March 3, 1863

Arthur Machen (March 3, 1863 to December 15, 1947) is described as "the forgotten father of weird fiction...[who] might be little read today, but ...[whose] ideas lie at the heart of modern horror writers [such as] Stephen King and Clive Barker....[His and] dozens of other titles by authors both famous and obscure ... taken as a whole form a secret library, a catalogue of weird fiction from its roots in Victorian Britain through to the modern day.'

'.... [T]he Welsh author of supernatural, fantasy and horror fiction, Arthur Machen . ....[was born] into the social hinterland between the privileged upper classes and the poverty of the working class, he received an excellent early education but lacked the money to attend university. Nonetheless he pursued a career as a writer, working as a journalist and tutor and writing through the night, hard work that led in his thirties to Machen establishing himself as an author of "decadent horror".
...
'The qualities which made Machen's work important are the same that have driven the tradition of weird fiction. From his early story "The Great God Pan", through his acclaimed masterpiece The Hill of Dreams to his later work on The Secret Glory, Machen remained determined to take readers into worlds of mysticism and the supernatural. In a society gripped by Christian zeal, he drew on pagan and occult ideology to energise his writing. At a time when scientific rationalism was coming fully to the fore, Machen and other writers of weird fiction continued to argue for the mystical experience as an important tool for understanding the modern world. It is an argument which is still being made today.'

How is this "weird fiction" connected to mysticism? The validity of such a conjunction may be open to questions. I quote some of the conclusions Machen reached, to examine the  connection assumed above. You can understand why someone said

'“In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star” might be called a mystic.

So these words of Machen help us. He also said, "it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.” This sounds like "weird fiction," but reflects. not knowedge, at all, but rather, a person seeking a create a superficial sense of frisson. 

And when Machen says “Every branch of human knowledge, if traced up to its source and final principles, vanishes into mystery,” we are back in the land of fragile but empirical insight. 

Then, somewhere (I have not read the full texts where these quotes occurred) he said:

'What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?

'Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is.”' Or, make you want to call your wife or husband outside.

 A real mystic hews, clings, lives, for the portion of a moment when he can glimpse something beyond his own ego. He survives in his ambition by learning the meaning of his surroundings, including those that make up his personal reality. And this includes a sense for the nature of verbal reality, and sometimes what the verbality is an edge of.

Anything beyond the non-verbalizable, is not sin, is no alternative to anything. It is just imagination. It composes most of everything of course, this imagination; it is not bad, evil, sinful. It just keeps the world running.