In what is surely his best-known “shocker” of the 1890s, Arthur Machen has one of his ubiquitous bachelor heroes (Clarke by name) try to warn another off his pursuit of the truth about a preternaturally dangerous femme fatale figure, a woman responsible for the hideous deaths of a number of English gentlemen. “I am,” he writes to his friend, “like a traveller who has peered over an abyss, and has drawn back in terror. What I know is strange enough and horrible enough, but beyond my knowledge there are depths and horrors more frightful still” (“Pan” 89). But to what “depths,” exactly, does the fearful Clarke refer? What “horrors”? And why, here as elsewhere in this text, do depth and horror seem so intimately interconnected? The tale in question, “The Great God Pan” (1890), bristles with multifarious horrors, to be sure. In the novella's opening episode, a mad scientist figure performs experimental brain surgery on a young woman (“a slight lesion in the grey matter, that is all,” he says to an over-scrupulous chum), causing her to “see the god Pan,” and reducing her to idiocy and death (“Pan” 62, 68). The bulk of the subsequent narrative concerns a sequence of seemingly unrelated tragedies – the mysterious death of one gentleman in London, a rash of particularly horrid suicides by a number of others, the demise of an English artist in Buenos Aires – which prove all to be connected to a single figure of monstrous evil, a woman who goes by the name of Helen Vaughn (among others). She is, it turns out, the offspring of the subject of the surgical experiment and Pan himself, and her own (forced) suicide at the end of the story leads to a gruesome tableau of bodily dissolution reminiscent of Poe's M. Valdemar (or, to update the reference, the gooey, B-movie slime Slavoj Žižek seems to have claimed in the name of the Lacanian Real).

Moreover, just as the horrors to be found in “Pan,” and in other Machen tales of the period, are many and various, their ultimate sources – the conceptual wellsprings from which his fiction derived its power to deliver pleasingly potent frissons to readers – were, no doubt, similarly diverse. Scholars have compellingly pointed, for instance, to Machen's exploitation of contemporary fears of “degeneracy” (Eckersley), even the late-Victorian specter of the “abhuman subject” (Hurley 3). But the particular twinning of depth and horror is suggestively prevalent in Machen; when Clarke warns of terrifying “abyss[es],” of unspeakable “depths and horrors,” he is invoking a strikingly recurrent theme in tales like “Pan.” Indeed, one aspect or incarnation of Pan himself, we learn from an ancient Roman inscription, appears to have been “the great god Nodens (the god of the Great Deep or Abyss)” (Machen, “Pan” 114). (A pre-Roman temple at the same site had, in the distant past, been dedicated to a “God of the Deeps” [Machen, “Pan” 112]). While, then, Machen certainly hints at plenty of unspeakable acts, perpetrated by Vaughn, towards which Clarke's language might conceivably gesture, a closer look at the trope of horrific depth, and its possible significance within his fiction, seems warranted.

Of course, one likely candidate for a factor underlying fears of depth in the nineteenth century is the prospect of deep time. In fact, support for the idea that it might be the depths or abysses of temporality which fuel the text's more unsettling anxieties is easily found. Indeed, Helen Vaughn (who serves thousand-year-old wine at her infernal soirées) is herself an embodiment of the kind of terrifyingly expansive past that had forced itself into the Victorian consciousness during the previous decades. When she hangs herself to avoid exposure (one of Machen's heroes, ever the gentleman, gives her an ultimatum, a length of rope, and a little privacy), her body enacts, in cinematic fashion, a graphic, and disconcertingly reversible, narrative of evolutionary recapitulation. As the horrified doctor attending her deathbed recounts:

More “depths” and “abyss[es]” – the doctor's words point, most obviously, to the conventional (metaphoric) baseness of the bestial (and less than bestial: the primal stuff signifying life qua life), but they also resonate, surely, with the sheer, and horrifying, profundity (also, of course, metaphoric) of the temporal span which here unfolds, in radically compressed form, before his eyes. Certainly, then, we may add that well-known nineteenth-century bogeyman, deep time,Footnote ¹ with its attendant anxieties of reverse evolution and atavistic retrogression, to the heady mix of conceptual material Machen used in crafting his late-Victorian Gothic fiction.

