«Man is made a mystery for mysteries and visions»: Occultism, modernism, and Arthur Machen’s esoteric reading strategy in fin de siècle Britain

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«Man is made a mystery for mysteries and visions»

Occultism, modernism, and Arthur Machen’s esoteric reading strategy in fin de siècle Britain

Mats Veivang Sypriansen

Master thesis in European culture (KULH4890) Supervisor: Professor Dirk Johannsen

Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages Faculty of Humanities

University of Oslo

Spring 2021

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1 Summary

This thesis is an analysis of Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature (1902) by the Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863-1947). The book presents a reading strategy that focuses on the uncovering of symbols in literature which invokes feelings of ‘ecstasy’, a trait Machen associates with ‘fine literature’ for its ability to draw readers away from the common life.

This theoretical framework is contingent on the epistemological position that mystic symbols and signs are latent in nature and in the pre-modern mode of existence, and that an artist is uniquely equipped to decipher, transform, and communicate them. If done correctly, art can then express a higher form of knowledge if it received through an ecstatic mode of thinking, something from which the modern man has become estranged by the process of modernity, apart from some few who had the good fortune of developing an a priori-sense of ecstatic thinking by exposure to places where such latent signs are more numerous. Machen, by formulating the qualities in literature required for the communication of ecstasy, seeks to instil in readers the knowledge required for beneficial readings and proper appreciation for the literary art. The analysis is performed through an interdisciplinary approach. We establish relevant historical context about esotericism and occultism in fin de siècle Britain and its connection with the process of disenchantment, before discussing Machen’s position and perspective in that period and performing a close reading of Hieroglyphics. Machen is then contrasted with the knowledge production of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a magical organisation in which he was briefly a member, and who stands as representatives for the modern conception of occult activities. We conclude by arguing that Machen’s project aspires for a “re-enchantment” of literature, and as such is anti-modernist in its conception, as it is contingent on the rejection of certain signifiers of modernism and modernity, such as secularization, urbanism, positivism, and psychological “inwardness”.

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2 Foreword

With special thanks to Astrid Veivang. My grandma. Your support has been the lathe around which my years at university were made possible.

Additional gratitude must be offered to my supervisor, Dirk Johannsen, who gave invaluable suggestions, was a constant source of enthusiasm, and whose erudition has been profoundly inspiring. The staff and professors of the EKUL program, who met a difficult time with rolled up sleeves and an impressive cheer. My fellow students, whose company and conversations in this year of plague have been pinpricks of starlight through the long, cloudy night: Oliver Reiersen, Paal André Hermansen, Evelyn Førstemann Nilsen and Julie Ellinor Dalseth.

Thank you. My dad, Stig Sypriansen, for the patience. And last, but not least, Joanna Rzadkowska, for everything.

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3 Introduction

3.1 Ancient signs for the new century

In May 1899, Arthur Llewelyn Jones-Machen (1863-1947) finished writing Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature and set about writing the novella A Fragment of Life.¹ That story would not be completed until 1904, as tragedy struck and on July 31^st, 1899, Amelia Hogg, Arthur’s wife of 13 years passed away.² In his autobiography, he writes: «Then a great sorrow which had long been threatened fell upon me: I was once more alone.»³ Machen wrote and worked from 1885 until the 1930s and achieved some renown in his own time. His success would never be such as to grant him financial comfort, however, but he was able to spend the last few years of his life in relative ease after several literary figures—including, amongst others, T.S. Eliot—petitioned the government on his behalf to secure him a Civil List pension.⁴ In A Fragment of Life, Machen tells the tale of a married couple, Edward and Mary Darnell, living in London where they spend their days absorbed by the mundane trivialities of modern life. Hours are spent in conversation to discuss whether to buy a new piece of furniture or how to decorate the guest room, and hours more to investigate which stores gives them the best value for every shilling spent. They are fond of each other, and quite content with their lot in life, but the reader sees how life has been arrested by ritual: The daily meals, the evening pipe, the hour for sleep, the money saved, the conversations. It is circular and incurious. One day, Edward is telling his wife of a grand tour he had walked about the city that had felt to him like an adventure. He then speaks forlornly of reading about the great travellers when he was a child, memories reawakened by his recent local sojourn, and now, home again, he feels silly for the exuberance and joy he had experienced: «It was such nonsense, you know; as if there could be anything strange or wonderful in London.»⁵ But wonder he had felt:

1 Arthur Machen, The Autobiography of Arthur Machen, (North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, 2017), p.259

2 Susan Johnston Graf, Talking to the Gods, (New York: State of New York Press, 2016), p.57

3 Machen, The Autobiography of Arthur Machen, p.259; St. James’s Gazette, 2^nd August, 1899, “Deaths”, p.7

4 S.T. Joshi, “Introduction” in Arthur Machen’s The White People and Other Weird Stories (London: Penguin Books), p.xviii

5 Arthur Machen, The White People and Other Weird Stories, p.179

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There was a rapture in Darnell’s voice as he spoke, that made his story well-nigh swell into a song, and he drew a long breath as the words ended, filled with the thought of that far-off summer day, when some enchantment had informed all common things, transmuting them into a great sacrament, causing earthly works to glow with the fire and the glory of the everlasting light.

And some splendour of that light shone on the face of Mary as she sat still against the sweet gloom of the night, her dark hair making her face more radiant.⁶

Daily life returns, but the restlessness perseveres. Edward tells Mary that, “It is the old blood calling to the old land.” They begin spending their days dreaming and talking of wonderful things and strange places, and as their hearts open to the mysteries, London is transformed around them: «London had become Bagdad; it must at last be transmuted to Syon, or in the phrase of one of his old documents, the City of the Cup.»⁷ This knowledge that reality is transmutable and elastic, subject to different laws than those championed by the positivist sciences was not a new position for Machen, who was well versed in esoteric literature, and in 1899 joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a modern magical organization that taught ceremonial and ritual magic to its initiates. Edward and Mary, having discovered something of these mysteries, change their lives in their service. Edward keeps a journal of these days, and on the last page he writes:

‘So I awoke from a dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, of weary, useless little things; and as my eyes were opened I saw that I was in an ancient wood, where a clear well rose into grey film and vapour beneath a misty, glimmering heat. And a form came towards me from the hidden places of the wood, and my love and I were united by the well.’⁸

