Arthur Machen and the panic charm of the uncanny

The new special issue of zothique, magazine of fantastic and "weird" literature published by Dagon Press, in its over 230 pages allows us to retrace the life and work of Arthur Machen, a Welsh writer who between the end of the XNUMXth century and the beginning of the XNUMXth was able to look beyond the "veil of reality" and reveal the essence of "Great God Panโ€œ, Establishing himself as one of the greatest authors of supernatural fiction of his time.


William Butler Yeats, navigator of the Great Memory

Going upstream in the opposite direction, WB Yeats became a bard in an age that had banned all poems, forgotten Arcadia, denied and ridiculed the knowledge of the ancient Druids. His entire work - and even before that his entire existence - was consecrated to a Vision, founded on the so-called "Great Memory", a sort of Anima mundi of the Neoplatonists, "reservoir of souls and images and a meeting point between the living and the dead", which the Seer must access to fill theirremediable distance between the ideal and the real, between the divine and the human.

Terror and Ecstasy: Arthur Machen's "Hill of Dreams"

Arthur Machen was born on March 3, 1863, one of the greatest writers of Fantastic literature of his time and, together with WB Yeats, one of the most important standard bearers of the so-called ยซCeltic Revivalยป. After having already reviewed on our pages his work before him, "The Great God Pan", We now turn to his third novel," The Hill of Dreams "(1907), perhaps his greatest masterpiece by virtue of the indissoluble union, here as never before, between the two dichotomous aspects of the Sacred in the Gaelic tradition: the terrifying and the ecstatic one.

Arthur Machen and the awakening of the Great God Pan

The recent reprint of Arthur Machen's "folk horror" masterpiece allows us to shed light on one of the most fascinating phenomena of "pagan rebirth" in the modern West: the awakening of the Great God Pan in Victorian England, at the turn of the 800th century. and the '900.