I would like to speak a bit about the great god Pan. With the word “great,” I’m referring to Arthur Machen’s work The Great God Pan (1890).

Arthur Machen was an English writer, a forerunner of Lovecraft, who largely influenced the latter as well as decadent literature on the whole. Arthur Machen was highly acclaimed by Jorge Luis Borges, who is himself regarded as a classic of the “magical realist” movement. He also influenced modern cinema — for instance, Guillermo del Toro’s films largely revolve around motifs and influences from Machen.

Machen’s Great God Pan touches on the question of human contact with the sublime. Along with the beautiful, the sublime is one of the two foremost elements of aesthetics, although this is often forgotten.

The sublime — le sublime in French and das Erhabene in German — is not simply something refined, exquisite, or aesthetically charged. Rather, it is a figure, an action, a history, a situation, or an experience that greatly exceeds the norms of ordinary human existence and experience.

Therefore, this notion comes closest of all to the “sacred,” in the sense that Rudolf Otto understood it, and after him Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and others.

An Operation to Expand Possibilities

The sublime and the sacred are manifest in the work The Great God Pan in a very interesting and unusual context. The story is based on Irish folklore. The plot is quite classic for the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The hero of the story is a scientist, a doctor, who by way of a surgical operation is capable of expanding the possibilities of the human perception of reality. The scientist conducts a test on a simple village girl named Mary. The experiment is not entirely successful. The girl plunges into madness. The patient is constantly confronted with something that radically surpasses and overwhelms her. While she does gain access to some kind of extra-reality, she is unable to control it. The scientist understands the girl to have met the god Pan, the personification of the forces of nature in all their diversity and power.

Further on, the reader is presented with an account of the life of Mary’s daughter, whom she gave birth to after meeting Pan. The daughter, Helen Vaughan, harbors something at once inexpressibly beautiful and terrifying, capable of driving those around her insane to the point of suicide or murder. The faces of the people led to death by Helen Vaughan are frozen with panic, fear, and horror. This fear and horror are transmitted to anyone who sees their bodies.

Beyond the Human

This work is an excellent showcase of the problem of the sublime. Here, in full measure, we see the experience of facing the sublime, the numinous, which according to Rudolf Otto, is characterized at once by astonishment, admiration, and incredible joy, as well as wild fear and deep horror. This encounter is almost always fatal, or in the very least traumatic for a person who otherwise dwells within their comfort zone (although being in such a state should not be considered natural).

Beauty is interpreted in this book to be a kind of border that separates what we are capable of perceiving without special preparation, something in which we can delight in and admire on the one hand, and which exceeds our possibilities and capacities on the other, i.e., the sublime.

If the experience of encountering the “beautiful” entails temporary charm and fascination, then the experience of encountering the sublime, as happens in Machen’s tale, can be the opposite, i.e., one that brings with it horror, death, and madness.

Thus, in this story, the god Pan himself acts as a generalized representation of the sublime, but by no means the beautiful.

It is interesting that Socrates was often compared to Pan. His exterior form, down to the wrinkles on his face, largely corresponds to Greek notions of how this god should have looked.

Thus, ever since archaic times, the encounter with the sublime has been associated with the experience of trauma. It can lead a human being to death and madness, but it also harbors the possibility of meeting that which lies beyond the human..

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