Explanatory Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 Far Off Things (London: Martin Secker, 1922), 116.
2 “Folklore and Legends of the North,” Literature (September 24, 1898): 272. Rpt. in The Line of Terror and Other Essays, ed. S. T. Joshi (Bristol, RI: Hobgoblin Press, 1997), 31.
3 “On Re-reading The Three Impostors and the Wonder Story,” unpublished ms., August Derleth Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Madison, WI). It appears that Machen wrote this essay for a contemplated reprint of The Three Impostors by Arkham House.
4 H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), in The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000), 23.
5 The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, 61.
6 See Phillip Ellis, “Spectral Soldiers: Possible Literary Antecedents for ‘The Bowmen,’” Studies in Weird Fiction no. 24 (Winter 1999): 5–10.

THE INMOST LIGHT

“The Inmost Light” was first published in The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (London: John Lane; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1894) and reprinted in The House of Souls (London: Grant Richards, 1906; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). It has gone on to become one of Machen’s most frequently reprinted stories, appearing in such anthologies as Joseph Lewis French’s Masterpieces of Mystery (1920), Montague Summers’s The Supernatural Omnibus (1932), and Carl Van Doren’s The Borzoi Reader (1936). Like “The Great God Pan,” it is the tale of a horrible experiment (the attempt to extract the soul from the body), although Machen’s treatment is more transcendent than horrific. It introduces us to Mr. Dyson, an interlocutor widely used throughout the episodic novel The Three Impostors (1895) and a few other works.
1 Ratés: French for “failures.”
2 “Because they lacked a sacred prophet [i.e., a poet].” Horace, Odes 4.9.28.
3 A red lamp was the customary sign of a general practitioner in England. Cf. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of medical life, Round the Red Lamp (1894).
4 The pub is named after Major-General Charles George Gordon (1833–1885), a celebrated British army officer chiefly serving in China and Egypt. He was governor-general of the Sudan (1874–79) and heroically defended Khartoum during a siege by Mahdist rebels (1884–85); he died before British forces could lift the siege.
5 Machen alludes to a celebrated passage in the Bible—“Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:44, 46, 48)—referring to the tortures of hell.
6 Paracelsus was the pseudonym of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541), a German-Swiss physician and alchemist who did pioneering work in medicine and chemistry. The Rosicrucians (Brethren of the Rose Cross) were an esoteric sect probably originating in Germany in the early seventeenth century and chiefly involved in alchemy, astrology, and healing. British novelists William Godwin and Edward Bulwer-Lytton based several of their Gothic novels on the Rosicrucian sect.

NOVEL OF THE BLACK SEAL

“Novel of the Black Seal” is a segment (under the heading “Adventure of the Missing Brother”) of the episodic novel The Three Impostors (London: John Lane; New York: Roberts Brothers, 1895). Machen appears to have endorsed the publication of this segment separately from the novel, as it appeared in Dorothy L. Sayers’s anthology Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (1928; also titled The Omnibus of Crime) during his lifetime; in this appearance, the first line has been slightly altered (it originally read: “‘I see you are a determined rationalist,’ she said”). The narrator is a Miss Lally, one of three individuals who are hunting down a “young man with spectacles” throughout The Three Impostors; her interlocutor is a Mr. Charles Phillipps, who acts as the recipient of the various “novels” told by the “three impostors.” The tale is one of the richest in Machen’s corpus, presenting with a wealth of convincing documentary evidence the possibility of the existence of “little people” on the underside of modern civilization.
1 Meditationes de Prima Philosophiae (1641; Meditations on First Philosophy), a pioneering philosophical work by René Descartes (1596–1650).
2 The Gesta Romanorum (Deeds of the Romans), a collection of moral anecdotes in Latin probably assembled in the thirteenth or fourteenth century.
3 This passage suggests that Machen was drawing on his own impoverished life in London in the 1880s: “In the corner nearest the angle of the wall by the window I kept my provisions, that is to say, a loaf of bread and a canister of green tea. Morning and evening the landlady or ‘Marry’ would bring me up a tray on which were a plate, a knife, a teapot, a cup and saucer, and a jug of hot water. With the aid of a kettle and a spirit lamp.... I made the hot water to boil and brewed a great pot of strong green tea.” Far Off Things (London: Martin Secker, 1922), 118.
4 “What do I know?” This archaic French expression became the motto of the skeptical philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592).
5 Latin for “unknown land.”
6 I.e., the care of horses’ hooves.
7 Humphrey Prideaux (1648–1724), The Old and New Testament Connected in the History of the Jews and Neighbouring Nations (1716–18), commonly known as Prideaux’s Connection.
8 Robert Estienne (1503–1559) and his sons, Henry, Robert, and François, celebrated printers in Renaissance France. “Stephanus” is a Latinization of Estienne.
9 Pomponius Mela (c. 43 C.E.) was the earliest known Roman geographer. De Situ Orbis (On the Position of the World) is a small treatise in three books.
10 C. Julius Solinus was a Latin grammarian of the fourth century C.E. In “The Great God Pan” Machen quotes from a work by Solinus titled De Mirabilibus Mundi (On the Wonders of the World). Although Solinus does in fact mention the “Sixtystone” (hexacontalithos: De Mirabilibus Mundi 31), the Latin passage that follows is of Machen’s invention.
11 The story of Sindbad the Sailor occupies the 538th–566th nights of the Arabian Nights.
12 Either William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham (1708–1778), prime minister of England (1757–61, 1766–68), or his son, William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806), prime minister of England (1783–1801, 1804–06).
13 Literally, “no footsteps backward” (i.e., no turning back). A loose quotation from Horace, Epistles 1.1.74–75: “Quia me vestigia terrent, / Omnia te adversum spectantia, nulla retrorsum.”
14 The Eumenides (literally, “well-meaning women”).
15 Meropes anthropes (literally, “articulate human beings”), a phrase found frequently in Homer (e.g., Iliad 9.340).
16 “Turanian” refers to an ancient language formerly thought to have been used by non-Aryan and non-Semitic peoples in Asia. Cf. Machen’s prose-poem “The Turanians” (in Ornaments in Jade, 1924). A “Shelta” is “A cryptic jargon used by tinkers, composed partly of Irish or Gaelic words, mostly disguised by inversions or arbitrary alteration of initial consonants” (Oxford English Dictionary). Machen uses the term here to denote a language or code understood only by a select band of initiates.