And yet, I want to suggest, at the bottom of “Pan,” as well as Machen's other fiction of the 1890s, we may discern another, and in my view quite distinct, source of unease. This dread-inducing trope similarly derives from the nineteenth-century discovery (or invention) of deep time, yet differs in crucial respects from the nexus of better-documented anxieties named above. Indeed, the conceptual entity whose contours I want here to delineate constitutes, to some degree, a kind of inversion of the atavistic model, of tropes of reversion or retrogression. Alongside, or in place of, the survival or return of the pre-cultural – the figure of the animal or savage – in the present, Machen persistently imagines the backwards projection of properly historical and cultural forms into the nineteenth century's emergent deep pasts – evolutionary, paleontological, and geological. His fiction is haunted, in other words, not only by the new abysses of time disclosed by science, but by the prospect of a history (as history was coming to be defined in this period), or histories, coeval with these. And, as Machen seemed intuitively to understand, quite a few concomitant anxieties could be wrung from such a premise in the later nineteenth century. By imaginatively attributing an impossible antiquity to symbolic forms, for instance, he robbed such forms of their differentiating power, their comforting status as privileged markers of humanity. Throughout Machen's fiction the cultural and the biological, jointly projected into remote pasts, are perplexingly mingled, blended: he figures disconcerting continuities precisely where nineteenth-century historiography had begun to insist upon divisions, lines of clear demarcation. In short, he probes at the faultlines of modern historiography in order to generate readerly anxieties.

In what follows I propose to draw upon historian Daniel Lord Smail's conception of “deep history,” as articulated in his recent book On Deep History and the Brain (Reference Smail2008), in developing the above claims. Reading Smail's account of modern historiography's fraught encounter with deep time alongside recent work in cognitive linguistics and literary theory, I take deep history to represent a collective, and collectively suppressed or repressed, act of conceptual integration on the part of nineteenth-century historiography. I argue that, in his horror fiction of the 1890s – particularly his tales of a predatory “little people” haunting Britain's Celtic fringe, as well as “The Great God Pan,” to which I will return – Machen in effect consummates this act of integration, imaginatively articulating a form of deep history in order to create particular emotional effects. At one level, then, the present essay offers a particular interpretation of the work of a minor literary figure of the British fin de siècle. At the same time, I am interested in exploring ways in which new currents in historiography such as Smail's may be of use to literary scholars, especially those interested in probing the relationship between particular cultural contexts and the forms of imaginative writing that emerge from the creative blending of their collectively generated fantasies, desires, and anxieties.

In many respects Smail's account of modern historiography, and its response to deep time, itself resembles a Victorian horror tale. Like Machen, he offers a Gothicized (albeit archly so) narrative, set in the nineteenth century (and continuing into the twentieth) and relying heavily upon the twinned tropes of fear and profundity. The protagonists of the story Smail tells are timorous historians, confronted with the prospect of a radical expansion of historical time. Beginning his account in the second half of the century, he suggests that while the discovery of deep time was largely welcomed within such disciplines as geology, biology, and paleoanthropology, it proved profoundly disconcerting to historiography. In fact, the “time revolution of the 1860s” (Smail 26), most conspicuously embodied in a trio of magisterial works by Darwin, Lyell, and Lubbock, appears in Smail as a kind of traumatic event for a generation of historians. He figures their collective response to the prospect of a bottomless history in Gothic terms: they are depicted as “recoiling” in panic from the “endless vista” of deep temporality (Smail 1), anxiously “[unwilling] to contemplate the dark abyss of time” (Smail 42). (The same figure recurs later: “Like many of his contemporaries, Labberton suffered from mild vertigo when contemplating the abyss of time, and so, withdrawing from the brink, he sought to explain why history should be limited to the short chronology” [Smail 50].) Smail's historians, “recoiling” in horror from “the dark abyss of time,” sound rather uncannily like Machen's Clarke, “who has peered over an abyss, and has drawn back in terror.” Like Clarke, the historiographic imagination of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was eager to nip in the bud any deeper probing into this newly disclosed chasm, fearful of the implications that might be brought to light. But what might these have been? And what could be done to suppress them?

