#aegipan

….I did it….. introducing Aegipan!

I have lore for this baby bellow the cut!

This is an interesting ask! (I do want to write about this in length one day)

I am fond of the version where Hera was involved in the creation of Typhon (not necessarily his mother) because a) marital drama between the two of them that isn’t centered on Zeus’ cheating is very interesting, and b) there is a passage where Hera feels guilty about the betrayal and tells Zeus once they’re reconciled and I imagine Zeus saying “okay honey, I’ll handle it *nervous laughter*” energy after being gob smacked with the news of his wife manufacturing a baddie that can beat him. I think that would excite him as much as it would scare him.

I also imagine Zeus refusing to risk his Olympians’ lives over Typhon, so he orders the escape to Egypt, much to the disapproval and anger of Hera, Athena, Poseidon, and Hermes (and Hermes is particularly important in this story). Zeus to me is a god who thinks he can handle whatever you throw at him beyond his own abilities and will refuse help until it is absolutely necessary (out of his own superiority complex? or the need to show everyone that he’s a good protector, good brother/father, and good king most of all? Because the alternative is so much more scary? You decide). Still, it ends up blowing in his face when Typhon rips out his sinews and effectively trapping him in a cave before Hermes and Aegipan rescue him.

The rise of Typhon happened after the Gigantomachy (at least according to Pseudo-Apollodorus in the Bibliotheca), and I also like to place it after the Hera-Athena-Poseidon rebellion. I go with the version of Typhon as the son/creation of Kronos (the silly little parthenogenesis variant you can find here), because I like the aspect of Zeus and Typhon being half? brothers and mirrors to each other (usurpers with very different goals but still being family men). Typhon here is also Gaia's adopted son and pawn after Hera abandons the usurper plan, virtually Gaia's real youngest after the Giants.

I’ll limit the Olympians I think would react in Egypt to a certain few. (To as how they knew, I imagine the Fates above stayed behind to oversee the battle, and reported to Hera as acting leader in Egypt).

Hera - guilty, upset and definitely worried for her husband. Guilty because she did have a hand in the creation of Typhon (In my head she planted him during the rebellion period as a "last straw" move while not really thinking about the implications of it post-reconciliation, and she feels the guilt unfold ten times over when Typhon arrives), while also being upset at Zeus' decision for them to escape while he fights (because contrary to popular belief, Hera knows Zeus is not stronger than all Olympians combined, even he has his own weaknesses, and she's! not! there beside her husband!) but of course she's also the Queen of the Gods so she pulls a brave authoritative face for the rest of the Olympians, but probably breaking down when she's alone with the gods closest to her: Poseidon and Athena.

Poseidon - worried and pissed, especially since (in my headcanon) Zeus promised he would allow them (Poseidon, Hera and Athena) to lighten his load in their reconciliation after the rebellion. I imagine him kinda jumpy, waiting for the next move and just genuinely worried for his younger brother. Since all the gods temporarily migrated to Egypt, I think he’d also have a fair trouble of assuring his sea-subjects with the help of Amphitrite. He’d also be Hera’s rock during this hard time.

Athena - even though there is a version where Athena stays behind with Zeus (Antoninus Liberalis’ Metamorphoses) In my version she was also told (forced) to migrate to Egypt under the impression that Zeus would send orders for her help later (he didn’t) which leaves her very worried and confused. She definitely offers to go their herself first when Zeus’ defeat is revealed before they selected Hermes and Aegipan instead. She would privately cry at the thought of her father broken down and weak, since she always viewed him as a strong figure even in his lowest moments.

