In an earlier article, I seemed to
imply that Christian elements don’t appear in Machen’s “Great
God Pan” until the second chapter.
Some readers probably thought that the
submission of Dr. Raymond’s virginal ward Mary gains pathos from
her bearing the name of the Blessed Virgin and therefore from the way
her submission to the scientist’s heartless wishes so tragically
and so ironically suggests the Virgin’s gracious “Be
it unto me according to thy word” in response to the angelic
Annunciation. Of course this is true.
But even before Mary’s entrance in
“The Experiment,” the first chapter of “The Great God Pan,”
there appears a passage that, for some of Machen’s early readers,
may have sounded a Christian undertone and subtly enhanced their
sense of the sacrilege about to occur.
Shortly before Mary steps into Dr.
Raymond’s laboratory, his friend Clarke falls asleep. In the
earlier article, I quoted a portion of that dream, which described a
dreadful “presence” that confronts the dream-Clarke, and I
suggested that Machen is recalling a passage from Ovid about the
peril of meeting Pan at noonday.
Now I give the next sentence:
“And in that moment, the sacrament of body and soul was dissolved,
and a voice seemed to cry, ‘Let us go hence,’ and then the
darkness of darkness beyond the stars, the darkness of everlasting,”
and Clarke awakens.
Well, “sacrament” sounds a
Christian note, but it’s that cry of “Let us go hence” that I
want to unpack, at least partially, in a moment. I’m going to
refer to an author whose two major books – Antiquities of the
Jews and The Jewish War -- were once familiar presences in
the homes of many English-speaking people and in church and school
libraries.
I’ve asserted that, for the
understanding of Machen -- upon whose knowledge of esoteric, rare
books some of his admirers like to dwell -- it’s often helpful to
consider what were once widely recognized, readily available books
(but that now are probably known to few).
I’m certain that William Whiston’s
18th-century translation of the ancient historian Flavius Josephus
(AD 37-ca. 100) is one of these now nearly forgotten works that were
once common.
For example, Coleridge considered
writing an epic poem on the siege and fall of Jerusalem (letter to
Hugh Rose, 25 Sept. 1816), the great subject of Josephus’s The
Jewish War. Thomas de Quincey cites Josephus in “On
Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.”
John Buchan mentioned Scott’s aunt
alternating her reading of the Bible with Josephus. Buchan
called him “that portentous author from whom few Scottish children
in older days escaped” (Sir Walter Scott, 1932, pp. 29-30).
Overlapping with Machen’s time, G. A.
Henty (1832-1902) produced an abundance of popular historical novels
for youngsters, which included For the Temple: A Tale of the Fall
of Jerusalem (Blackie, 1888).
The publisher’s advertisement said:
“Few boys have failed to find the story of the revolt of the Jews
of thrilling interest when once brought to their notice; but there
has hitherto been little choice between sending them to books of
history and supplying them with insipid fictional transcripts of the
story. Mr. Henty supplies a distinct want in this regard,
weaving into the record of Josephus an admirable and attractive
plot,” etc. (This advertisement, which had no need to
identify Josephus, appeared at he back of an 1888 reprint of
MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie.)
Henty’s preface for his boy readers says, “the narrative of Josephus, an eye-witness of the events which he describes, has come down to us; and it is the storehouse from which all subsequent histories of the events have been drawn.”
I would be surprised if the rectory in
which Machen grew up did not contain Josephus’s works.
Whiston’s Josephus was well known when “The Experiment” was
published in The Whirlwind in 1890.
Josephus was prized for his detailed account of the Jewish revolt against Rome (AD 66) and the ensuing destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70, prophesied by Christ in the synoptic Gospels (Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21).
In The Jewish War, Josephus
writes:
in the one and twentieth day of the month Artemisius, a certain prodigious and incredible phenomenon appeared: I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable, were it not related by those that saw it, and were not the events that followed it of so considerable a nature as to deserve such signals; for, before sun-setting, chariots and troops of soldiers in their armor were seen running about among the clouds, and surrounding of cities. Moreover, at that feast which we call Pentecost, as the priests were going by night into the inner [court of the temple,] as their custom was, to perform their sacred ministrations, they said that, in the first place, they felt a quaking, and heard a great noise, and after that they heard a sound as of a great multitude, saying, "Let us remove hence."
Although
Josephus was the son of a Temple priest, he had opposed the doomed
Jewish revolt against Rome. He probably took “Let us remove
hence” as one of the supernatural warnings to the Jews to flee from
Jerusalem before it was too late.
That
cry might also be taken as having signaled the departure of the
divine Presence from the Temple. That “us” could be an
imperative in accordance with the royal second-person grammar.
Moreover, for Christian readers, the plural could suggest the Persons
of the Trinity. That the voice is divine is the interpretation
that may have recommended itself to Machen, if his “Let us go
hence” is, as I suspect, an echo of Josephus.
Like
the weird aerial phenomena recorded by Josephus, Clarke’s dream
certainly foreshadows an imminent violation, in this case the
violation that Mary will suffer. Clarke’s dreaming
consciousness might be drawing upon his memory of Josephus’s
narrative of the destruction of the Second Temple, that is, the
“house of the Lord,” as the First Temple, that of Solomon, had
been called (1 Kings 5-8). Dr. Raymond confesses, in the
novella’s final sentences, that, for Mary, the “house of life
[had been] thrown open.”
I
have more to say about Machen and the Temple, but will conclude for
now by asking the reader: if “Let us go hence” does not allude to
Josephus’s account of the destruction of the Temple, what does
it mean? Is there any other explanation that so well conveys
the sense of the profound violation of a human being made in the
image of God (as Machen believed), of the sacrilege, that is
about to occur?
(c) Dale Nelson
Notes
The Josephus passage may be accessed here.
De Quincey’s “On Murder Considered
as One of the Fine Arts,” with the Josephus reference, is here.
In
1902, Rider Haggard’s romance Pearl-Maiden:
A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem
was published. On the eve of the destruction of the Temple, the
heroine, Miriam, feels that “in the midst of this unnatural quiet
Jehovah was withdrawing Himself from the house where His Spirit
dwelt,” and then the narrator refers to the Roman general Titus
entering even “the Holy of Holies itself … nor, since God had
departed His habitation, did any harm come to him” despite his
looting of the golden candlesticks (Chapter 18).
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