Both of these questions, Smail suggests, can be answered by looking at the emergent conceptualization of “prehistory” in the nineteenth century: an invention, in effect, born of horror – a kind of dodge meant to keep history itself safely quarantined in the shallow end of the disciplinary pool. Its creation, as an imaginative “buffer zone” (Smail 2) separating Paleolithic and Neolithic from postlithic humanity, thus emerged as a defensive maneuver, the erection of a set of imaginative barriers to guard against the disconcerting prospect of a continuous narrative seamlessly linking biological and cultural man, and mingling historical time with the unsettlingly deep new chronologies. It is precisely such narratives – possible “deep histories,” in Smail's phrase – which historians have for the most part anxiously repressed, chiefly by mentally “translating” sacred history “into secular terms” (Smail 10). This conceptual stratagem led to the transposition of James Ussher's short chronology onto a schema denuded of its original Biblical trappings. Henceforth it would be history proper that originated somewhere around the magical date of 4,000 BC, and in the Middle East: the sacred chronology would be reinscribed as a new, secular narrative (“the Garden of Eden became the irrigated fields of Mesopotamia, and the creation of man was reconfigured as the rise of civilization”) (Smail 4). Of crucial importance to this project of remapping was the emergent conceptualization of the invention of writing as a uniquely “catalyzing event” (Smail 35), one sharply marking off historical man from his “historyless” forebears. On one side of what Smail terms a hastily erected “Rubicon” (37) (the same metaphor, incidentally, which Max Müller had used in the 1860s to characterize articulate languageFootnote ²) we find a static, changeless world of stone axes and arrowheads; on the other, the clay tablets and sheets of papyrus denoting the birth of civilization. Historians of the later nineteenth century and after thus engaged in a set of conceptual acrobatics in order to suppress the unsettling prospect of a continuum joining ahistoric hominid, prehistoric people, and historical humanity.

Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner have argued that what they call conceptual integration (or, less dauntingly perhaps, “blending”) is of central importance to human cognition: a fundamental operation of the mind which quietly, but powerfully, underlies not only such obviously creative acts as generating metaphors but also a host of seemingly unpoetic activities, ranging from counterfactual thinking to arithmetic. By combining aspects of what they term “mental spaces,” packets of conceptual material associated with distinctive source domains, we construct new concepts, sometimes of startling novelty and sometimes, constantly prompted as we are by culturally available cues, of depressing conventionality.Footnote ³ Thinking of Smail's notion of deep history in terms of conceptual integration is useful, in my view, because it allows us to explore the relationship between text and context (in this particular case, the fiction of Machen and the historiographic thought of the later nineteenth century) in a new way.

Reading Smail's account through the lens of cognitive theory,Footnote ⁴ we might produce something like the following account: In the course of the nineteenth century a new conceptual space emerged, itself representing a powerful, collective act of integration, which we call “deep time” (the phrase is of course of recent mintage, but it captures a contemporaneous, and pervasive, conceptual metaphor). Historians were then confronted with a problem: how to integrate the timescale of their own domain, the conceptual space of historical time, with the new chronologies of depth – a prospect fraught, as we have seen, with a number of anxieties. Faced with this challenge, historiography elected to decline the invitation altogether, opting instead to blend the ideational space of history with that of Biblical time, the short chronology of Ussher. Smail and his like-minded colleagues, on the other hand, propose to write “deep history,” a concept which represents precisely the act of integration systematically shunned by their predecessors. As the phrase signals (rather heuristically), a deep history blends the conceptual spaces of historiography and deep (paleontological or evolutionary) time, in a move whose concomitants include the imaginative transference of such conceptual elements as the idea of a continuity between nature and culture, and among hominids, early humans, and modern humans. Smail's own, “neurohistorical,” approach to crafting such a continuous narrative focuses on the human brain as a locus of investigation.Footnote ⁵ But other attempts at integration are certainly possible: he actively exhorts his colleagues (many of whom are, in his view, going in precisely the wrong direction, compressing the chronological scope of history rather than radically expanding it) to imagine their own versions, to embrace the writing of historical narratives that would blur the specious divisions between biology and culture, animal and human, as well as lithic and postlithic humanity, in the process dethroning such putative indices of historicity as writing systems.

