Soliloquy for Pan

by Beech, Mark

  Table of Contents

  – Endpaper –

  – Epigraph –

  – Title Page –

  – Copyright –

  A Magical Invocation of Pan [Dion Fortune]

  The Rebirthing of Pan [Adrian Eckersley]

  Panic [R.B. Russell]

  The Maze at Huntsmere [Reggie Oliver]

  The Secret Woods [Lynda E. Rucker]

  Faun and Flora: A Garden for the Goat-God Pan [Sheryl Humphrey]

  Pan With Us [Robert Frost]

  A Song Out of Reach [John Howard]

  Lithe Tenant [Stephen J. Clark]

  Pan [A. C. Benson]

  A New Pheidippioes [Henry Woodd Nevinson]

  Goskin Woods [Charles Schneider]

  Pan’s Pipes [Robert Louis Stevenson]

  The House of Pan [John Gale]

  The Company of the Lake [Jonathan Wood]

  The Role of Pan in Ritual, Magic & Poetry [Diane Champigny]

  Leaf-Foot, Petal-Mouth [Bethany van Rijswijk]

  The Rose-White Water [Colin Insole]

  The Death of Pan [Lord Dunsany]

  Meadow Saffron [Martin Jones]

  The Lady in the Yard [Rosanne Rabinowitz]

  An Old God Almost Dead: Pan in the 1940s [Nick Freeman]

  A Puzzling Affair [Ivar Campbell]

  South-West 13 [Nina Antonia]

  In Cypress Shades [Mark Valentine]

  Honey Moon [D.P. Watt]

  Summer Enchantment [Harry Fitzgerald]

  Louder than all trumpets sounds his voice alone, and at that sound fall helm and sword, the charioteer from his rocking car and bolts from gates of walls by night; nor might the helm of Mars and the tresses of the Furiai, nor the dismal Gorgon from on high spread such terror, nor with phantoms so dire sweep an army in headlong rout.

  – Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica (Cist A.D.)

  But frendly Faeries, met with many Graces,

  And lightfote Nymphes can chace the lingring night,

  With Heydeguyes, and trimly trodden traces,

  Whilst systers nyne, which dwell on Parnasse hight,

  Doe make them musick, for their more delight:

  And Pan himselfe to kisse their christall faces,

  Will pype and daunce, when Phoebe shineth bright:

  Such pierlesse pleasures haue we in these places.

  — Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (1579)

  “Pan again!” said Dr. Bull irritably. “You seem to think Pan is everything.”

  “So he is,” said the Professor, “in Greek. He means everything.”

  “Don’t forget,” said the Secretary, looking down, “that he also means Panic.”

  – G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

  I love this flute; it has given me a worthy voice. This melody plays out my world—the hard truth of a mother eagle with gaping mouths of nestlings to fill, and a mother nanny who unwittingly supplies the food. It calms me with inevitability. This is the way of my world. This is the way.

  – Donna Jo Napoli, The Great God Pan (2003)

  Edited by

  Mark Beech

  Egaeus Press

  MMXV

  Edited by Mark Beech

  Published by Egaeus Press, MMXV

  egaeuspress@gmail.com

  www.egaeuspress.com

  All written works are © their individual authors,

  or otherwise, in the case of reproduced work, are out of copyright or included herein with permission of the copyright holder.

  The title page features Ornament with Two Couples of Satyrs by Heinrich Aldegrever (1549).

  The endpapers reproduce Pan Reclining by Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1610).

  Reclaimed head and tail pieces and cover pattern by unknown/uncredited artists.

  ISBN 978-0-957160682

  A Magical Invocation of Pan

  Dion Fortune (c. 1936)

  I am She who ere the earth was formed

  Rose from the sea

  O First begotten Love come unto me

  And let the worlds be formed of me and thee

  Giver of vine and wine and ecstasy,

  God of the garden, shepherd of the lea—

  Bringer of fear who maketh men to flee,

  I am thy priestess answer unto me!

