The Great God Pan is Dead

“The Great God Pan is dead” …. These are the words that Thamus, the Egyptian sailor, proclaimed to the world, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Tiberius. 

Pan With Nymphs In Arcadia

 

..... Thamus was told the news by a divine voice, that wafted across the Aegean on an evening zephyr, blowing from the west one hot summer night, and that lamented the passing of "The Old God".

 

Pan dead? He who had been the saviour of mighty Athens in ages past, when he told Pheidippides that Athens needed to honour him, if they wanted his help and victory against their Persian enemies, and who had been worshipped on the Acropolis ever since ... dead? Pan the warrior god, who stood in the Athenian Phalanx at Marathon and led the war chants, dead?

Legend has it that mad Emperor Tiberius wept for the only time when he heard the news ….. but that is only legend. No, the truth is that of all the gods extant in the world when the Christ God was born, only Pan the first born, saw the future, and took steps to save himself.

For when all the classical old gods were abolished by the imperial diktat of Theodosius I on February the 27th, 390 AD, the Great God’s name was not on the list because he was already dead, everyone knew that, for hadn’t it been declared so three centuries earlier? A Christian then proclaimed "Paganism, with Theodosius dies, never to rise again".

But this was a slow death, and not all the gods died at once, for 'Old Gods' die very slowly. And a last defence and final act of defiance was in Caria in 484 AD, when a champion of the old ways, Illus, raised the Pagan standard against the Christian Emperor Zeno. Pan was there with his brothers, but four years later Illus and his “Pagan Emperor” Leontius, were executed in the Taurus mountains, and the Great God retreated back to the old places.

With this final defeat, the other Greek and Roman Gods finally left this world forever, to enter those realms that only the old gods can ever see, for has it not been written that “all things will pass!” Like them, these new gods (Jehovah and Allah) will one day leave the Earth, just as surely as the old ones have done, leaving behind just the primal one, the first born, to eventually reclaim his first kingdom.

His worshippers, the folk of the mountains and the dark places, the country folk, they have always known who was the first and true God, and they kept that in their hearts as they said their pater noster under the stern gaze of the new priests, and at the very same alters that they had once used for worshipping the old gods.

Pan knew that there were few pagans prepared to die to protect the old gods, but he had never asked for this sacrifice from his followers, and never would. The people, the country people, they knew this, and they moved the old shrines into the groves of Arcadia and those other forgotten places. Hid them from the violent imams of the other new god, awaiting the day when Pan could return to the open and reclaim his premier place in the pantheon.

The arrival of the new pagans was a brief period of revival and reinvention, for who could deny Pan his ability to reinvent himself?

He lived in the forests of Germany, and rode with the Goths as they swept away the 'Roman' God from Gaul. He was in the Saxon ships that crushed the 'Roman' God in the isle of the Britons, and he was with the Golden Hordes that swept across half of Asia and called his name as a war cry.

The Viking long ships rode the oceans with his name never far away, but it was ne'er enough, and these gains were all ephemeral, but still he survives in those dark places that even in their pomp, the new gods could never reach.

He who had been the goat god of the 'pa-on’s', and who had once been called 'Phanes' the first born. He whose first image had been with man the hunter who worshipped the lion, and whose name ‘Cerne the Sorcerer’ had long echoed through the hills of Europe and Asia, and whose cave shrine at Trois-Frères was carved 13,000 years before the appearance of any of the others.

He who was wandering the world long before the Krishna arrived, or the 'Roman' Christ God was born, long before the first fields had ever been planted and the first city stone laid, and long before the arrogant Greeks and their poet Homer had 'named' all the Gods, and written the ‘Hymn to the Great God Pan’, placing their new God Zeus above all others.

For 15,000 years his names have been legion across those millenia, "Attes, Tammuz, Nin-Girsu, Aigipan, Agrus, Baphomet, Pan, Nomios, Phaunos, Faunus, Anshar, Pashupati, Cernunnos, Lupercal, Dionysus, Azazel, Sylvanus, Cerne, Herla, Hackel, Herne, Puck, Leshi, Herlechin, Herlequin, Yang Ching, Capri, Capricorn, Harlequin, Hellequin, Hillikin, Herla, Berchtold, Berholt, Berndietrich", and in latter times "Robin Goodfellow" or the "Green Man".

