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Although it is traditionally associated with poetry, at the end of the 19th century, one can observe an application of the artistic philosophy of orphism to the novel. Whereas the goal of the fin-de-siècle orphic poet was to create a poem wherein the words themselves might incarnate a facet of the Divine, such is not the ambition of the orphic novelist, who endeavors, rather, to avert the “average” reader to the reality and the possibility of a mystical experience. This was done in an effort to offer a spiritual counterpoint to the climate of pessimism engendered by the secularization and decadence of the society at that time. Thusly framed, the novels of the Welsh writer Arthur Machen appear particularly interesting. Machen—who freely recognized any form of human expression as insufficient when it is a question of depicting not only the complexity of God, but any sort of mystical experience in its entirety—does not seek to describe or incarnate the Divine, but rather the effect that its presence exerts upon the individual. This is achieved through a modification of the narrative syntax within the text. In this sense, his orphic texts strive to reproduce the internal changes that human thought undergoes when the subject enters into a state of extasy in the presence of the Divine. Thus, the true intention of Machen’s mystical novels is to act as a catalyst which might trigger an awakening within the reader, pushing him to reunite with his own spirituality beyond the world of the story.