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 |
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“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.”
“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. “