Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan: A Literary Analysis
- M. Grant Kellermeyer
- Jun 19, 2018
- 10 min read
Updated: Aug 10
When Arthur Machen published his first serious attempt at a supernatural tale in 1890, it would set the tone for his horror fiction for the rest of his life. Nearly all the themes, motifs, and philosophy that would make Machen an icon of fin-de-siècle horror can be found in “The Great God Pan” – the story that he is most famous for, but one to which critics continue to have mixed (though always strong) reactions. “Pan” was a study in Machen’s favorite horror narrative: the story of two worlds touching – barely overlapping, yet long enough for something from beyond to take seed in the world of human affairs. Nearly all of the speculative fiction that he wrote before World War One concerns this idea of spiritual cross pollination.
In a sense he was talking about what Ivan T. Sanderson called vile vortices – interdimensional windows through which the unseen Outer Powers can step through and encounter us. In his stories these vortices are strongest among the rugged Welsh wilderness, but they can be summoned in Westminster parlors, Soho alleys, or West End apartments. Aside from any genuine theories about the supernatural, “The Great God Pan” – and the rest of Machen’s prewar corpus – is primarily invested in reminding us of the nearness of the Beyond. This doesn’t necessarily mean the land of ghosts and fairies, but it does mean the untapped potential and undiscovered range of the human spirit.
Like Robert Louis Stevenson, Machen was obsessed with the concept of vestigial evil – a sort of atavistic will-to-wickedness that clung to the back of men’s brains like a hungry parasite in spite of all our science, manners, and political correctness. Machen wrote at a time when the middle class was surging: the days of a small, educated elite and a massive, illiterate populace dependent on priests and noblemen for their sense of identity was long gone, and while Machen would hardly have wished humanity back into feudal Europe, he was concerned about the rapid strides made and the intoxication of independence.
As the middle classes continually divorced themselves from communities, traditions, religions, folklore, and history – turning to the promoted advantages offered by science, technology, and capitalism – the new gods, savvy but cynical deities who permitted a man to do as he damn-well pleased – Machen foresaw the perils of a world off the leash. Before the world wars and Stalin’s Great Purge, before the Holocaust and the H-bomb, Machen had a sense that modern industry and technology – and the brave new world which they were ushering in – had the potential to unlock the doors which collective spirituality and social community had kept barred for centuries – doors which admittedly limited human expression and individuality, but doors which also barred our potential to destroy ourselves and those around us.
II.
In Greco-Roman mythology, Pan was the deity who embodied chaos. He reveled in lonely nature, terrorized skittish shepherds, indulged carelessly in bestiality, rape, and pedophilia, and defied the order of the villages. Pan was worshipped as the bringer of madness (whence, “panic”) – defiant of civilization, drunk on his liberty, prince of the wild hills, lord of the black void of space. The famous experiment in Machen’s novella uses science and moral relativism to justify the unleashing of Pan on a vulnerable girl, and she – the sexually violated victim of a careless intelligentsia, and a flippantly amoral patriarchy – becomes the vessel which will bring Hell to earth.
Not unlike “Rosemary’s Baby,” this tale – often lambasted by critics for its misogyny – is the story of how abuse, sexism, and moral relativism turn a defenseless woman into the surrogate mother of an abomination – a child who will usher in apocalypse if left unchecked. In “Rosemary’s Baby” that child was the spawn of Satan. In Machen’s novella, we can never be sure. Outer forces with archetypal connections to Celtic and Roman paganism – gods or monsters or aliens or elementals that humanity had detected since our retreat into the caves where fire kept the bogeys at bay.
Machen is never precise about who or what impregnates the victim of this amoral scientist, but he implies that it is a force of chaos, virulently anti-human, hateful of innocence and life – a power that uses human beings without loving them, that unfeelingly wrings them dry of life and hope before sending them away to madness and suicide. It is a vampiric entity, but on a cosmic scale, one that could be seen a metaphor for the greedy capitalism that would breed class disparity and the Great Depression, or for the heartless science that would lead to eugenics and the Holocaust. But Machen doesn’t even claim to know himself – or at least he doesn’t say. It is enough to know that it is chaos incarnate. It is the great god Pan.
