#paul robichaud

Pan’s dramatic role in classical mythology is primarily that of a seducer of nymphs. As we’ve seen, many of the earliest artistic representations depict him with large testicles and a prominent phallus, so his connection with sexuality is an early one. Goats were regarded throughout the ancient world as exceptionally libidinous animals, so it is unsurprising that a god with a body that is half-goat was also thought to be lustful. The best-known myth of Pan is relatively late, and tells of his attempt to seduce the nymph Syrinx. It was included by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC–AD 17) in his Metamorphoses, a poetic retelling of classical mythology that has exerted enormous influence on Western culture. As Ovid tells it, Syrinx passed her days in Arcadia, where she followed the virgin goddess of the hunt, Diana (in Greek, Artemis), whom she resembled. Returning from Mount Lykaion, Pan saw her and was immediately smitten by her beauty. Although he begged her to yield to him, Syrinx refused, fleeing to the banks of the River Ladon with Pan in pursuit. Realizing that she would never escape a god, least of all one driven by sexual passion, she prayed to the nymphs of the river to be turned into a reed rather than submit to his desire. In the moment Pan grabbed hold of her, he found himself clutching a bunch of reeds. He sighed with grief and yearning, and the reeds made a haunting sound as his breath passed over them. Delighted with the notes, he bound the reeds with wax, promising Syrinx that they would always speak to each other in that way. And so Pan discovered the pipes that would forever accompany him, producing the strange and plaintive music for which he is known.

With the horns and legs of a goat but the torso of a man, Pan is a god whose very form confounds the distinction between animal and divine. From his earliest appearances in the written record, Pan has been imagined in ways that are often irreconcilable. Even the stories of his birth and parentage vary wildly. According to the Homeric hymn ‘To Pan’, which may date from as early as the fifth century BC, when the newborn Pan’s nurse first saw his goatish face, shaggy legs and cloven hooves she fled in terror, never to return. His father, Hermes, delighted by any sign of mischief, burst out laughing and picked up the strange child at once. He brought him straight to Mount Olympus, where the gods all shared in his mirth and welcomed Pan to their divine company, especially Dionysus. That is how he got his name, the hymn tells us, for the meaning of ‘pan’ is ‘all’.

Surveying Pan’s role in mythology, art, literature, music, spirituality and popular culture, it shows how portrayals of the god reveal shifting anxiety about our own animality and our relationship to the natural world, whether this is understood as the wilderness beyond civilization or the cosmos as a whole. Pan is a god who transgresses the boundaries between human and animal, refusing to abandon the wilderness for civilization. After lurking in the shadows during the later Renaissance and eighteenth century, Pan returns in the Romantic era as a potent symbol of our instinctual life and the otherness of natural forces that live through us. At times he is a dangerous power threatening the order of modern civilization; at others, he is a power of fertility and renewal offering a new hope for our relationship with nature.

The Greek god Pan emerges into the knowable past as a guardian of flocks and inducer of panic terror, combining the physical features of goat and man. Yet from these remote origins he comes to have a rich variety of identities that shift and change through the centuries: cosmic god of All; symbol of bestial lust; demon; protector of forests; cipher for Stuart monarchs; symbol of the latent powers in nature; terrifying god of the abyss; source of occult knowledge; symbol of gay love; guardian of wild animals; Horned God of the witches; ruler of nature spirits; archetype of the unconscious; and many more. If these irreconcilable interpretations of the god have anything in common, it is that they register a powerful sense of otherness in the face of the radically different or unknown. Whether divine or demonic, animal or royal, this recognition of profound difference suddenly transfiguring the ordinary persists in representations of Pan into the twenty-first century.