NOVEL OF THE WHITE POWDER

“Novel of the White Powder” is another segment of The Three Impostors (London: John Lane; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1895), occurring under the heading “The Recluse of Bayswater.” It is narrated by a Miss Leicester, probably identical to the Miss Lally who told “Novel of the Black Seal”; she tells the story to Mr. Dyson, although he is never mentioned in the text. This story also appeared separately on several occasions in Machen’s lifetime, including such anthologies as V. H. Collins’s More Ghosts and Marvels (1927) and T. Everett Harré’s Beware After Dark! (1929). A clever fusion of science (chemistry) and superstition (the witch cult), it features one of the grisliest climaxes in Machen’s fiction.
1 Latin for “Everything resolves into a mystery.” The saying was a commonplace among the scholastic philosophers (“Schoolmen”) of the Middle Ages.
2 A paraphrase of John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816), l. 14: “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” The reference is to the explorer Vasco Nuñez de Balboa’s first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean in the province of Darién in Panama in 1513.
3 Apparently a reference to Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824), although he wrote no monograph explicitly about the witch-cult. Possibly Machen is referring to his notorious work The Worship of Priapus (1786), about phallic worship in the ancient and medieval period.
4 “Taking up the chalice of the prince of darkness.” The Latin phrase is in fact of Machen’s own invention.

THE RED HAND

“The Red Hand” was first published in Chapman’s Magazine (December 1895) and included in The House of Souls (London: Grant Richards, 1906); when Alfred A. Knopf reprinted that large omnibus in two volumes, “The Red Hand” was included in the second volume, titled The Three Impostors (1923). It is, in a sense, a pendant to that episodic novel, featuring once again the interlocutors Mr. Dyson and Mr. Phillipps. On the surface it appears to be a detective story, but toward the end it becomes evident that the supernatural (in the form of the suspected existence of the “little people”) is involved.
1 Abury is an archaic name for Avebury, a site in Wiltshire that features one of the most impressive surviving sets of Neolithic stone circles in England, analogous to Stonehenge. This circle was probably erected no more than five thousand years ago, but flints and other remains have been found that are as much as nine thousand years old.
2 Fellow of the Royal Society. The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge was founded in 1660.
3 Italian for “fig hand,” in which the hand is made into a fist and the thumb is interposed between the index and middle fingers. It is still considered a highly insulting gesture in Italy, equivalent to saying, “Go take a hike.”
4 Peckham is a district in South London, in the borough of Southwark. In the late nineteenth century it was largely residential, although Rye Lane had become a popular shopping area. Willesden is a district in North West London, in the borough of Brent.
5 dollar: British slang for a crown or five-shilling piece; hence, half a dollar is a half-crown.
6 The Hittite Empire existed from roughly the sixteenth century B.C.E. to 1180 B.C.E. By “Hittite seal” Machen probably refers to one of the various cuneiform tablets found in Assyria in the later nineteenth century.
7 St. Thomas’s Hospital, founded as early as the twelfth century and named after St. Thomas à Becket, was originally built in Southwark, but a new building was constructed in Lambeth in 1871.
8 The phrase occurs at the very beginning of Part II of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) by Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859).

