Great Pan Is Not Dead



According to Plutarch "Great Pan is Dead!" are the words uttered in a loud voice (sometimes called a "divine voice") heard by the sailor Thamus on his way--by boat one would assume--to Italy while travelling there during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.  The extremely fat and inordinately glib Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton, who could be a witty fellow though over-fond of quips, thought Pan to be the only pagan god said to have died, and thought his death somehow connected with the death, or perhaps the birth, of Jesus.

I'm not sure if it mattered all that much for Chesterton's purposes, but I suspect the birth of Jesus somehow precipitated the death of Pan.  I think a case can be made that it did, though it took quite some time to do Pan in.  This had something to do with the birth of theology, according to Chesterton.

Others, such as Robert Graves, thought the story the result of some confusion, and believed the great shout had been mistranslated over time or mistold.  He believed there was no Thamus, but there was a Tammuz, another pagan god who died and whose death was remembered through a ritual which was being performed and was overheard by...someone.

It does seem jolly old Chesterton was mistaken about pagan gods and their birth or death, for various of them did die or their consorts did, and it was their death and resurrection which became the subject of the mystery religions such as that of Mithras, and Isis, and the Great Mother.

Pan was the god of nature, of wild nature that is; but also of shepherds and flocks, and music through the rustic flute.  He's often confused with satyrs, due to the fact that he had the horns, hoofs and hindquarters of a goat.  And it must be said he was inclined to physical pleasures as well, which of course rendered him abhorrent to many Christians.  As a nature god he wasn't worshipped in temples but in caves or wooded groves.  He was born in Arcadia.  His Roman counterpart was Faunus.

But if he died so long ago, he seems to keep coming back, Chesterton and, perhaps, Jesus notwithstanding.  He came back during the Renaissance, as did so much else pagan in spirit.  He was a favorite of the 19th century Romantics, and is even now worshipped by neo-pagans.  He is part of the great inheritance of Western culture that is pagan antiquity, and like it will not die much as some wish it would, who are blithely ignorant of the debt owed to it even, and perhaps especially, by Christianity. 

I know little of Wiccan or neo-paganism generally.  I'm not inclined to engage in rituals or ceremonies which are meant to revive or mimic ancient religious worship.  Nor am I inclined to worship any of the old gods.  But I am pleased that there seems to be a revival in respect for and reverence towards nature--by which I mean the physical world, the universe.  We've believed ourselves to be nature's master for far too long, and are paying the price of the monstrous credo we've accepted here in the West; that we like the God of the Abrahamic religions are apart from nature rather than a part of it.  We will pay more for our self-regard. 

Stoicism also keeps coming back, as the modern resurgence of that philosophy makes clear.  But it's always been around in one sense or another, and it's injunction to "live according to nature" is one that will be accepted it's to be hoped.  It may have to be accepted if we're to survive.

But if I were to worship any of the old gods, I think Pan would be one of them, along with Apollo and Hermes, the one the god of reason, the other the bright intelligence of the universe.  And Pan the god of the physical nature of all living things.

Angry Gods

The man we know as Lucius Apuleius wrote the only entire Latin novel to survive the fall of the ancient word, The Golden Ass also known as the Metamorphoses (the Satyricon of Petronius has come to us with sections missing).  It is perhaps the first picaresque novel, its hero suffering through all kinds of discomforts at the hands of many, both as a human and while transformed into an ass. 

At the end of the novel, however, there is a seemingly very serious and interesting description of ceremonial in the worship of Isis and her consort, Osiris, as that goddess was worshipped in Roman times.  Apuleius is initiated into the mysteries of Isis, the Queen of Heaven, Regina Caeli.  Also included in the novel is a description of ecstatic dancing and blood-letting (flagellation) by eunuchs in the worship of what is referred to as "the Syrian goddess."  I assume that is Cybele, given the role played by eunuchs in her worship.

Older Catholics like me will find the title Regina Caeli familiar as one given to the Virgin Mary, which could be heard in a hymn to her sung back in the old days of the Latin mass and Novenas.  As for flagellation, and even ecstatic dancing, Christianity has had its proponents of both.  These are reminders of the debt (if one can call it that) owed by Christianity to the ancient pagan past.

But there is one sense at least in which Christianity differs from the religion of the ancient pagans (amusingly called Gentiles by Christians).  It isn't monotheism either, assuming "monotheism" is properly used to describe the three gods in one said to be the Christian God.  There were monotheists among the pagans, or at least those who could claim to be monotheists as appropriately as could Christians of the time.  It is instead Christianity's pretension to being the only true religion, the one path to heaven, the sole truth; that is to say its exclusivity, and its often violent intolerance of that which is not Christian. 

Christianity isn't alone in this remarkable conceit of course.  So are the other major religions said to derive from Abraham, Judaism and Islam, which have been equally exclusive, equally intolerant.  Their gods are angry, jealous gods; we are sinners in their hands, though some sinners are worse than others.  I know little of the religions of the East, but it seems to me that they have at least been less intolerant than those of the West.

The pagan religions from which Christianity borrowed so much had no such pretensions in the sense that they were generally not exclusive and not intolerant.  One could, and did, worship many gods.  One could be admitted to the mysteries of Isis and those of Mithras.  Admission to the Eleusinian mysteries was open to all, after they ceased being purely local; several emperors were initiates.

Religion was essential to Greco-Roman society; there were temples everywhere, rituals were to be performed with great frequency.  The worship of some gods or goddesses was considered silly or barbaric or contrary to social order from time to time.  Christianity was indeed thought to be anti-social and was persecuted because its followers refused to participate in the ceremonies believed to be essential to the welfare of the Roman state and its people.  However there was no insistence that only one god should be worshipped, no claims that worshipping other gods was evil, no crusades as in Christianity, no religious conquests as took place as was the case in Islam and Christianity, no Inquisitions.

It's interesting to consider just how it came about that the Abrahamic religions became exclusive and intolerant.  If it wasn't the influence of pagan religion, what could it be?  Judaism was certainly exclusive and intolerant, and there was a long tradition that Jews alone were the favorites of the one God.  There were occassions as in Alexandria where fights would break out between Jews and pagans--riots, really.  There was frequent tension, but nothing quite like the virtual warfare with pagans and heretics resulting from the triumph of Christianity and later Islam.  Perhaps the Jews' belief in their own sanctity and righteousness didn't result in the extermination of other religions and beliefs and those who followed or held them on a larger scale because they never obtained political and military power as did Christianity and Islam. 

It's likely that such intolerance derives from the belief not just in a single God but in a single truth, a single way of living that is the only way.  We see the same intolerance in Nazism, fascism, Stalinism, Maoism.  This intolerance seems to be associated with a figure divine or semi-divine who issues commandments to be followed or interprets those given by some other figure.

Sheep and Shepard seems an all too accurate analogy for humans and our relationship to power of all kinds.  But it's curious that this kind of religious absolutism didn't develop during the time of polytheism.  There was political absolutism enough in the Roman Empire, of course, but the emperors didn't begin to demand the closing of the temples and the schools of philosophy and the acceptance of a particular version of Christianity until the reign of Theodosius (he also banned the Olympic games).

An all-powerful, all-knowing god who is jealous, demanding and angry.  What does this reveal about those who worship such a being and were induced to do so at the end of antiquity, and the state of the culture and society which saw the triumph of such a religion?