One must surmise that it was no coincidence that this was the tale Machen sat down to write after finishing Hieroglyphics. Nor even that Hieroglyphics was the book he wrote at the end of the 19^th century, not only because of the circumstances of Machen’s life then—defined by a duality of grief and faith—but also in that point and place in history, which was charged

6 Machen, The White People and Other Weird Stories, p.183

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with tension between the emergence of a secular hegemony, a resurgence of interest in the esoteric, and the advent of modernism. Even the occultists, such as those in Golden Dawn, advocated for a rational conception of esotericism.⁹ Machen felt this as well as any sensitive man living through interesting times would and realised that in such times the mysteries of life had never been more important, and these are the circumstances this paper seeks to understand. Hieroglyphics is the cipher he conceived to unveil the symbols, and the key with which the modern man can open the door to ancient knowledge that modern life would rather he forgot, but how is this done, and why?

3.2 Why Machen

Arthur Machen has largely avoided academic scrutiny, at least until the past few decades.

Were one to speculate on the reasons for this, one might consider his position in relation to three spheres that have generally also been neglected by mainstream academia, these being respectively genre fiction (horror specifically), occultism and alternative history. Some writers of horror have been well-regarded consistently since their own time, despite varying critical reception.¹⁰ Since the 1970s horror fiction has enjoyed a considerable commercial success, which has re-ignited an interest in the genre’s progenitors. Best known among these were Howard Philips Lovecraft, whose books have been sold in the millions, and is touted by successful practitioners of the genre such as Stephen King as a major figure in horror

fiction.¹¹ This interest has since been extended to the stories that Lovecraft championed in his extant letters as well as in the essay Supernatural Horror in Literature¹², as well as his

various contemporary writers. In fact, the two horror stories Lovecraft appreciated most were The Willows by Algernon Blackwood—Machen’s compatriot in Golden Dawn—, and The

9 By which I refer to the modern conception of rationalism, as distinct from general rationalism, which could theoretically encompass such as things as would be considered irrational in a modern context, such as early modern demonology and witchcraft, that was still considered rational by those who accepted their central premisses. For a historical treatment of this subject matter, see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): «Demonology was the study of a natural order in which the existence of demonic actions and effects was, largely, presupposed.» (Ch.10, p.1.)

10 These include, among others, Edgar Allan Poe—whose short stories were often panned by his contemporary critics but was eventually championed by individuals with significant cultural capital, such as Charles

Baudelaire—, Mary Shelley, and Bram Stoker.

11 Stephen King, “Introduction” in Michel Houellebecq’s H.P. Lovecraft — Against the World, Against Life, (London: Gollancz, 2006), p.9-18

12 H.P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” in Eldritch Tales — A Miscellany of the Macabre, (London:

Gollancz, 2011), p.423-492

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White People, by Machen himself. Likewise, some occultists have exerted sufficient mystique to warrant the attention of academia, most (in)famous of these being Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). While certain occultists perhaps had an allure that made them fascinating objects for study, occultism generally has not. The field would not see proper academic scrutiny until the 1970s, when James Webb published his findings in The Occult Underground (1974) and The Occult Establishment (1976). As Wouter J. Hanegraaff writes:

«[…]the category of “the occult” emerged during this period as a conceptual waste-basket for “rejected knowledge,” and it has kept functioning as the academy’s radical “Other” to the present day.»¹³ Likewise with alternative history, which other renowned philosophers and scientists have occupied themselves with, but has been considered in them a quirk of

character or eccentricity. The best-known example of this being Isaac Newton who

considered his work on physics a footnote compared to his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms.

In Machen’s case, this interest in alternative history came in form of Grail research, which he conducted with his friend Edgar Arthur Waite, whom he aided in authoring the book The Hidden Church of the Holy Grail in 1909.¹⁴

If these three subjects were circles in a Venn diagram, Arthur Machen would be placed squarely in the middle. He was not considered a central figure within the Golden Dawn in his own time, but as he has achieved a level of prominence separately, it is of interest to compare his perspective with that of the Order. His rare position between these spheres of influence marks him as of particular interest when trying to discern the ways different modes of knowledge interacted and influenced each other during the chaotic period of fin de siècle modernity.

3.3 Why and how Hieroglyphics

Hieroglyphics is an obscure book, rarely read, about Machen’s conception of fine literature, and the qualities required therein to attain that consideration. Most of the academic scrutiny devoted to Arthur Machen has focused its attention on his fiction rather than his nonfiction,

13 Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy — Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture, (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2013) 221

14 Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, in collaboration with Antoine Faivre, Roelof van den Broek & Jean-Pierre Brach, (Leiden: Brill, 2006), p.1165

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which has left Hieroglyphics for the most part undisturbed. It is not an entirely unknown work, and was reviewed at release, but seeing as much of Machen’s recent attention has come through his position as a writer of horror fiction, it remains as of now mostly a curiosity for his devotees. Dennis Denisoff makes some note of it in Arthur Machen — Decadent and Occult Works¹⁵, but mainly, as the title suggests, as it pertains to his occult perspective and decadent style. Its occult connections is also the focal points in Christine Fergusson’s article

“Reading with the Occultists”, in which she describes how Hieroglyphics traces the artistic success of popular books back to an esoteric point of origin.¹⁶ But its significance as cultural history extends beyond its affiliation with Machen’s oeuvre and occult interest. Machen, in the fictitious dialogues between himself and the character of The Hermit, discusses how knowledge emerges as something entirely unique and specific from literature, which makes Hieroglyphics not only interesting from the perspective of cultural history, but also of some interest as a piece of early literary theory and as such benefits from literary analysis. It presents a reading technique that is not entirely conceptually dissimilar from Viktor Schlovsky’s defamiliarization/estrangement in Art as Technique (1917) and Walter

Benjamin’s profane illumination in Surrealism (1928), yet it predates them both by several years. Where Schlovsky is concerned with literary formalism and Benjamin with

revolutionary energy, Machen advocates for a reading technique that would “re-enchant”

literature and re-establish certain ancient narrative ideals, which ties his conception of knowledge intimately to the esoteric and is congruent with his background in occultism and Christian mysticism. Its position relative to Machen’s career as a whole is also fortuitous, as it was written and released during the period considered to be his transitory phase, in which his interest in the gothic and the traditionally occult was slowly replaced with a more

conventional Christianity, and should offer insight into both periods. These things considered it makes sense to approach the book from an interdisciplinary perspective, in which we first clarify the cultural- and intellectual history context of occultism in the relevant period, before performing a close reading of Hieroglyphics, at which point it will be advantageous to

compare the arguments in the book with Golden Dawn’s conception of mysticism (and their attendant modernism), and consider how the two divergent systems concern themselves with knowledge production.

