קדוש

The pigeon grinned a beak full of dog’s teeth. “Ha. They say there aren’t. They even kept most of them out for a while.”

“How did you make it?”

“By being smart. By hiding.”

She gave the one-legged, feral feathered thing a sideways look. “As a pigeon?”

“Sometimes,” said the pigeon. “Sometimes I’m graffiti on a wall. Sometimes I’m a coin dropped in a beggar’s hand. I am neon at night, the rain in the light. I am the song the busker sings. I listen to the prayers of those who come to the city with big dreams.”

“And in return?”

It grinned again. Steam rolled off its feathers, smelling of cigarettes. “I eat their despair.”

“That’s cruel.”

Disclaimer: 1) I am focusing more on cultus and less on myth. This is a religious post after all. 2) A lot of the information here comes from Philippe Bourgeaud’s work The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece. 

Pan rules over wilderness and most especially, the frontiers between civilization and wilderness. 

It is why he is found in more than forests. He does dwell in the forest, but also in the mountains and coasts. He is at the eschatiai, the edges of city life. Where the land belongs to no one, making him the god of no man’s lands. 

A good example of this notion comes from the diviner Artemidorus in Oneirocritica (which is about dream interpretation), where seeing Pan in a city setting is considered a bad omen of conflict and upheaval. On the contrary, seeing Pan in his natural wilderness is a sign of success and happiness. 

Pan is less a god of agriculture than a god of transhumance (and snow).

As such, he is nomadic. Herders leave a long time in the wilderness when it is time to move the livestock to the higher pastures. On the contrary, the Greeks considered transhumance to be what links the shepherd to civilization. A shepherd who insists on staying up in the mountains when the bad weather arrives is risking himself against Pan’s power aka snow. Snow covers the flock and the path that led them there, and the land becomes hostile and directionless. Snow is Pan’s way of claiming back those mountains, and they are his realm.  

Let’s also note that Pan doesn’t rule over the finished product of agriculture (like cheese for example). This is Aristaeus’ domain, which more directly serves mankind. Pan is uncivilized by nature. 

Caves and grottoes are sacred to Pan

His cultus started in the mountains of Arcadia, and it was then (5th century BC and before) considered best to “build” a temple directly in rock or in a cave, rather than build a temple. This mindset changed over time when his cultus spread further than Arcadia alone. Again, caves and grottoes are one of the places where civilization doesn’t dwell. 

Noon is the Hour of Pan

I wish I could find more information on that statement but I don’t have access to the author’s source. Anyway, noon is supposed to be the hour at which Pan is most powerful and, logically, the most dangerous in the panic, manic sense.

Hermanubis

Open your doors, and let me in, I hope your favours I shall win; Whether I rise, or whether I fall, I’ll do my best to please you all.

The Great One, bestower of death and generative force, imaged as a horned man is probably the very earliest conception of the Divine which crystallised, along with the iconography of the Supreme Mother, in the deeps of the prehistoric psyche. The archetype is older than the hills, old beyond reckoning, reaching back into unimaginable gulfs of antiquity, stirring primeval residues of ancestral memory, for the Horned Master as the lord of this world and the Otherworld, has ruled from the time before time, omnipotent and mysterious.

The old icons are mute testament to the initiatory encounters and transformations undergone by his shaman-priests in the vast forests, swamplands and mountains of the primeval world. The Great God was the Divine Hunter who led his worshippers upon the chase, who was propitiated and who gave luck to the faithful who pursued the herds of wild bison, deer and goats.

To these prehistoric hunters the God of the Two Horns was the very incarnation of the Giver of Life and Death, the implacable and dangerous power who held sway over the wilderness. He was the Great Sorcerer and as such he was the source of those magico-psychic faculties which enabled early humanity to survive in rough and savage environment by the guidance of cunning, intuition and magical luck-force.

However the Master was never a simple hunting-deity for he embodied the various states of spirit trance and magical ecstasy cultivated amongst those early shamans of the Pleistocene era. As the cosmic god of life and death the Horned One was the Janus-faced divinity who stood between the worlds, between the realms of light and shadow, day and night, partaking of both and transcending them in the highest state of consciousness.

Liv Rainey-Smith, Lux Stellarum, woodcut print, 2014.