But of course it is not only historians who engage in such blending; and as historically-minded literary critics we should be particularly attentive to the ways in which imaginative writers of such periods as the one I consider here draw upon the same conceptual material in creating their own imagined worlds. In the present context, it is clear that the emergence of the concept of “prehistory” in the nineteenth century created new creative possibilities for writers of fiction. In the process of erecting a set of barriers segregating the Paleolithic and the postlithic, historians also sketched out a novel imaginative space for the projection of – among other things – scenes of primal conflict, violence, and terror, as a number of literary incarnations of bellicose “men before history” began to appear later in the century. While prehistoric violence may be a commonality in such fictions, however, it was attached to quite different meanings with respect to the historiographic anxieties of the age. Before returning to Machen, I want to look briefly at H. G. Wells's contemporaneous “A Story of the Stone Age” (1897), a tale in which a prehistoric world of brutal violence finally serves as backdrop for a narrative of punctuated progress which ultimately undercuts the principles of a true deep history. Wells's tale serves as a useful foil, drawing as it does upon similar conceptual material while demonstrating how pervasive the habit could be of suppressing the kind of deep-historical blending we find (as I argue) in Machen.

One embodiment of “a sudden general cultural interest in prehistoric man” (Pearson 61), “A Story of the Stone Age” is set “before the beginning of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we know by the name of the North Sea” (Wells 360). Wells traces the fortunes of a “Palæolithic” Adam and Eve as they are forced to flee from their tribe, who chase after them with murderous intent, armed with “smiting stones” of chipped flint (414). Ultimately, after facing a succession of dangers in a Nature truly red in tooth and claw, the pair return, using their newly developed technological superiority to massacre their male kin and rule over the survivors. As even this brief synopsis indicates, perhaps the most salient constant knitting together this loosely episodic tale is brutal and unremitting violence: there is first of all the omnipresent danger posed by wild beasts, in an England populated by lions, mammoths, rhinoceroses, and hyenas (the male protagonist, Ugh-lomi, after an epic struggle with a cave bear, manages at last to shatter its skull with a boulder). But Ugh-lomi's fellow early humans are at least as predatory as any beasts: as Wells observes, “There was no hunting so sweet to these ancient men as the hunting of men. Once the fierce passion of the chase was lit, the feeble beginnings of humanity were thrown to the winds” (368). In the bloody reckoning of the story's final chapter, Ugh-lomi and his mate pit “blood-stained axe” and new, spiked club against “stabbing-spears and throwing-stones,” in a one-sided victory (Wells 416).