15 Dennis Denisoff, Arthur Machen — Decadent and Occult Works, (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2018), p.16-20

16 Christine Ferguson, “Reading with the Occultists: Arthur Machen, A.E. Waite, and the Ecstasies of Popular Fiction”, Journal of Victorian Culture, Vol.21, Nr.1, 2016, p.40-55

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4 Esotericism and modernism

4.1 Modernism in literary- and cultural history

Establishing a precise definition of modernism is perhaps a quixotic endeavour, but some modicum of context is appropriate if we are to use the term in relation to esotericism in fin de siècle Britain. In literary history, the term is understood as a signifier for various styles, trends and genres of an avant-garde persuasion and its writers are summarized in the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms so: «Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories.»¹⁷ Symbolist writing is noted as a precursor to modernist literature, which goes to some extent in placing Arthur Machen in relation to modernism as a literary phenomenon, but it’s also defined as a rejection of 19^th century traditions and «their consensus between author and reader», a notion which Machen would repudiate completely. In Verdenslitteratur, it is noted that the term is not very apt as a period marker at all, but rather as one that connotes a plurality of styles and expressions.¹⁸ To draw some conclusion from this, for the purpose of this paper, when we refer to modernist

literature, we are referring to the collection of avant-garde literary genres that emerged in the wake of the 19^th century realists.

In cultural history, it is far more complex. To put it in general terms, we understand it in part as the result of the friction generated between traditions and the emergence of certain

processes, such as secularization and rationalization. As such, it becomes more

interchangeable with ‘modernity’, albeit with certain subtle differences, in that modernism emerges as a consequence of the social relations and engagement with the cultural and technological progression that defines the former. This means that something we might denote as ‘modern’ or ‘of modernity’ might also then contribute to a state of cultural modernism, even if we don’t necessarily refer to it as modernist in and of itself. To

understand how modernism relates to the expressions of esotericism of the period—and the

17 Chris Baldick, Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p.213

18 Jon Haaberg, Tone Selboe & Hans Erik Aarset, Verdenslitteratur — Den Vestlige Tradisjonen, (Oslo:

Universitetsforlaget, 2007), p.427

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modes of knowledge favoured by the contemporary occultists (we refer here mainly to the rational mysticism of the Golden Dawn)—, for the purposes of this paper, we shall do so in terms of Weberian disenchantment (discussed further in section 4.2). For now, we wish merely to clarify that when we use the term modernism, we refer to either the cultural reactions resulting from the domain of traditional religious and magical thought being encroached upon by the processes of rationalization and secularization, or literary modernism, and will be denoted as either such when relevant.

4.2 Esotericism in fin de siècle Britain

It is a generally agreed upon thing that fin de siècle Europe experienced an explosion of interest in subjects such as spiritism, seances, tarot card readings, astral projections, and myriad others. Victorian era England in particular, generated a frenzied demand for books and services that could satisfy the curiosity of the middle- and higher classes of people who felt dissatisfied with the traditional religious teachings and dogma. Into this newly formed vacuum, there grew societies, reading circles and clubs who made concerted efforts to reconstruct a liturgy for the modern man, who melded together his conceptions of himself as a rational, scientific being with a soul destined for an afterlife. It is not to be overstated how sudden and radical this change in opinion was. Consider for instance how Edward B. Tylor described the ‘occult sciences’ in his Primitive Culture (1865): «Its place in history is briefly this. It belongs in its main principle to the lowest known stages of civilization, and the lower races, who have not partaken largely of the education of the world, still maintain it in

vigour.»¹⁹ In London, an early ‘occult celebrity’ was Madame Helena Blavatsky, who came to London from Ukraine via the United States—where interest in spirituality had developed earlier than in Europe²⁰—, who authored Isis Unveiled (1877) and founded the Theosophical Society. She promised spiritual fulfilment through teachings that combined the various religions of the Orient—such as Buddhism and Hinduism—with a reverence for the

mysterious monks of Tibet, the Mahatmas, hidden masters. While these new exotic esoteric beliefs claimed their authenticity through a connection to the Orient, they had been prepared

19 Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture — Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom, Fourth Edition, revised, (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1903), p.112

20 See: Cathy Gutierrez, “Spiritualism” in The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism, edited by Glenn Alexander Magee, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p.237-247

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as a product for the west in America, that had seen similar interests blossom decades earlier.²¹ Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophic Society had been established in New York a decade before coming to London, and Spiritualism in the same place as early as 1848.²² Shortly after its advent to London, several English scholars and writers would reach prominence through their various teachings, such as Anna Kingsford who advocated for a form of Christian Mysticism.

She was the president of the Theosophical Society before founding its offshoot, The Hermetic Society. This in due course inspired the founding of such organizations as The Society for Psychical Research²³ that would later be involved in the process that saw Madame Blavatsky accused with fraud.²⁴ Indeed, the orient-occident dichotomy was not unfelt, and many

westerners interested in occult subjects looked at Theosophy with scepticism, and many would see the Golden Dawn as a western alternative where one could study esotericism without fear of being considered a “occult oriental ass”.²⁵ Even within the Theosophical Society itself, the question of Christianity would cause discord in the 1880s, with Anna Kingsford ascending to a position of leadership within the London Lodge—albeit very temporary—, pledging: «to the study of all religions esoterically, and especially to that of our Western Catholic Church.»²⁶ The Theosophic Society would leave a mark that far

transcended these rather provincial disagreements, however, and would come to affect even the Indian National Movement²⁷, as well as anticolonial politics²⁸ and Hinduism in India proper.²⁹ This encroachment of esotericism on the spheres of politics and science were not

21 For a thorough examination of The Theosophic Society’s relationship with eastern teachings from a western inception point, see: Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism and the Orient in the First Theosophical Society, p.29-64, in “Theosophy across Boundaries — Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Modern Esoteric Movement” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020), edited by Hans Martin Krämer and Julian Strube.