SUMMARY
ANALYSIS
“The Great God Pan” was written during a period of deep cultural upheaval in the late Victorian era, when traditional spiritual ideals and social mores were being challenged by a gush of paradigm-shifting scientific discoveries, particularly Darwinian evolution, psychology, and new understandings of human consciousness. The novella reflects the period’s widespread anxieties about this seemingly unstoppable tide of new knowledge, which many felt was rapidly outpacing 4,000 years of ethical standards: if science proved (or could be manipulated to suggest) that some races, genders, or classes were better than others; or that land-theft, genocide, slavery, or class oppression are natural expressions of Social Darwinism – that “Progress” could be used to justify all manner of manmade horrors. Indeed, such horrors – condoned as they supposedly were by scientific progress – were widely manifested during the 1900s, from Imperial Japan’s heinous Unit 731 and the United States’ Tuskegee Syphilis Study to the Bikini Atoll radiation experiments and the tens of thousands of forced sterilizations of mentally-ill women in mid-century Sweden.
Evil is a spiritual, not a scientific concept, and if modernity had truly de-mythologized, deconstructed, and delegitimized the system of human ethics erected by global faith systems and philosophies, the results would have been stunning to say the least. The titular, pagan entity was a symbol of primal nature, fertility, and chaos, suggesting a return of repressed pagan forces in a modern world overly reliant on rationalism.
The story’s structure—built around fragmented testimonies and disjointed perspectives—mirrors the uncertainty and instability of the era, evoking a world in which truth is elusive, and horror often lies just beneath the surface of civilized society. Thematically, “Pan” explores the consequences of transgressing natural and spiritual boundaries. The central premise—that a scientist’s reckless experiment to “lift the veil” of the world and allow a woman to perceive the spiritual realm leads to monstrous offspring and widespread death—embodies Machen’s warning against forbidden knowledge and unnatural curiosity.
The story implies that the occult and the scientific are not opposed but tragically intertwined when human pride attempts to dominate mystery. At its core, Machen’s horror stems not from violence or gore, but from ontological terror—the fear that reality is not what we believe it to be, and that behind the curtain of normalcy lurks something vast, alien, and terrifyingly amoral. Philosophically, Machen’s story is grounded in his mystical, sacramental worldview, in which ultimate truth cannot be attained through intellect or experimentation but only through personal experience and reverence for the sacred.
Pan, in this context, is not merely a figure of classical mythology, but a representation of unfiltered spiritual reality, terrifying because it is unmediated by grace. For Machen, evil arises when humanity seeks spiritual power without submission to divine order—a proto-Freudian insight into the dangers of unleashing unconscious forces without moral restraint. “The Great God Pan” thus operates both as supernatural horror and as theological parable, critiquing the arrogance of modernity and warning of the existential cost of seeking truth without reverence.
III.
Compared to dread Cthulhu, who actively seeks the oblivion of mankind, Helen seems tremendously underwhelming, but I would argue – especially today, in a digitally-neutered world where relationships are more splintered and toxic than ever, with anxiety, loneliness, alienation, bullying, depression, and disenfranchisement at all-time highs[1] – that she is a far more loathsome horror than Lovecraft’s elder things. Oblivion we can stand. We can cling to one another and weep and bid our farewells as R’lyeh rises above us, blackening the sun and breaking our minds. But there is one thing that is even more crippling to the human spirit than the reign of Yog Sothoth and faceless Nyarlathotep: indifference, rejection, and apathy from someone whom we loved and hoped would love us, of from someone in power whose abuse of that power both resulted in and – by virtue of the source – legitimized the dehumanization of our fellow beings and the kind of cruel cynicism that has been explored in books like A Christmas Carol, movies like Wall Street, and albums like The Wall.
Note, however, how this transcends the pearl-clutching mores of Victorian sexual ethics: Helen is so much more than a flirtatious femme fatale. She despises the most profound emotions and noblest inclinations of the human experience, pooh-poohs the gang-rape of a prepubescent girl, and despises the dependency of human beings on one another. One of the most disappointing elements of “The Great God Pan” for many readers is Helen’s suicide. Why should she be so easily blackmailed into killing herself? Some “monster”! She’s afraid of being discovered? She’s embarrassed of being exposed as a libertine? Hardly. To be perfectly clear, Helen Vaughan – utterly shameless, fearless, and self-invested – doesn’t care the slightest jot if she is exposed to human society. If anything, she’s bored with humanity: we’re simple, gullible, clingy, sentimental, and too dependent on each other. Helen Vaughan has no room in her life for fear or hope or hate or love or desperation or adventure or peace or thrills. She is a lazy, apathetic villain consumed with her appetite for draining life and hope wherever she goes.