Hermes - Okay so if the story of Typhon has a protagonist, its not Zeus, but its Hermes and Aegipan. I imagine Hermes being very distraught at not knowing the state of his father (seeing Hera and Iris together and thinking I am my father’s servant, have I failed him?) and I think when the news of Zeus’ defeat came, it amplified his self-blame. The other siblings would try to comfort him to no avail. Now again headcanon but this is where I see Hera being the one to successfully comfort and encourage Hermes, and both of them (alongside Aegipan who overheard the conversation) finally returning to Olympus discreetly to find Zeus’ sinews being guarded by the female serpent. They then find the cave Zeus is trapped in and well Zeus and Hera are reunited in tears, with Zeus stammering on about why they’re here and how weak he looks and Hera just sighing but glad her husband is okay. They tell the plan to him and he relents and agrees to it. Upon their return Hera informs the rest of the gods the plan of Hermes and Aegipan returning Zeus’ sinews. I know most people put Pan instead of Aegipan but I honestly like that Aegipan is a son of Zeus and like Hermes he just wants to save his father as well. Sorta like the underdog of the story)

How….did you survive Tokyo Casino without Hakumen being Hakumen?

So Aegipan is just Tayuya from Naruto.

PAN

Category: Greek mythology

I) Who is Pan?

Pan is one of the most famous, and weirdest, gods of the Greek mythology.

Pan is defined, first and foremost, by two things. One, he is a god of nature and wild lands: he protects the shepherds and their flocks, while also offering hunters their bounty. He is found in the forests, the meadows and the grottos ; he is the spirit of the fields, the groves and the glens. He is the patron of Arcadia, the Greek region that gave birth to the “Arcadian myth”, this idea of a peaceful, beautiful, idealized pastoral region (though the real-life Arcadia was a very mountainous area of Greece deemed “primitive” and backwards by the other Greeks). Two, he has a very unique appearance among the gods, being half-human and half-goat. He is usually depicted as a bearded man with the legs (or whole lower body), horns and ears of a goat. If this description sounds familiar, it is because it also fits the entire species of supernatural beings known in Greek mythology as the satyrs. The satyrs, the goat-men, were thought of as the friends and companions of Pan. The closeness between the god Pan and the satyr species led to Pan, from a singular entity, evolving through time into a “multiplicity”. For example the late Greek author Nonnus wrote in his “Dionysiaca” that Pan had twelve children, identical to him and who were all also known as “Pan”. Now, this is a very late addition to the Greek poetic canon, and is doesn’t seem to have been a widespread belief – but Nonnus does rely on the fact that the satyrs as a whole were commonly known as “little Pans” (Paniskoi), to distinguish them from the “great Pan”, the god proper.

When it comes to Greek literature, we actually do not have much information about Pan. When it comes to archeological study we have lots of things to say – we have lot of info about his cult, rites, offerings, worship, temples… But as a character? In poetry and hymns and Ancient Greek texts? Things are less clear… Most of the tales and legends surrounding Pan actually come from Rome (and from Pan’s assimilation there with the god Faunus), not from Greece. The Greeks themselves seem to have quite confused by this god: all the archeological clues and elements point out to Pan’s cult beginning and appearing in Arcadia (a Greek region) and YET the Greek historians couldn’t admit that Pan came from their own culture and country, and rather believed he must have been an Egyptian god brought over…

The legend of Pan’s birth is the best representation of the mystery and bizarreness of Pan – because unlike other gods or characters of Greek mythology, there was never one predominant or major narrative with Pan. We just have a LOT of various different birth stories. The three oldest stories we have about his birth, all Greek in origin, are contradictory. On one side, the Homeric Hymn to Pan claims that he was born when Hermes seduced the “daughter of Dryops”, an Arcadian woman. Pan was a “marvelous” child, noisy, merry and constantly laughing – but his goat’s hooves and horns frightened humans. His Arcadian family abandoned Pan as a baby in the wilds, but Hermes saved the baby, and brought him to Olympus, where he amused all of the gods (especially Dionysos) and he was thus called “Pan”, meaning “all”, because he delighted “all” of the gods (We’ll return to that later). On the other side, there is the “Histories” of Herodotus, which highlight how Pan is one of the “three youngest Greek gods”, alongside Herakles and Dionysos – born out of an affair between Hermes and Penelope (yes, Odysseus’ Penelope), though Herodotus adds that it is unclear if Pan was a mortal man who was divinized after his death, or if the son of Penelope was actually a perfectly regular human man living after or around the Trojan War, and who was named after an older figure, the REAL divine Pan. And the third story comes from Epimenides – we do not have Epimenides’ actual text, but other sources mentions his record of Pan’s birth, which seems to predate chronologically the other two sources I mentioned before, and in Epimenides’ story Pan was the child born out of the affair between Zeus and Callisto (the huntress of Artemis).

