Dr Fabienne Toupin
email: fabienne.toupin@univ-tours.fr

Keywords: grammar, AElfric's Grammar, Anglo-Latin education, late Latin Antiquity, transmission, vernacular, metalanguage

This paper explores the extent to which the tenth-century English scholar AElfric, author of a grammatical treatise known to us as AElfric's Grammar, differed from his sources, the late antique grammarians Donatus and Priscian, (i) in his conception of grammar, (ii) in his perception of the structure of Latin, and (iii) in the descriptive apparatus he used.

I argue for the transmission of a conceptual framework. The facts taken into consideration are those dealt with by Donatus and Priscian, and they are analyzed with the help of the self-same concepts: AElfric does not introduce new concepts into the description, nor does he elaborate or refine those transmitted by the grammatical tradition.

I also note the transmission of a descriptive apparatus, at which level, however, discontinuity appears in the partial re-organisation of the treatise so as to gain coherence and pedagogical efficiency, in the Christianisation and Anglicisation of the exemplification, in the systematic translation of Latin items into English and in the coinage of a vernacular grammatical terminology. Yet in the most important form of discontinuity, i.e. in AElfric's decision not to use Latin as the medium of a Latin grammar, several elements point to a continuity, such as the technical terms being Latin loan words or functioning as glosses to Latin words.

Exploring continuities and discontinuities between AElfric's Grammar and its antique sources 1

INTRODUCTION

AElfric (c.955-1010) was a priest and a monk, a pupil of AEthelwold who was one of the leading figures in the Benedictine reform movement in tenth-century England. In about 998 he wrote a grammar of Latin in English for monastic pupils. The text is generally known as AElfric's Grammar, but is also occasionally referred to as AElfric's Excerptiones de arte grammatica anglice (see for instance Law 1997). It was probably the most sizeable grammar of its time and it rapidly achieved wide currency. It has two prefaces, one in English, the other in Latin, and comes with a bilingual Glossary and a Colloquy on Trades and Occupations meant to train young oblates to converse in Latin. 2 AElfric was not the first grammarian in Anglo-Saxon England. From the end of the seventh century Alcuin, Aldhelm, Bede, Boniface, Tatwine, and several anonymi had produced treatises of Latin grammar. But AElfric's Grammar differs from these scholars' works in one major respect: it is the first grammar of Latin which uses the vernacular as its medium [START_REF] Hurt | AElfric[END_REF]Porter 2002). Such an innovation, radical though it is, has to be considered in relation to its cultural background: at the time that AElfric wrote his Grammar, English had been extensively used for literary purposes for three centuries.

AElfric thus deals with categories, processes and terms of Latin grammar, but his metalanguage is English (that standard variety of Old English called West Saxon). AElfric's decision was motivated by his desire to provide his young oblates with a grammar through which they would work their way first to the rudiments, then to a fluent command of Latin which would determine their ability to comprehend the Christian faith. Again, this purpose has to be set against a cultural context in which learning and Latin scholarship had been badly depleted by two centuries of Scandinavian raids on the monasteries. This paper belongs to the intellectual tradition exploring the continuities and discontinuities in the transmission of grammatical knowledge between the late Latin Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. This transfer has been the subject of much scholarly attention (see in particular Law 1993;Lepschy 1994;[START_REF] Swiggers | L'héritage grammatical gréco-latin et la grammaire au Moyen Age[END_REF]), but it should be interesting to examine it in the light of the first grammar of Latin ever written in a European vernacular. I wish to emphasize from the start that in doing this I am not concerned with questions of originality nor of finding precursorsit would be irrelevant to frame the question in this way. Rather I wish to explore to what extent (and, if necessary, why) AElfric, as an early medieval grammarian, differed from the grammarians of late Antiquity (i) in his conception of grammar, (ii) in his perception of the structure of Latin, 1 I wish to warmly thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments and attention to detail improved the first draft of this article. I am particularly appreciative of their critical eye and helpful suggestions. 2 Somewhat paradoxically, these three texts of Grammar, Glossary and Colloquy are referred to as "AElfric's grammatical triad", as "a carefully designed pedagogical triad" by Hill (2007: 287), but have been demonstrated by the same author not to have functioned and not to have been transmitted as a grammatical triad in the eleventh century. and (iii) in the descriptive apparatus he used.3 I will adopt the conventional divisions of Antiquity and the Middle Ages into historical periods. Whether AElfric's Grammar is partially designed as a grammar of the English vernacular, in addition to being a grammar of Latin, is a relevant issue here, which I would like to briefly address before moving on to considerations of legacy.

AELFRIC'S GRAMMAR, A GRAMMAR OF ENGLISH TOO? 4

Those scholars who have studied the Grammar disagree about whether AElfric does teach English (cf. Menzer 2004: 108-09 for a detailed review). Some authors seem to think that such is the case (e.g. Lapidge et al. 1999: 8), an opinion probably backed by a famous passage in the Latin preface: Ego AElfricus, ut minus sapiens, has excerptiones de Prisciano minore uel maiore uobis puerulis tenellis ad uestram linguam transferre studii, quatinus perlectis octo partibus Donati in isto libello potestis utramque linguam, uidelicet latinam et anglicam, vestrae teneritudini inserere interim, usque quo ad perfectoria perueniatis studia.

(I, AElfric, having only slight pretensions to learning, have taken the trouble to translate these excerpts from Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae for you young children into your language, so that once you have studied the eight word classes of Donatus's grammar in this book you will be able to incorporate both languages, Latin and English, into your tender minds until you arrive at more advanced studies.) (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 1; translation Vivien Law's; emphasis mine) echoed in the English preface: I am not saying for all that that this book can bring much to teaching, nevertheless it will constitute an introduction to both languages, should it have the good fortune to please. (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 3; translation and emphasis mine) Other scholars explicitly reject the idea: His Grammar offers no systematic treatment of the morphology of Old English nor of its grammatical peculiarities. By utramque linguam AElfric seems to have been referring to something else, namely that with the help of this grammar a pupil could at the same time acquire the ability to describe his own language in precise grammatical terms, drawing on the categories used for Latin [...]. (Gneuss 1990: 14) Undeniably, AElfric's Grammar is interspersed with remarks on the vernacular. These might be adequately described as contrastive remarks. They are punctual and lexical in naturethey are mainly concerned with questions of vocabulary (Law 1997: 212), and there are very few insights into the structure of English. Here are a few examples:

(i) AElfric sometimes underlines a resemblance between the two languages, as when he remarks that the eight parts of speech of Latin are attested in English, without questioning the adequacy of this analysis for the vernacular: Indeed, the whole of the Latin language is comprised in these eight classes, and English agrees with it in all these classes, as we have just briefly explained. (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 11; translation mine) (ii) Conversely, his aim can be to point out that what goes for Latin does not necessarily go for English:

The sixth mode is used with the five others and it is always in the third person of the PASSIVVM: amatur: amatur a me 'I love', amabatur a me 'I loved', and so forth. But it is not very common in Latin and even less so in English. (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 134;translation mine) The verb eo 'I go' (is 'you go', it 'he goes') has the forms iens 'going', euntis 'going' in the PARTICIPIVM, similarly queo 'I am able to' has the forms quiens 'being able to', queuntis, queunti in the PARTICIPIVM, and so forth. And all the verbs derived from the latter take -e and -u in the five inflected cases. Their future PARTICIPIVM is the following: iturus 'the one who wants or has to go'; quiturus, but we don't know of any equivalent in English for that form. (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 252;translation mine) AElfric is aware that gender in nouns is not necessarily the same in Latin and in English, which is something of a problem because he translates all the Latin examples: Know too that nouns are often of one gender in Latin and another in English. We say in Latin hic liber (masc.) and in English ðeos boc (fem.); in Latin haec mulier (fem.) and in English ðis wif (neuter), not ðeos; and in Latin hoc iudicium (neuter) and in English ðes dom (masc.), not ðis. (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 19;translation Vivien Law's) But strangely enough, the question of the case system elicits no comment on the two languages not being isomorphic. Old English, like Latin, is an inflected language which relies on changes in the form of a word to indicate grammatical function in nouns, and person, tense and mood in verbs. Thus Old English nouns, adjectives and determiners inflect for case the way these items do in Latin, except that the latter has six cases and the former just four (the nominative, accusative, genitive and dative cases). For this reason, among others, the description of Latin inflectional morphology cannot fit Old English, but AElfric makes no observation about this.

He focuses instead on establishing a semantic equivalence wherever possible: for instance, he uses a prepositional construction (preposition + noun phrase in the dative) as an equivalent to the Latin ablative.

Where they do occur, AElfric's contrastive remarks are not systematic in nature. They certainly form no framework for the grammatical description of English, and it is impossible to find out how AElfric perceived the structure of the vernacular from his description of Latin. I therefore do not endorse Hurt's opinion that the Grammar "illuminates his [AElfric's] understanding of the Latin language, his conception of its relations to English, and thus his principles of translation" (Hurt 1972: 105). I think it is a misconception for a modern reader to interpret AElfric's wish to have young children incorporate both languages, Latin and English, into their tender minds ("potestis utramque linguam, uidelicet latinam et anglicam, vestrae teneritudini inserere interim") as an intention on the part of the scholar to compare English with Latin. First, comparative grammar requires a theory of observables and a formal representation of languages, in which propositions explicitely derive one from the other in an ordered way. Such formalism, necessary to capture any kind of generalisation, is unknown to medieval linguistic thought. Secondly, AElfric does not question whether the concepts and metalanguage he inherited from antique grammarians are relevant for the description of Englishas a man of his time, he takes it for granted that they are:

The classical tradition leaves the Middle Ages and the Christian school the priceless legacy of an ars grammatica, of a complete metalanguage which was destined to be accepted as the most lucid and incisive instrument of intellectual penetration, the indispensable paradigmatic reference point for solving the most varied cultural quaestiones which clerics and lay scholars tirelessly pursued.