22 David Allen Harvey, “Elite Magic in the Nineteenth Century”, p.547-575 in David J. Collins’ The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West — From Antiquity to the Present, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p.554

23 This claim also requires some clarification. While indeed some sought to disprove claims of ‘phenomena’, other members came at the problem from the opposite angle, seeking to prove the efficacy of, for example, theosophy, such as the physicists Lord Rayleigh and Joseph Kohn Thomson, who hoped “to preserve some spiritual aspect to the universe or gain new insight into the laws of nature through an investigation of psychical phenomena”. See: Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment — British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, (Chicago / London: Chicago University Press, 2007), p.35

24 Owen, The Place of Enchantment, p.34

25 Machen, The Autobiography of Arthur Machen, p.276

26 Owen, The Place of Enchantment, p.266 n.72.

27 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire — 1875-1914, (London: Abacus, 2014), p.265 & p.288

28 See chapter 3 in Peter van der Veer’s Imperial Encounters — Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001): «I argue that spiritualism, and Theosophy in particular, played a significant role in the development of radical, anticolonial politics both in Britain and India. » (p.57-58)

29 Krämer and Strube, Theosophy across Boundaries, in particular chapter 2: “Hinduism, Theosophy, and the Bhagavad Gita within a Global Religious History of the Nineteenth Century” by Michael Bergunder.

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only limited to Britain and its satellite colonies. In France as well, academics were forced to confront an increasing belief in spiritism, which had debuted there in 1853, and caused an epidemic of dancing tables and materialized spirits.³⁰ In the 1880s a group of French

interdisciplinary researchers started affording such claims close scrutiny, simply because they were ubiquitous³¹ and in formed the Institut Psychique International for the express purpose of investigating “supra-normal phenomena”,³² hearkening back to the London-based Society for Psychical Research.

To understand how esotericism reached such a preeminent position in England during this period we must juxtapose the phenomenon with the concept of disenchantment, which we understand here as a point of tension generated between the emergence of modernisation and the gradual diminishment of religious and magical beliefs—as in, the belief in magic as a concrete force in the universe. Max Weber diagnosed this condition as an inevitable result in an industrialised society that had embraced the ‘puritan work ethic’, which condemned its workers to ‘iron cages’ and saw them reduced to little more than numbers in a ledger.³³ When analysing the hermetic practices of the fin de siècle as a modernist phenomenon, some

academics look to the definitions developed by Max Weber, who saw modernism as Enlightenment values and puritanism come home to roost, to summarize it somehow reductively. Owen: «He argued that far from the liberation envisaged by Enlightenment thinkers, what has been bequeathed to the modern era is the imprisoning straitjacket of a Zweckrationalität, purposive or instrumental rationality.»³⁴ For Weber, looking at the different ways disenchantment had influenced the modern existence, thought it defined by

«[…]a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual.»³⁵ Man’s position within the modern society was also largely defined by his relation to material goods and work, claiming that the rationalized restructuring of the workplace limited the possibility-

30 M. Brady Brower, Unruly Spirits: The Science of Psychic Phenomena in Modern France, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), p.xvi

31 Brower, Unruly Spirits, p.xvi-xvii.

32 Brower, Unruly Spirits, p.48.

33 This language is taken from the Talcott Parson 1930 translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and infuses the text with a more ‘Marxist’ aspect than is perhaps warranted. The purpose of its inclusion here is not to encumber the argument with an ideological critique, but rather to stress the context of the process of disenchantment within an industrialized society.

34 Owen, The Place of Enchantment, p.240-1

35 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parson, (New York:

Routledge, 2005), p.60

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horizon of the individual: «The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so.»³⁶ And: «Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.»³⁷ It was precisely within this transcendence of the mechanized daily existence that the occult found its upsurge. The occult man saw himself as a rational creature and considered his own industry to be not only scientific, but even of a ‘higher’ form of science.³⁸ Denied the freedom of the material world, the occult man found an inner freedom through magic. Weber’s precise definition of disenchantment (Entzauberung) has never been established³⁹, but can be broken down to ‘de-magic-ation’

(Britannica) or «”removing the magic”».⁴⁰ When Adorno and Horkheimer diagnosed many of the same tendencies, they considered the process of disenchantment as an inevitable result of the enlightenment values, them being necessarily totalitarian: «To the Enlightenment,

anything which cannot be resolved into number, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry. Unity remains the watchword from Parmenides to Russell.

All gods and qualities must be destroyed.»⁴¹ The concept still retains an explanatory power for scholars of occultism when analysing the emergence of new magical systems in the face of the burgeoning impetus of secularisation. Indeed, while in the Western world, magic in large part lost its position as an explanatory component, rather than disappearing, it transitioned from being a symbol for the unknown and unexplainable to a tool for self- improvement for those with the intellect and willpower to harness its potential. Or to put it another way: it shifted from being a signifier for our collective, pre-enlightened past, to being yet another tool in the toolbox of the urban modern man. Some, however, claim that proof of witchcraft, cunning folk, spiritualists, and such still being present is evidence of Weber’s thesis being incorrect. This could be seen as missing the forest for the trees. In Owen Davies’

introduction to his otherwise excellent essay “Magic in Common and Legal Perspectives”, he writes: «In Weberian terms, then, the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries continued to be

“enchanted”, expressed in the same forms as those found in the worlds of ancient, medieval

36 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p.123

37 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p.61

38 A concept we can trace back to Éliphas Lévi, for «signifying the use of magical operations to obtain a true knowledge of the cosmos, and of oneself, as opposed to the mere satisfaction of material and emotional needs.» Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), p.72

39 Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived the Disenchantment of the World”, in Religion, 33:4, (2003).