These three stories are from the BC era, but if we jump to the second century of our current era, we suddenly have tons of new stories about Pan’s birth popping out. One story keeps Pan as a marriage born out of Penelope’s unfaithfulness, but with Antinous this time (one of the “hundred suitors”) – after giving birth to the shameful child she fled to a mountain to hide it, and it is where Hermes found and took it to become a god. Another story rather keeps Pan as one of Zeus’ numerous illegitimate children, but this time born out of a nymph called Thymbris. A third story mentions a nymph of Arcadia named Sinoe as a mother, with no specific father. Pindar made Pan the son of Apollo and Penelope, Theocritus rather claimed Pan was the child of Odysseus, commentators of Virgil claimed Pan was born of an orgy Penelope had when she slept with ALL of the “hundred suitors” in her palace (hence his name meaning “all”…). As you can see, the stories of Pan’s birth are varied, numerous and contradictory.

There is also another branch of texts that rather go with the idea that there wasn’t one Pan, but two “Pans”, hence why there are so many tales about his birth. It is the theory that for example Aeschylus had, during “Classical” Greece: he distinguished the “younger Pan”, son of Zeus and twin of Arcas (a legendary hunter-king of Arcadia), and the “older Pan”, a son of Kronos (and thus on equal footing with first-generation Olympians). Apollodorus also had the idea of dual Pans, though he claimed that the “younger Pan” was the son of Hermes and Penelope everybody talked about, while the “older Pan” was rather the son of Zeus and a nymph called Hybris (yes, like the flaw “hybris/hubris”), and that this “old Pan” was the mentor of Apollo during the god’s youth. And finally, we have Nonnus’ own late poetic inventions, in which he claims that the two Pans were identical twins, both born of Hermes, but yet birthed by two different mothers. One was Pan god of the hunters – he was called Agreus, had the power of prophecy and was an expert at killing beasts. The second was Pan god of the shepherds – he was called Nomios, was a talented musician, and the son of Penelope (not Odysseus’ wife this time, but a nymph with the same name).

II) Pan’s hobbies: sex and music

Rivaling his numerous birth tales, are Pan’s love tales. Pan was either depicted as a lustful deity constantly running after women, who in return were terrified by his ugly and frightening appearance (which makes him closer to the satyrs), either as an actually swell guy, great seducer, horned Casanova, who however had a bunch of tragic and unfortunate love stories.

In the versions where the nymph Echo isn’t madly in love with Narcissus, her love story will rather go to Pan. For example one story claims she had rejected the love of all men who sought after her, and this angered the lecherous Pan, who in a mad and lustful rage, tore Echo to pieces. Gaia, the earth, absorbing the body parts of the nymph within her, only left her voice behind – which formed the “echo” we know today. An alternate version rather depicts Pan and Echo’s story as a consensual love, which gave birth to two daughters, Iambe and Iynx.

Beyond Echo, Pan was also known to have loved the nymph Pitys, and once again we have two different versions. In the short version, Pitys turned herself into a pine tree to avoid the lust of the goat-god. In the longer version, Pan and Boreas (the North Wind) were fighting over Pitys’ love: Boreas uprooted all the trees to impress her with his strength, but Pan merely laughed to seduce her, and she chose to love him for his merriness. Boreas, angry, then threw the nymph off a cliff, and Gaia turned her into a pine tree. Virgil, the Roman poet, added a story about Pan seducing Semele (goddess of the moon), through some tricks with a sheep’s skin – but people think Virgil was simply rewriting the Greek story of Endymion and Selene. Hyginus also evoked a love story Pan had with the nymph Eupheme (the nurse of the nine Muses), a love story which later gave birth to a son named Crotos.