(Lepschy 1994: 139-140; emphasis mine) On the whole, comparative grammar can be said to be foreign to AElfric's interests, and accordingly I consider the Grammar as a grammar of Latin only. 5How much of this work, formally and conceptually, is inherited from AElfric's sources and how much of it is original with the Anglo-Saxon scholar? My present concern about legacy makes it a necessary step to be now more specific about the derivative nature of AElfric's Grammar.

SOURCES FOR AELFRIC'S GRAMMAR

AElfric draws upon two grammatici of the Imperial period, Donatus and Priscian, and a later grammarian, Isidore of Seville. The most important influences are Donatus's and Priscian's. Donatus (Aelius Donatus) lived in the fourth century AD and is known for two works: Ars Minor (Donati), a Latin grammar of the elementary type, and Ars Maior, a more elaborate treatise about three times longer. Priscian (Priscianus) is a sixth-century scholar who taught in Constantinople and wrote the immensely popular Institutiones Grammaticae. The work for which Isidore of Seville (c.570 -636) is famous, Originum sive etymologiarum libri XXoften abbreviated as Etymologiae, is only partly about grammar: it is the first book, a text often copied in the Middle Ages, that deals with the art, and it does so from a Donatian point of view.

To be more precise, AElfric's Grammar is based on the following three texts, presented in an ascending order of influence:

(i) The grammatical summary found in the first book of the Etymologiae, entitled "De grammatica." It is relevant only for the Grammar's last section, "Triginta divisiones grammaticae artis" (the thirty divisons of grammar).

(ii) Donatus's Ars Minor. In this respect AElfric's Grammar belongs to a set of synoptic texts of elementary level, whose aim is to provide the student with the rudiments of Latin necessary to make one's way through a textas opposed to the more elaborate grammars which are commentaries on Donatus's Ars Maior and whose object is to stimulate the reader's reflection (Swiggers 1995: 173-74).

(iii) Priscian's Institutiones Grammaticae. The Grammar has long been thought to have been compiled from the eighteen books of the Institutiones, but it has been established that AElfric's starting point was in fact the Excerptiones de Prisciano [START_REF] Gneuss | The Study of Language in Anglo-Saxon England[END_REF]Law 1997;Porter 2002). The text is an abridged version of the Institutiones Grammaticae incorporating material from other sources, and it might have been compiled by AElfric himself (Porter 2002: 23-30;for counter-arguments cf. Hill 2007: 297). By making the Excerptiones, and therefore by making Priscian, the main source for his Grammar, AElfric is in line with the main intellectual trend of his time.

AElfric makes it clear that he is indebted to these grammatici, with the exception of Isidore of Seville, as early as the first sentence of the Latin preface: I, AElfric, having only slight pretensions to learning, have taken the trouble to translate these excerpts from Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae for you young children into your language, so that once you have studied the eight word classes of Donatus's grammar in this book you will be able to incorporate both languages, Latin and English, into your tender minds until you arive at more advanced studies. (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 1; translation Vivien Law's)

The derivative nature of the text is ackowledged throughout, mainly by mundane, matter-of-fact expressions along the lines of "as Donatus/Priscian said", but sometimes by distinctively laudative turns of phrase such as "PRISCIANVS, who is considered the genius of the Latin language" or "master PRISCIANVS says it is necessary to distinguish...", and Priscian's name is even used in the exemplification (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 94, 111, 128).

In view of Isidore's lesser influence on AElfric, I will henceforth use the expression AElfric's sources to refer to the other two grammatici he drew upon, Donatus and Priscian.

CONTINUITY ON THE CONCEPTUAL LEVEL

What strikes the observer most is the general absence of new conceptual developments in AElfric's work. The first continuity between AElfric and his sources has to do with the autonomy of grammar from the study of the auctores.

The aim of grammar

Swiggers considers Graeco-Latin grammar as having no real unity except when considered in retrospect, from the point of view of the legacy that it constitutes. There is no real continuity, he argues, between the grammatikē and the ars grammatica. Greek grammar remained a philological science throughout, a preliminary whose study was the key to the understanding and appreciation of literary texts, whereas in the works of the Latin grammarians from Donatus on grammar became an end in itself for reasons that have to do with the school system and the spreading of Latin in the Empire. This development gave rise to the production of manuals which could later be commented on. "Plusieurs de ces manuels ne visent que le niveau de l'instruction élémentaire et certains d'entre eux ont été conçus à l'usage d'un public grécophone (comme l'Ars grammatica de Dosithée [...])" (Swiggers 1995: 168).

Swiggers's opinion is not shared by the majority of linguists who have written about the Graeco-Latin world. In his major book on Donatus, Louis Holtz says that the grammaticus "considère l'explication des poètes comme sa tâche essentielle", and warns against "de graves erreurs d'interprétation si l'on ne considérait pas dans une même continuité grammaire grecque et grammaire latine. Il n'est peut-être même pas de domaine dans lequel les Latins soient plus étroitement tributaires des Grecs" (Holtz 1981: 74, 3). Most research into the history of linguistic ideas thus points out the philological nature of Graeco-Latin grammar when considered as a homogeneous whole. Latin grammars in particular are presented as being devised for students whose mother tongue is Latin (or at least for advanced foreign students).6

If we follow Swiggers, then AElfric has a common point with his sources. The grammar AElfric and his predecessors are engaged in is an autonomous discipline, detached both from rhetoric and dialectic with which it formed the classical trivium. Grammar becomes even more of an end in itself with AElfric, whose pupilscontrary to Donatus and Priscian'swere not members of an urban Latin-speaking community and were not likely to have attended primary classes:

Natural language change, on one hand, and an influx of non-native speakers, members of Germanic tribes, on the other hand, meant that the grammatici could no longer assume a knowledge of the forms and syntax of the language of Virgil and Cicero on the part of their pupils. Instead of being a preliminary to the appreciation of Classical verse and oratory, the study of grammar became an end in itself. (Law 1986: 368; emphasis mine) Therefore AElfric's first concern is to supply the monastic pupils with a practical instrument for learning Latin:

"AElfric is not concerned with training budding poets in the mysteries of the Latin hexameter" (Law 1997: 207).

Yet, neither in AElfric's treatise nor in the Ars Donati and the Institutiones Grammaticae is grammar perfectly autonomous. One distinguishes the outline of a higher aim, which for Donatus and Priscian is the knowledge of the auctores (Virgil, Terence, Cicero, ...), and for AElfric the knowledge of the holy texts of Christianity. For the English scholar, just as for the Carolingian tradition that he drew upon, "[t]he goal of grammar was an enhanced understanding of the Word of God as made manifest in the Latin Scriptures" (Law 1997: 140). This goal AElfric makes plain in his English preface:

It is therefore important now to warn the monks and the servants of God against the waning of sacred teaching or its abandonment in our days, as was the case several years back in England when no priest was any longer able to write or decipher an epistle in Latin, until Archbishop Dunstan and Bishop

AEthelwold re-established this teaching in monastic life. (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 3; translation mine) AElfric's higher concern is therefore with the correct understanding of the Latin Scriptures and the avoidance of error, OE gedwyld, a term by which he is said to have often meant 'heresy' (Hill 2007: 299). "Grammar, in other words, underpinned orthodoxy [...]" (ibid.).

Grammar is not a speculative discipline

Another form of continuity can be observed on the conceptual level between AElfric and his sources. The (more or less) autonomous grammar they are engaged in is a knowledge of facts, not a speculative discipline. What Swiggers says of antique grammar:

[S]i elle donne lieu à des réflexions plutôt spéculatives (par ex. sur le rôle de l'analogie ou de l'anomalie dans la langue), ce n'est qu'en fonction de convergences ou de divergences qu'on observe entre des formes qui ont été réunies en paradigmes, ou qu'on observe entre une forme et un sens (par ex. un pluriel pour un objet singulier, un nom féminin ou masculin pour un inanimé). (Swiggers 1995: 161) is also true of AElfric's Grammar, which is a catalogue of facts:

[…] for the first time Europe's most precocious vernacular, English, became a vehicle for linguistic explanation, a medium to convey a collection of facts about Latin, the language of school and scripture.

Practical classroom concerns thus dictate the form of the Grammar, and the result is a full presentation of the basic facts of Latin accidence and vocabulary, in clear, logical order and in accessible form." (Porter 2002: 1, 31; emphasis mine)

The object of grammar

Spoken language is outside the scope of grammar thus defined. Where Donatus and Priscian are concerned, this is due to a difference which had appeared between Greek and Latin grammar, the latter diverging from its Greek model by the reduced importance of prosodic and metrical phenomena (Swiggers 1995: 165-66). The difference is only more marked in their works than in most of their predecessors'. In AElfric's Grammar, the issue of the pronunciation of Latin is not addressed, somewhat paradoxically, considering that its importance is underlined in the preface: (One must yet acknowledge that in many instances Latin grammar doesn't easily lend itself to interpretation in the English language: for example where feet and meters are concerned, a subject that we leave aside here. Nevertheless, as an initiation, our version seems to us to be of help to young beginners, as we have already said. Many, to my astonishment, shorten in prose syllables which are indeed short in verse, but prose is not governed by metric. Thus they pronounce pater, malus in the British way, whose vowels are considered short in verse. It seems to me preferable, though, to invoke God the father by articulating the syllable pompously rather than shortening it in the British way, even though it is true that God couldn't possibly be subjected to the laws of Latin grammar.) (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 2; translation and emphasis mine)

Porter's following comment on Priscian's Institutiones: "[...] surely no non-Latin speaker ever learned colloquial language from it" (Porter 2002: 11) probably goes for AElfric's Grammar too, except that it is supplemented by the Colloquy whose aim was precisely to train young oblates to converse in Latin.

