Pan (mythology)

Pan (Greek Πάν, genitive Πανός) is the Greek god of nature who watches over shepherds and their flocks. He has the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat, with the upper body and hands of a human male, resembling a faun or satyr. He often holds a logaobolon, a variation of the shepherd's crook which is used for hunting small game, or else a syrinx, a flute-like instrument also known as the panpipe. The Roman counterpart to Pan is Faunus, another nature spirit .

Pan teaching his eromenos, the shepherd Daphnis, to play the panpipes
2nd c. CE Roman copy of Greek original
ca. 100 B.C.E. attributed to Heliodorus
Found in Pompeii

Origins

The theonym pan is of Indo-European derivation, following from the word pa-on, which means "herdsman" and shares its prefix with the Latin pastor and the modern English word "pasture". The name is often mistakenly thought to be identical to the Greek word pan, meaning "all". This misunderstanding probably originated out of the Homeric Hymn to Pan, in which Pan is described as having delighted all the gods. Also, this dual-usage of the word pan was subject to some Platonic wordplay. In Plato's work Cratylus, the god Pan is portrayed as the personification of the entire cosmos, embodying both the lower animal nature as well as the higher spiritual of humanity.

Pan may have at one point been multiplied as the Panes, as is suggested in myths which tell of Pan boasting that he had slept with every maenad for the purpose of creating a whole brotherhood of creatures like himself, also known as the Paniskoi . In support of this theory, depictions of the retinue of Dionysos, as well as those of wild landscapes in ancient Greece often picture not only a great Pan, but also little Pans, Paniskoi, who played a role similar to that of the Satyrs. Kerenyi (1951 p 174) notes that Aeschylus in Rhesus distinguished between two Pans, one who was the son of Zeus and twin of Arkas, and another who was a son of Cronos.

Pan was first venerated in ancient Arcadia, a mountainous area in central Peloponnessus. The majority of Greeks disdained Arcadia and its inhabitants, as the society was far removed from Classical Greece, with a pastoral economy and rudimentary political system. Furthermore, the mountain dwelling Arcadians themselves were considered somewhat backwards and primitive. Thus, the fact that they held a figure of the wilderness in such high regard is not surprising.

Mythology

Birth

The parentage of Pan is unclear. In some myths he is the son of Zeus, though generally he is the son of Hermes with his mother said to be a nymph, either Dryope or else Penelope). The Homeric Hymn to Pan claims that, upon seeing his goatlike appearance, Pan's mother ran away in fright. Despite these suggestions that Pan was the son of an Olympian God, he often appears in some myths to be older than the Olympians. For instance, this is suggested in the story which explains that he gave Artemis her hunting dogs and taught the secret of prophecy to Apollo.

Pan and music

Once Pan had the audacity to compare his music with that of Apollo, and to challenge Apollo, the god of the lyre, to a trial of skill. Tmolus, the mountain-god, was chosen to umpire. Pan blew on his pipes, and with his rustic melody gave great satisfaction to himself and his faithful follower, Midas, who happened to be present. Then Apollo struck the strings of his lyre. Tmolus at once awarded the victory to Apollo, and all but Midas agreed with the judgment. He dissented, and questioned the justice of the award. Apollo would not suffer such a depraved pair of ears any longer, and turned Midas' ears into those of a donkey.

One of the famous myths of Pan involves the origin of his trademark pan flute. Syrinx was a beautiful nymph who and follower of Artemis who maintained strict vows of chastity. Nonetheless, she was still beloved by the satyrs and other wood dwellers. She scorned them all. As she was returning from the hunt one day, Pan met her. She ran away and didn't stop to hear his compliments, and he pursued from Mount Lycaeum until she came to the bank of the River Ladon where he overtook her. Desperate, she called upon the river nymphs for help. Just as Pan laid hands on her, she was turned into the river reeds. When the air blew through the reeds, it produced a plaintive melody. The god took some of the reeds to fashion an instrument which he called a syrinx, in honor of the nymph.

Echo was a nymph who was a great singer and dancer and scorned the love of any man. This angered Pan, a lecherous god, and he instructed his followers to kill her. Echo was torn to pieces and spread all over earth. The goddess of the earth, Gaia, received the pieces of Echo, whose voice remains repeating the last words of others. In some versions, Echo and Pan first had one child: Iambe.

Amorous Encounters

Pan is famous for his unfettered sexuality, and is often depicted with an erect phallus. This rampant desire lead him on many a conquest, plying his charms primarily on maidens and shepherds, such as Daphnis, a Sicilian nymph whom he taught to play the panpipe. However, the god was rarely successful in his conquests. Just as he was avoided by Syrinx, so to was he abhorred by a nymph named Pitys, whom he stalked untiringly. She escaped his pursuit only when the gods turned her into a pine tree. With these epic failures in mind, no doubt, Diogenes of Sinope jestfully related the myth of Pan learning self-gratification from his father, Hermes, and teaching the habit to his beloved shepherds.

Though Pan failed with Syrinx and Pitys, he was not so unfortunate fail with the Maenads, making love to every one of them. To effect this, Pan was sometimes multiplied into a whole tribe of Panes so he could orchestrate epic orgies. Even greater than this was Pan's conquest of the moon goddess Selene. Pan accomplished this feat by wrapping himself in a sheepskin to hide his hairy black goat form, and drew Selene down from the sky into the forest where he seduced her.

