The Great God Pan

by Arthur Machen

I have devoted myself to transcendental medicine for the last twenty years. I have heard myself called quack and charlatan and impostor,

Desde Machen ya había homeopatía...

You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things -- yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet--I say that all these are but dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes.

"London has been called the city of encounters; it is more than that, it is the city of Resurrections,"

but I tell you you can have no conception of what I know, not in your most fantastic, hideous dreams can you have imaged forth the faintest shadow of what I have heard--and seen. Yes, seen. I have seen the incredible, such horrors that even I myself sometimes stop in the middle of the street and ask whether it is possible for a man to behold such things and live.

I am like a traveller who has peered over an abyss, and has drawn back in terror. What I know is strange enough and horrible enough, but beyond my knowledge there are depths and horrors more frightful still, more incredible than any tale told of winter nights about the fire.

...and the abyss has peered back.