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
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.