The Great God Pan
The Great God Pan is a horror and fantasy novella by Welsh writer Arthur Machen. Machen was inspired to write "The Great God Pan" by his experiences at the ruins of a pagan temple in Wales. What would become the first chapter of the novella was published in the magazine "The Whirlwind" in 1890. Machen later extended "The Great God Pan" and it was published as a book alongside another story, "The Inmost Light", in 1894. The novella begins with an experiment to allow a woman named Mary to see the supernatural world. This is followed by an account of a series of mysterious happenings and deaths over many years surrounding a woman named Helen Vaughan. At the end, the heroes confront Helen and force her to kill herself. She undergoes a series of supernatural transformations before dying and she is revealed to be the child of Mary and the god Pan.
The Great God Pan
"Black Gate" Matthew David Surridge said that "The Great God Pan" influenced Bram Stoker's "Dracula" (1897) as both works feature "an introductory sequence featuring a horrified Englishman in a non-English setting; then a variety of seemingly-unconnected events in London, the metropole at the heart of Empire; then the discovery that all those events are in fact inspired by one malign and supernatural intelligence, that the rational contemporary capital is threatened by the irrational and archaic; then an equivocal conclusion. The fear of sex, women, foreignness." John C. Tibbetts notes that both Helen Vaughan in "The Great God Pan" and Lucy Westenra in "Dracula" are "demon women of voracious and malignant sexuality". Theodora Goss also notes similarities between the death of Helen Vaughan in Machen's novella and Lucy's death in "Dracula". Tibbetts also notes that Machen's portrayal of Helen Vaughan as demonic and hyper-sexual may have influenced a similar character, The Woman of Songs, in Richard Marsh's "The Beetle" (1897).