Pan

← Encyclopedia

Pan is the Greek god of shepherds, flocks, and the uncultivated country — the high pastures, the woods, and the lonely places at the edge of the settled world. He is imagined with the legs, horns, and beard of a goat above a human torso, playing the reed pipe named for him, the syrinx, and his oldest home is Arcadia, the mountainous interior of the Peloponnese where herding, not farming, set the rhythm of life. In the ranking of Greek divinity he is a small figure: a god of the back country with no great temples, met in caves and at springs rather than in the marble precincts of the Olympians. The fullest early notice of him, the nineteenth of the Homeric Hymns, makes him the son of Hermes by a daughter of Dryops, born already horned and goat-footed and so strange to look at that his nurse fled — until his father wrapped him in a hare-skin and carried him up to Olympus, where the gods, and Dionysus most of all, were delighted by him. The hymn ends with a folk etymology that would prove more durable than the rest of the poem: the gods named him Pan, it says, because he gladdened the hearts of all.

His shape is the first thing the tradition records about him, and it is not incidental. The goat is the animal of the marginal land, browsing where nothing can be sown; the horns and the rank smell and the appetite belong to the threshold between the human enclosure and the wild outside it. Pan haunts that threshold. Among the gods of the Greek pantheon he belongs to the rim rather than the center — closer in rank and habitat to the lesser powers of nature and the spaces between worlds, the rainbow-messenger Iris or the merman Triton, than to the sky-king Zeus or Apollo of the oracle. He keeps no household and presides over no city. The places that are his are the noon heat when the herdsmen sleep and the god is not to be disturbed, the mountain cave, the spring under the rock. His company is the nymphs, whom he chases, and the train of Dionysus, whose intoxication is close to his own. The pipe he carries is the residue of one of those chases: pursuing the nymph Syrinx to the bank of a river, he grasped at her and found his arms full of marsh reeds into which she had been changed, and the wind in the cut reeds gave back a thin music; so he bound reeds of falling length together and kept her, the story says, in the only form left. The instrument is a memorial of a failure, and the sound it makes is the sound of the empty country.

Panic

Two things about Pan outgrew the modest cult that honored him, and the first is fear. The Greeks held that the sudden, groundless terror that can seize a single traveler or a whole army in a wild and silent place was the god’s own touch — panikon, the panic that bears his name. It is terror without a visible cause, the dread of the noon stillness or the night wood, and because it has no object it spreads by contagion: a herd stampedes, a camp breaks and runs, and no enemy is there. The god of the empty places is felt precisely as their emptiness turned hostile. This was not abstract theology but a usable explanation for a real and dangerous phenomenon, and it gave Pan a foothold in the most public event of Athenian memory.

According to Herodotus, when the runner Philippides was sent from Athens to Sparta to beg help against the Persians, Pan accosted him on the mountain road through Arcadia, asking why the Athenians paid him no honor though he was their friend and had served them before and would serve them again. After the victory at Marathon in 490 BCE — a victory the Athenians were ready to credit in part to a terror that had broken the Persian line — they made good on the god’s complaint. They gave him a cave-shrine on the northwest slope of the Acropolis and instituted annual sacrifices and a torch-race in his honor. The Arcadian goat-god thus entered the religion of the leading Greek city not as an Olympian but as a useful power of the wild, naturalized at the rock’s foot, under the open sky, in a cave rather than a temple — exactly the kind of place that had always been his.

”Great Pan is dead”

The second survival is a single strange anecdote, and it carried the god further than any cult could. It is preserved by Plutarch, the priest of Delphi and essayist, writing around the turn of the second century, in the dialogue On the Obsolescence of Oracles. The matter under discussion is melancholy: why the old oracular shrines have fallen silent, why the divine voices that once answered have grown faint. As evidence that spirits, even great ones, can die, a speaker reports a story told by Epitherses, a teacher of rhetoric and father of the orator Aemilianus. Sailing for Italy, Epitherses was aboard a ship that fell becalmed at evening near the Echinades, by the islands of Paxoi. A voice came across the water, calling the name of the Egyptian pilot — Thamus — and charging him, when the ship reached Palodes, to announce that Great Pan was dead. Thamus resolved that if there were a wind he would sail past in silence, but at Palodes the sea lay glassy and still, and so from the stern he called out toward the land the words he had been given. At once there rose from the shore a great groaning, not of one voice but of many, as of people astonished and grieving. The tale reached Rome; the emperor Tiberius, in whose reign it was set, sent for Thamus and had scholars look into who this Pan might be.

In Plutarch the story is a curiosity, an ornament to a learned conversation about the silencing of the gods. It became something else. Eusebius of Caesarea, the fourth-century bishop and historian of the church, retold the passage in his Preparation for the Gospel and fixed a meaning on it that the original had not carried. The reign of Tiberius was the reign in which Christ was crucified; Eusebius held that the daemons who passed for gods among the nations had lost their power at that death, and here, in a pagan author’s own words, was the testimony — the wail along the shore was the lament of the demons of the old world as their dominion ended. The death of one minor rustic god became, on this reading, the death of paganism itself, timed to the cross. The chronology is forced and the identification arbitrary, and it is Eusebius’s interpretation, not Plutarch’s, that the centuries kept. The Christian reading is the one that gave the line its weight, and it is as that — the announcement that an entire sacred order had ended — rather than as a problem in the history of oracles that “Great Pan is dead” entered European memory.