40 Harvey, Magic and Witchcraft in the West, p.548

41 Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment — Philosophical Fragments, (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 2002), p.4-5

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and early modern magic, such as astrology and divination, sometimes as reformulations of old concepts, namely, the nineteenth-century for mesmerisms, Spiritualism and modern ritual magic.»⁴² Per Faxneld echoes the sentiment in “Only Poets and Occultists Believe in Them Just Now”: «The so-called disenchantment may never have occurred, at least not in the manner traditionally described.»⁴³ Such claims rest on a fundamental misunderstanding of Weber’s approach to analysis, which understands hegemonic modes of knowledge and their function as inherently domineering rather than erasing. One can find examples that belies any wider trend within a culture or society, but if we look back to the statutes that governed witchcraft and cunning among the common folk, the shift from the supernatural to the secular within England’s laws, is clearly writ (such as in the following paragraph). Just as the

presence of a single atheist in the Crusades would not belie the dominant position of the Church, the presence of a tarot card reader in London does not belie the process of

disenchantment during the late 19^th century. Egil Asprem clarifies the Weberian thesis by pointing out that Weber formulated it based on “ideal types” which «[…]rarely correspond to ground-level historical realities.»⁴⁴ The concept thus retains value as an analytical tool, while keeping in mind that Weber wrote his analysis from the position of—and for the benefit of—

the German class system, and charted how the working life premisses had shifted from being under the influence of the ecclesiast class to being defined by an emerging bureaucratic administrative system. This analysis would have been applicable to the English working class of the fin de siècle who would have felt this keenly, being mainly English Anglicans. For them, for whom Predestination was a vital part of their doctrine, seeing the gradual lessening of the Church’s hegemonic position in the workplace in favour of the burgeoning

administrative class, this new dichotomy would have felt alienating. One might even postulate that by demoting witchcraft from an existential threat to one’s safety (in the legal context) to frivolous antics by superstitious peasants, the fate of the enchanted mode of thinking was cemented, and by early 20^th century, secularisation reached a zenith: «In short, intellectually western religion was never more hard-pressed than in the early 1900s, and

42 Owen Davies, “Magic in Common and Legal Perspectives”, p.521-546 in David J. Collins’ The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West — From Antiquity to the Present, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p.522

43 Per Faxneld, “‘Only Poets and Occultists Believe in Them Just Now’ — Fairies and Modernist Crisis of Authorship”, p.93-110 in Tessel M. Bauduin & Henrik Johnsson’s The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature and Cinema. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p.101

44 Egil Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment — Scientific and Esoteric Discourse, 1900-1939, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), p.4

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politically it was in full retreat, at least into confessional enclosures barricaded against assault from outside.»⁴⁵

This period is considered by academics as a renaissance for occultism⁴⁶, which is likely true insofar as the period saw a great flourishing of innovative ways of practicing the arts, but in our opinion, as a general claim it lacks class analysis. If we look at the confirmed members of the best-known organization of the period The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, they consist of educated persons with means and standing. Likewise, we see that those engaged in spiritism and occult activities are referred to in the literature as middle class.⁴⁷ The

organisations that would become the occult authorities of the period were masonic in structure, and bourgeois in inclination, in effect leaving them insular and niche, with the occasional member even having to abandon their positions within the hierarchy if their occult activities became known, as would be the case with Golden Dawn co-founder William Wynn Westcott.⁴⁸ The ways and degrees to which the lives of common folks were influenced by magic can be understood through the laws of the relevant countries, in this case England. By the end of the 19^th century, the days of the witch burnings were a century past, but that is not to say that magic had seized being an illicit activity. As transgressions, however, they had passed from the ecclesiast courts to the secular. Witchcraft as a criminal act had been reduced to a “false belief” by the Witchcraft Act of 1736 and carried the punishment of a year in prison and quarterly stints in the pillory.⁴⁹ However, magistrates found the concept of accusing anyone of “witchcraft” embarrassing, and the law saw little use, in favour of the eventual 1824 Vagrancy Act, under which persons could be tried for «pretending or professing to tell fortunes, or using any subtle craft, means or device, by palmistry or otherwise, to deceive or impose.»⁵⁰ These shifts in the law went for the most part unnoticed by the common folk, who for decades after the fact still thought of witchcraft as something punishable. Davies writes: «Suspicions of witchcraft were reported to the police and

magistrates, and there was shock, bemusement and anger when accusers were told there were no laws against witchcraft (other than as fraud) and that they should not be so foolish as to

45 Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, p.266

47 Brower, Unruly Spirits, p.ixv. & Owen, The Place of Enchantment, p.4-5

48Owen, The Place of Enchantment, p.78

49 Davies, Magic and Witchcraft in the West, p.524

50 Davies, Magic and Witchcraft in the West, p.526-7

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believe in such things.»⁵¹ The efficacy this use of ridicule and mockery would have to

eradicate magical beliefs would not go unnoticed by colonial powers, who would wield it as a weapon to make local populaces more manageable. In his 1948 study, Hutton Webster

encouraged its use against Native Americans, noting that in Australia, «[…]the aborigines often have their magical notions shattered as the result of the contemptuous attitude toward them displayed by white settlers.»⁵²

Among the magical organizations of the period, the most notorious to this day is the Golden Dawn. While never seeing as widespread popularity as the Theosophic Society, whose members numbered in the thousands⁵³, the Golden Dawn, despite being a much more modestly sized group⁵⁴, nevertheless has seen its influence endure long since the internal schism fractured the group. Some of this might be attributed to the sort of members the group sought, which was predominantly writers and artists. As an organization it was dedicated to magical practices in which members could study and practice various esoteric disciplines and theories, and through care application, rise through its ranks. For some time, well-to-do men had been forming lodges and clubs for studying and experimenting with magical systems, most commonly the Kabbalah. While these were a relatively modern phenomenon, in some cases their claims to authenticity were built upon an established tradition of Rosicrucianism, which traced its legitimacy back several hundred years, to the publishing to certain

pamphlets, which claimed that there existed «a hidden society of adepts, equipped with a knowledge of the secrets of the cosmos and dedicated to religion and healing, which had been founded in the fourteenth century.»⁵⁵ Such was the founding principles of Golden Dawn as well, though its secondary purpose was also to offer an alternative to the Theosophical

Society.⁵⁶ New organisations would claim legitimacy by linking their magical liturgy to some esoteric traditions in similar fashion—what Eric Hobsbawm would later call ‘inventing tradition’⁵⁷—, and Golden Dawn was no exception. For a new order to be established and be

