Wisdom from Machen
“Holiness requires as great, or almost as great, an effort; but holiness works on lines that were natural once; it is an effort to recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort to gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels, and in making this effort man becomes a demon. I told you that the mere murderer is not therefore therefore a sinner; that is true, but the sinner is sometimes a murderer. Gilles de Raiz is an instance. So you see that while the good and the evil are unnatural to man as he now is—to man the social, civilized being—evil is unnatural in a much deeper sense than good. The saint endeavours to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall.” -The White People by Arthur Machen
I haven’t written about the Nephilim in a bit, but everytime Machen comes up I have to point out that The Great God Pan (his most famous story and one of the great pieces of fiction) is a nephilim story inverted (or maybe a Tower of Babel story, either way ancient sins about boundaries). This comes out most clearly in HP Lovecraft’s the Dunwich Horror, which is basically Lovecraft retelling Machen. But Lovecraft makes the sin of the watchers motif much more overt. While neither men seem to understand this part of Biblical literature explicitly they hit upon one of the central themes of the Old Testament more consistently than seems coincidental.
The above quote, while not clearly about the sin of the watchers, gets at what makes that sin such a powerful part of the biblical worldview that Jesus is addressing. God isn’t calling us to what is unnatural, which is how the gospel is presented so much of the time, but to what is most natural. He is calling us back to who we really are made to be, away from the giants and the corruption of evil angels.
This is why Christmas is so ubiquitous in western culture. The human heart forces itself to return to the Greek and Norse myths because they are fascinating parts of our culture but we continually tame them (look at the Thor movies, barely any connection to the real myths), but we easily latch onto the gentleness of Christmas. It gets easily perverted with commercialism. But so much of what Christmas movies are about is the gentle righteousness God has made us for, to love each other and hold each other. To eat with each other.
We really underestimate the importance of that part: food. The Biblical image of heaven is eating with each other. The central act of Christian worship is feasting on Christ together. There is something mystical about eating food with people, with sharing food. The heart of the Christian vision of life is a great return. God is not calling us to something unnatural, he is calling us to our true destiny.
This is one of the reasons that Machen and horror in general are important sources of Christian knowledge. The weird tale, the horror story, shows us what we don’t want. It reveals the unnatural and untrue, and because of that returns us to the true. It exposes the darkness for what it is, a fraud that takes and never gives. But Christmas keeps on giving, as long as we receive it.
I was just reading a Lovecraft anthology where Robert Price made this comment:
“As “the gate,” Yog-Sothoth’s role suggests something familiar from Shi’ite Islam. The similarity is likely fortuitous, and yet since Lovecraft was a great fan of Islam in its Arabian Nights version, who knows what he knew of the faith? And besides, once one taps into the flavor of a religion, it becomes possible sometimes to spontaneously reinvent, re-infer, items that exist in that religion of which one had not been aware. One taps into the system, and the dominoes begin to fall in familiar patterns. And so it comes as no major surprise to learn that there were prestigious individuals in Shi’ite Islam who held the title of “the Bab,” or “the Gate.” (Think also of the Genesis 11 tale of the Tower of Babel. “Bab-el” means “the gate of God,” the altar atop a hill or ziggurat, just like the top of Sentinel Hill, come to think of it.)”
It’s all connected more than we want to admit.