Pan’s second passion, beyond nymphs, was music. And his love for nymphs AND music shows up in the tale of Syrinx. Syrinx was a wood nymph of Arcadia that Pan tried to seduce. She wanted none of it, and fled from him, but he followed her everywhere she went. So she turned herself into a reed to escape him – and whenever the wind blew through them, the sadness of the harassed nymph could be heard as a plaintive melody. Pan then took the reeds, cut them into seven pieces, and created a musical instrument he named after his beloved Syrinx. The “syrinx”, aka “Pan’s Flute”. Now, let’s think about it… the story of a poor innocent nymph harassed by a rapist god and that has to turn herself into a plant? Yep, that’s an Ovid story, fully Roman one. But to be fair, Ovid did not invent Pan’s connection to the “pan’s flute” – the Greeks did consider that Pan had invented the instrument known as the “syrinx”, and they believed that he regularly played it in the wildlands where he dwelled. In the “Hymn to Pan”, a very ancient Greek text, there is a description of Pan playing “rustic music” in the evening, after the hunt – a sweet and low melody which made the nymphs dance in the woods. Just like the other satyrs, Pan was often depicted as a dancer and musician n the retinue of Dionysos – for as I said, he was a joyful, merry creature of laugh and music. But he was still a dangerous being whose mad lust could tear girls to piece… Beautiful but wild, just like nature.

There is also a story tied to Pan concerning Daphnis, a Sicilian shepherd who invented pastoral poetry. The legend said that Pan taught Daphnis how to play the “pan-pipes”, making him the first human wielder of the Pan’s flute – and apparently Daphnis was also Pan’s lover during his time with him. [Though we do not have exact texts for that – the sources here are Christian criticism and mockery of pagan tales]. The Romans heavily reinforced Pan’s connection to music by rewriting the myth of Apollo and Marsyas – you know, how a satyr tried to challenge the god of music in a music contest? Well, the Romans like Hyginus or Ovid, rewrote the myth by replacing the humble satyr Marsyas with the god Pan (no need to tell you, the whole “the loser is flayed alive” thing was removed). Fun fact: it is in this Roman narrative that we find the famous story of “how Midas got his donkey ears”, as a punishment for preferring Pan’s music over Apollo’s.

III) Pan’s interventions

Pan could literally be called the “god of the deus ex machina”, because in a lot of legends he just pops up when someone needs something, and then disappears. For example, according to Pausanias, when Demeter, both angry at Poseidon’s raping her and Persephone’s disappearance, removed herself from the world and made the earth wither away, she hid herself in a grotto where no god would find her. No god… except Pan, who hunted her down, found her, and then reported her secret location to Zeus. A not Greek, but Roman story this time (from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass) claims that, when Psyche wandered the world grieving the loss of her lover, Cupid/Eros, she met Pan (who was at the time all lovey-dovey with the nymph Echo). Pan then comforted Psyche, talked her out of her suicide projects, and advised her to give love one more chance.

Mind you, not all of Pan’s “interventions” were as peaceful and subtle as these ones. You see, the Greeks considered Pan the god of panic. The very word “panic” comes from the Greek “panikon”, which was created after Pan’s name. It was believed that Pan randomly appeared to those that wandered the forests and the woods – and his weird appearance would terrify people, sending them into a “panic”. Other tales rather speak of how he likes to take a nap during the hottest hours of the day, and if someone ever woke him up, he would pursue them in a mad anger – again, sending them into “pure panic”. When Nonnus described Dionysos’ expedition in India, he wrote that Pan, who was a companion of the wine-god at the time, used shadows ad echoes to terrify an army that was attacking them, invoking “strange voices coming out of nowhere” to make them flee in terror.

