“The Seal of the Satyr” (Strange Stories, June 1939)

Bloch, Robert. “The Seal of the Satyr.” The Opener of the Way, Valancourt Books, pp. 112-125.

Roger Talquist is an archaeologist in England who remembers his boyhood in Greece fondly. When he has the chance to join an expedition there, he eagerly agrees. He quickly loses interest in the work, however, and pursues his own curious study: the folklore and superstition of small towns in rural areas. He meets a man, Papa Lepolis, and persuades him to bring him to an ancient site the on Lepolis family land, a place that very few outsiders have ever seen. The travel through rugged countryside, through swamps and over hills until they find what appears to be an altar ring of standing stones. Talquist is excited by the archaeological potential of the place and eagerly explores it. He discovers hoof prints at the central altar stone. he thinks goats, but Lepolis says, no, these are of a species not quite natural. He tells Talquist about ancient human sacrifices meant to confer immortality and physical changes on humans. He slips a knife out of his robe and attacks Talquist, saying that he’d prefer an altered eternal life to old age and death. In the struggle, Talquist kills the old man.

At his feet, he discovers an amulet he hasn’t before seen. The amulet compels him to don it, and Talquist begins to feel uncanny changes coming over him. Soon, there is a gathering of beasts at the altar, creatures straight out of folklore. He sees dryads, nymphs, centaurs, and others take the lifeless body of Lepolis away. He follows them to the lake where he accosts a nymph who tears the amulet from his neck. She disappears into the lake. All is quiet. Talquist wonders if he hallucinated all of it, but then he sees his reflection in the still waters of the lake. He looks exactly like the wood-God, Pan!
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This story takes place in Greece, and it represents another imaginative leap for Bloch. I am certainly no expert at all, but I have been to Greece. It is a mountainous place covered to a great degree by forests. Nothing about this story clashed with my memory (and Google image searches) of the place, and for a young writer without the means to travel anywhere, setting a story in such a location took some courage, I imagine. Bloch knows the mythology pretty well; it seems and has great fun imagining the confab of beasts with a thing for human sacrifice. As an academic, too, I smiled at the thought of this guy signing on for this expedition under slightly false pretenses, immediately losing interest, and then following his own muse into the backcountry. Not the false pretenses part, but I do like the idea that one’s gut can tell you, “follow this path of inquiry,” and you ignore it at your own peril. (Kind of like the voice that tells some crazy person to blog about all of Robert Bloch’s stories 😊)