THE WHITE PEOPLE

“The White People” was written in 1899 and first published in Horlick’s Magazine (January 1904). It was gathered in The House of Souls (London: Grant Richards, 1906; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). Because of its length, it has not appeared in a great many anthologies, but it was included in Alexander Laing’s The Haunted Omnibus (1937), Basil Davenport’s Tales to Be Told in the Dark (1953), and Jack Sullivan’s Lost Souls (1983), among others. H. P. Lovecraft regarded it as the second-greatest weird tale ever written, next to Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows.” In the introduction to The House of Souls Machen claimed to have composed the work from “odds and ends of folklore.”
1 Romanée-Conti was a particularly rare and expensive wine made in the Middle Ages in a small region of that name in the Burgundy district of France.
2 Caterans were fighting men in the Highlands of Scotland. Moss-troopers were disbanded soldiers from the Scottish wars of the seventeenth century.
3 Gilles de Rais (or Retz) (1404–1440) was a French nobleman and soldier who was accused of torturing, raping, and killing dozens, perhaps hundreds, of boys and girls. Some (including Aleister Crowley) believe the charges against Gilles were trumped up.
4 The critic John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854) wrote a famously hostile review of John Keats’s Endymion. His friend Percy Bysshe Shelley later exaggerated the influence of such reviews on Keats’s temperament, maintaining that Keats’s subsequent decline in health stemmed from his discouragement at the reception of his work.
5 Tophet was originally a location near Jerusalem where the Canaanites were thought to have sacrificed children to Moloch. It was later used as a synonym for Hell.
6 The word Juggernaut is an Anglicization of the Indian word Jaganna-tha; hence it would have no etymological connection to the Greek word Argonaut.
7 It is not clear what biblical passage Machen is citing. The most celebrated passage relating to charity in the Bible is St. Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 13:2f.
8 A reference to the story “Qui sait?” (1890; usually translated as “Who Knows?”), by French novelist and short story writer Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893). Like many of his later tales, this story is a grim exploration of psychological aberration.
9 In Greek mythology, “Alala!” was the war-god Ares’s battle cry.
10 Tales of the Genii (1764) is a series of pseudo-Persian tales, written in imitation of the Arabian Nights by James Ridley (1736–1765).
11 The final line of the Doxology.
12 An aumbry was, in medieval times, a cupboard or cabinet, usually in a church and used to store chalices and other objects.
13 Troy Town was a game played by Welsh shepherds in which mazelike paths were cut into the turf in imitation of certain aspects of the Trojan War and also the Labyrinth (the Cretan maze in which the Minotaur was housed).

A FRAGMENT OF LIFE

This short novel was begun in 1899; it is not clear when it was completed. An early version of it was serialized in Horlick’s Magazine (February, March, April, and May 1904), and the final version appeared in The House of Souls (London: Grant Richards, 1906; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). It was separately published as A Fragment of Life (London: Martin Secker, 1928), but has otherwise not been reprinted aside from its appearance in reprints of The House of Souls. Because its supernatural or fantastic element is so attenuated, it was not included in Tales of Horror and the Supernatural (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948). In its depiction of Edward Darnell’s return to Wales after many years as a clerk in London, it anticipates Machen’s own migration to the small town of Amersham, Buckinghamshire, after nearly forty years in London.
1 A hair-trunk is a large trunk, usually for storing clothes or other objects, with a hair covering.
2 In this context, “kitcat” indicates the size of a portrait—not quite half-length, but showing the hands.
3 Machen’s knowledge of tobaccos was exhibited in the early work of ponderous pseudo-scholarship, The Anatomy of Tobacco (1884).
4 French for “to stroll.”
5 A seaside town on the north coast of Essex.
6 An exhibition of new technological devices was first held in Paris in 1798. Machen is probably referring to the large exhibition of 1878 or to that of 1889 (where the Eiffel Tower was unveiled) or 1900.
7 City Temple is a Nonconformist church. The church dates to 1640; the current building was built on Holborn Viaduct in London in 1874.
8 A long four-wheeled carriage, open or curtained at the sides.
9 Exodus 20:12.
10 Cf. Machen’s later essay “Strange Roads” (Out and Away, December 1919), a poignant account of his walks in the rural countryside.
11 I.e., a female employee of the ABC (Aerated Bread Company) chain of tea shops.
12 A reference to the Transactions of the Hertfordshire Natural History Society and Field Club (1879f.), loosely referred to as the Hertfordshire Naturalist.
13 “To him that waits all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light.” The statement is by Coventry Patmore (1823–1896), British poet and theologian, and is found in his collection of aphorisms, The Rod, the Root and the Flower (1895).
14 “And apples not her own.” Virgil, Georgics 2.82. In Virgil the expression relates to the grafting of one plant on to another, with the result that the original plant, to its delight, bears “alien” fruit.
15 Greek for “practice” or “training.” In Christian thought, the concept refers to spiritual exercises, specifically those pertaining to self-denial.
16 Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), Italian psychologist and criminologist who, in such works as L’Uomo delinquente (1876; The Criminal Man), propounded a now discredited theory that certain people were born criminals and could be detected by physiological and other features.
17 “Only incredible things must be believed.” An adaptation of the axiom by the early Christian thinker Tertullian (160?–240 C.E.): Certum est, quia impossibile est (“It is certain because it is impossible”: De Carne Christi 5), oftentimes rendered Credo quia impossibile [or incredibile] est (“I believe because it is impossible [or incredible]”).
18 “The sacred fountain must not be turned over to common use.”
19 “The Land of Iolo.”
20 Literally, “the wood of the wise.”
21 Lilith, originally a Mesopotamian female demon, was conceived in the biblical apocrypha as the first wife of Adam, hence a kind of witch figure. Samael, in Judaic lore, is the Angel of Death.
22 “The breaths of the infernal [creatures].”
23 A phrase from Psalms 113:1 (Vulgate) = 114.1 in the King James Version (“When Israel went out of Egypt . . .”).
24 “Now I know for certain that all legends, all histories, all fables, every Scripture is telling a story about ME.”

