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Pan’s Nature And Deeds

Pan
SEVERAL powerful gods and goddesses of Greece have never been enrolled among the Olympian Twelve. Pan, for instance, a humble fellow, now dead, was content to live on earth in rural Arcadia; and Hades, Persephone, and Hecate know that their presence is unwelcome on Olympus; and Mother Earth is far too old and set in her ways to accommodate herself to the family life of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
b. Some say that Hermes fathered Pan on Dryope, daughter of Dryops; or on the nymph Oeneis; or on Penelope, wife of Odysseus, whom he visited in the form of a ram; or on Amaltheia the Goat; He is said to have been so ugly at birth, with horns, beard, tail, and goat legs, that his mother ran away from him in fear, and Hermes carried him up to Olympus for the gods’ amusement. But Pan was Zeus’s foster-brother, and therefore far older than Hermes, or than Penelope, on whom (others say) he was fathered by all the suitors who wooed her during Odysseus’s absence. Still others make him the son of Cronus and Rhea; or of Zeus by Hybris, which is the least improbable account.
c. He lived in Arcadia, where he guarded flocks, herds, and beehives, took part in the revels of the mountain-nymphs, and helped hunters to find their quarry. He was, on the whole, easy-going and lazy, loving nothing better than his afternoon sleep, and revenged himself on those who disturbed him with a sudden loud shout from a grove, or grotto, which made the hair bristle on their heads. Yet the Arcadians paid him so little respect that, if ever they returned empty-handed after a long day’s hunting, they dared scourge him with squills.
d. Pan seduced several nymphs, such as Echo, who bore him Iynx and came to an unlucky end for love of Narcissus; and Eupheme, nurse of the Muses, who bore him Crotus, the Bowman in the Zodiac. He also boasted that he had coupled with all Dionysus’s drunken Maenads.
e. Once he tried to violate the chaste Pitys, who escaped him only by being metamorphosed into a fir-tree, a branch of which he afterwards wore as a chaplet. On another occasion he pursued the chaste Syrinx from Mount Lycaeum to the River Ladon, where she became a reed; there, since he could not distinguish her from among all the rest, he cut several reeds at random, and made them into a Panopipe. His greatest success in love was the seduction of Selene, which he accomplished by disguising his hairy black goatishness with well-washed white fleeces. Not realizing who he was, Selene consented to ride on his back, and let him do as he pleased with her.
f. The Olympian gods, while despising Pan for his simplicity and love of riot, exploited his powers. Apollo wheedled die art of prophecy from him, and Hermes copied a pipe which he had let fall, claimed it as his own invention, and sold it to Apollo.
g. Pan is the only god who has died in our time. The news of his death came to one Thamus, a sailor in a ship bound for Italy by way of the island of Paxi. A divine voice shouted across the sea: ‘Thamus, are you there? When you reach Palodes, take care to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead!’, which Thamus did; and the news was greeted from the shore with groans and laments.
1. Pan, whose name is usually derived from paein, ‘to pasture’, stands for the ‘devil’, or ‘upright man’, of the Arcadian fertility cult, which closely resembled the witch cult of North- western Europe. This man, dressed in a goat-skin, was the chosen lover of the Maenads  during their drunken orgies on the high mountains, and sooner or later paid for his privilege with death.
2. The accounts of Pan’s birth vary greatly. Since Hermes was the power resident in a phallic stone which formed the centre of these orgies, the shepherds described their god Pan  as his son by a woodpecker, a bird whose tapping is held to portend the welcome summer rain. The myth that he fathered Pan on Oeneis is self-explanatory, though the original Maenads used other intoxicants than wine; and the name of his reputed mother, Penelope (‘with a web over her face’), suggests that the Maenads wore some form of war paint for their orgies, recalling the stripes on the penelope, a variety of duck. Plutarch says that the Maenads who killed Orpheus were tattooed by their husbands as a punishment; and a Maenad whose legs and arms are tattooed with a webbed pattern appears on a vase at the British Museum. Hermes’s visit to Penelope in the form of a ram-the ram devil is as common in the North- western witch cult as the goat-her impregnation by all the suitors, and the claim that Pan had coupled with every one of the Maenads refers to the promiscuous nature of the revels in honour of the Fir-goddess Pitys or Elate. The Arcadian mountaineers were the most primitive in Greece, and their more civilized neighbours professed to despise them.
3. Pan’s son, the wryneck, or make-bird, was a spring migrant employed in erotic charms. Squills contain an irritant poison-valuable against mice and rats-and were used as a purge and diuretic before taking part in a ritual act; thus squill came to symbolize the removal of evil influences (Pliny: Natural History), and Pan’s image was scourged with squill if game were scarce.
4. His seduction of Selene must refer to a moonlight May Eve orgy, in which the young Queen of the May rode upon her upright man’s back before celebrating a greenwood marriage with him. By this time the ram cult had superseded the goat cult in Arcadia.
.5. The Egyptian Thamus apparently misheard the ceremonial lament “Thamus Pan-megas Tethnece!” (‘the all-great Tammuz is dead!’) for the message: ‘Thamus, Great Pan is dead”. At any rate, Plutarch, a priest at Delphi in the latter half of the first century AD, believed and published it; yet when Pausanias made his tour of Greece, about a century later, he found Pan’s shrines, altars, sacred caves, and sacred mountains still much frequented.
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