Also outside the scope of grammar is syntax, another feature common to AElfric, Donatus andto a lesser extent -Priscian. Antique grammar had not set up the notions of agreement (congruitas) and government (rectio), which are central in syntax. In the works of the grammatici in general, syntactic theory is underrepresented, not to say altogether absenta systematic treatment of syntax will not be found before the twelfth century. In Priscian's Institutiones one finds the concepts of sentence structure and word order, but already in the Excerptiones, which is AElfric's direct source, "the higher theoretical studies on syntax have largely gone by the board." (Porter 2002: 13) Witness to the status of syntax in AElfric's Grammar is a particular technical term, namely word. Just like the Biblical verbum, word means both 'word' and 'verb' ('word' is the initial meaning while 'verb' is first attested in AElfric's work). But the most remarquable feature of word is its ability to refer to all possible syntactic levels. Bosworth and Toller (s.v. word II) define it thus:7 "a word, a group of words forming a phrase, clause, sentence or sentences." The meaning of word covers the entire semantic field that modern linguistics marks out with phrase, clause, sentence and discourse.8 This is not so much due to an extraordinary semantic versatility as to the lack of distinction in AElfric's description between the different syntactic levels: the scholar goes into an enormous amount of detail concerning the morphology of the eight parts of speech but is not concerned with syntax. This does not imply that the notion of hierarchy is unknown to AElfric. The backbone of his conception of language is indeed a hierarchy of four units, but in accordance with the whole antique tradition which he inherited these units are letter, syllable, word and sentence, not phrase, clause, sentence and discourse.

The fact that prosodic, metrical and syntactical facts fall outside the scope of grammatical knowledge benefits the description of morphology. Morphologymore precisely inflectional morphologycan even be said to be over-represented in the works under consideration here. Porter writes of Priscian's Institutiones that "[b]eyond the sheer size of the work, there is an enthusiastic emphasis on morphological oddities" (Porter 2002: 11). Such emphasis is also apparent in AElfric's Grammar: out of the 296 pages of Zupitza's edition, 280 (94%) are dedicated to the eight parts of speech and their accidents.

Combined with the conception of grammar as a knowledge of facts, morphology's inflated importance has two main consequences:

(i) on the form of the work. AElfric's Grammar can be seen as an enumeration of forms functioning as paradigms and inserted into a continuous text. The following comment by Holtz on the Carolingian material fits this treatise: it is not the notion of system that prevails in it but that of standard (Holtz 1988: 139-40). By this I no more than Holtz imply any (anachronistic) criticism, merely that the grammarian's preoccupation is with the description (and preservation) of the standard forms of Latin, not with the structure of language in the abstract, cf. the antique formula Grammatica est scientia gnara recte scribendi et recte loquendi (the skilful art of writing and speaking correctly).

(ii) on the structure of the work. This is the question I now wish to address.

Structure of the work

The structure of AElfric's Grammar is that of the artes grammaticae, which here again differ from their Greek model by the reduced importance of prosody and metric together with the inflated role of morphology. This structure is as follows:

I. Preliminaries (analysis of the vox articulata) II. Reading, prosody and metric (letters/syllables/measure/accent/punctuation) III. Morphology: the eight parts of speech IV. Rhetoric and normative stylistics: barbarism, solecism, metaplasm, figures of speech.

Greek as well as Latin grammarians set great store by the order in which the parts of speech were enumerated (Holtz 1981: 64). A fixed order of presentation had been adopted as early as the Hellenistic period;

but the grammatici, having on the one hand done away with the article (an unknown part of speech in Latin) and on the other hand added the interjection (by dividing the adverb into adverbium and interiectio), had three types of lists circulating. Adopting a specific order amounted for the grammarian to declaring the school he belonged to. The order used by AElfric corresponds to what Holtz calls the d order, spread by the Ars Donati and different from the p order which was characteristic of Priscian and was used in the Greek technai (Holtz 1981: 64-69;Swiggers 1995: 165-66). The d order has an advantage in terms of memory, by associating noun and pronoun, verb and adverb.9

Donatus's Ars, like Priscian's Institutiones, pertains to the genre called Schulgrammatik in Law's typology [START_REF] Law | Late Latin Grammars in the Early Middle Ages: a Typological History[END_REF], which means that each part of speech is dealt with in a section comprising a definition in semantic terms, an enumeration of the properties of the part in question (its accidents), and a treatment of each property. AElfric adopts the same organization. In his Grammar the definitions of the verb, the participle and the interjection come from Donatus; those of the pronoun and the adverb, from Priscian; the definitions of the conjunction and of the preposition are an original contribution of the author, inspired by both his sources (Hurt 1972: 109). Porter has noticed an increased coherence from the Institutiones Grammaticae to the Excerptiones de Prisciano and finally to AElfric's Grammar:

In terms of coherence, the Excerptiones compares favourably with Priscian's originals. Where Priscian's discussion of a topic may ramble over two or more books of the Institutiones, or between separate treatises, the Excerptiones will often gather these together in an unbroken treatment. This advantage is palpable. Law has called the Excerptiones' organizational innovations a simplification, which is certainly true, yet the added coherence and continuity are also a major improvement. [...] And despite the organizational modifications to the Institutiones, the superior arrangement of AElfric's Grammar

shows that the Excerptiones still left room for improvement (Porter 2002: 12-13).

While sticking to Donatus's d order for the eight parts of speech, in each of the eight sections AElfric gathers together the discussion of a given topic, syntactic category or lexical item. He compresses or altogether omits useless lists of examples or the kind of information of secondary importance that can be the object of tedious commentaries by Priscian (Hurt 1972: 109;Porter 2002: 31;Law 1997: 204-05). He thus skilfully shortens several lengthy passages, for instance: "In fact all the nouns that derive from other nouns are called DENOMINATIVA, and their number is almost incalculable." "We won't say any more here concerning verbs and hope this will prove to be of some usefulness." (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 18, 222; translation mine).

From this comparison on the conceptual level between AElfric's Grammar and both the Ars Donati and the Institutiones Grammaticae, it can be concluded that the grammarians' conception of grammar and perception of the structure of Latin are on the whole identical, and that there is no conceptual renewal in the transmission process. Discontinuity is rather found in grammar's descriptive apparatus.

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY IN GRAMMAR'S DESCRIPTIVE APPARATUS

Method for analysing and setting out the facts

It is a difficult task to compare the method of analysis used by AElfric with that of his sources, insofar as none of the scholars is explicit about it. In particuliar, the procedures for identifying morphosyntactic units are not stated, these units being taken for granted.

The method for setting out the facts used by AElfric does not differ from Donatus's or Priscian's or, more broadly speaking, from the grammatici's. On the theoretical level, as has been said, one finds an enumeration of forms functioning as paradigms (as much as glossaries) and indicating the prevalence of the notion of standard.

On the didactic level, the approach is more teaching-than learning-centred: knowledge is declarative in nature, magisterial and not procedural, as is to be expected at the time.

Discontinuity is to be found elsewhere in the apparatus. Culturally, AElfric's students are not similar to those of Donatus or Priscian. Not only is Latin a second language for them, but imbued as they are with the monastic ideal, the Classical spirituality and culture have also largely become foreign to them. This makes it necessary for the grammarian to christianise the exemplification and give it a strong local colouring, to translate all Latin items into English, and to resort to the vernacular as the medium of grammar, i.e. to use English technical terms.

Christianisation and anglicisation of examples

The exemplification shows both continuity and discontinuity between AElfric and his sources. Continuity is due to the fact that medieval grammarians do not consider it a necessity to be original in their choice of examples.

Bunches of examples are obviously handed down from grammar to grammar and from glossary to glossary.

Thus the first example quoted in the AElfric's Grammar is the beginning of the Aeneid: "Any sound is either intelligible or indistinct. Intelligible is a sound emitted meaningfully, such as arma uirumque cano 'I sing of arms and the man'." (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 4; translation mine). Virgil is named several times and his heroe Aeneas illustrates the noun of the first declension ending in -as.

Yet, there is no reference whatsoever to the authors from whose works the exemplification is excerpted.

No names, no titles: all examples are anonymous, one is not to know whether a verse is by Ennius or Virgil.

Interestingly, in that separation with the auctores there is continuity toocontinuity with the Ars Donati. Holtz has noted that while other Latin grammarians sometimes mention the author, sometimes not, Donatus introduces a more systematic practice, consisting in never mentioning him:

Elle [cette pratique] a pour effet de rendre moins fondamental le lien entre analyse linguistique et exégèse des auteurs. Il s'agit toujours, au moins virtuellement, de citations poétiques, mais ce qui compte c'est moins le recours à l'auctoritas que l'évidence que l'exemple proposé, quel que soit son auteur, illustre de façon adéquate la notion à laquelle il s'applique. (Holtz 1981: 120) Incidentally, this seems to lend weight to Swiggers's position that there is no continuity between Greek and Latin grammar because the grammatikē always remained a philological science, while in the works of the grammatici from Donatus on grammar became an end in itself. Holtz does not endorse that view, having argued earlier (in 1981) that it would be a gross misconception not to consider Latin grammar as the continuation of Greek grammar, and that there was probably no other domain in which Latin scholarship was more heavily indebted to the Greeks (see above).

There is probably another explanation for the separation from the auctores. I have already stressed that the notion of standard prevails in AElfric's Grammar. AElfric is concerned with teaching corrrect language and having his monastic pupils master correct usage in due course. But many of the linguistic features so dear to the poet are considered to be faults from a formal grammatical point of view; a grammar's linking of the poets and corrrect usage is, in that respect, untenable. And to crown it all, the difficulties inherent in using literary works composed several centuries before as the basis of correct language are bound to multiply as the historical distance between ancient text and medieval reader increases (such difficulties were necessarily encountered by Donatus and Priscian well before AElfric's time). But Christ himself has forbidden us to swear and told us to confirm our words in the following manner:

Discontinuity is apparent in

est? 'is it so?', est 'it is so', non? 'is it not so?', non 'it is not so'. There are other ADVERBIA that are used for swearing, but why mention them since we are not allowed to swear? (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 227; translation mine) However, AElfric's christianized treatise is not comparable to the Ars Asporii, a Latin grammar written by a seventh-century Irishman called Asper, whose examples refer exclusively to the monastic environment.

