Information About Aleister Crowley and Pan
THE GREAT GOD PAN
Both Satanists and Wiccan witches
adore and worship the Pagan god,
Pan, the world's most infamous sex predator! Pan is the
embodiment of Rock 'N' Roll music!
Heavy Metal
rocker and known Satanist,
Ozzy
Osbourne, has featured Pan on all of his recent album covers (2000,
2001,
2002,
2003,
2004,
2005,
2006,
2007,
2008).
Ozzy is bound
for Hell. The Rock 'N' Roll industry is
infamous for worshipping Pan,
who is the very embodiment of Rock music. Pan represents Satan,
which is what the ever-so-popular
Satanic hand sign
(more
signs) shows, allegiance to the Beast, the coming Antichrist.
By Anthony Roe
Published at Beltane 1999
As a schoolboy looking through the pages of Picture Post, I remember
being curious about the reproductions of paintings from the walls of
Aleister Crowley's Abbey in Sicily, uncovered by the underground filmmaker
Kenneth Anger, who produced the Crowley inspired Pleasure Dome.
There was one picture taken in the Chamber of
Nightmares, with the sexologist Kinsey strategically posed in the
foreground. The picture of a goat was evident. In my youth I did not
recognise Pan, the son of Hermes, the Arcadian god of lust and magic who
seduces men and women with his pipes and wantonness, the symbol of the
libido in its sexual aspect, vagrant male sexuality, the personification of
undisciplined procreation in nature, But the image remained with me, and I
subsequently learnt that the herdsmen of ancient Greece adored Pan, and
discovered the magick in connection with him.
Looking at such gods of the simpler Greek
communities, we find them often vague in their nature and sometimes limited
in their functions to a far greater degree than the better-known deities. It
is noteworthy that some at least of Pan's worshippers were none too certain
whether he was one or many; at all events, Aristophanes and Plato, to say
nothing of later authors, have heard of the plural, Panes. But this is
exactly what, under the circumstances, we should expect, and indeed find in
several like cases. It is probable on the whole that his name means the
Feeder or Pasturer. We can easily imagine that in Arcadia, where he was
originally worshipped, many little groups of herdsmen devoutly adored each
its divine Pasture, perhaps represented by some stick or stone set up in a
holy place, and quite possibly each group was ready to proclaim the
superiority of its own Pan to everyone else's. This might well be so,
whether the god had originally been conceived as a single being or a
plurality, for local cults tend to break up in this way. Nothing can be more
certain than that the Virgin Mary is one person in every kind of Christian
theology, and no cult is more widespread in modern Greece than hers; but I
have heard of a Chian peasant who proclaimed in emphatic and not
over-delicate language that the Panaghia (the All-Holy One, her popular name
) of his village church could out do all other Panaghies whomsoever.
The same divine Pasturer was never a very
exalted figure, nor always treated with profound respect, or what we should
regard as such, even by those who worshipped him in all sincerity. His
business (a god has his duties; even Zeus is commended for 'doing well' when
he sends seasonable rain) was to keep his herdsmen-worshippers well supplied
with meat. The obvious way to do this was to make their flocks and herds
increase abundantly, and theirs were mostly small cattle, sheep and goats,
especially, it would seem, the latter. Now the obvious increaser of a herd
of goats is the he-goat, and a divine he-goat is essentially what Pan was
supposed to be. When represented by an image at all, he regularly had goat's
legs and a shaggy beard, and his few legends make him out to be as lustful
as his prototype.
His power was not unfailing, and, like that of
not a few gods of sundry religions, might need stimulation and renewal at
times. We know how this was done; if the meat supplies, whether got from the
flock or by hunting, were scanty, the boys used to beat Pan tie his statue:
or whatever object represented him) with squills (a liliaceous plant, scilla
maritima, resembling the bluebell), a plant supposed to have the virtue of
driving away evils. Thus they at once roused the god to further efforts and
rid him, to the best of their ability, of whatever unlucky influence had
hindered his activities. Later mythologers prepared a parentage for the
Pasturer. Reckoned amongst the sons of Hermes was this great phallic god of
the inhabitants of the Peloponnese, especially of Arcadia - a goat-horned,
goat-legged god named Pan. In a story concerning Hermes set in Arcadia,
Hermes pastured sheep for a mortal master, Dryops, 'oak' - the first Green
Man - and whilst doing so fell in love with a local nymph. Hermetic desire
found fulfilment, and a magic child was born, with goat's feet and goat's
horns, crying and laughing.
