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Foreword

The Ecstasy of St. Arthur

It is a rare breed of fabulist who transcribes and records—rather than invents—a reality invisible to most of us. These scribes, like St. John the Divine, are possessed of a near-religious certainty that such worlds exist. Arthur Machen was one of these.

Much like Algernon Blackwood, Machen had no doubts about ancient worlds beneath us and the power their inhabitants exert over our souls and, ultimately, our flesh. There are, he knew, barbarians at the gate, hiding somewhere in the darkness below.

The United Kingdom, for all its pomp and phlegm, is permeated with a sense of spiritual doom. No matter how many churches were built in its fields and villages, no matter how many saints walked its newly paved streets, pagan powers had long before claimed the blood-soaked land. Thus, every year, the River Thames’s muddy banks at low tide yield ancient figurines, human bones, and Roman coins. Here is a raw reminder that we share this world with impish beings with unbridled hunger and desire, who watch us and our silly concerns with bemusement.

Machen’s magisterial style and labyrinthian storytelling (“The Great God Pan” and The Three Imposters come to mind) have influenced many authors, from H. P. Lovecraft to Jorge Luis Borges, and portions of the Machen literary universe, with its dense, Chinese-box formalism and the meta-dialogue between reader and author will become a hallmark of generations to come.

Much like Borges, Machen was an acolyte of Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the most painstaking writers in the English language. And also like Borges, Machen seemed to believe that reading and writing are a form of prayer, each an extension of the other. But where the world was a library to Borges, to Machen it was an all-encompassing concrete geography, even as he was fascinated by traces of pre-Roman cults. Today, as then, his words are neither scholastic nor philosophical, but rather an alarm, a frantic denunciation.

The coherence of his tales and beliefs was not fueled by the fanciful invention of Marcel Schwob (another Stevenson devotee) or Lord Dunsany or, even later, Clark Ashton Smith. Machen didn’t need to visit Zothique or Bethmoora or any other distant land. He simply turned to the hills and promontories around him—those timeless green sentinels that confided to him all the Eleusinian mysteries buried in the earth.

Overheated paganism surrounded Machen: the Symbolists, the Decadent movement, the Golden Dawn, Tarot, Spiritualism, and Egyptian magic were everywhere in a pre-war Europe sated with Victorian morality, deflowered by industry, and seeking spiritual fulfillment in truths older than the Anglican Church.

The lustful pursuits of the modern pagans took place in exquisitely decorated salons; even absinthe had its own patron saint. Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke delineated foreign geographies as Felicien Rops (the perfect counterpart to Machen) and Oscar Wilde demolished moral ones. Machen translated François Béroalde de Verville and Giacomo Casanova and was thus familiar with their notions of philosophy, alchemy, and lust, but unlike many of his counterparts, he articulated his world through naked fear rather than fascination or desire. Far from being a libertine, he was afraid not only of the corruption of the spirit but also the more palpable corruption of the flesh. The price of lifting the veil and glimpsing the face of Pan is high and real.

The dichotomy between sexuality and spirituality can only take root in countries founded on puritanical principles—countries that cannot laugh at the Devil because they would be mocking God, too.

Machen recorded these articles of faith with great zeal as an explorer in a lonely spiritual universe. He abandoned the safety of his humble quarters, the sanctity of his God-given name, and the veneer of metropolitan sophistication to achieve an ecstatic vision. Much like Lovecraft, he believed in the transitory nature of our agency in this world and the unyielding ferocity of the cosmos.

This fear tenuously also links Machen with that other great antiquarian, M. R. James, but in his case it is not scholarly arrogance that dooms his characters, but curiosity and fate. Unlike Machen, James deals with hauntings of such specificity that they never allude to a grander scheme. Yet both men seem to share the conviction that our condemnation lies in our past, in the sins of our forefathers. In “The Great God Pan,” the impregnation and curse of a character blooms in the next generation. Evil is never dormant—it gestates.

Freudian interpretations of these fears, focused on images of fertility, femininity, and the earth, seem to me to miss the point and can only be yielded as reductive arguments. Philosophers, writers, and artists are rarely emotionally successful human beings. A more interesting connection springs from the fact that fear can be recognized as an eminently spiritual sensation.