It is precisely in this technologically lopsided confrontation that we may discern Wells's own desire for a conceptual “Rubicon” within his imaginative realization of prehistory. Interestingly, Smail gives credit to Wells for attempting, in his later Outline of History (1920), something like a deep history – in that it incorporates geologic, evolutionary, and historical time into a single narrative. But if “A Story of the Stone Age” is viewed as a contribution to such a project, it is one whose treatment of technology shirks the kind of robust encounter with deep continuity that Smail advocates. Wells here not only tells a story of progress, but one of sharply punctuated progress – it is informed by a Lamarckian saltationism, and dramatizes precisely the sort of watershed rupture that is antithetical to deep history. Technology is unequivocally presented as the Rubicon separating men from brutes.Footnote ⁶ And it is the quantum leap from a Paleolithic to a Neolithic level of technological achievement that forms the story's crucial event. This leap is embodied, in compressed form, in the figure of Ugh-lomi (or “Ugh the thinker”), who in the course of the narrative invents the first axe, becomes the first horseman, and perfects a murderously effective spiked club. In Ugh-lomi Wells depicts a proleptic, presumably isolated explosion of what Steven Mithen calls “cognitive fluidity” (Mithen, Prehistory). (At 50,000 BC Ugh-lomi is early for the Neolithic age, but right on target for what has been called the “cognitive big bang.”Footnote ⁷) Precisely, then, as nineteenth-century historians seized upon symbolic technologies like writing as a dividing line separating Paleolithic and Neolithic humanity from postlithic civilizations, so does Wells use the axe to dramatize an analogous gulf between Paleolithic and Neolithic man, one literalized in the battle between hand-axe and crude “throwing-stones.”

By contrast, Machen's fiction of the same period works with similar conceptual material in order to generate quite different effects, disconcertingly straddling the very boundaries that nineteenth-century historiography had been at such anxious pains to erect. Several of Machen's better-known tales of the 1890s posit the survival of a prehistoric race on England's Celtic borderlands – predatory, nocturnal horrors who form the kernel of truth behind folk traditions of fairies or “little people.” But “our ancestors,” as one of Machen's ethnographers says, knew the truth, “call[ing] the dreaded beings ‘fair’ and ‘good’ precisely because they dreaded them” (Machen, “Black Seal” 32). And with good reason: the “little people” commit shocking acts of violence against men and women unfortunate enough to encounter them in the lonely woods, including rape, murder, human sacrifice, and other acts Machen will only hint at. As Carole Silver has shown, Machen's central conceit drew upon contemporary beliefs in the survival of “primitive, dwarfish English aborigines or prehistoric settlers,” traceable to figures like David MacRitchie (Silver 73). Given Machen's fascination with “the dark side of fairy lore,” a connection with the Celtic revival of the later nineteenth century has also been suggested (Leslie-McCarthy 65). My interest here lies, again, in Machen's manipulation of the emergent conceptual categories associated with historiography's uneasy encounter with geological, evolutionary, and paleoanthropological thought. I will first discuss three of the core stories that fall squarely beneath the aegis of this mythos, before returning to “Pan,” a story closely akin to this series of interlinked fictions.

The “little people” appear in “The Novel of the Black Seal” (published as part of the 1897 pastiche The Three Impostors) as the abiding intellectual passion of one Professor Gregg, one of the ethnographers to be found in several of Machen's tales of this period. Outwardly staid and conventional, Gregg has long nursed a secret theory for which, having completed his authoritative Textbook of Ethnology, he is finally free to seek hard evidence. As he tells Miss Lally, his unusually well-read governess:

Armed with a collection of vaguely connected evidence, Gregg removes to a remote country house in search of these “survival[s]” and, finding them, vanishes forever. In the manuscript he leaves for Miss Lally, he recalls his moment of speculative epiphany regarding the origins of the little people:

It is significant, as I will show, that the static, unchanging nature of the race is highlighted in passages like this.

Other stories of the nineties elaborate on the nature of these primeval men (strangely, they do seem be entirely male) and the “Gothic” horrors they enjoy perpetrating. In “The Shining Pyramid,” for example, the reader learns of the mysterious disappearance of a local girl in another prototypical Machen village in the west of England, all “ancient woods” and “wild, domed hills” (Machen, “Pyramid” 184). Meanwhile, in a seemingly unrelated enigma, one of Machen's two protagonists (named Vaughn) tells the other (Dyson, a recurrent character in these stories) of the strange appearance on his property of a set of “prehistoric” flints (“Pyramid” 205), which he finds variously arranged into a sequence of emblems: in turn, “the signs” – as the two men interpret them – “of the Army, the Bowl, the Pyramid, and the Half moon” (195). The two mysteries prove to be, in fact, connected: the petrous symbols are coded instructions left by some of the little people for their fellows, regarding the meeting place and time for their ritualistic sacrifice of the girl, at a location deep in the forest (she is incinerated by the fiery “pyramid” of the title). In the tale's dénouement Dyson, playing Holmes to Vaughn's Watson, explains the chain of reasoning which led him to guess the truth behind the mystery of the arrowheads:

