"The Great God Pan" by Arthur Machen

1 year ago
106

0:00:00 The Experiment
0:19:16 Mr. Clarke's Memoirs
0:36:22 The City of Resurrections
0:54:05 The Discovery in Paul Street
1:07:52 The Letter of Advice
1:20:02 The Suicides
1:40:15 The Encounter in Soho
1:56:57 The Fragments

The book I am reading from has an occasional difference in word or phrase from what you will find in the link below. If you are following along with the link, I'm not reading it wrong, I'm reading a different edition that actually has uses different words here and there.

My edition contains a good deal of annotations. I won't reproduce all of them, but here are some of the more useful ones:

Chapter 1: "chase in Arras, dreams in a carrier" from 'Dotage', in "The Temple", by the Welsh-born clergyman and poet George Herbert"

Digby's theory and Browne Faber's discoveries" are fictitious"Oswald Crollius": Paracelsian introchemist (combination chemist and physician) known for his 'theory of signatures'

Chapter 2: homoeopathic: in a medical context, curing like with like. The principle of 'homoeopathic magic', by which 'like produces like', is discussed at length by James George Frazer in "The Golden Bough"

a place of some importance in the time of the Roman occupation: the village is near Machen's birthplace of Caerleon, barely disguised here as 'Caermaen'. The town was the site of the castra (legionnary fortress) of Isca Augusta, built around 75 AD. ... No doubt Machen also has in mind the nearby village of Caerwent, of which he wrote, years later: 'Caerwent, also a Roman city, was buried in the earth, and gave up now and again strange relics - fragments of the temple of "Nodens, god of the depths"'

charcoal burners: the production of charcoal from wood was a traditional occupation in Wales, dating back at least to Roman times

Et diabolus incarnatus est. Et homo factus est. "And the devil was made incarnate. And was made man"; a travesty of the Nicene Creed in which Christ 'By the power of the Holy Spirit ... became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man'

Chapter 3: the Treasury: the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions had been combined with that of the Treasury Solicitor in 1884

Chapter 4: model lodging-house: in response to the squalid and overcrowded conditions of many common lodging houses in the early Victorian era, Prince Albert spear-headed efforts to construct new tenements for the London poor

Chapter 6:
-bachelor's gown = university degree
-Zulu assegai = a type of spear
-the murders of Whitechapel is a reference to killings by Jack the Ripper
-the labyrinth of Daedalus = the maze of the Minotaur
-Carlton Club was founded in 1832 and is associated with the Conservative Party

Chapter 7: Queer Street: slang expression indicating a state of financial embarrassment; a metaphorical place. Here, presumably by extension, Villiers seems to be referring, less figuratively, to a particular seedy locale and its under-worldly denizens

cicerone: a learned guide, one 'who shows and explains the antiquities or curiosities of a place to strangers'

There is a post-script in the text that I didn't read into the recording: "NOTE. - Helen Vaughan was born on August 5th, 1865, at the Red House, Breconshire, and died on July 25th, 1888, in her house in a street off Piccadilly, called Ashley Street in the story."

The Latin in Chapter 5: "Silet per diem universus, nec sine horrore secretus est; lucet nocturnis ignibus, chorus Ægipanum undique personatur: audiuntur et cantus tibiarum, et tinnitus cymbalorum per oram maritimam."

The Latin in Chapter 8:
DEVOMNODENTi
FLAvIVSSENILISPOSSVit
PROPTERNVPtias
quaSVIDITSVBVMBra

The pictures used are:

Chapter 1: A scan of title page from the book "The great god Pan" (Roberts Bros, Boston, 1894) by Arthur Machen. Cover illustration by Aubrey Beardsley

Chapter 2: From a Roman sarcophagus, showing Bacchante playing the tambourine and turning towards Pan, from the 3rd century AD. Photograph by Rama (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Rama), Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 France: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/fr/deed.en)

Chapter 3: The Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. Also shows the corner of Rupert Street leading off into Soho. Photo by Tom Morris, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)

Chapter 4: An early photo of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street

Chapter 5: Piccadilly Circus circa 1900

Chapter 6: London news boys circa 1900

Chapter 7: "Soho Vice" by konstantin, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

Chapter 8: Of the Caerwent Roman Temple, photo by andy dolman, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en)

To follow along: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/389/389-h/389-h.htm

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