  Lo, I receive thy gifts thou bringest me—

  Life, and more life, in fullest ecstasy.

  I am the moon, the moon that draweth thee.

  I am the waiting earth that needeth thee.

  Come unto me great Pan, come unto me!

  From The Goat-Foot God.

  The Rebirthing of Pan

  Adrian Eckersley

  One of the best tricks of the gods is to die and be reborn. In most distant times this was a trick performed by gods connected with fertility, like Egyptian Osiris or Mesopotamian Adonis—but Christ could do it too. It was typically a trick performed in a short timespan: the old fertility gods died and were reborn with the turning of the seasons, Christ in a mere three days. The old gods of the Greeks were less fond of rebirthing, many simply passing away with the end of the classical world—but a claim can be made for Pan. However, Pan took a very long time to be reborn, staying dead for thirteen centuries.

  The death of the Graeco-Roman goat-god, spirit of lust and lonely places was, according to the historian Plutarch, announced one night during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, to a sea captain moored off the island of Paxos. The sailor, Thamus, heard a voice crying from the dense olive groves that lined the shore, telling him to pass on the news that “Great Pan is dead”—Ho megas Pan tethneke. Thamus did what he was told: the news was taken seriously enough to reach the ears of Tiberius himself.

  It’s bewildering to wonder what this piece of news might have meant to its first hearers. Was the passing of Pan to be connected with the end of an ancient rustic simplicity, as the Roman Empire, like our own home places today, became relentlessly urbanised? We can be sure that news of Pan’s death will have saddened some but gladdened others, early Christians among them. Pagans might generously have been prepared to make room for one more god, and to have welcomed among others the cult of Jesus; but Christianity’s intransigent insistence that there was only one god—their one—automatically ruled out all Olympians.

  Christianity conquered Rome and, when Rome fell, Christianity showed its enormous staying power by rising again to conquer the barbarian victors. It is often argued nowadays that during the ensuing Christian middle ages paganism survived secretly, lurking beneath bland Christianity to emerge triumphantly into the daylight in the more tolerant era of the renaissance. Many today for example believe that the persecution of witches in the seventeenth century was a last, ferocious attempt to extirpate paganism—‘the old religion’—once and for all. Pan, it is thought, has a part in this secret paganism, for he represents sexuality, drunkenness, lust, all matters given much respect in the ancient world but declared against by Christianity.

  It is also widely believed that the most familiar visual form of the Christians’ devil, with horns and goat legs, must have owed a lot to Pan; and this is true, but it didn’t happen in the middle ages; the identification of the devil with Pan happened far more recently. There are plenty of paintings and other visual representations of the devil surviving from medieval times across the whole of Europe; but beyond the occasional pair of horns, none of them looks remotely like Pan[1]. Conversely, the Pan who began to be depicted in renaissance visions of ancient classical Arcadia is often an almost innocent, bucolic figure: he looks nothing like the devil. So the evidence suggests that Pan really did die in Roman times, which means in turn that he really was reborn in early modern, renaissance Europe. How did this happen?

  Especially in
renaissance Italy, painters, poets and political leaders became interested in the civilisation of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the more liberal values they had lived by; and this included a revival of interest in paganism. Of course that doesn’t mean that the Olympian gods and goddesses were actually worshipped: it was really that in an increasingly tolerant world their images were entertained. They and the old beliefs that sustained them were imagined, their implications thought through, wondered at and about, and savoured. In this sort of way, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Olympians: Jupiter and Juno, Diana and Apollo, revisited the European imagination as honoured guests. And Pan.