The little people also make an appearance (though little more than a cameo) in “The Red Hand,” a mystery set, uncharacteristically, in London rather than on the Celtic fringes of England.Footnote ⁸

But while at first blush Machen's little people might seem unequivocally to be “savages,” they would in fact present significant difficulties of classification to a figure like John Lubbock, author of the popular Prehistoric Times (1865) (one of the three texts representing the “time revolution” mentioned earlier), and the man responsible for the conceptual division between Paleolithic and Neolithic (“old” and “new” Stone Age). The “key” to Lubbock's comparative method was the study, as George Stocking points out, of “material culture” (153), the treatment of the “crude” tools and weapons of present-day “savages” as clues as to what prehistoric life might have been like. Considered in isolation, many aspects of the material culture of Machen's little people would, no doubt, have led to a more or less straightforward classification within the scheme of cultural stages that had emerged in the middle years of the nineteenth century, as the tales featuring these “dreaded beings” bristle with artifacts that might have been cribbed straight from a dog-eared copy of Prehistoric Times or Sir John Evans's Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain (Reference Evans1872). “The Red Hand,” for example – a narrative which destabilizes the borderlines separating prehistoric Britain from the fin-de-siècle metropolis – centers upon a mysterious murder performed in the heart of London by a small, “adze”-like stone weapon.Footnote ⁹ One character, a conventionally-minded ethnographer, calls it a “flint knife” which he dates, using comparative methods, to “about ten thousand years ago” (Machen, “Red Hand” 52). A “primitive stone axe” is responsible for another homicide in “The Novel of the Black Seal” (a weapon so curiously balanced that no modern Englishman seems able to grasp the kinesthetic trick of wielding it). And “The Shining Pyramid” is, again, premised upon the discovery of a set of “flint arrow-head[s] of vast antiquity” (Machen, “Pyramid” 190), arranged into mysterious configurations.

A culture employing flint arrowheads and crude stone axes and knives (particularly when the appearance and behavior of their artificers conform so closely to conventional ideas of “savagery” – or rather, exceed them wildly) would surely fall, according to convention, squarely within the Stone Age – and thus on the far side, to the historian's eye, of Smail's conceptual divide. At first look, in other words, these races seem to be precisely what they are explicitly called in the stories themselves: “prehistoric” men, Paleolithic “survivals,” counterparts – albeit disconcertingly domestic ones – to the far-flung, contemporaneous “savages” whose artifacts and cultural practices Lubbock studied in his attempt to reconstruct “prehistoric times” on the basis of analogy.Footnote ¹⁰ Just as Lubbock claims that “the Van Diemaner and South American are to the antiquary what the opossum and the sloth are to the geologist” (Pre-historic 336), Professor Gregg, in a neat inversion of this formulation, likens his discovery of the little people to the prospect of “one of [his] confrères of physical science” stumbling with horror upon a living “ichthyosaurus” or “pterodactyl” (Machen, “Black Seal” 34).