Christianised and Classical exemplification coexist in the Grammar.

Similarly, the topics chosen for the exemplification are given a Christianized and an Anglicized colouring. Vivien Law has remarked on the choice of citharista 'harpist' as the model for the first-declension masculine paradigm, which reflects the importance of the hearpere in Anglo-Saxon society (see Law 1997: 208-10 for a very detailed presentation of the issue discussed here). Besides, the kingand the queen to a lesser extentis given a prominent place in the exempla. Maybe the king summons the theme of the comitatus heroic code, which was central in the pre-Christian Germanic culture and still very much alive in tenth-century Anglo-Saxon society.10

Next to the king, the bishop is the most important local character, and the pair of king and bishop (i.e.

rex and episcopus) serves several times to illustrate grammatical points, such as the second-and third-declension paradigms. Here Christianisation and Anglicisation go hand in hand. According to Crépin (1985: 88),

Christianization is also apparent in the fact that despite occasional references to the family, AElfric's Grammar does not dwell on this aspect of Germanic society, focusing much more on the monastic community than on flesh-and-blood family ties. Eventually, after King Edgar and Bishop AEthelwold, AElfric himself steps in, his name appearing in a passage exemplifying the use of personal pronouns (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 8). When he uses his own name, AElfric is merely emulating most Latin grammarians, in particular Priscian (Holtz 1981: 110 and footnote 19).

To conclude, the exemplificationthe examples proper and the topics chosenis infused with three clusters of ideas and values which Hurt characterizes as central on all levels in tenth-century Anglo-Saxon life:

the Classical heritage, the pre-Christian Germanic heritage and the Christian heritage.

Translation of all Latin items into English

AElfric's students being imbued with the monastic ideal, Classical spirituality and culture have become largely foreign to them. The translation of Latin items into English is therefore necessary and takes a systematic turn, although AElfric sometimes gives more of an explanation than a translation, for instance when dealing with mythology: "haec Dido: anes wifes nama 'Dido, name of a woman'." (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 37).

Technical terms 11

The most important discontinuity between AElfric and his sources is in the medieval scholar's decision not to choose Latin as the medium of his grammatical manual but the students' native language, English. The coinage and use of vernacular technical terms shows AElfric's preoccupation with comprehensibility. The scholar is a master teacher whose work is meant for young pupils not yet able to cope with Latin, as stated in the Latin preface:

Noui namque multos me reprehensuros, quod talibus studiis meum ingenium occupare uoluissem, scilicet grammaticam artem ad anglicam linguam vertendo. Sed ego deputo hanc lectionem inscientibus puerulis, non senibus, aptandam fore.

(I know that many people will reproach me for having chosen to occupy myself with such studies, i.e.

translating grammar into English. But I consider this subject to be suited to ignorant children, not to greybeards.) (Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 1;translation Vivien Law's) That the pedagogical viewpoint should prevail over all other considerations marks a continuity with the Ars Donati (Holtz 1981: 93 sq).

The vernacular terminology, like the christianized exempla, also testifies to AElfric's conception of the ultimate end of grammar: "AElfric's decision to translate a Latin grammar into the vernacular is entirely consistent with the thrust of his life's work: to provide a body of literature through which the monk or nun with only a scanty knowledge of Latin could none the less come to comprehend the Christian faith" (Law 1997: 203).

In addition to being a master teacher AElfric can be described as a master terminologist who works his way from the notion to the term by implementing two universal methods for enriching the word-stock of languages, borrowing and neology. What loan words he uses come from Latin while most neologisms are loan translations of Latin items. Continuity (in the prevalence of the pedagogical point of view, in the more or less overt presence of Latin terms) therefore subtly mingles with a major discontinuity residing in the choice of a vernacular as the medium of a Latin grammar. The group of metalinguistic terms borrowed from Latin is the least numerous. I will deal with them first.

A) Loan words

AElfric makes use of three loan-words: part (< Lat. pars), casus (< Lat. casus) and declinung ('case' or 'inflection, declension').

The masculine noun casus is the insular adoption of Lat. casus, likewise a masculine noun. It is impossible to hypothesize an accidental resemblance between the two words, because OE casus is not attested anywhere in the whole of the Old English corpus apart from the Grammar. There is no such English verbal stem as OE *cad-meaning 'fall' (cf. Lat. cadere); the Old English for 'fall' was feallan. Declinung is a quite different case, representing the native derivational suffix -ung added to a Latin base.

From a morphological point of view, loan words behave in accordance with the rules of Old English grammar (e.g. if they are in the dative, it is indeed the English dative form they take and not the Latin one). The same does not hold for the majority of Latin technical terms found in the Grammar, e.g. ABLATIVVM: theirs is still the morphological behaviour of Latin words. Therefore they cannot be considered as loan words but as mere substitutes in Latin of items availableor potentially availablein English.

B) Neology

Neology is the terminological method most resorted to by AElfric. It makes it possible, among other things, to coin units by the technique of loan translation, that is by translating morphologically complex Latin words or phrases element-by-element, in compliance with Old English morphosyntactic constraints. AElfric's translation of Lat. sub-auditio by under-hlystung ('implying something' or 'retrieving [missing] words') is typically a loan translation. It is a perfect one-to-one (morpheme-for-morpheme) correspondencein both cases a preposition meaning 'under' is followed by a deverbal noun derived from the verb meaning 'hear'.

AElfric's Grammar hosts numerous such loan translations: all the names for the parts of speech (e.g.

fore-set-nes « preposition », Lat. prae-posi-tio) and the various modifiers that apply to them (for instance, concerning prepositions, the adjective gespraec(e)-lic, which is usually translated by 'inseparable' but really means 'discursive', being a loan translation of Lat. loquela(r)-is); the names for sound units, all the names indicating case, gender, number, tense or mode (e.g. under-ðeod-endlic 'subjunctive', Lat. sub-iunc-tivus) are thus formed, which testifies very clearly to the crucial role played by loan translation in the coinage of Anglo-Saxon grammatical terminology.

The question is how far loan translation can go. Are morpheme-for-morpheme translations always lexical in nature? I have no definite answer to this, but would like to mention two different cases:

(i) The first seems to be the loan translation of a suffix ending. (That age is considered as the evening of this fleeting world. [BTS, s.v. ateorigendlic])

From 'failing, fleeting' to 'defective' one observes a semantic shiftcorresponding to a narrowing of meaningindicating the transfer of ateorigendlic from non-technical vocabulary to grammatical terminology.

Ateorigendlic is no isolated case: the adjective ðylc (found in the Grammar as ðyllic) means 'such', but in its metalinguistic use refers to what belongs to the same paradigm (as another item under consideration).

Anfeald means 'simple, peculiar, singular', but as a technical term it has an underextended meaning: 'simple' applies only to the form of words, in contrast to 'compound'; 'singular' refers only to the grammatical category of number and is then antonymous with 'plural'. The noun cwide (which has the variant form cwyde in the text) has the rather vague meaning of 'the expression of a thought', which accounts for the many different translations of the technical term, from 'word' to 'discourse', to 'sentence' and 'words'. Tid and tima have first and foremost the meaning of 'time', with all the semantic distinctions of time. But both also have a grammatical sense, which comes last in the entry for tid in BTS ('tense') and last but one in that for tima ('time of pronouncing a syllable, quantity'), a position which reflects the underextended meaning these items have when used metalinguistically.

Contrary to the previous words, geicendlic 'adjective' is only a technical term, but a narrowing of meaning can be observed between the derivative and the original verb geican 'increase, add, enlarge': geicendlic represents a semantic narrowing, from 'added' to 'said of a noun added to another noun'.

Had (Lat. persona), cynn (Lat. genus), name (Lat. nomen), word (Lat. verbum), hiw (Lat. schema, figura) and fyll (Lat. declinatio) are yet other instances of semantic shift.

Whether the terminology coined by AElfric, by loan translation or other means, is meant to replace the Latin one and to be regularly used in the classroom is a nice question. Are his English terms real technical terms or rather glosses, "explanatory renderings of the Latin terms?" (Hurt 1972: 111). There is no clear-cut answer to this, especially as there is no way of ascertaining what exactly in the vernacular terminology is original with

AElfric and what antedates him, what was already conventional in the classroom practice of his day (Hurt 1972: 110-11;Law 1997: 214-15).

Yet, there exists a particular set of terms that seem to function as glosses to the Latin technical items, namely those formations which are either loan translations (element-by-element translation is the kind of lexical glossing commonplace in late Anglo-Saxon manuscripts) or loan renditions of Latin words, e.g.: OE wordes gefera 'adverb' (lit. 'companion to the verb'), ðaes naman speliend 'pronoun' (lit. 'representing the noun') or again weaxan on genitivum 'be imparisyllabic' (lit. 'increase in the genitive'). In this connection, most of the "TRIGINTA DIVISIONES GRAMMATICAE ARTIS" (the thirty divisions of grammar) listed in the last section of the Grammar receive a vernacular equivalent in the form of incredibly unwieldy phrases which it is difficult to consider plausible technical terms. They rather look like "explanations of the Latin terms of the kind that a good teacher would provide to help his students understand and remember the new terms, not replacements for them" (Hurt 1972: 111). For instance, the Latin word ethimologia, inherited from Greek (lit. 'the study of the true sense of a

CONCLUSION

Following Swiggers, I have assumed here that between Greek and Latin grammar there is no real continuity.