  Pan didn’t start ahead of the rest. Being half-goat, as much animal as god, he wasn’t a particularly splendid Olympian. On the other hand he did have something like pole position in the most important collection of tales and myths to come down from ancient Rome to renaissance Europe: the Metamorphoses written by Ovid, wittiest and wildest of all the ancient Roman poets. As the great transformation of the renaissance gathered force, this ancient book was rediscovered and translated into all the European languages, to become a star text for the new, rising phenomenon of private readers. Its theme is every kind of transformation—mythological, geological, even actual. Ovid’s main story about Pan concerns a river-spirit, a naiad named Syrinx, who is transformed into a reed. At first we are invited to understand her as a very beautiful girl. She is not quite a goddess herself but, like the pagan moon-goddess, Diana-Artemis, she is into hunting, and again like the goddess her chastity is all important to her—after all, it’s her only guarantee of freedom from motherhood and dependence on men. Seeing her returning from the hunt one day, Pan is strongly attracted to her. He speaks civilly to her, but when she runs away he betrays his true nature by giving chase. Her escape is barred by a river, and Pan is about to seize her—but in that moment she prays to the river spirits to transform her, and they do: Pan reaches out and clutches not a girl but a bunch of reeds. He is perplexed. His sighs of disappointment are echoed by the wind playing a strange music across these reeds; he is charmed by their eerie sound world and goes on to make the first ever set of pan-pipes—known to the world as a syrinx! Pan doesn’t emerge as a particularly splendid god from this tale, outwitted by a bunch of mere river spirits; however, through his childlike attraction to the reed sound, leading to the melancholy consolation of his musicmaking, Pan becomes himself something of an emblem for the figure of the artist—as Ovid suggests when the reed sounds echoes his sighs. He has transmuted his disappointment into art.

  So, through the contagious imaginations of Ovid, Pan made his first return not as a deity, nourished by the belief and worship of a people, but as little more than a divine entity in the realm of story, a shadowy place where all sorts of characters are honoured merely by the willing suspension of disbelief.

  In the sixteenth century, Ovid’s work became enormously popular, not just as reading matter but as inspirational material for further writing, and painting. So we catch an early glimpse of the risen god Pan, as a splendid, princely human, in Luca Signorelli’s The Court of Pan, of about 1484. But it was in the seventeenth century, particularly among European painters, that Pan first began to outpace his Olympian rivals. Some of the baroque age’s most important painters—Rubens, Poussin, Jordaens—particularly liked to paint Pan. Their paintings about Pan were about sex, and they used the figure of Pan to explore the farther reaches of a wilder sexuality, beyond the boundaries of their familiar world. Most often Pan is portrayed in full-blooded pursuit of Syrinx, and an act of rape. All the above painters close in on the moment when Pan reaches out for the girl and gets hold of reeds instead. The sensual possibilities of the scene are not excluded; the girl is painted as enticingly voluptuous by the standards of the time, and available in fantasy to the viewer too. Another common factor in these paintings is that Pan’s power is available to the spectator, his back a river of muscle, his face often a grimace of unashamed and unmitigated if baffled lust: Pan, god of rape—and rape itself a matter of some interest to the rule-bound, patriarchal ethos of the time.

  Some today will want to see little more than an appeal to the pornographic in this group of paintings; but we should be in no doubt that whatever political incorrectness some today may attribute to the subject matter, this is art, not porn. We can see something of the complexity of the theme’s treatment in Rubens’s Pan and Syrinx, (1617-9)[2] which, like any good painting, raises as many questions as it answers. First: how brutal or bestial is this vision of the god? Though the girl has not yet been transformed, there is already some puzzlement in him: he is clearly at the end of his chase, yet there is no strong sense of forward movement. There is something warily beseeching rather than threatening in his pose; he is still obviously making eye contact with his victim, still hoping that her flight is all part of an elaborate ritual game, still prepared to try and play the gentleman despite the threatening meatiness of his arms and thighs. There is a class barrier between them: Pan is tanned like a field worker, while Syrinx has the fine pinky-white skin of a lady who lives indoors—and he seems cowed by her radiance. We are certainly not invited to enjoy any sense of triumph or conquest.