THE BOWMEN

“The Bowmen” first appeared in the London Evening News (September 29, 1914), and was collected in The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1915), a slim volume of Machen’s war tales and sketches that was meant to capitalize on the notoriety of “The Bowmen.” The story’s setting in time and place is quite vague, but it appears to deal with the very early stages of World War I. By late August 1914, the French and British forces were forced to retreat precipitously toward Paris in the wake of the advance of the German army; but in the First Battle of the Marne (September 5–12), tactical errors by the Germans allowed the Allies to hold their ground and force a German retreat, thereby robbing the Germans of a quick victory. In his long introduction to The Angels of Mons, Machen suggests that the tale was inspired by the Battle of Mons (August 23–24, 1914), the first battle in which the British fought the Germans, during which the British were forced to retreat; Machen also recounts the manner in which his story was accepted as a true account in spite of his repeated statements to the contrary, as various parties believed that the story dealt with “angels” (not ghostly archers, as in the story) coming to the rescue of British troops. Accordingly, the “legend” of the “angels of Mons” was born.
1 The Battle of Sedan (September 1, 1870), during the Franco-Prussian War, was a disaster for the French, resulting in the capture of the Emperor Napoleon III and significant losses to the French army that made ultimate defeat inevitable.
2 “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” (1912) was a music-hall song composed by Jack Judge and Harry Williams. Machen has devised an alternate final line that rhymes with the actual final line of the chorus: “But my heart’s right there.”
3 Evidently a reference to the so-called Siege of Sidney Street, occurring on January 2, 1911, in a street in the Stepney district of London. A criminal gang was besieged by two hundred policemen for six hours; two of the gang members were killed by a fire that eventually consumed the building.
4 The battle of Agincourt, occurring on October 25, 1415, in northern France, constituted one of the greatest victories of England over France, chiefly as a result of the longbow.

THE SOLDIERS’ REST

“The Soldiers’ Rest” was first published in the London Evening News (October 20, 1914) and reprinted in The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1915). Like “The Bowmen,” it fuses war, religion, and supernaturalism in a somewhat sentimental portrayal of the fate of wounded British soldiers in the early stages of World War I.
1 Wells is a city in Somerset, in southwestern England, and the site of Wells Cathedral, a magnificent Gothic cathedral built between 1175 and 1490 and featuring about three hundred statues carved into its west front.
2 The soldier does not refer to the two Battles of Cambrai (November 20–December 3, 1917; October 8–10, 1918), which took place years after the story was published. Cambrai is near the border between France and Belgium, and it was near the scene of some of the initial battles between the German Army and the British Expeditionary Force in late August 1914.
3 Boshes is an adaptation of the British slang term Boches, an insulting reference to German soldiers (derived from the French caboche, cabbage or blockhead).
4 Psalm 115:15 (Vulgate) (“sanctorum” for “innocentium”). In the King James Version (Psalms 116:15), the line is rendered: “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.”
5 Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Canto II, lines 124–26. The lines are found represented in a stained glass window in Melrose Abbey, a Gothic abbey in Melrose, Scotland, founded in 1136.