When his mother had borne him, she sprang up
and fled, leaving none to suckle the child, so terrified was she saw its
wild and bearded face. Hermes picked up his son, wrapped him in a hare's
pelt, and hastily brought him to Olympus. He sat down beside Zeus and the
other gods, and introduced his son to them. The immortals were delighted
with the child - Dionysus most of all. They named him Pan because 'all' had
been pleased with him.
In Greek 'pan' means 'all', and the god was
later identified with the physical Universe - although his name, except for
its sound, has nothing to do with this. The story just told suggests that
Pan was one of the youngest generation of gods. But each generation of gods
must have had its own Pan, seeing that there was already a Pan in Zeus's
cave, who helped Zeus against the Titans, or against Typhon, and seeing
also, that a Pan was - together with Arcas - a son of Zeus and Callisto. The
great poet and mythologian Aeschylus distinguished between two Pans; a son
of Zeus, a twin brother of Areas; and a son of Kronos. The distinction
between various Pans was also expressed in composite names such as
Titanopan, Diopan, Hermopan - referring in each case to his father - or
Aigipan, which was used by those who did not wish to assign any particular
parentage to the god.
In the retinue of Dionysus, or in depictions of
wild landscapes, there appeared not only a great Pan, but also little Pans,
Paniskoi, who played the same part as the Satyrs. This resemblance to the
Satyrs, of whom there must at first have been more than one, led to a
dispersion and multiplication of the god Pan, who perhaps, when he
originally came into being, had only a single twin brother and represented
the darker half of a divine male couple. Pan belongs to that twilight world
of satyrs, fauns, centaurs and sileni, who according to venerable tradition
once thronged the globe, and whose descendants may still be glimpsed by the
sensitive. (Crowley once confessed to having seen a faun peering at him from
behind a tree at Fontainbleau.) These earlier stages of human evolution, the
androgynous and semi-animal states, are yet recapitulated in the womb.
The characteristics that were ascribed to Pan
in numerous lesser tales are well known: dark, terror-awakening, phallic,
but not always malignant. He could, of course, sometimes be malignant,
especially at noon, if he were awakened from his sleep. At night he led the
dance of the nymphs, and he also ushered in the morning and kept watch from
the mountain summits. Many love-stories were told of him, in which he
pursued nymphs. These chases often had dramatic results. Syrinx turned
herself into a reed-pipe, from which Pan fashioned the syrinx, a herdsman's
flute with a row of holes; Echo, chased by Pan, became a mere voice, mere
refracted sound. But Pan's greatest passion was for Selene. Of this affair
it was told that the moon-goddess refused to company with the dark god.
Whereupon Pan, to please her, dressed himself in white ram-skins, and thus
seduced Selene. He even carried her on his back. It is however uncertain
whether even in the earliest time it was necessary for him thus to change
his shape in order to play the role of successful lover with a goddess who
repeatedly lets herself be embraced by darkness. But the myth has traceable
links with the ancient devotions of Egypt. Of all the Egyptians who were
skilled in working magic. Nectanebo, the last native king of Egypt, about
BCE 358, was the chief, if we may believe Greek tradition. When he saw that
the end of the kingdom of Egypt was at hand, he shaved off his hair and his
beard, disguised himself by putting on common apparel, took ship and fled to
Pella in Macedonia, where he established himself as a physician and as an
Egyptian soothsayer.
The historian Pseudo-Callisthenes tells us that
there Nectanebus cast the nativity of the queen, Olympias, and sent a dream
to the queen by means of a wax image. His object was to persuade the queen
that the Egyptian god Amun (worshipped at Luxor in ithyphallic form in the
guise or the fertility god Min) would come to her at night. Nectanebus also
sent a dream to King Philip of Macedon, by means of a hawk that he had
bewitched with magical words, and the king was satisfied that the child to
whom his wife was about to give birth was the son of the god Amun (or Ammon)
of Libya, who was regarded as the father of all the kings who ascended the
throne of Egypt who did not belong to the royal stock of that country. The
child was Alexander the Great.
When he conquered Egypt Alexander straightway
resorted to the oasis of Siwa, to visit the shrine of Jupiter-Ammon. There
he embraced the god and clothed himself in the skin of the sacred ram in
which the god was incarnate. Medallions of the king ever after showed him
crowned with the ram's horns of kingship and divinity. Thus Greece succumbed
to the wiles of Egypt, but hellenic ways were even so impressed upon the
land of the Nile, and the goat would lie with the ram.
