, as a man sees a scene far away, tiny with great distance. And into the heart came a green, shining winged figure with the body of a man and the head of an elephant—no longer blind or crippled [Yara's erstwhile prisoner]. Yara threw up his arms and fled as a madman flees, and on his heels came the avenger. Then, like the bursting of a bubble, the great jewel vanished in a rainbow burst of iridescent gleams, and the ebony table-top lay bare and deserted—as bare, Conan somehow knew, as the marble couch in the chamber above, where the body of that strange transcosmic being called Yag-kosha and Yogah had lain.----

Machen had written of the "jewel" in his story:

----the whole room blazed with light — and not with light alone, but with a thousand colours, with all the glories of some painted window; and upon the walls of his room and on the familiar furniture, the glow flamed back and seemed to flow again to its source, the little wooden box. For there upon a bed of soft wool lay the most splendid jewel, a jewel such as Dyson had never dreamed of, and within it shone the blue of far skies, and the green of the sea by the shore, and the red of the ruby, and deep violet rays, and in the middle of all it seemed aflame as if a fountain of fire rose up, and fell, and rose again with sparks like stars for drops. Dyson gave a long deep sigh, and dropped into his chair, and put his hands over his eyes to think. The jewel was like an opal, but from a long experience of the shop-windows he knew there was no such thing as an opal one-quarter or one-eighth of its size. He looked at the stone again, with a feeling that was almost awe, and placed it gently on the table under the lamp, and watched the wonderful flame that shone and sparkled in its centre-----

It probably sounds like I dislike "The Inmost Light." It's not my favorite story by Machen, certainly, but it probably won't be long before I read it again. I feel a little vulgar in having objected to the coincidences of the wadded-up paper with the vital clue being thrown at Dyson's feet and his just happening to meet Dr. Black. These coincidences may be read as indications of insufficient cleverness in the devising of a plot. But they may also be read as elements by which the fantasticalness of the story is emphasized; in this London of the imagination, such things are even to be expected.

Now to "The Novel of the White Powder," which I should have mentioned in the title of this thread. This is different from "The Experiment" and "The Inmost Light" right off in that there is no experiment intended. Dr. Haberden prescribes a medication that probably would have done poor Mr. Leicester nothing but good, and the chemist/pharmacist who supplies a medication has no intention of experimenting on his customer. Also, the woman in this story isn't the victim of a bad man, but a loving sister who is the anxious, then horrified, witness of a ghastly calamity she does not understand until far too late.

As regards plot details -- I think Machen may simply have forgotten to provide a passing indication of how the sister and the servants dealt with the miserable mess on the floor in Leicester's bedroom and the foul stuff that dripped through the floorboards to the bed below. He could have said something simple, to the effect that she vacated the house for a week while the necessary repairs were done. But then again, Machen might well have considered that this sort of thing would have been bathetic. Frankly, in all the years I have read this story since, say, 1972, I don't remember to have caught myself thinking about this topic till now.

In Haberden's scientist friend's account, the passage about "a world that seems as strange and awful to me as the endless waves of the ocean seen for the first time, shining, from a peak in Darien," is an allusion to Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's [translation of] Homer," where the poet refers to Cortez (really, it was Balboa, in 1513) seeing the Pacific for the first time:


Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.


More soon.

DN



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 14 Oct 19 | 11:02AM by Dale Nelson.

Haberden's colleague, in "The Novel of the White Powder," says that, when the potion of the witches' sabbath was taken, "the house of life was riven asunder and the human trinity dissolved."

The "human trinity" may refer to the definition of the human being indicated in 1 Thessalonians 5:23, i.e. that the human being is body, soul, and spirit. Some New Testament passages refer just to body and soul, so it has sometimes been inferred that the "spirit" here is the "higher" aspect of the soul. For a sample of how this understanding has been expounded, the curious may read the passage from Martin Luther quoted below.

This is not the place for a discussion of anthropology in the theological sense except as it related to understanding Machen.

My thesis is this: (1) Although Machen is widely regarded as knowledgeable about the occult (and he was), i.e. the so-called "esoteric", (2) the key to understanding the central horror in "The Experiment," "The Inmost Light," and "The Novel of the White Powder" is to be found in references that were formerly widely known.

I'll just assume (1) doesn't need any defense. For (2), I have already begun to advance my thesis, by citing a New Testament passage that Machen could assume would be very familiar to most of his readers.

In my next message, I will refer to an author who may be new to my readers, but was once almost a household name. An incident in one of this ancient historian's books may have haunted Machen's imagination.