Seemingly, then, Machen's little people are prehistoric survivals tout court – an unwelcome irruption into modernity from a time before history. And yet, another of the cultural possessions of these figures – a central component of their material culture – would seem to complicate matters rather seriously for any Victorian taxonomist: namely, their mastery of writing systems. While these vary in character in different tales, all would seemingly serve to disqualify their makers from the status of true savage or prehistoric man, by signaling their participation in the cultural stage of civilization, placing them in the domain of history proper. A look at Victorian authorities bears out the contention that in the nineteenth century writing came to serve as the privileged index of modern, as distinct from prehistoric, people. For Edward Tylor, in Glyn Daniel's words, civilization “by definition meant writing” (Daniel 59) (a reversible proposition); John Evans wrote that “in no case do we find a knowledge of writing developed in this [Stone Age] stage of culture” (7). And Lubbock wrote in his Origin of Civilisation (Reference Lubbock1870) that

In Machen's fiction, however, it is the European protagonists who stare in bafflement at the impossibly ancient scripts of “savage” races. The eponymous artifact of “The Novel of the Black Seal,” for instance, is a stone inscribed with strange characters (indecipherable until a kind of Rosetta Stone providentially appears) which dates, as the story hints, from the veritable deeps of time, perhaps “before the hills were moulded into form” (Machen, “Black Seal” 25). Given the unthinkable antiquity of this script, it is no doubt a sly bit of ironic mockery that the seal is found by Gregg's “agent” “near the site of the ancient Babylon” (Machen, “Black Seal” 36), a richly symbolic location, as we have seen, which was beginning to acquire at this time its quasi-mythic status as birthplace alike of writing and of civilization. The same script, scrawled on parchment, is likened to a “corrupt cuneiform” (Machen, “Black Seal” 4), again suggesting a Mesopotamian connection, while one character obliquely links the signs to Egypt, another candidate for “first civilization,” by calling them “hieroglyphics” perpetrated by local “gipsies” (Machen, “Black Seal” 37). (That the people responsible for these signs might still be living is first suggested by their sudden appearance on some English limestone.) Similarly, the “Red Hand” in the tale of that name is a conventionalized symbol, “a horrible old sign” of which the story's ethnographic expert says, somewhat surprisingly perhaps for one ostensibly committed to the conventional schema of cultural evolution, “It is one of the survivals; you must look for the origin of it in the black swamp whence man first came” (“Red Hand” 54). The hand-sign, first seen chalked on a Holborn wall, is later found etched upon a small and ancient tablet of stone, and beneath it “a series of fantastic figures, spirals and whorls of the finest, most delicate lines, spaced at intervals over the remaining surface of the tablet” (“Red Hand” 61). Though this writing too appears radically “inscrutable,” its mere contemplation triggers unbidden visions of geologically deep temporality: “gazing at the mystic whorls beneath the hand, Dyson became subdued with an impression of vast and far-off ages, and of a living being that had touched the stone with enigmas before the hills were formed, when the hard rocks still boiled with fervent heat” (“Red Hand” 61). The tale's resident ethnographer thus employs an unintended litotes, to say the least, in remarking, “Dear me! . . . Why, it looks to me even more ancient than the Hittite seal” (Machen, “Red Hand” 61). And even the arrowheads from “The Shining Pyramid” appear not as weapons but as markers within a system of picture-writing, a system which Lubbock had declared to be no less beyond the ken of Stone Age man. Writing, then – which was at this time beginning to acquire its status within the historiographic imagination as a point of rupture between historyless and historical man, stasis and progress – here stands for no such comforting division; quite the contrary, in fact.

I would suggest, then, that the true horror of Machen's ostensibly prehistoric men inheres in their conceptually hybrid status: they embody unsettling blends of the very categories of prehistory and history, Paleolithic and postlithic, themselves, as the age was coming to define them. Here technology, including symbolic technology, is no comforting Rubicon, as the little people pointedly straddle a host of conceptual boundaries that were supposed to divide savagery from civilization, biology from culture. Perhaps, as I suggested earlier, it is not even fair to call them “atavisms” – Machen's treatment of writing systems here suggests something quite different from the atavistic model (about which there is something counterintuitively comforting, as the categories which it transgresses imaginatively are in some sense preserved conceptually). Here, the privileged markers of civilization are projected indefinitely backward in time, while being associated with a radical stasis or historylessness. Writing loses its power to differentiate man from beast: it is neither an index of development, nor a marker of separation. Machen's literate savages thus function as a counterfactual variant of humankind, mockingly shadowing us while embodying radical destabilizations of the divisions (between biology and culture, stasis and progress) which emergent historiographic practice had been at such pains to establish. Machen, in other words, articulates the continuities suppressed by historians, figuring, through his conceptual blends, a form of deep history.