THE GREAT RETURN

“The Great Return” was serialized in the London Evening News (October 21, 25, 28, November 3, 5, 10, 16, 1915) and published as a separate booklet (London: Faith Press, 1915). It is one of Machen’s most searching treatments of the legend of the Holy Grail, a subject that fascinated him throughout his life. The Holy Grail, usually conceived to be a dish or cup purportedly used by Jesus at the Last Supper and thereby possessing miraculous powers, later became blended with the Arthurian cycle, another subject of great interest to Machen. For one of Machen’s many writings on the subject, see “The Secret of the Sangraal,” an essay written in 1907 and published in The Shining Pyramid (London: Martin Secker, 1925). It is now available in The Secret of the Sangraal (Horam, UK: Tartarus Press, 1995).
1 “Tashai Lama” is an alternate name for the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamas were a line of Buddhist spiritual leaders who were the nominal heads of the Tibetan government from 1578 to the 1950s. A British expedition commanded by Colonel Francis Younghusband invaded Tibet in 1904. In 1910 the Chinese invaded, forcing the Dalai Lama to take refuge in British India. He returned in 1912.
2 Paul Julius Reuter (1816–1899), a German entrepreneur who became a naturalized British subject in 1857, established a news agency in 1850, using a combination of telegraphy and homing pigeons. The agency was formally named Reuters in 1851.
3 The phrase “Lords of Life and Death,” referring generally to the unseen hand of fate, occurs frequently in the work of British writer Rudyard Kipling (1865–1933). See “‘The Finest Story in the World’” (1891): “The Lords of Life and Death would never allow Charlie Mears to speak with full knowledge of his pasts . . . The Lords of Life and Death were as cunning as Grish Chunder had hinted.” Best Short Stories (Ware, UK: Wordsworth, 1997), 89.
4 Scottish writer Andrew Lang (1844–1912), although he served as a president of the Society for Psychical Research in 1911, wrote skeptically about myth and religion in such volumes as Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887) and Magic and Religion (1901). In the article “The Poltergeist, Historically Considered,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 45 (February 1903): 305–26, Lang dismissed most accounts of poltergeists as delusions or fabrications.
5 There are several Llantrisants (the name means “church of the three saints”) in Wales, but the one Machen is probably referring to is a town in the county of Glamorganshire (now Mid Glamorgan) in southern Wales. Although Arfonshire is an archaic designation of the northwestern county of Caernarfornshire or Carnarvonshire, Machen is probably using the term as a generic archaic term for a Welsh county.
6 In Greco-Roman rhetoric, tmesis (a cutting) refers to a single word that has been cut in two with a word or phrase intervening. English slang uses the figure in such a term as “Ri-goddamn-diculous.”
7 Sarnau is a town in the county of Cardigan, near Cardigan Bay, in southeastern Wales.
8 The Evangelical Movement was a movement within the Church of England, emerging in the late eighteenth century and persisting through much of the nineteenth, that sought to restore the church, and the nation, to moral uprightness, with a strong emphasis on social welfare.
9 “Eyebright” is the popular name for the plant Euphrasia officinalis, commonly thought to be a remedy for weak eyes.
10 Lundy is the largest island in the Bristol Channel, the body of water that lies off the southern coast of Wales and off the northern coast of Devon.
11 Ogham is an alphabet, current in the fifth and sixth centuries, customarily used to write in the Old Irish or Brythonic language. Most of the surviving inscriptions in Ogham are in Ireland or western Britain, including south Wales.
12 Machen had, from his perspective as an Anglo-Catholic, written harshly about orthodox Protestantism. See “Sancho Panza in Geneva,” Academy 72 (June 8, 1907): 559–60: “The real truth is that Protestantism is a revolt against Christianity.” The treatise Dr. Stiggins: His Views and Principles (1906) is a satire on a dogmatic Protestant clergyman.
13 Penvro is an archaic term for Pembroke, the county town of Pembrokeshire, in the far western tip of Wales.
14 Twyn (more properly Tywyn) is a seaside resort on the western coast of Wales, in the province of Gwynedd and facing Cardigan Bay. Kemeys is a region near Usk in Monmouthshire.
15 “But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.” William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807), ll. 64–65.
16 In Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), John Durbeyfield, Tess’s father, is an alcoholic carter who puts on airs when he learns that he is descended from a noble family, the d’Urbervilles.
17 Teilo Sant, or St. Teilo (d. 604), leader of a monastic school in Llandaff, Wales, purportedly visited Palestine in the year 518, but this account is now discredited.
18 Sir William Crookes (1832–1919), British chemist and physicist, became interested in spiritualism in the 1870s, joining the Society for Psychical Research and concluding that not every instance of spiritualistic phenomena could be accounted for naturalistically. Sir Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) was a British physicist whose reputation later suffered as a result of his credulous belief in spiritualism and telepathy.
19 Henry Hallam (1777–1859) was a British historian and the author of The View of the State of Europe During the Middle Ages (1818). The passage to which Machen alludes appears in the chapter “On the State of Society in Europe During the Middle Ages.”
20 Machen alludes to various Gothic structures found in the cities of Cologne (Köln), Germany; Colne, Lancashire; Arles, France; and Abingdon, Oxfordshire.
21 The Llantrisant parish church was dedicated in 1096; it was rebuilt in 1246 in the Norman style, and a tower was added in the fifteenth century. No doubt to Machen’s horror, the interior was “restored” in 1874 by John Prichard.
22 “My God, and Is Thy Table Spread,” words by Philip Doddridge (1755), music by C. P. E. Bach, arranged by Edward Miller (1790).
23 Mescal button consists of the fresh or dried tubercules of peyote, a hallucinogen.
24 Tynewydd is a village in Glamorgan, about fifteen miles north of Llantrisant.
25 The Tregaron Healing Cup, or the Nant Eos Healing Cup (referring to Nant Eos or Nanteos, a mansion near Aberystwyth, in westcentral Wales), was a wooden chalice, purportedly constructed from a piece of the cross on which Jesus was crucified, brought to England in the late twelfth century by John Stedman.
26 From the hymn “The Blood of Sprinkling, Which Speaketh,” by John Wesley (1703–1791), the founder of Methodism.
27 Greek for “holy, holy, holy.”
28 A fusion of Welsh and Latin. “Sacred is the Father, sacred is the Son, sacred is the Holy Spirit. Holy, holy, holy, blessed Holy Trinity. Holy Lord God of Sabaoth, the Lord God.”
29 Evidently an error for Manafon, a village in the county of Montgomeryshire in east-central Wales.
30 Anatole France (1844–1924), a leading French novelist, wrote skeptically of Joan of Arc’s visions in Vie de Jeanne d’Arc (1908). Andrew Lang (see n. 4 above) replied with a competing biography, The Maid of France (1908).
31 Idylls of the King (1856–85), a celebrated epic poem about King Arthur by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892).
32 The reference is to a passage in De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae [On the Antiquities of the Glastonbury Church] by William of Malmesbury (1080?–1143?). In section 30 of that work, there is a reference to the Sapphirus altar as a gift from the Patriarch of Jerusalem. The passage is generally believed to be a later interpolation. See John Scott, An Early History of Glastonbury (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1981), 82.

