Arthur Machen

“ Strange to say, there rose no argument on this matter; but I have been wondering ever since that evening how Sylvanus got his notion that beautiful, sensuous images are the peculiar property of paganism as opposed to Christianity; that Christianity, regarded from the high, æsthetic standpoint, is a grim, grey business, chiefly bent on making everybody very uncomfortable by purely negative ethics. ”

“ The great white theatre with the sky above it, the thousands of citizens assembled, the actors "buskined" to more than human height, masked so that no impertinence of mere human emotion should by chance be visible, chanting in a measured song, so that the inadequacy of mere "dramatic" expression should not spoil the great work ”

“ PAGANISM In a certain company a man once read out some verses from an old hymn. Lest the character of the assembly should be mistaken, it must be said at once that the hymn was not read from a hymn-book, but from an "anthology," which makes all the difference. ”

“ Whence follows more than might appear; it follows that the Greek was ruled and governed and hemmed in by a complicated and wide-spreading net of observances, of purifications, of ritual customs, of taboos and commands; all of which things were in the way of his doing exactly as he liked all day long. It is agreed by those who know the barbarous races of these days that if such peoples have a different morality and a different code from ours, at least that morality and that code are most rigidly observed; neither a Blackfellow nor a negro can do what he likes under all circumstances. ”

“ No doubt these, like the Ancient Greeks, have licenses of which we should not approve; but, on the other hand, wild Australia and Central Africa and old Greece have and had laws and observances, prohibitions and ordinances which would have seemed minutely oppressive to a seventeenth-century Scotch Presbyterian. In the old paganism (as in that which survives to-day amongst savages) there were initiations painful to the body and awful to the spirit: before a man was allowed to experience pleasure he was required to prove that he was able to suffer anguish bravely and patiently. ”

“ Where else can they hear the music that invokes the gods? And from what has been said it seems clear enough that the modern sects which dispense either in thought or word or deed with this system of sensuous symbolism on one pretext or another have no real title to be called Christians at all. ”

“ If one wanted to describe the Attic Drama in a phrase, one might call it the Doctrine of Predestination set to slow music. It would seem, indeed, that a race which could imagine the Avenging Furies possessed of necessity the notion of right and wrong ”

“ They shall revive as the corn and grow as the vine. The scent thereof shall be as the wine of Lebanon.
The glowing and jewelled splendours of the Apocalypse are too well known to be cited here. So again I wonder at the misconception of the man who thought the imagery of the old hymn "pagan" because it was beautiful and sensuous. For the fact is that the Christian mythos is remarkable for its constant and lavish use of all such imagery. ”