What about the relationship between the medieval English scholar AElfric and the Imperial grammatici that he drew upon, Donatus and Priscian?

I have noted the transmission of a descriptive apparatus, at which level discontinuity appears in the partial re-organisation of the treatise so as to gain coherence and pedagogical efficiency, in the Christianisation and Anglicisation of the exemplification, in the systematic translation of Latin items into English and in the coinage of a vernacular grammatical terminology. Yet in the most important form of discontinuity, i.e. in AElfric's decision not to use Latin as the medium of a Latin grammar, several elements point to a continuity, such as the technical terms being Latin loan words or calques of Latin words or again functioning as glosses to Latin words. And even in his decision to use a vernacular, AElfric may not be as original as all that:

The enormous variety of surviving Old English glosses to Latin texts testify that translation into the vernacular was a common learning tool (e.g. Page 1982). Thus it may well be that AElfric's Excerptiones, in presenting Latin grammar through the medium of Old English, was not an innovation in teaching, but merely an innovation in written composition. (Bayless 1993: 75) I have also noted the transmission of a conceptual framework. The facts taken into consideration are those dealt with by Donatus and Priscian, and they are analyzed with the help of the self-same concepts: AElfric does not

  AElfric's Christianisation of the exempla. More specifically, Christianisation consists in introducing references to the Vulgate, the Church Fathers, and the Christian poets. Once again, there is not so much real discontinuity in this as the intensified continuation of a process initiated earlier. Vivien Law argues that the Christianisation of pagan examples occurred as early as the fifth century: "In Priscian and Pompeius we find a few Judeo-Christian examples: Augustine's Ars breuiata contains several details which point to a Christian context, along with many examples from Cicero and Virgil"(Law 1986: 367; see alsoHoltz 1981: 256-58). This suggests that the Christianisation of examples may also have been linked to an awareness of the linguistic differences between Virgil's Latin and the Vulgate's.AElfric introduces the names of AEthelwold, Dunstan and Bede (among others) alongside the Classical characters; in a discussion of the second-declension vocative, the names of two saints (Laurence and Maurice) are added and that of Terence is omitted. Christianisation is especially noticeable in a section on jurative adverbs (i.e. swear adverbs). AElfric refuses to use Priscian's adverbs (Hercle et Mediusfidius) or to substitute Christian adverbs for them; he classifies the preposition per in juro per deum or per meum caput as a jurative adverb and thus concludes:

  word'), is rendered by OE namena ordfruma and gescead 'origin and shade [of meaning] of the nouns'. Other examples include Lat. barbarismus, rendered by OE anes wordes gewemmednys (lit. 'pollution of a word') or Lat. solocismus (lit. 'speaking [Greek] like the people of Soloi'), rendered by miscweden word on endebyrdnysse þaere raedinge of ðam rihtan craefte 'sequence of words wrongly used in a text in consideration of correct speech'.

  The second is apparently a syntactic calque concerning the valency pattern of a verb: ateorian, whose nontechnical sense is 'fail, become weary, cease, leave off', is an intransitive verb according to the data provided by BTS. But in AElfric's text the verb is used transitively, as attested by its complement "sume": ealswa gaeð hoc genu þis cneow ET PLVRALITER haec genua; hoc gelu þes forst, ueru spitu, specu scraef, pecu nyten, testu crocscerd, penu heddern ET CETERA, ac hi ateoriað sume on menigfealdum getele.(The same goes for hoc genu 'this knee', ET PLVRALITER haec genua; hoc gelu 'this frost', ueru 'broach', specu 'cave', pecu 'cattle', testu 'potsherd', penu 'store-house', ET CETERA, but they lack some [forms] in the plural.)(Gneuss and Zupitza 2001: 80; translation mine) Are the lexicographical data concerning ateorian incomplete? Or is this a syntactic calque of the pattern of Lat.deficere, a verb which is both transitive and intransitive? Loan translation of morphologically complex Latin words or phrases sometimes yields impossibly clumsy results, some of which might even be described as tongue-twisters, for instance Lat. interiectio > OE betwuxaworpennys.A good many technical terms are not loan translations but originally non-technical terms that undergo a shift in meaning. And shifts in meaning can be considered semantic calques of Latin. There is a shift in meaning, for instance, when AElfric uses ateorigendlic to render Lat. defectivus 'defective': Sume word syndon gehatene DEFECTIVA, þaet synd ateorigendlice, forðan ðe hi ateoriað on sumere stowe. Ferio ic slea naefð naenne PRAETERITVM PERFECTVM, butan hit nime of oþrum worde ðaes ylcan andgites: percutio ic slea, percussi ic sloh.

	(ii)
	The double suffix -end-lic (e.g. wregendlic
	'accusative') represents in most cases a calque of Latin -t-ivus. 12 The OE inflectional suffix -end(e) marks the
	present participle and forms an agentive noun, like the corresponding Lat. -tor; the OE derivational suffix -lic
	translating Lat. -ivus derives an adjective from the noun.

(Some verbs are called DEFECTIVA, that is to say defective, because they lack certain forms. Ferio 'I strike' has no PRAETERITVM PERFECTVM of its own, but borrows it from another verb with the same meaning: percutio 'I strike', percussi 'I struck'.)

(Gneuss & Zupitza 2001: 203

; translation mine) Ateorigendlic derives from the intransitive verb ateorian defined above. The adjective means 'failing, fleeting, perishable' and it so happens that AElfric uses it in one of his homilies: Seo yld is geteald to aefnunge ðises ateorigendlican middaneardes.

By which I mean the more methodological aspects of the work, mainly how it is organized into chapters and how information is set out in these chapters, the way grammatical points are exemplified by the grammarian, the method he employs for analysing the facts which are relevant in his conceptual framework, and the kind of metalanguage he uses.

This article is not as such devoted to the debate about whether or not the Grammar teaches English, but as this heading states the main idea of Melinda Menzer's PhD dissertation and of several articles by her, it is especially relevant to refer to[START_REF] Menzer | Donatus Anglice: AElfric's 'Grammar' and the Making of the English Language[END_REF]Menzer ( , 1999Menzer ( , 2004) ) for a comprehensive study of the question and an opinion different from that expounded here.

This opinion is at variance with Menzer's, who claims that AElfric is teaching English grammar in his text, but by giving the expression teach English grammar a particular, specialized meaning: "To make an analogy to modern language instruction, we should not suppose that AElfric wanted to teach Old English the way we do. Instead, writing for English speakers, he is teaching English grammar the way we teach introductory grammar or linguistics, making it possible for students to talk about their language grammatically. AElfric's Grammar does teach English, not as other medieval grammars teach English, but as a textbook written for speakers of English teaches introductory English grammar."(Menzer 2004: 110; emphasis mine). For recent studies of AElfric's Grammar as a contrastive grammar, seeHill (2007, footnote 18).

It is the case for instance inLaw (1986: 365-80), or inGneuss (1990: 9): "The Anglo-Saxons had to learn Latin as a foreign language. Vivien Law has rightly stressed how unsuited the late Roman grammatical works were to this task, since they had been written for native speakers." (emphasis mine).

The dictionary is hereafter cited as BTS.

Finally "anything said, words" seems by far to be the best definition of the term (BTS, s.v. word IIa).

By contrast, the advantage of the p order is in the grouping together of the declinable categories before the indeclinable ones.

The code is based on the idea of absolute loyalty vowed to a lord by his followers, seeLapidge et al., 1999, s.v. comitatus.

A number of studies have been dedicated to AElfric's grammatical terminology; apart from articles by[START_REF] Williams | AElfric's grammatical terminology[END_REF],[START_REF] Gneuss | The Study of Language in Anglo-Saxon England[END_REF] andToupin (2005: 203-62), one should be referred to two unpublished PhD dissertations:[START_REF] Shook | AElfric's Latin Grammar: a Study in Old English Grammatical Terminology[END_REF]) and, more recently, Bender-Davis (1985).

A high-frequency item in the Grammar, this double suffix is not specific to AElfric (see for example berendlic 'tolerable' and wemmendlic 'which corrupts').

introduce new concepts into the description, nor does he elaborate or refine those transmitted by the grammatical tradition. Like his predecessors, the Carolingian grammarians (Holtz 1988), AElfric shuns novelty, either because, as Vivien Law says, originality for originality's sake was unknown in the Middle Ages (Law 1997: 127), or because, as Giulio Lepschy says, the ars grammatica left by the classical tradition "was destined to be accepted as the most lucid and incisive instrument of intellectual penetration" (Lepschy 1994: 140, quoted above).

It might be interesting to extend these reflections by studying the transmission process between the Irish scholarly tradition and AElfric. The Excerptiones de Prisciano descended from a text with an Irish pedigree and the scholarship of the Irish masters is said to have left distinctive marks on its glossing (Porter 2002: 15). If we accept that the main source for AElfric's Grammar was the Excerptiones, then the Irish tradition is to be expected to have borne more or less directly on the writing of the Grammar.