OUT OF THE EARTH

“Out of the Earth” was first published in T. P.’s Weekly (November 27, 1915) and collected in The Shining Pyramid (London: Martin Secker, 1925). Written in the repertorial style common to Machen’s later tales, it is one of his final contributions to the “Little People mythology.” At the outset Machen, apparently in his own voice, uses the controversy surrounding “The Bowmen” as a springboard for his examination of weird events in Wales.
1 [Edward] Harold Begbie (1871–1929), a British journalist and religious writer, wrote about the “Angels of Mons” controversy in the pamphlet On the Side of the Angels (1915).
2 The Serjeants’ Inn was one of two inns for Serjeants-at-law (an order of barristers in England): the one in Fleet Street dates to 1443; the other, in Chancery Lane, dates to 1416. Both buildings were destroyed during the German bombing in 1941.
3 Manavon is a variant spelling of the Welsh village of Manafon (see n. 29 to “The Great Return”).
4 Tremaen (“place of the stone”) is a common Welsh place-name, reminiscent of Caermaen (“citadel of the stone”), Machen’s name for his birthplace, Caerleon-on-Usk.
5 Pierrot is a character in the Commedia dell’arte, generally depicted as a sad clown.
6 Avalon (from the Welsh afal, apple) is a mythical island associated with the legend of King Arthur: it was where his sword, Excalibur, was forged, and where he would return to recover from his wounds after the Battle of Camlann.
7 Castell Coch is a Gothic Revival church built in 1871–91 by John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute, and William Burges on the site of a thirteenth-century castle just north of Cardiff.
8 The Welsh Anglican Church, officially known as the Church in Wales, was formally disestablished in 1920, five years after the first publication of this story.

