A PRAYER TO PAN - THE PAGAN VIEW

The Renaissance alchemical writer Clovis Hesteau de Nuysemant described Orpheus' invocation of Pan:

Pan, the strong, the subtle, the whole, the universal;

All air, all water, all earth, and all immortal fire,

Thou who sittest upon the same throne with time,

In the lower, middle, and upper kingdom,

Conceiving, begetting, producing, guarding all;

First in all and of all, thou who comest to the end of all,

Seed of fire, of air, of earth, and of the waves,

Great spirit enlivening all the limbs of the world,

Who goest about from all to all changing natures,

Lodging as the universal soul within all bodies,

To which you give existence and movement and life,

Proving by a thousand effects thy infinite power.  [1]

 

OLYMPIAN - CHTHONIAN

Scott Scullion writes:

“Olympian and chthonian have been seen as coinciding with a rich variety of cosmic opposites: rich/poor, aristocratic/democratic, Indo European/indigenous, masculine/feminine, patriarchal/matriarchal, advanced/ primitive, rational/mystical, and so on.” [2]

 

 

Olympian            Chthonian

Apollo                  Dionysian

Prometheus        Orphic

Sky                       Earth

testosterone       oestrogen

rational                intuitive

conscious            unconscious

 

x

 The baby Pan is wrapped in rabbit skin and taken to Olympus to be shown to the Gods, where he is a great success.

 Pan, is the Child of Hermes . . . and protects Huntsmen . . . two hunters are murdered by the Captain . . . and the rabbits are cooked . . . the Baby Pan is wrapped in rabbit fleece . . . I think these details are part of Del Toro’s subtle manipulation of the material . . . and refreshing  the archetypes with his own creativity . .

    Secondly, we must recall that Garcia Frederico Lorca was murdered by the fascists in what would be similar circumstances . . . Lorca was a Poet totally dedicated to Dionysus -  and Pan . . . I will amplify this . . . Love Samten

 Nietzsche:

 “O Zarathustra, ... to those who think as we do, all things themselves are dancing: they come and offer their hands and laugh and flee-and come back. Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same house of being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.”  [3]

 


 “Greek myth placed Pan as God of nature. What is meant by that word ‘nature’ has been analysed into at least fifty different notions, so that our usage of ‘nature’ here must be discerned from the qualities associated with Pan,  with his description,  his appearance in imagery, his style of behaviour. All Gods had aspects of nature and could be found in nature, leading some to conclude that antique mythological religion was essentially a nature religion, the transcendence of which by Christianity, therefore, meant the suppression especially of the representative of nature, Pan, who soon became the goat-footed Devil.”

 Hillman, Pan. 


“From the vantage point of our own troubled age, in which monotheism has long laid the ghosts of paganism, idolatry, and polytheism, only to be threatened by the much more formidable enemy of materialistic atheism, we can permit ourselves to look back, no longer with scorn, but with sympathy, at the goddess who had her hour and whose motherly touch softened the human heart just about to open to greater things. “

 Raphael Patai, Ashera, p.52


[1] Bonnefoy, Yves (compiler), Roman and European Mythologies, tr. under dir. Wendy Doniger, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 216.]
[2] Scott Scullion, Olympian and Chthonian, Classical Antiquity, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Apr., 1994), P.76.
[3] The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann (New York, 1954), 329-30 (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "The Convalescent")., in: Robin Small, Nietzsche and a Platonist Tradition of the Cosmos: Center Everywhere and Circumference Nowhere, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1983), pp. 89-104.