Великий бог Пан: Повесть ужасов и фантастики

1894 novella by Arthur Machen

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 unearthly transformations before dying and she is revealed to be a supernatural entity. On publication, it was widely denounced by the press as degenerate and horrific because of its implied sexual content, and the novella hurt Machen's reputation as an author. Beginning in the 1920s, Machen's work was critically re evaluated and The Great God Pan has since garnered a reputation as a classic of horror. Literary critics have noted the influence of other nineteenth century authors on The Great God Pan and offered differing opinions on whether or not it can be considered an example of Gothic fiction or science fiction. The novella influenced the work of horror writers such as Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King, and has been adapted for the stage twice.

Clarke agrees, somewhat unwillingly, to bear witness to a strange experiment performed by his friend, Dr. Raymond. The ultimate goal of the doctor is to open the mind of a patient so that she may experience the spiritual world, an experience he notes the ancients called "seeing the great god Pan". He performs the experiment, which involves minor brain surgery, on a young woman named Mary. She awakens from the operation awed and terrified but quickly becomes "a hopeless idiot". Years later, Clarke learns of a beautiful but sinister girl named Helen Vaughan, who is reported to have caused a series of mysterious happenings in her town. She spends much of her time in the woods near her house, and takes other children on prolonged twilight rambles in the countryside that disturb their parents. One day, a young boy stumbles across Helen "playing on the grass with a 'strange naked man"; the boy becomes hysterical and later, after seeing a Roman statue of a satyr's head, becomes permanently feeble minded. Helen also forms an unusually close friendship with a neighbour, Rachel, whom she leads several times into the woods. On one occasion Rachel returns home distraught, half naked and rambling. Shortly after an explanation to her mother that is unrevealed to the reader but instills great revulsion in Clarke, Rachel returns to the woods and disappears forever. Clarke relates these events in a book he is writing entitled Memoirs to Prove the Existence of the Devil. Years later, Villiers happens across his old friend Herbert, who has become a vagrant since they last met. When asked how he has fallen so low, Herbert replies that he has been "corrupted body and soul" by his wife. After some investigation with Clarke and another character, Austin, it is revealed that Helen was Herbert's wife, and that a well to do man died "of fright, of sheer, awful terror" after seeing something in Herbert and Helen's home. Herbert is later found dead. Helen disappears for some time; according to rumour, she spent the time taking part in disturbing orgies somewhere in the Americas. She eventually returns to London under the pseudonym Mrs. Beaumont. Soon afterwards, a series of stable, happy men in the city commit suicide; the last person known to have been in the presence of each of them was Mrs. Beaumont, whom they are implied to have slept with. Villiers and Clarke, each learning of Mrs. Beaumont's true identity, band together and confront Helen in her house with a noose. They tell her that she must kill herself, or they will expose her. Helen has a very abnormal death, transforming between human and beast, male and female, and dividing and reuniting, before turning into a jelly like substance and finally dying. A fragment of a document covers the remains of a pillar honouring the Celtic god Nodens. The Latin inscription on the column reads, "To the great god Nodens (the god of the Great Deep or Abyss), Flavius Senilis has erected this pillar on account of the marriage which he saw beneath the shade." The document says that historians are puzzled as to what the inscription refers to. A letter from Dr. Raymond to Clarke reveals that Helen was the child of Mary, who died shortly after her daughter's birth. In the letter, Raymond informs Clarke that Mary became pregnant after his experiment caused her to see the god Pan, implying that Pan fathered Helen.

Machen's lifelong fascination with occultism began after he read an article on alchemy in an edition of Charles Dickens's periodical Household Words belonging to his father, a clergyman. Aaron Worth writes that The Great God Pan superficially resembles science fiction due to its depiction of Dr. Raymond as a mad scientist, but it cannot be seen as an example of the genre as it posits that occultism is superior to science. The novella has been classified as Decadent literature as well, Early Christian commentaries suggested that this event occurred at the same time as the death of Christ and that the "death" of Pan represented the transition from a pagan to a Christian world. This story had particular resonance with Victorian literary audiences. In 1844, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote her poem "The Dead Pan", an adaption of Plutarch's story which insisted that proper Christian literature should abandon Greek mythology, with each stanza ending in the words "Pan, Pan is dead." As a member of the Decadent movement, Machen sought to subvert traditional themes and transgress literary boundaries, an agenda which made Pan a particularly appealing figure. The title of The Great God Pan appears to have been specifically derived from Browning's later poem "A Musical Instrument" (1862), in which the first line of every stanza ends with the words "the great god Pan". Machen's use of Pan in the novella may have also been influenced by Robert Louis Stevenson's essay "Pan's Pipes" (1878) and Algernon Charles Swinburne's poem "A Nympholept" (1894), in which Pan is portrayed as the "emblem of the delicious combination of ecstasy and terror." In a review of the novella for Black Gate, Matthew David Surridge hypothesized that Machen took inspiration from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) in his portrayal of Dr. Raymond as a mad scientist akin to Victor Frankenstein. The works of Robert Louis Stevenson, especially his 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, were among Machen's most significant influences when writing The Great God Pan. John Gawsworth saw Machen's novella as reminiscent of the horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Sheridan Le Fanu. Aaron Worth noted similitude between the death of Helen Vaughan and the theories of alchemist Thomas Vaughan, who is the character's namesake and Helen's disintegration recalls the alchemical concept of the prima materia. John C. Tibbetts observes similarities between Helen Vaughan and Ayesha, the sexually liberated demonic priestess from H. Rider Haggard's She: A History of Adventure (1886). Machen wrote that several critics felt that Joris Karl Huysmans's novels À rebours (1884) and Là bas (1891) had inspired The Great God Pan, though he did not read either book until after Pan was published. Upon reading the two novels, Machen concluded that "my critics had not read them either."