Dr Kostas Boyiopoulos
email: boyiopk@hotmail.com

Keywords: Machen, Judeo-Christian, esoteric, mysticism, fin-de-siècle, Lilith

This article looks at Arthur Machen"s baffling but defining work The Great God Pan from a completely new angle. Contrary to the text's conspicuously pagan character, the essay argues that there is a calculated Judeo-Christian scheme beneath the surface. With the detection of this scheme, the peculiarities of Machen"s narrative make sense. By making intertextual connections and comparisons, and utilizing psychoanalytic ideas, the essay argues that the main character, Helen Vaughan, is the (re)incarnation of both an antichrist and Lilith. By employing a sophisticated esoteric narrative, the text updates the Judeo-Christian myth to fin-de-siècle London. The analysis attempts to illuminate the workings of Machen"s esoteric narration, observe its effects, and comprehend its purpose. It argues that the Judeo-Christian scheme in disguise is not only a proof of Machen"s personal theory of literature, but it is also chaotic and personal: Machen"s mystical vision and narrative obscurantism involves recombination, integration, and manipulation of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

mother"s name, Mary, is the direct analogy of the biblical Virgin Mary. She is "a girl of about seventeen, dressed all in white. She was so beautiful". 1 Youthful innocence marked by the white clothes and beauty compose the angelic portrait of Mary, which along with her blind compliance to the scientist evokes the Virgin Mary and the latter"s absolute faith in God. When Dr. Raymond asks her for her full obedience, her reply is dutifully laconic: "Yes, dear" (67). Raymond could be a twisted version of Jesus"s foster father Joseph, who assists the execution of Pan"s/Devil"s Plan. His role corresponds to a sexual instrument of the Devil employed in order to achieve the divine impregnation of Mary in the biblical fashion of the Immaculate Conception. In Machen"s loosened arcane imagination, the name Raymond could be a linguistic corruption, or rather a rhyme, of the word daemon.

Raymond is a ruthlessly ambitious scientist who exploits Mary. The surgical operation in which she would "see the god Pan" ( 64) is a procedure of exploitation akin to rape. It symbolizes the phallic aspect of the divine impregnation: "Clarke saw him cutting away a circle, like a tonsure, from her hair, and the lamp was moved nearer. Raymond took a small glittering instrument from a little case, and Clarke turned away shuddering. When he looked again the doctor was binding up the wound he had made" (68). The scene of the scalpel penetrating Mary"s cranium is an emphatic metaphor for sexual penetration. The "seeing" of Pan on the operating table suggests sexual intercourse between Mary and the ancient, goat-like Pan/Devil. Science, which violates the human body, is perceived as evil. Thus, the scene can be interpreted as the coupling of Science with the susceptible and innocent human body 1 Arthur Machen (1949) Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, London: Richards, p. 67. All subsequent quotations from the novella, as well as quotations from Machen"s short stories, are taken from this edition.

(nature); Helen, the progeny of such a union, is the Evil of the uncontrollability of the violation of nature. This mingling of religion and science echoes James Frazer"s highly influential study The Golden Bough (1890) in which "religion, regarded as an explanation of nature, is displaced by science" (Frazer 1998, p. 805). 2 Immediately the biblical drama is disguised as the terrain of scientific discourse.

Mary"s operation and subsequent supernatural pregnancy emphatically mimics the Virgin"s miraculous conception assisted by the Holy Ghost. The twofold manifestation of the divinity apropos the impregnation of the Virgin, that is, the pair Pan-Raymond (daemon), is a distortion of the pair God-Holy Ghost. The Gospel of Matthew verifies: "Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost" (Matt 1:18). 3 The conception, resulting from the insertion of the scalpel in the brain, is also a variant of the idea of the divine conception through an unlikely body orifice. The psychoanalyst Ernest Jones systematically studied the myth in which "the conception of Jesus in the Virgin Mary was brought about by the introduction into her ear of the breath of the Holy Ghost" (Jones 1974, p. 268). 4 Machen appropriates the supernatural conception through the ear, from the spiritual sphere to the sphere of organic matter; the Victorian scalpel replaces the holy breath.

The fact that the first chapter, "The Experiment", features the parody of the divine impregnation is corroborated at the end of the novella, with the disclosure that Mary "was the mother of Helen Vaughan, who was born nine months after that night" (114). Helen is the anti-Messiah, a poisonous force of sin and inconceivable evil. Her role as the antichrist becomes evident in the devastated lives of a succession of characters (Rachel, Herbert, Meyrick, Argentine, Crashaw). The healing powers of Jesus are here reversed; they are destructive. The traumatized and "haunted" (78) Herbert, for instance, photographs indirectly Helen as the embodiment of the Devil: "Only human beings have names" (78); she "had corrupted him body and soul" (79).

Mary"s supernatural pregnancy and her daughter"s career of evil shape the framework of the Machean version of the Divine Plan.

Machen enriches this distorted model of the elementary Christian myth with fragmented biblical motifs and images. Clarke"s daydream is interpolated in Dr.

Raymond"s surgery and so it falls into context: it foreshadows, or rather prophesies, the event of the warped conception and its calamitous result. On a different level, his hallucination resembles the scenario of the Fall. In his reverie, Clarke comes upon a landscape which entails biblical vegetation: "a vine climbed from bough to bough, and sent up waving tendrils and drooped with purple grapes, and the sparse greygreen leaves of a wild olive-tree stood out against the dark shadows of the ilex" (66).

The sensuousness of the description brings to mind the prelapsarian Paradise.

Simultaneously, the combined imagery of the vine and the olive-tree evoke iconography from the New Testament and in particular the gospel of Matthew: "I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father"s Kingdom […] they went out into the mount of olives" (Matt 26:29-30). 5 Yet, the sensual representation of the grapes is associated with the god Pan, and this is subtly juxtaposed with the Christian symbolism of the olive tree. The daydream proceeds with Clarke suggestively facing the figure of Pan, who was "neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all form. And in that moment, the sacrament of body and soul was dissolved, and a voice seemed to cry "Let us go hence," and then the darkness of darkness beyond the stars, the darkness of everlasting" (66-7). This abstract hyperbolic perception of Pan or anti-Miltonic Satan 6 , in which all forms are embodied, and yet there is no confinement into any of them, shares similar qualities with the supreme Judeo-Christian Being. These qualities also prefigure Helen Vaughan"s final shape-shifting and dissolution in the account of Dr. Matheson. By attributing the property of shifting dissolution both to Pan, in Clarke"s daydream, and to Helen, in the chapter titled "The Fragments", Machen mystically aligns the two characters with a sacrosanct-familial bond, which echoes the Father-Jesus bond. What is more, Machen points to the refashioning of the Christian myth palpably with the use of theological terminology: "the sacrament of body and soul" clearly designates the presence of an underlying Divine Plan through imagery of the Eucharist.

In his analysis of Clarke"s dream, Dale Nelson interprets the disembodied voice, which calls "let us go hence", with the help of Flavius Josephus"s Classical writings about the destruction of the Jewish Temple built by Herod. 7 On the other hand, the Fall and the loss of innocence are also encoded in the passage. The phrase could stand for Eve"s allurement by the Devil; it is an invitation to the Forbidden Tree of Eden and the source could be Paradise Lost. Satan says to Eve: "I can bring thee thither soon" (IX.630) and Eve: "Serpent, we might have spar"d our coming hither" (IX.647) (Milton 1989, p. 211). Clarke"s dream is then a foreshadowing of Mary"s loss of her prelapsarian innocence in the "darkness of everlasting". In his mystical narrative, Machen has craftily conflated Madonna with biblical Eve, who pays the price of acquiring forbidden knowledge as, after the operation, she becomes "a hopeless idiot" (68). The difference between Eve and Machen"s Mary is that the Devil"s method of enticement is replaced by the inhumanity of Victorian science; Eve is lured by way of argument, Mary is clinically raped. "The Experiment" reflects Machen"s anxiety of the fact that supernatural mysteries are demystified and penetrated by nineteenth-century progress boosted by the advances of science. In quoting Machen, Susan Navarette accurately appropriates the author"s own idea of the Fall in his fiction: "Death or madness await those doomed characters who, either by accident or in a misguided attempt to obtain "something which was never" theirs, repeat a "Fall" into damning knowledge" (Navarette 1998, p. 181). 8 Is not the result of Raymond"s medical operation the obtaining of the biblical Forbidden Fruit? In this light, the novella is no less a grand parable of the Fall, with the Miltonic condition updated in the Victorian age of scientific materialism.

The text features short cryptic passages whose ambiguity is largely challenging. One of them occurs in the conversation between Austin and Villiers, in their reference to Mrs Beaumont"s (Helen Vaughan"s) wine: "she has some wonderful claret, really marvellous wine" (91) and "Lord Argentine […] was there last Sunday evening" (91); the wine is "about a thousand years" old (91). The puzzling wine, which is also presented to Argentine on a "Sunday", is suggestive of the Holy Communion misapplied. In mythmaking the antichrist here, Machen evokes the Book of Revelation. The sexually promiscuous Helen, in the guise of Mrs Beaumont, echoes the so-called "Daughter of Babylon" "With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication" (Rev. 17:2). 9 In the context of the narrative, Babylon is late Victorian London and the "inhabitants of the earth" are Helen Vaughan"s victims. The fact that the wine is "a thousand years old" most likely alludes to Rev. 20: "And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season" (Rev. 20:2-3). 10 The wine has matured for a thousand years because the Devil is imprisoned for this length of time. Helen is the Devil"s manifestation in London and in her short through scientific materialism. See pp. 180-1 and endnote 7 on p. 265. 9 See also Rev. 18:3.

10 See also Rev. 20:7. existence she is "loosed a little season" as an anti-Christ figure. Thus, The Great God Pan subtly attains apocalyptic symbolism. Machen presents the wine as an inexplicable item, emphasizing its missing information. It deliberately obscures the narrative; it is a cryptic sign, an extraneous, yet esoteric, object, which has impinged on the storyline, endorsing Helen"s apocalyptic dimensions.

In another perplexing passage, in "The Encounter in Soho", Villiers confides to Austin in regard to the manuscript containing information about Helen"s life: "it is an old story, an old mystery played in our day, and in dim London streets instead of amidst the vineyards and the olive gardens" (107). It would seem that this remark refers to the shocking rites of Pan in Arcadian settings. Yet, the "olive gardens" also strongly suggest Jesus on the Mount of Olives or the Garden of Gethsemane. The "dim London streets" reinforce a diametrical comparison of Helen with Jesus at his nocturnal moment in the Mount of Olives. By pairing this updating of topography from biblical to Victorian with the image of Mrs. Beaumont"s apocalyptic "wine", one realizes that Helen is both suggestive of an anti-Christ and the Antichrist respectively.