He still leads the ‘Wild Hunt’ through the forests of the night, and has been sighted many times across the centuries, by those travelling through the lonely places. He is not of the harsh bright deserts which bred the new gods in their emptiness, he is only of the northern bogs and forests, where both he and the world were first born.

We still remember this when we cross those lonely heaths, or walk through the forests at twilight. So while we may cross ourselves to the new god, we still leave a thought for the oldest one, he who still causes Panic in the lonely places, and occasionally Pandemonium in the crowded ones.

The kourbània sacrifice is still practised secretly in his name in Greece, but passed off as a blood sacrifice in honour of a 'saint', who was once a "protector of the woods and the fields", but whose feast day has long been abandoned by the followers of the 'Roman' Christ God.

As the powers of the new god Jehovah, or his rival Allah, eventually retreat on the tides of time, the oldest of them all will still be there, in the darkness, waiting to reclaim the world that is left. The world after the decline, when technology has gone and the cities have fallen. The world of man that is nearer to the end, than it is to the beginning.

As it was at the beginning, so it shall be at the end .... Pan the Great God Lives.

Pan Often Took An Earthier Form For Worship

Homers Hymn to the Great God.

Muse, tell me about Pan,

the dear son of Hermes,

with his goat's feet and two horns –
a lover of merry noise.

Through wooded glades he wanders with dancing nymphs
who foot it on some sheer cliff's edge,
calling upon Pan,
the shepherd-god, long-haired, unkempt.
He has every snowy crest and the mountain peaks
and rocky crests for his domain;
hither and thither he goes through the close thickets,
now lured by soft streams,
and now he presses on amongst towering crags
and climbs up to the highest peak
that overlooks the flocks.

Often he courses through the glistening high mountains,
and often on the shouldered hills
he speeds along slaying wild beasts,

this keen-eyed god.

Only at evening, as he returns from the chase,
he sounds his note, playing sweet

and low on his pipes of reed:
not even she could excel him in melody –
that bird who in flower-laden spring,

pouring forth her lament
utters honey-voiced song amid the leaves.

At that hour the clear-voiced nymphs are with him
and move with nimble feet,
singing by some spring of dark water,
while Echo wails about the mountain-top,
and the god on this side
or on that of the choirs, or
at times sidling into the midst, plies it nimbly with his feet.

On his back he wears a spotted lynx-pelt,
and he delights in high-pitched songs

in a soft meadow where crocuses
and sweet-smelling hyacinths bloom at random in the grass.

They sing of the blessed gods and high Olympus
and choose to tell of such an one as
luck-bringing Hermes above the rest,
how he is the swift messenger of all the gods,
and how he came to Arcadia,
the land of many springs and mother of flocks,
there where his sacred place is as god of Cyllene.

For there, though a god,
he used to tend curly-fleeced sheep
in the service of a mortal man,
because there fell on him
and waxed strong melting desire to wed
the rich-tressed daughter of Dryops,
and there he brought about the merry marriage.

And in the house she bare Hermes
a dear son who from his birth was marvellous to look upon,
with goat's feet and two horns --
a noisy, merry-laughing child.
But when the nurse saw his uncouth face and full beard,
she was afraid
and sprang up and fled and left the child.

Then luck-bringing Hermes received him
and took him in his arms:
very glad in his heart was the god.
And he went quickly to the abodes of the deathless gods,
carrying his son wrapped in warm skins of mountain hares,
and set him down beside Zeus
and showed him to the rest of the gods.
Then all the immortals were glad in heart
and Bacchic Dionysus in especial;
and they called the boy Pan
because he delighted all their hearts.

And so hail to you, lord!
I seek your favour with a song.

And now I will remember you
and another song also.

Pan Reinvented In Literature