The Great God Pan

I love Pan, the great horned-god; he represents to me the generative force in nature, all that is exciting; all that is enhancing; all that is dangerous!

I remember reading an adaptation of Robert Grave’s The Myths and Legends of Greece when I was very young. These stories depicted a fascinating world; a world of flawed but endearing deities, so different from the Christian tradition in which I was growing up. The saddest part, the part that made me weep, yes, it did, came towards the end, when the cry went up around Greece that ‘The Great God Pan is dead!’ So, I lost him; I lost that world, as the other deities were driven from Olympus by the acolytes of the new faith.

But not so many years later, when I read The Wind in the Willows, I discovered that Pan was not dead at all. There he was: the Piper at the Gates of Dawn; the guardian and the protector of all nature. Still later I found him in his more adult guise, his more dangerous guise, if you like, in Knut Hamsun’s wonderful novel of the same name, where he appears as an echo and a symbol.

Pan is not forgotten, can never be forgotten, Yes, I also have a special place in my heart for Hecate, the mother goddess, and Artemis, the cool goddess of the moon. But Pan will always walk beside them, and nature is one

Pan in Anger

In reading about the life of Aleister Crowley I noted with interest that he believed that the Great God Pan is the only one of the ancient deities to have made it into the modern world, which corresponds exactly to my own view. It occurs to me, though, that there is another dimension of Pan that I have not properly explored. I know of Pan the Protector, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, from The Wind in the Willows. I know of Pan as the elemental force of sexual passion from Knut Hamsun’s novel of the same name. But what of Pan angry; what of Pan alienated from humanity, as humanity is alienated from nature?

What immediately came to mind is Algernon Blackwood’s marvelous short story The Willows, where nature is actively hostile to a human presence. Remember the words of the Swede, the narrator’s companion as the threat closes around them,

There are forces close here that could kill a heard of elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly. Our only chance is to keep perfectly still. Our insignificance perhaps may save us.

The interesting encounter for me is that the encounter with the God angry is on an island in a river, just as Mole and Ratty encounter him benevolent in exactly the same circumstances. Nature is being tortured; Pan is angry with humanity. To anger the Great God is a mistake beyond all mistakes.

Ana and the Horned God

I love Pan, the great horned-god; he represents to me the generative force in nature, all that is exciting; all that is enhancing; all that is dangerous!

I remember reading an adaptation of Robert Grave’s Myths of Ancient Greece when I was very young. These stories depicted a fascinating world; a world of flawed but endearing deities, so different from the Christian tradition in which I was growing up. The saddest part, the part that made me weep, yes, it did, came towards the end, when the cry went up around Greece that ‘The Great God Pan is dead!’ So, I lost him; I lost that world, as the other deities were driven from Olympus by the acolytes of the new faith.

But not so many years later, when I read The Wind in the Willows, I discovered that Pan was not dead at all. There he was: the Piper at the Gates of Dawn; the guardian and the protector of all nature. Still later I found him in his more adult guise, his more dangerous guise, if you like, in Knut Hamsun’s wonderful novel of the same name, where he appears as an echo and a symbol.

Pan is not forgotten, can never be forgotten, Yes, I also have a special place in my heart for Hecate, the mother goddess, and Artemis, the cool goddess of the moon. But Pan will always walk beside them, and nature is one.