The subtextual Judeo-Christian models are not stiff; Machen toys with his material in order to maximize the mystifying effect. The process is highly conscious. In the same speech to Austin, Villiers drops an illuminating metafictional comment. He speaks of "forces" that can "be imagined" "under a veil and a symbol" (107). The verb "imagine" indicates a range of possibilities of loose patterns and esoteric trajectories under the surface.

The analogy of "vineyards olive gardens" and "London" supports the idea that the anti-Messiah invades not the cityscape of biblical Jerusalem but that of fin-desiècle London. 11 Hence, the movement from Helen"s weird conduct in Caermaen, the 11 Helen is portrayed in strong religious iconography when Villiers shows "village on the borders of Wales" (70), to her devastating presence in London strikingly corresponds to Jesus moving from the countryside of Judaea to the big city of Jerusalem. The parallelism between biblical and late Victorian London settings is also restated by Machen in "The Novel of the White Powder". Regarding Francis"s horrific death, Dr. Chambers writes in his report: "And then, in the hour of midnight, the primal fall was repeated and re-presented, and the awful thing veiled in the mythos of the Tree in the Garden was done anew. Such was the nuptiae Sabbati" (59).

The repetition of the Fall, here, takes place in a suburban London surrounding instead of the Garden of Eden, in the same way Helen"s life is an "old mystery played in our day". It is worth noticing that in Machen"s mystical text, the surface is not a mere symbol of the religious subtext but a repetition of situations which involves narrative continuity, from biblical territory to Machen"s mythological universe. The esoteric power of The Great God Pan is due not to symbolization but to the actuality by which the condition of myth is perceived, updated and re-enacted.

The jumbled plot subtly harbours an esoteric storyline under its surface, and this can be worked out from certain narrative clues. As it is established in "The Experiment", Helen is Pan"s daughter. In "Mr. Clarke"s Memoirs" a boy witnesses in horror what could be the sexual act between Helen and Pan, who is perceived as a "strange naked man". This is clearly a sign of an incestuous relationship:

He was suddenly awakened, as he stated, by a peculiar noise, a sort of singing he Clarke "a small pen-and-ink sketch of the woman"s head" (87), "the glance that came from those eyes, the smile on the full lips" was "the most vivid presentment of evil I have ever seen" (87-8). Clarke"s sense of evil emanated from a portrait echoes Pater"s duplicitous face of Mona Lisa. called it, and on peeping through the branches he saw Helen V. playing on the grass with a "strange naked man," who he seemed unable to describe more fully. He said he felt dreadfully frightened, and ran away crying for his father. Joseph W. On a second level, the sceneas well as a series of other hintspoints to the perception of Helen as Lilith, the Judaic figure and archetype of feminine horror. In a similar manner, the sorceress Ayesha with her ancientness and demonic nature is a disguised Lilith in Rider Haggard"s She (1886-87). Possibly, Ayesha is Helen Vaughan"s precursor since She was published a few years before The Great God Pan.

Stories and numerous variations of Lilith feature in ancient Mesopotamian and

Hebrew texts such as The Alphabet of Ben Sira, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Zohar and the Talmud. 12 Lilith"s familial bond with the Devil and the incestuous, sexual relationship with him consist of a vogue in the subversive literary output of the fin de siècle. The sexual animalism in the congress between the Devil and Lilith is described in explicit terms and with an oedipal tint in Remy de Gourmont"s monodrama Lilith (1892). Upon their lustful encounter, Lilith comments: "Je donnerai la becquée à ton sexe comme à un petit oiseau" (Gourmont 1892, p. 34). 13 And Satan declares: "je me cache dans ton ventre" (Gourmont 1892, p. 52) 14 and "ouvre-toi, ventre de Lilith!" (Gourmont 1892, p. 98). 15 The ritualistic impact of the "charcoal burners", whereby the grass is violated in Helen"s postcoital moment, connotes infertility. This is a distinctive trait of Lilith. De Gourmont has Lilith requesting: "Ne m"appelle pa Hé, appelle-moi Sterilité. Ne suis-je pas l"Inféconde?" (Gourmont 1892, p. 36). 16 The "charcoal burners" indicate that Machen"s refusal to provide definite descriptions is his distinguishing narrative device for conveying a sense of horror by the suggestiveness of half-concealments.

In a more legitimate variation of the Devil-Lilith incest, the two are siblings. This fact is most evidently represented in a poem titled "Queen Lilith" found in The Candle and the Flame (1912), a collection of verse by George Sylvester Viereck (1884-1962), a German-American writer of some notoriety at the time who is outspokenly influenced by the subversive Nineties. The piece is in the form of versified dialogue:

"By the love of a love that is strange as myrrh, By the kiss that kills and the doom that smileth, By my cloven hoof and my fiery spur, Thou art my sister, the Lady Lilith, I am ---"

13 "And I shall satisfy the cravings of thy manhood as the mother bird brings food to her young." Gourmont (1945, p. 36).

14 "I"ll hop in and hide in your belly." Gourmont (1945, p. 47).

15 "Open thy womb, O Lilith!" Gourmont (1945, p. 76).

16 "Call me not HER; call me rather Sterility, for sterile I am." Gourmont (1945, p. 37).

"My brother Lucifer!"

"I am thy lover; I am thy brother, Time cannot prison us, space cannot smother, Proudest of Jahveh"s kindred we, Whom Chaos, the terrific mother, Begot from stark Eternity Viereck (1912, p. 42) In Viereck"s poem, the rhythm is Swinburnian, yet incest is portrayed as a Miltonic or Romantic, heroic defiance. Its explicit and epic nature is a stark contrast to the implicit and genuinely sinister nature of the same theme in The Great God Pan. The idea of the two being brother and sister is hinted in Rossetti"s "Eden Bower" (1869), where, concerning Lilith, "Not a drop of her blood was human" (3) (Rossetti 1898, p. 308). The poem is ridden with images of sexual activity: "In thy sweet folds bind me and bend me, / And let me feel the shape thou shalt lend me" (91-2) (Rossetti 1898, p. 311). Not only Rossetti"s Lilith copulates with her brother Satan, but she also transforms into his serpentine frame. In other words, she becomes him, imitating the hypostatic state of the God-Son model.

The identity of the "strange naked man" and the perverse familial dimension become evident when in the boy"s eyes "the man in the wood" (73), congressing with Helen, resembled a head of a "faun or satyr" (73). In the final chapter titled "The Fragments", Helen"s copulation with the Devil is corroborated when Matheson"s letter relates that she was "several times with a playmate, you may guess of what kind

[…] You know now what frightened the boy in the wood" (115). Machen"s religious evil is simply a force of difference, alienation and otherness, always threatening to invade through the text itself, which functions as a portal of its emergence. Machen writes in an attaching footnote to the chapter of "Dr. Clarke"s Memoirs" that Dr.

Philips "has never received such a vivid presentment of intense evil" (73). This sentence shocks from the bottom of the page, from the textual margin in the literal sense. Evil is not glamorized in an elevated and identifiable universe of classical myth as Satan"s "cloven hoof" in Viereck"s poem suggests. The Devil"s resemblance to a "faun or satyr" in Machen"s story has the depth of religious ancientness, with incest being terrifying because its abnormality represents the inexplicable.

The boy is "peeping through the branches" at Helen congressing with Pan (father) and this consists of the primal scene. According to Henry Edelheit, in the "primary form" of the "primal scene schema", "the oedipal configuration represents the child"s identification with the parents in the act of copulation" (Edelheit 1971, p. 213). The insinuations of oedipal connections are strong. The boy witnesses "the combined image of the copulating parents", that is, "the Theban Sphinx" (Edelheit 1971, p. 229). Undoubtedly, in the final climactic moment, at the end of the story, when Helen is shape-shifting she represents the conjoined and copulating parents of the primal scene, which drives the little boy into a shock. The spectacle in the woods carries also the dimension of the Freudian "phallic woman". Freud maintains about little girls that "with their entry into the phallic phase the differences between the sexes are completely eclipsed by their agreements. We are now obliged to recognise that the little girl is a little man" (Freud 1964, p. 118). The insinuated androgynous and hypostatic Helen-Pan in sexual activity is close to occult Hebraism. It recalls the image of Baphomet or the "Sabbatic Goat", a devil-like creature with breasts, featured in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854) by Eliphas Lévi. Machen was naturally familiar with the work of Lévi and this image. In The Hill of Dreams, as regards to the girl of his obsession, Lucian was "abased and yet rejoicing as a Templar before the image of the Baphomet" (Machen 1967, p.59). The image of the shocking conjoined sex partners is consistent with Rossetti"s idea of Lilith transformed into her lover, the Snake, in "Eden Bower".

Lilith is traditionally associated with the sexual dominance of men"s dreams.

For Lilith the phallic woman, the power of lust is her greatest power. 17 Austin describes his "dim far-off memory" of Mrs. Beaumont (Helen) to Villiers: "The only sensation I can compare it to, is that odd feeling one sometimes has in a dream" (98).

This comment represents the nocturnal emission, or wet dream, of the Victorian male world caused by Lilith, the ultimate succubus or the archetypal femme fatale. Lilith"s erotic haunting of men"s dreams dates from the Zohar and after. Clarke"s daydream in "The Experiment" also prefigures this sort of visitation. Indeed, Helen is represented through the confounded male characters, as a vague collective dream; she is a female version of Dracula, who also seduces by means of dreams. This element of female ravishment through dreaming gender-reverses the scenario in Paradise Lost, in which Satan endeavours to corrupt Eve in her dream in IV. 801-9: Satan raises "Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires / Blown up with high conceits engend"ring pride" (IV.