Like her father – “Pan” or whatever else we may dare to call it – she is everywhere and everything. Her death throes prove that. She isn’t even a “she,” or “it” – Helen is “They” and They don’t worry about death or scandal. They don’t worry about human emotions or losses or misery. They simply move on and become something Other. She assents to Villier’s request that she kill herself probably more out of boredom and irritation that fear or embarrassment. Due to Victorian standards of sexual decorum, Machen’s vision – which was outrageously scandalous at the time (to his delight) – has been read far too literally by some. He used the metaphor of sexual licentiousness to illustrate the absolute depravity, lack of empathy, and disregard for human relationships that epitomizes Helen’s dead soul.
IV.
For Machen’s audience, it was all the ghastlier because Helen took on a female shape, but today she could just as easily be an inside trading stockbroker, a pedophile priest, a human trafficker, or a munitions lobbyist. Helen’s debased sexual appetite is still an essential part of her attractiveness as a villain, but Machen saw far, far, far more in her wickedness than a wild libido. He saw the future of a humanity that tolerated the abuse of the poor by the educated, that allowed the pursuit of technological innovation to be a higher law than human decency, that privileged certain classes of people over others, and that valued profits over lives.
Today our world is even more shaped in the image of Helen Vaughan than Machen could have foreseen. In some ways we are much better, but in others we have grown less empathic, more brutal, and more monstrous. But regardless of which era humans have lived in, we have been plagued by forces – some familial, some systemic, and some in our very hearts – that exult in the subjugation of others, deny comfort to the suffering, and delight in having more, taking more, and being more. We exult in Us. We exult in Me. We exult in the great god Pan.
[1] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. NCHS Data Brief No. 514: Bullying Victimization Among U.S. Teenagers Aged 12–17. October 2024.
Zhang, Jie, et al. "Sense of Alienation and Its Associations With Depressive Symptoms and Poor Sleep Quality in Older Adults Who Experienced the Lockdown in Wuhan, China, During the COVID-19 Pandemic." Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry and Neurology, vol. 35, no. 2, 2022, pp. 215–222.
II.
“The Great God Pan” is in many ways a philosophical parable crafted to examine the looming social problems that most disturbed Machen: primarily, his skepticism of the modern progress generated by academic scientism and capitalistic industrialism, institutions he distrusted as a result in his profound belief in humanity’s inclination towards corruptions.
In the intervening years since its publication, other problems have been brought to light by the critical discussion surrounding the text – many of which are trained on the personal faults of the author himself. The most troubling and interesting one is Machen’s treatment of sexuality, women, and Helen Vaughn in particular. Machen has frequently been accused of misogyny – a sincere concern bolstered by stories like “The Shining Pyramid” and “The White People.”
Indeed, the primary fear that most modern readers note from Helen is her rambunctious sex life. To 21st century readers, a speedy read of “Pan” might leave them with the impression that their sexually adventurous sister, polygamous best friend, or bisexual roommate would have inspired Machen with puritanical shudders of terror. I think this is an understandable, but thoroughly nearsighted misreading of the text. Helen’s threat lies not in her sexuality – although that is certainly part of it – or even in the way she treats men in the same fashion so many men of the day treated women: as disposable sex objects. These are parts of her sinister nature, but to focus so closely on the sexuality of Helen Vaughn is to miss the far more hideous whole.
So what does Helen represent other than thoroughly-modern, sexually-liberated womanhood? First of all, she is reckless with human life, titillated by the corruption of innocence (including the sexual molestation of the underage girl whom she lured to a supernatural orgy), and utterly unbothered by the path of carnage that she leaves in her wake. Helen is not repulsive because she enjoys sex, or even because she is implied to be bisexual – or even because she a hybrid horror from Beyond. She is repulsive because she is antithetical to human love, community, and compassion: she epitomizes the kind of callous, disconnected indifference that is unconcerned with the plight of the poor, the abuse of the weak, the violation of the vulnerable, or the misery or the hopeless.
