Nina Lyon

The Great God Pan is all things to all men

Paul Robichaud explores the goat-man of antiquity’s many forms, including a proto-Christ figure and a semi-female devil

Pan by E. Louis Lessieux. [Alamy]

Pan’s name is thought to derive from ‘paean’, the ancient Greek verb meaning ‘to pasture’. His half-man, half-goat form reflected his role in protecting flocks of goats and those who herded them among the wild hills of Arcadia. Panic was his superpower, freaking out mortals in the woods with distorted sounds, even neutralising hostile armies.

This might seem like an adequate portfolio of godly aspects, but, as Paul Robichaud demonstrates in Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return, it didn’t take long for things to get more complicated. The Homeric ‘Hymn to Pan’ had a slightly different story, which was that the strange goat-child, rejected by its earthly nurse, got taken in by all the gods instead, and they named him Pan, or ‘all’. In this accident of language, each of his name’s two meanings created a distinct version of who Pan was and what he stood for.

The Orphic cult saw the ‘all’ of Pan as the genesis of the four elements that made up the material world; the Stoics argued that his part-goat, part-human form reflected the domains of earth and reason. Pan’s meaning accordingly turned cosmic. The announcement of Pan’s death on a ship headed to Italy — news that prompted the emperor Tiberius to call for an inquiry —might have been a second linguistic accident, in which a ceremonial lament of the death of another god was mistaken homophonically for Pan’s.

The flexibility of meaning afforded by Pan’s multitude of identities would later enable him to be incorporated as a reimagined proto-Christ in Renaissance and Restoration culture. Pan died, and so did Christ; because Pan meant ‘all’, and Christ was the all, Pan was legit, and could exist in all his goat-headed glory. These theological gymnastics are all the more impressive for Pan’s persistent horniness, in all senses: the goat-horns on his head, his protuberant genitals and his distinctly problematic predatory tendencies towards maenads and, depending on who you believe, the Moon.

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