  And how frightened is the girl? Her expression does not seem very frightened; despite the modest gesture of her right hand, the left might even be seeking his, and the very shape of the left side of her body echoes the right side of his in a complementary way, suggesting the naturalness of his enterprise. Part of this vision of Pan is the god’s simplicity: he is a child in a man’s body, his desire as transparent as King Kong’s for Fay Wray. There is even some incongruity in his meaty grasp of her diaphanous, gauzy robe; he has been distracted by this frippery as a child might be. We, though not he, are prepared for his disappointment and can savour something of its desolation in the empty, marshy tract of land leading to the river on the right of the painting.

  The painting asks questions still resonant to us today: are we creatures, fundamentally, of nature or of civilisation? If the answer comes back as it must that we are of both, then how do we address the kind of ambivalent standards of feeling and conduct which this double being imposes upon us? Are men and women complementary in the desires each may raise in the other, or is there a perpetual estrangement, even enmity? Pan is far more here than a presider over rustic revels, and this may be no accident: the special quality of this god, in contrast with other Olympians, is that he is both deity and animal, above us and below us, perfectly poised for us to project on him the complexities and delusions our human natures place upon us.

  So Pan began to triumph because he allowed humans to explore their darker side.

  By the end of the eighteenth century, with the rise of science and a culture across Europe more firmly based on reason, we might have expected things to be going badly for Pan as for other Olympians. The old gods remained familiar figures during the Enlightenment, but the tendency in poetry and painting was to use them in an allegorical way, as symbols representing abstract qualities: so Jupiter may represent authority, or Diana chastity. Pan did not do too badly out of this process. He was connected with nature—not only the nature external to us, of woods, fields and mountains, but of nature within. When the intuition arose that human nature overlaps in any way with animal, creatural nature, then Pan was the appropriate symbol.

  At the end of the eighteenth century Pan got lucky again, this time because of his name. This had been originally derived from the Greek word paein, to herd, appropriate to a herdsman-god. But Greek speakers could, and did, from very early on, confuse his name creatively with another familiar word: pan—which means All, as we still use today in coinages like panAfrican or pandemic.

  In the years around 1800, in Britain, the rising Romantic generation were in search of a new kind of deity. They were tired of the familiar Christian god, who had no sense of wonder for them. His god-nature might have been revealed miraculously to others, long ago, but in their own age when science and industry
were already conditioning and determining how the world was experienced, god’s nature was rarely if ever revealed directly, for example through miracle or vision. The Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge first among them, went in search of a sense of wonder that would renew the world; and they found this most intensely when they contemplated the power and grandeur of nature. Their feeling was that they came closest to god in the sense of awe and wonder which wild nature gave them. Worship of nature spirits was of course nothing new: it was what the Greeks and Romans had done, and among those worshipped was Pan. However, in those troubled, French-revolutionary times, the way was simply not open for the poets to embrace paganism, with its local spirits, and its minor deity in every tree or river. Their concept of deity was moving beyond their Christian past, but was also profoundly conditioned by it: hence they rejected the very possibility of polytheism. They insisted that god was one, that god was Nature, that god was Allnature—one great ‘Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe’, as Wordsworth put it. They called their new creed pantheism—by which they implied that they found All god in All nature. By insisting on the oneness of the universal spirit they were specifically denying that they were pagans, who worshipped many spirits.

  In his poetry, Wordsworth mentioned the god Pan from time to time, as a rustic spirit, but there was no overlap with pantheism. When the awe and wonder they felt in the face of nature was at stake, they did not mention him—and so pantheism had nothing to do with Pan. However, names are slippery things, and in a world where middle and upper class males received a classical education, the god whose name was Pan could only benefit in the long run. The essential connection that began to be made as time moved on was that Pan became the inheritor and representative of the sense of the power of wild nature. The god named Pan had been much too gruntily creatural for Wordsworth’s idealising of nature, so for him the pan in pantheism had nothing of the god. But as time moved on younger generations made the same connections with awe and wonder, and did not exclude Pan from the loop.