THE TERROR

The Terror was serialized in the London Evening News (October 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 1916) as “The Great Terror” and later published in book form as The Terror: A Fantasy (London: Duckworth, 1917). A radically abridged version, bringing the text down to about 25,000 words, was published as “The Coming of the Terror,” Century Magazine (October 1917). Machen was not consulted on this abridgment, but he later remarked that it was skillfully done. Perhaps the acme of Machen’s attempts to convey terror by posing as a sober reporter of “facts” (a technique enhanced by the appearance of the story in a newspaper, by his clever mingling of real and fictitious locales, and by his using the trauma of the world war as a vivid backdrop), The Terror is possibly the most notable example of the supernatural trope of animals hostile to or revolting against human beings. As such, it probably inspired such later tales as Philip Macdonald’s short story “Our Feathered Friends” (1931) and Daphne du Maurier’s novella “The Birds” (1952).
1 Namur, a city in Belgium, fell to the Germans after three days of fighting in August 1914.
2 The Germans were prevented from entering Paris by the British victory at the First Battle of the Marne (September 5–12, 1914).
3 Alexander von Kluck (1846–1934) was a German general who commanded the German First Army at the outbreak of World War I. His army fought the British at Mons (August 23–24, 1914), among other places. Following his retreat after the First Battle of the Marne, he stationed his forces behind the river Aisne, remaining there for several years.
4 The Battle of Neuve Chapelle (March 10–13, 1915), in the northern province of Artois, was a British victory, but the army’s failure to exploit the victory was a significant factor in the fall of the H. H. Asquith government. The Battle of Loos (September 25–October 14, 1915), in the far north of France, resulted in a standoff and immense casualties on both sides.
5 Joseph Joffre (1852–1931) was commander in chief of the French army. He participated in the victorious First Battle of the Marne, but the enormous losses his army suffered at Verdun and the Somme led to his replacement in late 1916 by General Robert Nivelle.
6 A throwster is one who twists silk fibers into raw silk or raw silk into thread.
7 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote an effective horror tale on this subject, “The Horror of the Heights” (Strand, November 1913).
8 The towns Towy, Merthyr Tegveth, and Meiros are apparently fictitious, but the names are based on actual Welsh names. There is a river Towy in Carmarthenshire. Merthyr Tegveth (“the place of the martyrdom of Tegveth”) is the original name of the small parish of Llandegfeth, near Cardiff. Meiros is a place-name used elsewhere in Wales for towns, but none in the locale in question.
9 Llanfihangel means “St. Michael’s Church” in Welsh; there are at least eleven communities in Wales with this term in its name. Machen probably refers to Llanfihangel Aberbythych, a village in Monmouthshire.
10 The village of Llangibby is now spelled Llangybi.
11 Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a classic instance of the doppelgänger motif, first appeared in 1886. See Machen’s comment in Hieroglyphics: A Note on Ecstasy in Literature (1902): “Let us take the strange case of R. L. Stevenson, and especially his Jekyll and Hyde, which, in some ways, is his most characteristic and most effective book.... Many, I have no doubt, gave it a very high place in the ranks of imaginative literature, or (as we should now say) in the ranks of literature; while many other judges set it down as an extremely clever piece of sensationalism, and nothing more. Well, I think both these opinions are wrong; and I should be inclined to say that Jekyll and Hyde just scrapes by the skin of its teeth, as it were, into the shelves of literature, and no more.... It is on the conception, then, alone, that I justify my inclusion of Jekyll amongst works of art; for it seems to me that, lurking behind the plot, we divine the presence of an idea, of an inspiration. ‘Man is not truly one, but truly two,’ or, perhaps, a polity with many inhabitants, Dr. Jekyll writes in his confession, and received a vision of the mystery of human nature” (New York: Knopf, 1923, 70–72).
12 Mr. Tulkinghorn is a successful solicitor in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53). By relentless investigation he discovers various secrets in the past of Lady Dedlock and is murdered for his pains.
13 Latin for “foreigner” or “stranger.”
14 The reference is to Thomas De Quincey’s celebrated essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827).
15 Porth is a town in Glamorganshire, in southeast Wales.
16 The Royal Flying Corps, founded in 1912 as a branch of the British Army.
17 The Defence of the Realm Act was passed by Parliament on August 8, 1914 and gave the government wide-ranging powers during war-time, including censorship of war reporting in the press. A second act was passed in 1915.
18 There are two locales named Plas Newydd in Wales. One is the county seat of the Marquess of Anglesey in Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, Anglesey, and the other is the residence of the Ladies of Llangollen, in Llangollen, Denbighshire. Probably the former is meant.
19 Brahma-Dorking is a crossbreed of two different types of poultry, the Brahma (originating probably in India and imported to England in 1853) and the Dorking (developed in Sussex).
20 Middle Temple is one of the four Inns of Court, professional associations to which every English barrister must belong; the others are the Inner Temple, Gray’s Inn, and Lincoln’s Inn.
21 Llantarnam is now a suburb of the new town of Cwmbran, in Torfaen (formerly a part of Monmouthshire), in southeast Wales. Morwen is apparently Machen’s adaptation of morwyn (“maiden”).
22 The reference is to a proverb, “Tenterden steeple is the cause of Goodwin Sands,” meaning that any explanation is better than none.
23 The luminiferous ether (or aether) was a postulation of nineteenth-century science, in which it was assumed that particles could not pass through a void, so that light, radio waves (discovered by Guglielmo Marconi), and other particles had to pass through an infinitely fine medium, which physicists called the ether even though they could not independently demonstrate its existence. The theory collapsed with the emergence of Einstein’s theory of relativity.
24 The paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise was first devised by the Presocratic philosopher Zeno of Elea (490?–430? B.C.E.): In a race, if a slow-moving tortoise was placed ahead of the fleet Achilles, Achilles could never catch it because, no matter how quickly Achilles reaches the tortoise’s original position, the tortoise would have moved a bit ahead, and so on ad infinitum. The paradox can be resolved by pointing to the fallacy of regarding time and distance as made up of discrete units.