51 Davies, Magic and Witchcraft in the West, p.534

52 Hutton Webster, Magic — A Sociological Study, (Stanford: Stanford University Press / London: Oxford University Press, 1948), p.505

53 Krämer and Strube, Theosophy across Boundaries, p.8.

54 Numbering about 250 in 1898: Hanegraaff, Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, p.548

55 Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). p.71

57 We refer here to the process through which organizations and persons create an aesthetic or rhetorical link to an earlier, more ancient entity whose legitimacy had been cemented for a long enough period to be unimpeachable, thus transferring that same legitimacy unto the newer subject. It is explained and

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recognised, it required two things: proof of social suitability and proof of authenticity. Their founding members—William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and A.F.A. Woodford—, already established freemasons and practitioners of magic involved in other organisations such as Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia in the case of Westcott and Mathers (thus securing the first requirement…), allegedly discovered an ancient Rosicrucian manuscript that contained lost and forgotten ritual ceremonies⁵⁸ (…and the second), which would become the foundation for the secret organization in which its members could build upon their own particular variety of magic. This would not prove to be without turmoil, however. Of the three founders, Woodford died shortly after the Golden Dawn’s founding, and leadership of the lodge was split between Wescott and Mathers, until Westcott resigned.

Golden Dawn under the sole control of Mathers, a strict authoritarian, dissolved quickly into infighting and discord, and the order fractured in 1901. Further, the authenticity of the concept of hidden Rosicrucian fraternities were disbelieved among scholars of such things from the very beginning, including Golden Dawn member A.E. Waite, who published The Real History of the Rosicrucians in 1887, where he claimed that the societies were an

invention of Johann Valentin Andreae (1586-1654).⁵⁹ Until its eventual fracturing the Golden Dawn was structured not unlike a masonic lodge, with ranks and offshoot factions, secret groupings and societies within the society, and a strict hierarchy. One was initiated into the First Order, but if one wished to advance, it was on Mathers’ terms. R.A. Gilbert puts it succinctly: «[…]the Second Order, which was run by Mathers for Mathers—liberty, along with equality, had disappeared.»⁶⁰ Like the Theosophical Society, Golden Dawn also

admitted a large number of women to their ranks, such as the avant-garde artist Florence Farr, the art nouveau artist Pamela Colman Smith and patron of the arts Annie Horniman. Initiation

demonstrated in The Invention of Tradition by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

58 As well as the name and address of another Rosicrucian adept living in Germany, who was summarily contacted to obtain permission to establish a “sister-temple” in England. For the traditional story, see Ellic Howe’s Magicians of the Golden Dawn — A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887-1923, (York Beach:

Samuel Weiser, Inc, 1984.), chapter 1, who also speculates as to the authenticity of this story, or at least its potential embellishment. For further discussions of this origin story, see also: Owen, The Place of

Enchantment, p.53-4, Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, p.74-77, and most extensive, chapter 2 of R.A. Gilbert, Revelations of the Golden Dawn — The Rise and Fall of a Magical Order, (London: Quantum Press, 1997).

59 Arthur Edward Waite, The Real History of the Rosicrucians — Founded on their own manifestoes, and on facts and documents collected from the writings of initiated brethren, (London: George Redway, York Street, Covend Garden, 1887), chapter VIII, and further expounded upon in A.E. Waite, The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross — being records of the house of the Holy Spirit in its inward and outward history, (London: William Rider

& Son, 1924), chapter VIII: “Authorship of the Chemical Nuptials”.

60 R.A. Gibert, The Golden Dawn — Twilight of the Magicians, (Wellingborough: The Aquarian Press, 1983), p.35

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tables of the various Golden Dawn temples in Britain shows that the Isis-Urania Temple in London accepted 189 members between 1888 and 1896, and that 84 of them were women.⁶¹ Compared to the Theosophical Society, whose membership numbers reached 45000 in 1928⁶², we see that Golden Dawn was very much an “elite” club, compared to its rival. A last point of contrast is worth highlighting here, which is that between the two, Golden Dawn, more than the Theosophical Society, represented the “modernist” conceptualisation of esotericism. Golden Dawn’s members were the ones who wrote volumes of literature where they charted the language, numerology and philosophy that wrought in total a rational conception of magic. Or, to place it in the context of an earlier subject, Golden Dawn, more so than the Theosophical Society, represented a disenchanted form of magic. This brief summary is worth bearing in mind going forward, as Arthur Machen joined the Isis-Urania Temple of the Golden Dawn only two years before its dissolution, during which period he would have been exposed to the various characters and ideas of the fractious group, including some who advocated for artistic directions that he would argue against directly in

Hieroglyphics.

This brings us to the Golden Dawn’s conception of epistemology. As mentioned, their form of occult activities focused on ritualistic ceremonies that would imbue its participants with greater knowledge or focus, or a puissance. The rites were a jealously guarded secret at the order’s conception and remained so for some time—a call to secrecy was part of the Neophyte Ritual for all initiates: «[…]do, of my own free will, hereby and hereon, most solemnly promise to keep secret this Order, its Name, the Names of its Members and the proceedings that take place at its meetings, from every person in the world who has not been initiated into it; nor will I discuss them with any Member who has not the Pass-word for the time being, or who has resigned, demitted or been expelled»⁶³. Aleister Crowley would publish some of the rites in his journal The Equinox before breaking with the Golden Dawn to form his own group, named A∴A∴, and then Israel Regardie published the complete teachings in 1937-40.⁶⁴ Explaining the complete workings of Golden Dawn’s ceremonial magics is obviously beyond the purview of this paper, for they are myriad and byzantine, but

61 Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, p.49

63 Israel Regardie, The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6^th Edition, (Woodbury: Llewelyn Publications, 2002), p.123

64 This is summarized in the Carl Llewelyn Weschke’s “Foreword”, in Regardie’s The Golden Dawn, p.ix-x

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we can sketch certain broader tendencies that illustrate their central nucleus, which is that of the rationalist magic. The system is based on Rosicrucianism and the Kabbalah⁶⁵, and uses symbols, signs and telesmatic images (a visualization technique to give mental shape to the inherently shapeless beings) and names, to evoke angels, demons and various spirits, that are each imbued with specific properties, through which the initiates to the secrets—perhaps armed with supplementary talismans to guard and focus the mind—may reach higher states of being or attain hidden knowledge. Casting a wide gaze across the collected teachings, we find ceremonies and rites, as would be an important part of Golden Dawn’s social function, but also an immense amount of rules, properties, instructions and definitions, such as how to perform clairvoyance, astral projection, skrying, the construction of talismans and sigils, alchemical properties, systems for tarot card readings, astrology, divination, the Zodiac, the effects of the Equinox, the Enochian system, Geomancy, meditation techniques, and so on.

