An Analysis of Mysticism in The Great God Pan and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

Abstract

Late nineteenth-century American and European writers of Gothic literature derived inspiration from a diverse variety of obscure and traditional sources. These sources fell broadly into the esoteric and spiritual traditions of Eastern and Western paganistic mysticism, and Judeo-Christian religious symbolism. This essay focuses on the blending of Western mysticism with elements of Christian nativity, and how those elements are foregrounded in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and H. P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. These examples of Gothic fiction demonstrate both the pagan and religious blending of motifs, and the rejection of modern science’s revelations about the natural world as proposed by Charles Darwin and theories of human evolution which entered the public consciousness in the decades following On the Origin of Species.