Machen

Perhaps I haven't read enough of Machen's work, but the BBC magazine article about him doesn't seem to quite match my take.

It's true that many of Machen's stories are about unwise explorations of a world beyond the one that's revealed to the senses. But like Walter de La Mare, it wasn't so much the supernatural as the mysterious qualities inherent in what we think of as our everyday environment that fascinated Machen. He had a life-long interest in esoteric traditions,

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Machen's fictions aren't intended to persuade the reader that events of the kind he describes could actually happen. He thought of the world as a kind of text in invisible writing, a cipher pointing to another order of things - but you needn't accept anything of this occult philosophy to find his stories more than just entertaining. What they deal with is the nature of human perception.

Instead I read Hill of Dreams as the story of a young man's journey into self-deception and madness. It began with a vision of a magic beyond the world through the ruins of a Roman fort, but in clinging to his dream and his contemptuous reaction to the world of yahoos, he contracts within himself and loses all sense of proportion in a solipsistic haze. Not quite what you'd hope for from a vision of realities beyond the world. The key section stuck with me for years:

Here, he thought, he had discovered one of the secrets of true magic; this was the key to the symbolic transmutations of the Eastern tales. The adept could, in truth, change those who were obnoxious to him into harmless and unimportant shapes, not as in the letter of the old stories, by transforming the enemy, but by transforming himself. The magician puts men below him by going up higher, as one looks down on a mountain city from a loftier crag.

In other words, defeat your enemies and destroy their evil by imagining yourself as more glorious and above it all. I wish that attitude was only found in literature.