Yet, despite this multitude of subjects, as Israel Regardie stresses, it is all «drawn together and worked up into a single majestic system.»⁶⁶ Common to these various threads is a demand for «not only extraordinary knowledge, discipline, and training, but a great deal of plain hard work toward which would-be dabblers never seem inclined.»⁶⁷ This is also a modern evolution of the conception of magic, as distinct from how it was considered during early-modern witchcraft, where all that was required was correct incantations and symbols, which had power for even the untrained. Intrinsic also to the system, is the wish to transform elemental powers, be they those of fire, wind, water and earth, or those of divinity, into a structured form of knowledge, which can be studied and understood, and above all else, mastered. In theory, by naming and visualizing, the forces become subject to human rules, and so subject to the rational mind, and so rationalist as an extension of its systematism. This we argue is at the core of the knowledge production in the context of British fin de siècle occultism and antithetical to Arthur Machen’s mode of thinking, as will be discussed in section 6.4.

65 They developed a version of Kabbalah, rather, that was distinct from and supplementary to the traditional Jewish Kabbalah. For a more complete explanation, see Egil Asprem, “Kabbalah Recreata: Reception and Adaptation of Kabbalah in Modern Occultism”, The Pomegranate, 9.2, 2007, p.132-153

66 Regardie, The Golden Dawn, p.10

67 Regardie, The Golden Dawn, p.xvii

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4.3 Occultism in literature

Occultism manifests in literature in two general ways: As occult representation and as an extension of occult praxis. The first is by far the most common and refers to persons, objects or organisations with occult affiliation or characteristics appearing as part of a narrative plot.

In such cases, the subjects do not need to be referring to persons and organisations with actual occult affiliation, and instead be “occult adjacent”, serving instead to provide a loose association to occultism. Secret societies and lost archaic knowledge were not uncommon tropes in Victorian literature—indeed, a secret society featured in Machen’s The Lost Club⁶⁸, written in 1890, long before his eventual initiation to Golden Dawn—, and did not

necessarily have any actual links to how occultists practiced their crafts, making it more an aesthetic inclination than didactic. Examples of this is plentiful, but we can mention for instance early vampire literature such as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872)⁶⁹ and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)⁷⁰, and other Gothic Victorian era stories, including those written by the Bronte Sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell and even Machen’s own The Great God Pan (1891). As an aesthetic preference, however, this tendency stretches back further than the occult revival itself, as we see in Romantic era Gothic literature that did not feature occult iconography, but rather evoked similar atmospheres through setting (often mysterious castles) and plot, such as The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole⁷¹. The premise of both these literary movements showed that mystery and illicit knowledge exuded a fascination on readers, despite not being specifically connected to anything concretely occult. The most obvious precursor to Hieroglyphics, however, is the Rosicrucian novel.⁷² Common to these is appearance of a Rosicrucian who possess hidden knowledge. The importance of this shall become apparent in the close reading of Hieroglyphics, where aesthetic explorations are a

68 In this tale, two young men get entangled in an obscure ceremony performed by influential people in secret somewhere in London, wherein those in attendance has their fate decided by reading from a mysterious grimoire. While the horror element is entirely fantastic, the secrecy of the meeting and the group is reminiscent of, for example, the Golden Dawn.

69 An early vampire tale, featuring a proto-example of the “occult detective” character that we would also see in Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-finder, Aleister Crowley’s Simon Iff and Dion Fortune’s Dr. Taverner.

70 Epistolary novel that featured several depictions of esoteric sciences, such as alchemy and mystic folklore.

71 The precursor to this style, wherein the titular castle is presented as a ghost-haunted, labyrinthine creation that defies logical explanations. It was followed by books such as The Old English Baron (1777) by Clara Reeve and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe.

72 Examples of this include Percy Bysshe Shelley’s St. Irvyne (1811), Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842) and William Harrison Ainsworth’s Auriol (1844).

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vital part of the human need to understand the mysteries that define the human existence in an increasingly disenchanted world.

The second manifestation of occultism in literature occurs as praxis, and can be subdivided into further two categories, the first of these being authentic occult representation. An example of this would be Algernon Blackwood. Like Machen, Blackwood was also an initiate of Golden Dawn, but, unlike Machen, most likely appreciated rational occultism for its practical possibilities, recognising it as a system that allowed for personal empowerment and improvement.⁷³ This is congruent with what little we know about Blackwood personally, which is that he was an athletic man, charismatic, worked as a undercover agent for the British military intelligence during the Great War and was a radio host for the BBC and worked regularly as a television presenter from 1936.⁷⁴ Alas, Blackwood’s diaries and journals were lost in London during WW2, when his house was bombed during the blitzkrieg⁷⁵, so the extent to which he put his faith in these systems is a matter of

conjecture—especially considering that he was scrupulously circumspect in writing about his occult involvement, even avoiding writing about his membership in the Theosophic Society in his own early memoirs⁷⁶. What we can tell, however, is that magic as practiced by Golden Dawn appears in Blackwood’s stories as part of the fictional narratives. Fictional, but when Blackwood described, processes, rituals, and invocations, they still retain a level of detail and authenticity that marks them as written by someone familiar with, or even adept in,

ceremonial magic, giving them a didactic dimension. So much so that in H.P. Lovecraft’s estimation, Blackwood’s “lesser stories” were marred by a «too free use of the trade jargon of modern “occultism”».⁷⁷

The final type of occult literature relevant here—and the second grouping of occult praxis in literature—is literature infused directly with magical spells, composed specifically for the purpose of changing the world. An example of this would be William Butler Yeats, a