Symbolism

In the poetry of the fifth century, Pan and the natural habitat in which he was said to live became a metaphor for the pastoral as it exists in contrast to the urban. Pan's dual nature as both divine and animal plays upon the tenuous balanced between disorder and harmony, the primal and the cultivated. Pan also was thought to inspire panic, the paranoid fear which can reduce human beings to their animalistic instincts, particularly when they are in lonely places. Apparently when Pan was a newborn, the first onlookers saw the ugly "child" and ran in fright (or panic [which is where this word was derived]). Also, Pan was considered responsible for causing individual, possession-like disruptions of the psyche, or panolepsy. In the Battle of Marathon (490 B.C.E.), it is said that Pan favored the Athenians and so inspired panic in the hearts of their enemies, the Persians. Of course, Pan was later known for his music, capable of arousing inspiration, sexuality, or panic, depending on his intentions.

Worship

As mentioned above, worship of Pan began in Arcadia, and as such, Arcadia was always the principal seat of his worship. Pan was considered Lord of Arcadia and guardian of its sanctuaries. One enclosure dedicated to Pan stood on Mount Lycaeus and functioned as a sanctuary for animals who were stalked by the wolf, consistent with the idea that Pan protected all creatures. Pan was also considered to be the adjudicator of the human activities of hunting and animal husbandry. His ability to bestow sterility or fertility upon domesticated animals gave him particular significance in the worship of Arcadian hunters and shepherds. In fact, Theocritus notes that if Arcadian hunters or shepherds had been disappointed in the chase or the sterility of their animals, respectively, they would undertake a rite in which the statue of Pan was whipped and scourged in hopes of calling the god back from inactivity. Arcadians believed that Pan as the keeper over the mountainous lands in which he lead his own flocks, and therefore considered such places to be his sanctuaries. One such example is the Menale, where Arcadians believed that among the auspicious sounds and echoes of the wilderness, they could hear Pan's music.

It was not until the fifth century B.C.E. that a cult of Pan began to develop in Athens, shaping the image of Pan as he is known today. According to Herodotus' account, Pan was declared an official diety in the city after appearing to the messenger Phillipides on an assignment which took him to Arcadia before the battle of Marathon. Pan questioned Phillippides as to why the Athenians had not yet dedicated a cult to him, despite all his benevolence. After the battle, Athenians remembered this epiphany, and consecrated a grotto on the northwest slope of the Acropolis to Pan. In contrast to his exalted position in Arcadia, Pan lost his status as a major god, assuming a marginal position in the pantheon when comparison to more prominent dieties such as the Olympians. However, Pan's symbolic value was greatly enriched during this period. Rituals involving the god were no longer confined to the pastoral sphere, and his myth and iconography began to spread throughout other major Greek centres such as Attica, Boeotia and Delphi.

Legacy

Pan, Mikhail Vrubel 1900

If one were to believe the Greek historian Plutarch (in "The Obsolescence of Oracles" (Moralia, Book 5:17)), Pan is the only Greek god who is dead. During the reign of Tiberius (A.D. 14-37), the news of Pan's death came to one Thamus, a sailor on his way to Italy by way of the island of Paxi. A divine voice hailed him across the salt water, "Thamus, are you there? When you reach Palodes, take care to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead." Which Thamus did, and the news was greeted from shore with groans and laments. The death of Pan upset Tiberius to such an extent that he called together a committee of philologists to find out who exactly the god was.

Third-century bishop Eusebius of Caesarea interpreted the so-called "death of Pan" to mean that all demons of polytheism had died along with the death and resurrection of Christ, which fittingly occured during the reign of Tiberius. With such a line of thought in mind, it is likely that the demonized images of the incubus and even the horns and cloven hooves of Satan, which became common in much Christian literature and art in the middle ages, were extrapolated from the images of the highly sexual Pan. Despite the declaration of his death, however, Pan is widely worshiped by Neopagans and Wiccans today, where he is knowned more generally as the Horned God, a male deity of comparable status with the Mother Goddess, and an archetype of male virility and sexuality.

Pan has continued to be a captivating character today, appearing in numerous modern works of literature. For instance, he is is the primary, metaphorical theme in Tom Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume, Knut Hamsun's Pan, and in Shepherds of Pan on the Big Sur-Monterey Coast by Elayne Wareing Fitzpatrick. Famed occultist Aleister Crowley alluded to the God in his Hymn To Pan. Pan also features in various supernatural fiction such as Arthur Machen'sThe Great God Pan, as well as Donna Jo Napoli's young adult novel of the same title. Pan appears in short-stories of a number of popular authors, including Stephen King's "The Lawnmower Man" and Agatha Christie's "The Call of Wings". It is also probable that the faun in the movie "Pan's Labyrinth" is inspired by Pan, since the movie itself is named after him.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Borgeaud, Philippe. Recherches sur le Dieu Pan. Geneva: Geneva University Press, 1979.
• Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion (John Raffan, trans.). Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1985. ISBN 0631112413
• Kerenyi, Karl. The Gods of the Greeks. London: Thames & Hudson, 1951.
• Ruck, Carl A.P. The World of Classical Myth. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1994.
• "Pan". Encyclopedia of Religion. Edited by Mercia Eliade. New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1987. ISBN 0029098505

External links

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Pan (mythology)

• The story of Pan and Daphnis
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• Pan Mythology

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