Similarly, I would contend that it is not merely deep time but deep history which haunts “The Great God Pan” as well. Certainly, as I pointed out earlier, contemporaneous (and well-documented) anxieties of evolutionary reversion or retrogression may be discerned in passages like the one which I quoted in my introduction; but there is a subtler, and more disconcerting, work of blending going on throughout this text as well. The central horror about which the narrative circles – the figure of Pan himself – is, of course, the very archetype of therianthropic blending in the Western cultural tradition,Footnote ¹¹ perhaps the definitive symbol of the admixture of human and animal (“neither man nor beast,” as the doctor at Helen Vaughn's deathbed puts it) (Machen, “Pan” 111). Pan is, moreover, accompanied within the tale by other paradigmatic figures of such hybridity – such as the “fauns and satyrs and Ægipans” (93) pictured, in a Bacchic revel, by an unfortunate young English artist shortly before dying of shock. Again, such hybrid figures may certainly participate, particularly after Darwin, in the evocation of atavistic fears of retrogression. But once more we should also perceive here the parallel, or chiastic, movement suggested by the imaginative projection of cultural forms into an evolutionarily or even geologically remote past, whether “before the hills were formed” (Machen, “Red Hand” 61) or, as here, a time coeval with “the abyss of all being” (Machen, “Pan” 111). In his (necessarily vague) depictions of the activities of Pan and his celebrants through the ages, Machen invokes numerous examples of undeniably symbolic activity, practices which fulfill precisely the same function served by writing in the “little people” tales discussed above, namely to travesty the conceptual categories established by the emergent “shallow” historiography of the period. Music, dance, song (and therefore language), a “rite” of “marriage” witnessed by an ancient Roman in a British wood (Machen, “Pan” 114), and similar religious or ritualistic activities: all bespeak symbolic thought, and indeed constitute conventional markers of human culture.Footnote ¹² In a colloquial sense, of course, many of these activities may be less than “civilized” – they are Dionysian rather than Apollonian, just the kind of thing banned by Euripides’ King Pentheus – but from an ethnographic or historiographic perspective they are undeniably cultural forms, activities belonging squarely on the human side of any conceptual Rubicon parsing man from beast. Here, however, they do no such thing, being associated rather with a seamless continuum, or indivisible hybrid, composed of both of these conceptual spaces.

In Machen's hands, the blended figure of Pan is thus equally emblematic of the culturally repressed act of conceptual integration represented by deep history itself – in Machen's own variant – which haunts this and his other fictions of the decade. Once more Machen blends biology and culture, animal and symbol, in unsettling ways; and once more the emergent distinction between “historical” and “historyless” cultures is transgressed, as the cultural forms he describes are characterized by a mocking stasis. The “shallower” civilizations we know – those of ancient Celt and Roman – can only abase themselves before, and transcribe echoes of, the changeless cultural forms dating to the ultimate deeps of time, forms which serve as no guarantors of a comforting conceptual separation from our bestial forebears. Of course, it is hardly novel to suggest that the sources of the fears, and other emotions, exploited by imaginative writers are to be found within the cultures that helped to shape their works, particularly, perhaps (according to the language of psychoanalysis), in what such cultures have collectively “repressed.” But a more productive way to express this truism might be to say that such works of the imagination often seek to intuit, and articulate, collectively suppressed acts of conceptual integration. As I have tried to show, the same anxieties that underpinned the establishment of sober intellectual categories like “prehistory” in the nineteenth century could be deliberately awakened, through their calculated blending, by a writer such as Machen in order to engender particular – and saleable – emotional effects in readers.