25 Machen takes particular aim at some of the leading thinkers of his age—the naturalists Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), and the philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)—because they were, directly or indirectly, largely responsible for the decline of religious belief among the intelligentsia.
26 Mescal button (see n. 23 to “The Great Return”).
27 X-rays were discovered by the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen (1845–1923) in 1895.
28 Midlingham is fictitious.
29 A Lewis gun was a light machine gun invented by Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis of the U.S. Army in 1911 and widely used by the British in World War I.
30 There are several towns or parishes named Belmont in England, but only one (Belmont Rural, in Herefordshire) in the Midlands. Probably Machen intends Belmont to be fictitious.
31 The Wipers Salient is a slang reference to the Ypres Salient, the area around Ypres, in Belgium, that was the site of one of the largest battles in World War I (the Second Battle of Ypres, April 22–May 25, 1915).
32 Holme is a village in Cumbria, in northern Britain.
33 Dunwich is a small town in Suffolk, on the southeast coast of Britain. In the seventh century it was the capital of East Anglia. Much of the town has now been submerged by coastal erosion. Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a poem about the town, “By the North Sea” (1880). Its mention here probably helped to inspire H. P. Lovecraft’s use of the name in such stories as “The Dunwich Horror” (1928), set in central Massachusetts.
34 The Russian writer Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) was the inventor of the mystical philosophy or religion called theosophy, expounded in such works as Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888). The basic principle of theosophy is the theory of the soul’s passage through seven layers of cosmic awareness to reach the Absolute.
35 Helmuth von Moltke the Younger (1848–1916), nephew of the celebrated Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800–1891), was chief of the German General Staff from 1906 to 1914 and was a major figure in the development of German war plans, including a contemplated invasion of Great Britain.
36 Latin for “third [party] in delight.”
37 Latin for On Human Villainy. “Facinore” is Machen’s coinage derived from the noun facinus (villainy).
38 The philosophy of German thinker Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), especially its conception of the übermensch (superman or overman), was commonly believed to have inspired the Germans to initiate World War I. Both the spelling and the pronunciation of his name were rendered erroneously by Anglophone speakers.
39 Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener (1850–1916), was a leading British military figure of the period. He had fought in the Sudan and in the Boer War, then served as commander-in-chief of the Army in India (1902–09). In 1914 he became Secretary of State for War and did important work in raising recruits for the British Army.
40 Pengareg appears to be Machen’s adaptation of Pen carreg (“head of the rock”). There are locales of this name in Gwent and Carmarthenshire.
41 Bog Bean (Menyanthes trifoliata), or Marsh Trefoil, is a water plant commonly found in bogs or marshes in North America and northern Europe.
42 In this sense, heliography refers to the use of the heliograph, a device (chiefly consisting of a mirror) that flashes signals in Morse code by the use of sunlight.
43 Louvain (the French name for the Dutch town of Leuven), the capital of the province of Flemish Brabant, is a town in Belgium where, in late August 1914, the German Army, in its avowed plan to terrify the populace, killed the mayor and other leading officials and destroyed the university library, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of rare volumes and causing worldwide outrage. The Lusitania was a British ocean liner that was sunk by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915, causing the deaths of 1,200 people, including 128 Americans. For a time it seemed as if the incident might lead to the United States’ entry into World War I on the side of the Allies.
44 Bachgen is Welsh for “boy” (bach, used earlier in the expression “doctor bach,” means “little”).
45 Llandudno is a popular seaside resort in the north of Wales. Colwyn Bay is a town and seaside resort a few miles east of Llandudno.
46 Ynys Sant (“sacred island”) is probably a reference to Caldey Island, off the coast of Pembrokshire in southwestern Wales. As a boy Machen spent his holidays in that area.
47 Cf. the Welsh boy Jervase Cradock in “Novel of the Black Seal” (p. 44).
48 William Burke and William Hare were Irish immigrants in Edinburgh who, in 1827–28, committed at least seventeen murders and sold the bodies to medical students for dissection. In most cases they killed their victims by suffocation. They were hanged on January 28, 1829.
49 Carbonic acid (H2CO3) is a weak acid that is not used as a weapon. Machen may be intending to refer to carbolic acid, an archaic name for phenol (C6H5OH), which was in fact used by the Nazis as an injection to kill victims in the concentration camps in World War II.
50 Apparently a variant spelling of Tredunnock, a village in Monmouthshire.
51 Pentoppin was a real farm near Caerleon-on-Usk known to Machen from boyhood.
52 The reference is to a celebrated passage in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) in which Johnson claimed to have refuted the idealism of the philosopher George Berkeley, who in Johnson’s view had asserted that the material world does not really exist. “I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus’” (August 6, 1763).
53 Machen was also an actor for a time, serving as a bit player in Frank Benson’s company (1901–10).
54 Engedi (more properly Ein Gedi) is a region in Israel, west of the Dead Sea. David hid from Samuel in the caves of Engedi (1 Samuel 23:29f.).
55 Zain (or Zayin) is the seventh letter of several Semitic alphabets, including Hebrew.
56 Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), is a work by the British writer Edwin A. Abbott (1838–1926), in which a sphere of three dimensions visits a world of two dimensions whose inhabitants fail to grasp the true nature of the sphere’s existence.
57 Peterborough Cathedral (properly the Cathedral Church of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Andrew), in the city of Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, is an impressive early Gothic cathedral whose construction began in 1118 and was completed in 1238.
58 Cf. John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667): “With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, / Confusion worse confounded” (2.995–96).
59 A not entirely accurate citation of Coleridge’s remark in his Table Talk: “A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere philosophy; nor of facts alone without ideas of which those facts are the symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded, for then it would be mere history” (December 3, 1831).