808-9) (Milton 1989, p.100). 18 Possibly, the passage in Milton"s poem opens a new dimension towards the reading of Helen as the conflation of Lilith and Eve. Another of Lilith"s demonic properties is that she kills the men she is entangled with by means of asphyxiation. This feature has evolved from ancient Hebrew sources, and sustained in Goethe"s Faust (1808-1832) and D. G. Rossetti. In the latter"s sonnet "Body"s

Beauty" (1868), for instance, Lilith ensnares a man as her "spell" "left his straight neck bent / And round his heart one strangling golden hair" (13-4) (Rossetti 1898, p. 17 See Schwartz (1998, p. 57).

18 See also the related insightful footnote by Christopher Ricks (p. 100).

216).

In "The Suicides", Helen"s victims have strangled themselves to death. Lord Argentine, for instance, "had tied a cord securely to one of the short bed-posts, and, after making a running noose and slipping it round his neck, the unfortunate man must have resolutely fallen forward, to die by slow strangulation" (96). Lord Swanleigh, Sidney Crashaw, Mr. Collier-Stuart and Mr. Herries are all reported strangled (see 96). Like an urban Lilith, Helen"s sexuality is a primordial force which has a horrific impact when it invades the tissue of London"s male civility and propriety.

In the last chapter of The Great God Pan, the Christian and Judaic subtexts are integrated and diffused, like the spectacle of Helen"s physical meltdown itself, bringing the esoteric narrative towards closure. The author engages in narrative confusion; his esoteric subtexts are synthesized intertextually pointing to infinite possibilities, combinations and permutations of canonical Christianity, apocryphal literature, Jewish lore, or medieval occultism. The reasserted facts of Helen as Mary"s daughter, and Helen"s interaction with a "playmate" are confirmations of two plot conundrums that, as observed already, initiate the warping of the Divine Plan and the anti-Christ"s/Lilith"s sexual act with the Devil respectively. These clues appear spaced out in doubles. This is a strategy by which suggestive clues are produced in the beginning and are validated later on or in the end. The amalgamation of the two traditions is inscribed in the dissolution of Helen in Dr. Matheson"s account: "I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited.

[…] for one instant I saw a Form […] the symbol of this form may be seen in ancient sculptures, and in paintings which survived beneath the lava, too foul to be spoken of…" (110, 111). Machen is often preoccupied with primal and elemental viscous substances as in "The Novel of the White Powder". 19 The ancientness and foulness of 19 Interestingly, according to the theme of dissolution the figure of Lilith dies the capitalized "Form" specifically suggest the "Devil". The division "from sex to sex", "from itself"", along with the reunification, on one level, insinuates a travesty of the Trinity: The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost pattern is reduced to the dyad of the Devil and his daughter (anti-Christ). It additionally connotes a simulation of copulation between the Devil and Helen (Lilith), or incest in its most extreme version, as an interaction between two hypostases of the same entity, similar to autoeroticism.

And of course, Helen wavers "from sex to sex" as if to evoke Lilith"s mythical metamorphosis into the Snake of Rossetti"s ballad.

Helen"s death is demarcated both by the scheme of incest, or hypostatic representation, and as the equivalent of the Crucifixion. According to Edelheit, "in crucifixion fantasies the crucified Christ represents the parents locked or nailed together in intercourse […] the figure of Christ on the cross […] is such a hybrid, half man, and half tree, representing the fused image of man and woman, mother and child" (Edelheit 1971, pp. 212, 232). 20 Helen Vaughan"s metamorphosis, or in the same way she is created. In The Alphabet of Ben Sira "Lilith was created from slime." Schwartz (1998, p. 58). Slime is what Machen explicitly describes in "The Novel of the White Powder": "a dark and putrid mass seething with corruption and rottenness" (55). 20 Edelheit draws a parallel between the story of Christ and Oedipus. While Christ, for example, ascends to heaven, Oedipus "descends bodily into (mother)

earth" (1998, p. 228). Likewise, Helen"s body "began to melt and dissolve" (110) just like Francis"s. Also Helen is executed by humankind just like Jesus. In the same way Jesus willingly lets himself to be lead and die on the cross, Helen Vaughan makes the choice to hang with the cord presented to her by Villiers who acts like a Pontius Pilate: "I shall offer a choice, and leave Helen Vaughan alone with this cord in a transfiguration, to use a Christian expression, is the site in which both schemes mingle generating an indefinite number of esoteric readings. One reading, for example, is that the Christian Trinity, with the property of three beings contained in one, meets its perverted version as incest. The event of Helen"s spectacular protean transmogrification is in fact the endorsement of the inscription with which "Mr

Clarke"s Memoirs" ends: "ET DIABOLUS INCARNATUS EST. ET HOMO FACTUS EST" (75) ("And the devil has become incarnate. And has become man").

This is a striking deformation of the Nicene Creed (Symbolum Nicaenum) (325 A.D.)

and its later versions. Correspondingly, the Latin version of the Nicene Creed declares that "Deum verum de Deo vero" "incarnatus est, / homo factus est" (Burn 1909, p. 109). 21 Machen"s inscription is a clever pun on esoteric or doctrinal semantics. The implication is that the Devil is incarnated in the human being. Father and daughter are one in the same way God assumes his human nature in His Son.

Mysticism for Machen serves as a literary method of representation just as W.

B. Yeats"s mystical universe of heavy-laden symbols does. 22 His attraction to Judaeo-Christian occultism is exhibited throughout his writings as in his autobiographical locked room for fifteen minutes" (109). 21 The English translation: "very God of very God" "was incarnate, was made Man" (Burn 1909, p. 2, 3). There is a number of variations of the Creed that illumine Machen"s text from different angles. One interesting example is the "Constantinopolitanum" version (381 A.D.) which professes about Jesus: "et incarnatus est de Spiritu sancto et Maria uirgine, homo factus" (Burn 1909, p. 112);

"and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary, and was made man" (my translation). This doctrinal pattern could be the analogical basis of Machen"s Devil"s humanized manifestation, where Helen becomes incarnate by the Mary-Pan union.

22 Both Yeats and Machen were deeply interested in the occult, as they were both members of the Order of the Golden Dawn.

Things Near and Far (1923) where he picks out an allusion to The Great God Pan, the name of Osvald Kroll, to spark a discussion on occult issues. He writes about "that matter of Lilith and Samael and the Shells or Cortices, the husks of spirits from a ruined world that brought about the Fall of Man; the strange mystery of that place "which is called Zion and Jerusalem"" (Machen 1923b, pp. 21-2). This sentence, if nothing else, is a broad hint for the deliberate encoding of the specific Judeo-Christian nuances in the novella.

His strategy of the occult narrative is supported by his fascination with Cabbalism: "The Tree of Lifeas the Sephiroth arranged in a certain scheme are calledis, in fact, I would point out, at once an account of how all things came into being and a map and an analysis of all things as they now are" (Machen 1923b, p. 23).

The Machean narrative is a cover for an archetypal template. Yet, Machen manipulates the means of esotericism as literary technique: "Dip then, and read and wander in the Kabbala, but do not become a kabbalist" (Machen 1923b, p. 23). The author connotes that "Kabbala" is a universal and a potentially all-purpose platform.

His aphoristic sentence encapsulates the classic Nineties conflict of the Aesthetes" and Decadents" playfulness with religion against its strict factuality typified by English bourgeois philistine society.

The esoteric narrative is a semi-opaque surface in which Machen transforms the mystical traditions of the West to serve his novelistic idiosyncrasies. In Hieroglyphics Machen avers that "fine literature means the expression of the eternal human ecstasy in the medium of words." The word "ecstasy" is not only one of Machen"s favourites, but it also represents powerful religious trance. It is hidden in the craftsman"s "words", the ciphers of a text which resists conventional explanation, requiring an occult insight instead. The masking of Christian lore in paganism in The

  proceeded in the direction indicated by his son, and found Helen V. sitting on the grass in the middle of a glade or open space left by charcoal burners. (72)Of course, unbridled sexuality is characteristic of Pan; but here it is also sinister and terrifying. Christian evil is also implicit. It seems that Machen bends the Christian myth towards a unifying flux of mystical elements. The Pan-Helen sex scene could be a twisted variation of the two-in-one manifestation of the divinity: the communion of God-Son is by means of prayer whilst that of the Devil-Daughter is by means of incestuous sex.

See pp. 804-7. Suggestively, as The Golden Bough was published four years earlier than The Great God Pan, Frazer"s radical proposition of the connection between religion and science could be partly an influence on Machen"s amalgamation of science and the occult.

The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1997Press, , rpt. 1998)). All subsequent biblical quotations are taken from this edition. See also Matt 1:20. Another variation occurs in Luke: "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God" (Luke 1:35).

See chapter titled, "The Madonna"s Conception Through the Ear", pp. 266-357.

This succession of images represents the shift of the scene of the Last Supper (see Matt 26:27-8) to the Mount of Olives.

Satan in Paradise Lost is starkly defined and outlined as an epic character, a deity modelled on those of the Classical world. Machen"s Pan/Devil is, on the contrary, abstractly defined, versatile, existing beyond the notion of space and time; his evil is mystically associated with psychological horror.

See Nelson (1991, pp. 20-21).

Navarette refers to Machen"s essay "A Secret Language" (publ. 1924). Specifically, on discussing "The Novel of the White Powder", she touches upon the emergence of Catholic mysticism

Many scholars disputably detect a reference of Lilith also in Isa. 34:14-15.

Great God Pan is effective; it amplifies the feeling of the uncanny by evoking a familiar pattern and inviting its detection on a textual level in the same way Helen

Vaughan"s true nature is detected by the male characters. For Machen, literature cannot be written "unless you have assimilated the final dogmasthe eternal truths", that is, the "Catholic dogma" (Machen 1923a, p. 164). When The Great God Pan is stripped down to the bone, the "final dogmas" are what remain.