[[File:Deedsoftheantichrist2580 detail. jpg|right|thumb|Helen Vaughan and Pan have respectively been compared to the Antichrist (left) and Lucifer (right). Literary critic Kostas Boyiopoulos reads the story from a Judeo Christian perspective, arguing that Helen Vaughan embodies a "female version of an antichrist", a perversion of Jesus, as well as the figure of Lilith from Judaic myth, with Helen's mother Mary being a "direct analogy of the biblical Virgin Mary". Black Gates Matthew David Surridge believes that the story associates paganism with sex and femininity, while portraying Helen as a female Antichrist, The art critic Harry Quilter's review of the book, titled "The Gospel of Intensity", and published in The Contemporary Review in June 1895, was even more harsh. Quilter declared: "The Great God Pan' is, I have no hesitation in saying, a perfectly abominable story, in which the author has spared no endeavour to suggest loathsomeness and horror which he describes as beyond the reach of words." Quilter warned that Machen's books were a dangerous threat to the entire British public and that they would destroy readers' sanities and senses of morality. Brian Stableford stated that The Great God Pan is "the archetypal Decadent horror story" and described the story as "highly original". Stephen King referred to it as "one of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language." The Washington Post Elizabeth Hand deemed it "one of the greatest supernatural tales ever written". The novella Helen's Story (2013) by Rosanne Rabinowitz retells the story of The Great God Pan from Helen Vaughan's point of view. Helen's Story was written from a feminist perspective and nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. The Great God Pan was adapted into a chamber opera by composer Ross Crean. Unusually for a composer, Crean wrote the opera's libretto himself. A recording of the work was released in 2017. The production saw its world premiere by Chicago Fringe Opera in 2018. According to the Chicago Tribune John von Rhein, Chicago Fringe Opera's staging of The Great God Pan portrays Helen Vaughan as both a symbol of gender equality and an evil femme fatale.

[[File:Hugh Rankin The Dunwich Horror. jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|The Great God Pan influenced later works of horror fiction, including "The Dunwich Horror" (1929) by H. P. Lovecraft. Pan also inspired Lovecraft to create his character Nodens It has been suggested that Michael Arlen's novel Hell! Said the Duchess (1934) is a parody of The Great God Pan, as Arlen was influenced by Machen's work. The Great God Pan influenced Peter Straub's novel Ghost Story (1979) in its depiction of a shapeshifting monster who terrifies those it encounters. Straub himself frequently credited The Great God Pan as having been a major influence on his work. According to film historians Keith McDonald and Roger Clark, Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro's portrayal of the faun in his 2006 dark fantasy film Pan's Labyrinth was inspired by the "ambivalent and possibly dangerous" portrayals of Pan in late Victorian and early Edwardian novels, including Machen's The Great God Pan and Pan's Garden (1912) by Algernon Blackwood. Del Toro deliberately chose to imitate the darker, more sinister fauns of Machen and Blackwood rather than the "sweetly domesticated figure" of Mr. Tumnus from C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950). The original title of the film in Spanish is El Laberinto del Fauno (The Labyrinth of the Faun), but the English title Pan's Labyrinth emphasizes the connection between del Toro's film and the body of late nineteenth century writings about Pan, including The Great God Pan. Stephen King wrote that his novella N. from his story collection Just After Sunset (2008) is "a riff on Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan Mine isn't anywhere near [as] good [as the original], but I loved the chance to put neurotic behavior—obsessive/compulsive disorder—together with the idea of a monster filled macroverse." Josh Malerman said The Great God Pan partly inspired his novel Bird Box (2014).