Desperate and wretched after the death of his wife at the hands of her lover, Hugh Paston becomes engrossed in the occult and goes on a quest for Pan, aided by an old bookseller called Jelkes. In order to fulfil his desire he buys an old monastery to convert into a temple for Pan. The monastery is haunted however by the spirit of a fifteenth century prior who was walled up for his pagan beliefs and who is also searching for the goat-foot god and seems to possess Paston who begins to wonder if the spirit is not actually the restimulation of a previous incarnation memory of his own. The key to the increasingly complex mystery is held by Mona Freeman whose awakening magical abilities bring success in a moving ritual climax in an old pagan shrine. In esoteric terms it is Dion Fortune's fictional representation of inner powers relating to the Qabalistic sphere of Malkuth – the Sephirah pertaining to Earth.