In an Orphic fragment preserved by Marobius,
the names of Jupiter and Pan appear to be titles of the all-creating power
of the sun, and Pan, the universal substance is called Kerastes, the horned
Jupiter. According to Plutarch, the Jupiter-Ammon of the Africans was the
same as the Pan of the Greeks. This explains the reasons why the Macedonian
kings assumed the horns of that god; for, though Alexander pretended to be
his son, his successors never pretended to any such honour; and yet they
equally assumed the symbols, as appears from their medals. The case is, that
Pan, or Ammon, being the universe, and Jupiter a title of the Supreme God,
the horns, the emblems of his power, seemed the most proper symbols of that
supreme and universal dominion to which they all, as well as Alexander, had
the ambition to aspire.
Now Nectanebo had been a pharaoh in the XXXth
dynasty, and had fought the battle of Mendes, a town in the Delta, Lower
Egypt, now called Ashmoun, with Ataxerxes II, his suzerain, king of Persia,
whom he had utterly defeated, and together with his army expelled from the
Delta, Nectanebo forever after remained faithful to the local god. The town
was sacred to the worship of the god Min and the ram Mendes. This devotion
Nectanebo took with him when he fled to Greece. His god was identified with
Pan. (The Greeks called Min's city in the IXth nome of Upper Egypt
Panopolis, today called Akhmim.) When the Ptolomies ruled Egypt after
Alexander, Min was accepted as the Egyptian Pan, and the worship of the goat
was conflated with that of the ram. This gave rise to the cult of the Goat
of Mendes, infamous in the West as the incarnation of the Devil, the age-old
arch rival to the slave masters of Christendom.
In dynastic times, the soul of Osiris was
thought to be lodged in the sacred ram that was worshipped in the Western
Delta town of Djedet, and was known as Ba-neb-Djedet (Ram-lord-of-Djedet),
who remained a popular deity down to the Ptolomaic period. The Greeks
garbled the last three syllables of Ba-neb-Djedet’s name into Mendes, and
two Greeks in particular, the geographer Strabo and the poet Pindar, not to
mention the Roman historian Diodorus of Sicily, made the Ram of Mendes
famous. Pindar insisted that this Ram was permitted to have intercourse with
women, a practice attested by Herodotus.
A tapestry fragment from Egypt of the fourth
century CE, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, shows Dionysus
accompanied by Pan, who here carries the pedum (sheperd's crook) and a
faun-skin. In the background are pan-pipes. Both wear the haloes of
divinity. Such 'post-classical' works bear witness to the cult of Pan all
around the Meditteranean well into the Christian era. Whether this
persisting iconography was supported by a continuation of the Mysteries is
another question. They were probably limited to the great centres of urban
civilization where his cult flourished most strongly, such as Alexandria,
Athens, Pergamurn and Ephesus. The silver 'Oceanus Dish' from the Mildenhall
Treasure, around 350-375ce, now in the British Museum, shows four lithe
maenads dancing with Pan and his satyrs.
It was Margaret Murray who said that the gods
of the old religion become the devils of the new. Jesus ended his life on
earth in the southern part of Judea in Jerusalem. The death of Christ
heralded the birth of a new religion which would bear his name. As this new
religion grew and spread, all, or almost all, it came into contact with
became its enemy. The common people, content in their style of worship were
suddenly heathens, sinners and enemies of the one true God. The pair of
opposites was now Paganism and Christianity. As Christ represents
Christianity, Pan represents Paganism. Pan was soon to become the Christian
Devil, Satan incarnate. But before this Christian conception took hold, Pan
was a god.
What was there about this frolicking god of the
glen that made him so odious to the new Christians? Wherein was he Satanic?
Perhaps in his sexual exploits. He is known to have seduced several nymphs.
He also boasted that he had coupled with all Dionysus' drunken maenads.The
episode related above wherein Pan seduces the Moon points to the Christian
belief that Satan is able to disguise himself and seduce chaste women. The
similarity between the Church Father Origen's description of Satan and the
features of Pan is very obvious.
Pan represented freedom of spirit, natural
instincts, sinless love. In some parts of the world, prior to the advent of
Christianity, women were free, untrammeled by rigid rules of moral conduct,
and therefore, when the new religion made its debut, women were called
sinful. "The Christians found the women of Europe free and sovereign," says
Elizabeth Davis in "The First Sex" (p 229). "The right to divorce, to
abortion, to birth control, to property ownership, to the bearing of titles
and the inheritance of estates, to the making of wills, to bringing suits at
law, all these and many other rights were attrited away by the Church
through the Christian centuries." We must remember that the leaders of the
early church were Jews, bred in the Hebraic tradition that women were of no
account and existed solely to serve men. Orthodox Judaism of the time, like
Saint Augustine of Hippo, taught that women had no souls.