A fourth story, this time a historical anecdote from Greek historians, told of how Athens was attacked by the Persians, and a message was sent to Sparta to ask for help. The Spartans said they couldn’t help until the ten-day religious ritual they had just started was over – so the Athenian messenger returned empty-handed and depressed to the city. On his way back, the Athenian crossed the mountains of Arcadia, and there met Pan, who randomly promised to help the Athenians. He did it by spreading fear and terror among the Persian troops. Athens was victorious, and thanked Pan with a special cult in his honor. I can even talk of a last story that claims Pan helped Zeus during the Titanomachy! This legend claims that when the Titans attacked Olympus, Pan brought terror in their heart with his powerful voice, and either made them flee or frightened them enough that the Olympians could easily defeat them. As you can see, this legend is tied to the concept of the “older Pan” – not a Pan born out of Hermes or out of Zeus’ affairs, but a Pan either born out of Cronos, or born out of Amalthea, the same goat that nursed baby Zeus, thus making him the “foster brother” of Zeus…

So… A peaceful musician and good Samaritan, that is also a dreadful monster causing bursts of terror and irrational fears. A shameful son rejected by humanity, and yet the merry-maker of the gods. Beloved and repelled by the nymphs. One god and yet many characters. A hunter and a shepherd all at once: Pan is a god of contrasts and contradiction, a deity with an unusual loose canon in Greek mythology. His very name became a heavy subject of debate and reinterpretation.

Nowadays, experts at linguistics claim that “Pan” comes from an archaic Arcadian word that meant “nature”, “growth” or “rustic”, something along those lines, clearly identifying Pan as a rural god. But for most of the Greeks of the Classic era, “Pan” sounded too much like their own word “pan”, which meant “all”. So they found various stories to explain why the god was called “All” – ranging from him being the “son of all” fathered by a hundred men, to him being the “jester of all” by amusing all of the Olympian gods. [Note however that Pan was never depicted on Olympus, expect for this one birth story of his – he was usually depicted hanging out with nymphs and satyrs on earth, and the only gods he interacted with are earth-roaming gods like Dionysos or Demeter]. But with time, Greek philosophers decided to take “Pan” literally, and considered Pan to be the “god of all”, the spirit of the very universe, the all-encompassing world personified inside this entity uniting in himself all the opposite sides of nature. Charm and ugliness, peace and wrath, human and animal…

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Having reached this point in the post, I need to bring another piece of the puzzle into this whole Pan mystery… Aegipan. A name that literally means “Goat-Pan”, and yet can be so much more…

Aegipan is a character of Greek mythology of late origin. In terms of Greek stories, he is only described by “late” Greek authors. We first have him mentioned by Eratosthenes (Greek author of the 3rd to 2nd century BC) – there Aegipan is said to have been the father of Pan, and that he was actually half-goat and half-fish, “just like Pan his son”… So already we have a departure from the usual Pan depiction. Next Greek author on the list is Pseudo-Apollodorus, where in his Bibliotheca he talks of a legend according to which, when the monster Typhon stole Zeus’ sinews, Hermes and Aegipan teamed up to retrieve them – they stole there from the cave where Typhon had placed it, a grotto kept by a monster known as “Delphyne”, before giving them back to Zeus. We also got several Greek art pieces depicting Aegipan as a half-goat half-fish creature – the beast that would later become the Capricorn of the Zodiac. The other tales concerning Aegipan are all Roman in origin: Hyginus claims that Aegipan was a son of Zeus and a woman named Aega (though variations evoke Apollo as a father), and that somehow he was transferred into the stars (hence his position as the Capricorn constellation). Plutarch rather claimed that Aegipan was an alternate name or identity for the Roman god Silvanus – and that he was born out of an incestuous relationship between a daughter and her father… As for Pliny the Elder he did not consider the Aegipan a singular entity, but an entire species of satyr humanoid living in the wildlands of Libya… Overall people debated back then (and still do) about what Aegipan is. For some he was a satyr-like creature like Pan, for others he was like the Capricorn sign half goat half fish. For some he was distinct from Pan, either his son or father. For others Aegipan was just another name, or another form of Pan (there are various retelling of the Typhon’s myth where it is Pan that teams up with Hermes, and Aegipan is just treated as an epithet). Hyginus notably told of a legend claiming that Aegipan was merely the Egyptian form of Pan, that the god took when Typhon arrived in Greece – in fear, Pan fled by jumping into the Nile and turning into the “water goat” we know today. This is all very confusing. In fact the story about Pan being the “foster brother” of Zeus born out of Amalthea? It was originally Aegipan’s story. (But of course if Aegipan is Pan all along, then it was always Pan’s story…).

