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.
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