The Great God Pan

"Yes, it was written at a time when there was a great interest in spiritualism, in another world or an afterlife. There was a sense that material reality—the material reality that was the stuff of the enlightenment and of industrial capitalism—is not all that there is. Strictly, The Great God Pan should be described as an occult rather than a spiritualist novel. However, it does use the language of spiritualism. The image that Arthur Machen uses is that of tearing aside the veil. If only you could tear aside the veil, you would find whole other vistas of reality. Machen probably did genuinely believe that the world beyond the veil interpenetrated with our world. One of the remarkable things about his novel is how it manages to unite the worlds of scientific materialism and of occult spiritualism. In The Great God Pan, the vehicle of witnessing the Great God is an unethical vivisection. It starts with a kind of brain surgery or trepanning operation. The character Mary gets to see the Great God Pan, and it leaves her an idiot."