… And of course, I have to talk about the famous part with Pan’s legend. The “Pan is dead” story. The late, late Greek historian Plutarch told in one of his works of a legend according to which Pan was the “only god that died”. He said that under the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberus, a sailor heard during one of his travels a mysterious voice from the shores of the island of Praxi. The mysterious voice travelling above the waves called the sailor by his name, and told him to announce at his next stop that the “great god Pan is dead”. The sailor did, which thoroughly depressed everybody, and so the news spread of the “god Pan” being somehow dead. Plutarch wrote this story in a treaty entirely called “On the obsolescence of oracles” – which as you can guess it a treaty going against superstitions, outdated rituals and many un-philosophical aspects of religion. And as the Roman Empire became the first Christian empire, you can guess that Plutarch’s story was HEAVILY reused by the first Christians as a way to rejoice at the “death” of the old, pagan gods and falsely divine “demons”. As I want to point out, this story is not part of the Greek or Roman religious canon – it was a historical anecdote, from late Greece/full Roman times, that was taken back heavily by the early Christians, and then was heavily talked about, debated and reinterpreted by various authors of modernity, from Rabelais to Chesterton, passing by Robert Graves and John Milton.

“Commission Capricorn” © Gustavo Melo, accessed at his ArtStation here

[Aegipan is the being immortalized in the stars as Capricorn, although it appears to be a relatively late addition to the canon as separate from Pan himself. The art above doesn’t quite meet my intentions for the image, which was of an aqua-satyr. Image searches got me either completely non anthropomorphic goat-fish or sexy mermaids with horns. At least this version is weird and eerie on top of being sexualized (I hate mermaids that have a human ass sticking out above their tails)

Edit: I figured I’d look for a new piece of art when reblogging this as a rerun, since I wasn’t happy with the piece I was using before. This is much more what I initially had in mind.]

Aegipan CR 3 NG Fey Swimming through the water is a creature with the head and torso of a furred, goat-like humanoid and the scaled tail of a great fish. Although its features are brutish and long, the thing bears a kindly expression.

Wherever the shore and the sea meet, the native humanoids of those disparate domains come into conflict.  Aegipans are selfless fey creatures that devote their lives to defusing such rivalries, seeking to negotiate treaties and trade accords between aquatic humanoids and their land-lubbing counterparts. In so doing, they hope to minimize the exploitation of oceanic resources and stop unnecessary bloodshed.

In aquatic societies, aegipans typically travel undisguised, but they use their shapechanging abilities to take human form on land—in part to conceal their alien natures, and in part to gain the use of convenient legs. Other common aegipan activities include freeing bycatch from fishing nets, protecting beaches used as nesting sites by sea birds and turtles, and even saving swimmers from drowning. Many reports of friendly dolphins guiding lost sailors or helping a child fallen overboard are in fact due to aegipan intervention.

An aegipan grows seven feet long and weighs 200 pounds. Although they disparage violence, they fight fiercely against wicked men or to protect a beloved charge. Such is their devotion that an aegipan would gladly sacrifice its life to save a deserving soul.