Arthur Machen
Around 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to his first major success, "The Great God Pan". It was published in 1894 by John Lane in the noted Keynotes Series, which was part of the growing aesthetic movement of the time. Machen's story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and consequently sold well, going into a second edition.
The Great God Pan
Author Theodora Goss sees "The Great God Pan" as equating paganism with irrationality and what Carl Jung would call the collective unconscious. "Black Gates" Matthew David Surridge believes that the story associates paganism with sex and femininity, while portraying Helen as a female Antichrist, a view shared by James Goho in "Journeys into Darkness: Critical Essays on Gothic Horror" (2014). Surridge adds "from another perspective: [Helen] is the undoing of progress. Rather than proceeding from paganism to Christianity, as orthodox Victorian belief imagined the progress of history, she is a reversal of time, the revenge of the atavistic." In keeping with this idea, Surridge sees Mary's name as a reference to Mary, mother of Jesus and Helen's name as a reference to the pagan figure Helen of Troy. Goho interprets the story as Machen's warning against the abandonment of "true religion" and the embrace of paganism.