73 See letter quoted by Graf on p.84 in Talking to the Gods.

74 Harold Bloom (ed.), Modern Horror Writers, (New York / Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 1995), p.33

& Graf, Talking to the Gods, p.80

75 Bloom, Modern Horror Writers, p.33 & Graf, Talking to the Gods, p.79

76 Graf, Talking to the Gods, p.80

77 Lovecraft, Eldritch Tales — A Miscellany of the Macabre, p.484

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prominent member of the Golden Dawn who infused his poetry with symbols that

corresponded with his hermetic system in a way that made fiction into spell. Dirk Johannsen describes the process: «Nothing was to remain arbitrary. Each association of ideas was a potential revelation of the correspondences of the universal mind, an actualisation of the forms inscribed in the great memory giving the moods a body to manifest themselves. The work of the poet oscillated between creation and revelation.»⁷⁸ As for Yeats’s broader literary project, Harvey summarizes it so: «Yeats himself blended Celtic mysticism with Neo-

Rosicrucian doctrine, and his Irish patriotism and yearning for a new age of cultural rebirth remained closely intertwined[…]»⁷⁹ This made for a literature less didactic and more an applied form of magical praxis for the purpose of fomenting feelings, the author-magician in effect becoming a conductor of emotion as much as a poet, which effectively erased the boundaries between poetry and magic. To understand how this would work in practice, it ought be mentioned that, according to Hanegraaff, what was referred to as “applied magic”

can also be considered a form of “applied psychology”⁸⁰, so a poem crafted to be a spell can also be considered a poem composed for the express purpose of manipulating certain emotive responses. At the time, however, it was not considered as such: «For Yeats, poems could be magical incantations.»⁸¹ Yeats himself stated about his own doctrine regarding the use of symbols in literature: «(1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy. (2) That the borders of our memories are shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of nature herself. (3) That this great mind and great memory can evoked by symbols.»⁸² Through this use of symbols in his poetry, Yeats effectively made his poetic compositions an extension of his mystical beliefs. Common in the two ways occult praxis manifests directly in literature, is the idea of fictional literature as a source of

knowledge, which we will see echoed in Hieroglyphics.

78 Dirk Johannsen, Entangled Imagination, (2021), p.10

80 Hanegraaff, Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, p.647

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5 Arthur Machen

5.1 Biographical overview

Arthur Llewelyn Jones-Machen was born at Caerleon-on-Usk, Wales, in 1863. The

landscapes that surrounded Machen, growing up, would plant their impressions in the young boy, and be carried with him throughout his career as an author:

I shall always esteem it as the greatest piece of fortune that has fallen to me, that I was born in that noble, fallen Caerleon-on-Usk, in the heart of Gwent. My greatest fortune, I mean, from that point of view which I now more especially have in mind, the career of letters. For the older I grow the more firmly am I convinced that anything which I may have accomplished in literature is due to the fact that when my eyes were first opened in earliest childhood they had before them the vision of an enchanted land.⁸³

He attended Hereford Cathedral School until 1880, where he received an excellent education by his own standards, learning Latin and Greek. There was even an attempt to impart some French to the young boys, but apparently the master «[…]wore neither cap nor gown, and so he was not a real master, and so, again, his language was not a real language.»⁸⁴ The family was poor, and by 1885, Arthur was living in a small room in London, working odd jobs for the man who had helped him publish his second work, The Anatomy of Tobacco. There were no funds for a university education, and Machen moved to London in 1881, determined to become a “man of letters” regardless. Much of what we know of Machen’s character today—

in conjunction with testimony of many friends who cherished him, and also a large number of correspondences—come from two of his autobiographies. The first was written as a serial in 1915 but collected and published as Far Off Things in 1922. It saw some success and was quickly followed by Things Near and Far in 1923.⁸⁵

In 1881 he had met Amy Hogg, whom he would marry in 1887. The decade following their marriage would come to be considered Machen’s greatest in terms of literary output, or at least the period in which he produced his most notorious works. These included The Great

85 This is summarized in Stewart Lee’s introduction to The Autobiography of Arthur Machen, 2017.

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God Pan which was written between 1890 and 1894, and caused somewhat of a stir after its publication, something Machen retells with great relish in Things Near and Far: «It had some mysterious property in it, this little book, which caused good men to froth at the mouth, greatly to my delight.»⁸⁶ The other notable works written in the period include The Three Impostors in 1895, The Hill of Dreams⁸⁷ and The White People and Hieroglyphics, both of which was written in 1899⁸⁸—in addition to the first chapter of A Fragment of Life.⁸⁹ In the years that followed, Machen spent some time travelling abroad while curing himself of what was probably severe depression following the death of Amy.⁹⁰

Machen spent some time working various odd jobs and acting on stage but returned to

writing fiction in the years that followed, eventually finishing A Fragment of Life in 1904. He also remarried that year and eventually started exploring his other interests, such as Celtic Christianity and the Grail legends, and found steady work as a journalist after the inheritance left to him by his father in 1890 ran out. The work that followed would see a shift in focus and style away from the Gothic style of his output during the 1890s. Some notion of the inner emotional and spiritual struggle that precipitated this change can perhaps be gleamed in Things Near and Far:

I have told, I think, how I was confronted suddenly and for the first time with the awe and solemnity and mystery of the valley of the Usk, and of the house called Bartholly hanging solitary between the deep forest and the winding esses of the river. This spectacle remained in my heart for years, and at last I transliterated it, clumsily enough, in the story of "The Great God Pan," which, as a friendly critic once said, "does at least make one believe in the devil, if it does nothing else." Here, of course, was my real failure; I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil; again, I say, one dreams in fire and works in clay.⁹¹

87 Which was published 1907 but written in 1895-1897.

88 Graf claims that The White People was written in 1897 (p.68), but Machen states 1899 in “Things Near and Far” in The Autobiography of Arthur Machen, p.259

90 Graf speculates extensively about this mystical “process” and its connection with the psychosexual energies that fed into Machen’s “great decade” (Talking to the Gods, p.61-67), while in Revelations of the Golden Dawn, Gilbert merely refers to it as “some magical form of auto-hypnosis” (p.169).

«Man is made a mystery for mysteries and visions»: Occultism, modernism, and Arthur Machen’s esoteric reading strategy in fin de siècle Britain