Pan the All

The name did the rest of the work. Because pân in Greek means “all” — the same word already exploited by the etymology in the Homeric Hymn — readers from late antiquity onward took Pan to signify the universe entire, and his hybrid body, beast below and man above, to figure the mixed totality of nature: the All made visible as a single divine animal. The move belongs to the allegorizing habit that ran through Stoic and then Neoplatonic reading of the gods, in which the crude figures of myth were treated as ciphers for cosmic truths. It is a play on a word rather than the recovery of an old theology, and the Arcadians who left offerings in their hill caves would not have recognized it. But it was a consequential play. It made the goat-god of a small province into a name for the divinity of the whole, and it gave him a second life in precisely the currents of thought that take the cosmos itself to be alive and ensouled.

That current runs through the tradition associated with Neoplatonism, where the sensible world is the last and lowest radiance of a single One and is everywhere animated by soul; through the worldview later called pantheism, which identifies God with nature and refuses any divinity standing outside it; and through panpsychism, the position that mind or feeling reaches all the way down into matter. None of these is a doctrine of Pan, and none derives historically from his cult; but each found in the figure of the All-god a ready emblem, and the goat-piper standing for living nature became one of the durable images by which the idea that the world is itself divine has been carried. The rustic deity of the Peloponnese had become, by an accident of language, a face for the cosmos.

The return of the god

It is largely this second, cosmic Pan — far more than the Arcadian one — that the modern imagination inherited. When the Romantic poets reached for him, they reached for the spirit of a nature felt to be alive, sacramental, and slipping out of reach in an industrial age. Wordsworth and Coleridge invoke him; Keats opens Endymion with a long hymn to Pan as the soul of the wild; Shelley gives him a song; and beneath the celebration ran an unease, sharpest in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Dead Pan,” that the green god of the old world was a casualty of the new faith and could not simply be called back. By the end of the nineteenth century the figure had darkened. Arthur Machen’s 1894 novella The Great God Pan made the god’s appearance an annihilating horror, an encounter with a reality the human frame cannot survive; the book was denounced as degenerate and admired, in time, by writers from Oscar Wilde to H. P. Lovecraft. Against that ran a gentler line — Kenneth Grahame’s chapter “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” in The Wind in the Willows (1908), where Pan is the benign and sorrowing guardian of the riverbank, and E. M. Forster’s “The Story of a Panic,” where the old terror reaches into an English picnic on an Italian hillside.

In the occult revival around 1900 Pan returned again, now as a deliberately invoked power of vital, untamed life set against the exhaustion of the modern world. The most documented instance is the “Hymn to Pan” of Aleister Crowley, with its driving refrain Io Pan!, printed in The Blue Equinox — the issue of his journal The Equinox brought out at Detroit in 1919 — and later read at his funeral in 1947. For Crowley the god named an ecstatic force that dissolved the boundary between worshiper and worshiped, and the hymn belongs to the broader early-twentieth- century reinvention of Pan as the patron of everything the age was thought to have repressed. From that reception the figure passed into the modern nature- religions, where the horned god of the wild is honored still — a use that stands at the far end of a long history and answers to the needs of its own moment rather than to the cult of the Arcadian hills.

Sources and scholarship

The disciplined study of Pan is dominated by Philippe Borgeaud’s Recherches sur le dieu Pan (Institut Suisse de Rome, 1979), translated as The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece by Kathleen Atlass and James Redfield (University of Chicago Press, 1988), which reconstructs the Arcadian religion from its sanctuaries, festivals, and the logic of panic and possession, and insists on the distinction that governs the whole subject: between the locatable historical worship of a particular god and the long European habit of borrowing his name to say what each later age felt itself to be missing. The two are different objects, and most of what passes for common knowledge of Pan belongs to the second.

The primary witnesses are short and accessible. The Homeric Hymn 19 (To Pan), which gives the parentage, the goat-shape, and the “all” etymology, is available in Hugh Evelyn-White’s Loeb translation (Perseus). The Marathon episode and the founding of the Athenian cave-cult are in Herodotus, Histories 6.105. The death-of-Pan anecdote is Plutarch, On the Obsolescence of Oracles 17, in the Moralia at 419B–D (Perseus); the standard public-domain English is Frank Cole Babbitt’s Loeb Moralia. Its Christian afterlife begins with Eusebius of Caesarea, Preparation for the Gospel, Book V, in the public-domain translation of E. H. Gifford (1903), hosted at tertullian.org, where the wail of the daemons is read against the date of the crucifixion. The Syrinx pursuit is told most fully by Ovid, Metamorphoses I.689–712. The allegorical Pan-as-All belongs to the same reading habit that produced the Stoic and Neoplatonic interpretation of myth; the temper of that habit, and of the cosmos-as-living-whole that it served, can be felt directly in Plotinus’s Enneads in Stephen MacKenna’s translation. For the modern reception, Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan” stands in The Blue Equinox (1919), the same volume that carries his Gnostic Mass and the public manifestos of his order.

Held apart, the two Pans rarely touch. One is reconstructed from sanctuaries and festival calendars: a god honored with a goat, a torch-race, a cave at the foot of the Acropolis, the small precise religion Borgeaud recovers. The other is a name pressed into service — for the All, for the demons whose dominion ended, for the wild that each later century told itself it had lost. The first leaves physical traces; the second leaves only the uses made of it. And under both runs the oldest thing the tradition gives, older than the panic and the anecdote and the cosmic gloss: the pipe of cut reeds in the noon stillness, the music of a nymph who would not be caught, played in the high country at the hour when the god is not to be disturbed and no one should be abroad.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna, 1917–1930) · Crowley — Liber AL vel Legis (1913)

→ Related: Hebe · Eris · Triton · Adonis · Hermes · Dionysus · Zeus · Apollo · Delphi · Pantheism · Panpsychism · Neoplatonism · Aleister Crowley · Mythology · Iris · Pantheon · Iapetos