Luther excerpt: "In the tabernacle fashioned by Moses there were three separate compartments. The first was called the holy of holies: here was God's dwelling place, and in it there was no light. The second was called the holy place; here stood a candlestick with seven arms and seven lamps. The third was called the outer court; this lay under the open sky and in the full light of the sun. In this tabernacle we have a figure of the Christian man. His spirit is the holy of holies, where God dwells in the darkness of faith, where no light is; for he believes that which he neither sees nor feels nor comprehends. His soul is the holy place, with its seven lamps, that is, all manner of reason, discrimination, knowledge, and understanding of visible and bodily things. His body is the forecourt, open to all, so that men may see his works and manner of life."

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.

[www.amazon.com]


[www.paideaclassics.org]

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.'"

[www.perseus.tufts.edu]

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

When I wrote the article for Avallaunius mentioned above, I didn't think of the text in St. Matthew 24:15-16 about the "abomination of desolation" or "abomination that causes desolation," and, while I don't propose to go into detail on it here, I will offer a comment as a footnote to the previously-posted comments.

It's widely understood that, in the St. Matthew passage, Jesus is recalling something in the Book of Daniel, as He prophesies about the destruction, a generation later, of the Temple, AD 70.

The Book of Daniel appears to refer to the defilement of the earlier Temple by Antiochus Epiphanes IV about two centuries before the time of Christ. In acts of extreme profanation, an idol of Zeus was brought into the Temple and, possibly, swine were killed there. So you have the idea of the end of the worship of the true God and the violation of the Temple by a false god, unclean rites, etc.

I would link this with the violation in "The Inmost Light." You'll remember that the horror there is twofold: the expulsion of the good and loving Mrs. Black's soul, and the substitution of some kind of evil spirit.

Similarly, in "The Great God Pan," after Mary's violation, her body is a "desolation," but from her, by substitution, was born the monstrous Helen Vaughan.

Dr. Raymond, it seems, in "Pan," has by his science replicated the effect of the potion of the witches' sabbath in "The Novel of the White Powder." In that story, the human trinity is violated, and the "worm" of sin becomes manifest as an alluring shape with whom the participant has carnal relations. In "Pan," Helen Vaughan is evidently something close to, or the same as, this alluring "worm" manifest by the white powder and the rite.

In "The Great God Pan" we read of men who knew Helen Vaughan committing suicide because of some wickedness in which they have been involved. Critics have been inclined to smirk about Machen's horrified hints of sexual transgression, as if this translator of Casanova couldn't bear such thoughts. But now I suspect that the evidence of "The Novel of the White Powder" suggests that Helen Vaughan may have presided over gatherings in which these once-decent men partook of the same potion and engaged in the same intercourse. On that supposal, one can understand why they would afterwards have been so horrified, and so despairing of grace, as to kill themselves. In "The White Powder" the alluring shapes were, it seems, impermanent, and we gather the effect of the potion wore off. But in "The Great God Pan," perhaps we are to take it that the "alluring shape" conjured by Dr. Raymond persisted in existence, as Helen Vaughan, till its revolting dissolution.

Machen, then, may have appropriated the idea of the "abomination of desolation" and transferred it from the Temple of the Divine Presence to the temple of the human being (body, soul, and spirit), for horror of an ultimate kind.

If anyone's interested in a conservative Christian discussion of the "abomination of desolation," etc., this article might be good, although I have only glanced at it.

[www.thegospelcoalition.org]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 14 Oct 19 | 01:11PM by Dale Nelson.

The other Classical allusion that may be present in "The Experiment" is to Ovid's Fasti Book IV, lines 761-762:

nec Dryadas nec nos videamus labra Dianae,
nec Faunum, medio cum permit arva die

which has been translated

May we not see the Dryads, nor Diana's baths,
nor faunus, when he lies in the fields at noon

(from the 1931 Love Classical Library edition, pp. 244-245)

The translator, Frazer, says in a note "It was dangerous to disturb Pan (Faunus) at midday" and the prayer just quoted specifies the peril of seeing him; but Dr. Raymond has been filled with pride when he promised Clarke that "'Mary will see the god Pan!'" The modern man of science lacked the prudence of the ancients -- as well as being terribly lacking in reverence for the human mystery.

I have reread the rest of "The Great God Pan," and find, again, that it seems to me a falling-off from the achievement of "The Experiment" considered as a slf-contained short story -- one could loosely say, a descent from myth to melodrama.

It is no wonder to me that Machen eventually disowned that type of story, vowing never to give anyone a white powder again and so on. I have little doubt that I'm in the minority in liking some of his later stories more than "The Great God Pan."