Now we draw closer to the reason Pan might have
been viewed as Satan, why the figure of Satan as handed down to us consists
of goat's feet, horns and black hair. (The statue of the god Min, the
Egyptian Pan, was daubed black.) Pan came to represent the freedom of spirit
and love of Nature which could be viewed only as works of the Devil. Pan and
women were allies, friends, lovers. All were guiltless, without shame. As
some scholars have it, guilt is the cornerstone of the early Christian
faith. Woman was guilty by virtue of being woman. Saint Clement announced
that "Every woman should be overwhelmed with shame at the very thought that
she is woman." Here we have it in a nutshell: pagans had no guilt, no shame,
no sense of sin. Thus Pan became the paragon of guilt, the embodiment of
sin, and the patron of that horrendous human weakness - sex. Obviously, like
gods and goddesses, and rites and ceremonies before him, Pan had to be
either syncretized, suppressed or subordinated. True to form, the Christian
Fathers incorporated Pan into their pantheon - as Satan. Pan could not be
annihilated for too many people loved, adored and worshipped him. He could
not be extirpated from the hearts and minds of men and women. So he was
simply 'evilized'. This Christian act was felt everywhere; the repercussions
were wide ranging. The Christian God was said to have killed Pan.
News of Pan's death came to a man named Thamus,
a pilot of a ship bound for Italy by way of Paxi. As Thamus was sailing
along in the Aegean on a quiet evening, he heard a loud voice announcing
that "Great Pan is dead". This announced the end of Paganism; Pan with his
pipes, the god of the natural, had yielded to the God of the supernatural.
The story is told by a character in Plutarch's dialogue "On why oracles came
to fail". When the boat Thamus was piloting came opposite Palodes, and there
was neither wind nor wave, from the stern, looking toward the land, he said
the words as he heard them: "Great Pan is dead". Even before he had finished
there was a great cry of lamentation, not of one person but of many, mingled
with exclamations of amazement. As many persons were on the vessel, the
story was soon spread abroad in Rome, and Thamus was sent for by Tiberius
Caesar. Tiberius became so convinced of the truth of the story that he
caused an inquiry and investigation to be made about Pan, and the scholars,
who were numerous at this court, conjectured that he was the son born of
Hermes and Penelope, based on the mystical conclusion that the numerological
value of the name Pan equates to 131, the number of lovers reputedly
entertained by Penelope.
The lifetime of Plutarch (CE 45-125), who took
the myth seriously, coincides with the time in which almost all the books of
the New Testament were written. Speculation about the death of Pan continued
in the Renaissance and afterward. Rabelais thought that Pan was Christ, for
'pan' means 'all', and Christ is mankind's all. Fontenelle, in his "Histoire
critique des oracles", considered the possibility that Jesus and Great Pan
might be daemons of approximately the same rank, and that the death of one
would affect the other. Even if the story of Great Pan has no foundation
whatsoever, it seems to sum up the mood of an entire era and its historical
truth is that of a myth, albeit a late myth. To many early Christians this
was the beginning of the end of paganism, and by the late Middle Ages the
ancient god of the Greeks was identified with the devil. Pan did not really
die. If anything, this was wishful thinking on the part of early Christians.
But that they truly believed Pan to be dead cannot be denied. It was with
hope and expectation of better things that they proclaimed: "Great Pan is
dead". To them it prophesied the end of the world. The alleged death of Pan
was not simply a matter of the end of ancient worship, the overthrow of the
preceding faith, the eclipse of time-honoured religious forms, but the
express hope that Nature is to disappear and life die out: the Gospel says
"The day is at hand"; the Church Fathers say "Soon, very soon". The
disintegration of the Roman Empire and the inroads of the barbarian invaders
raised such hopes in St Augustine's breast, that soon there would be no city
left but his City of God.
Yet how long a-dying the world is; how
obstinately determined to live on. The old gods enshrined in the heart of
nature, in the trees and streams, between the rocks and in the breeze, live
on to confound the Church and cannot be driven out. Who says so? The Church
herself - contradicting herself flatly. She first proclaimed them dead, then
waxes indignant because they are still alive. Unable to kill them, the
Church suffers the innocent-hearted to dress them up and disguise their true
nature.
The nature and attributes of the god Pan, after
'diabolization', were added to the looming black figure of Satan. Century
after century, by the threatening voices of Church councils, Pan was ordered
to die, but he is as alive as ever. There are those who accept the
definitions of the Church at face value, and in their stance against
Christianity invoke devils and worship Satan. On the other hand there is
that body of worshippers who call themselves witches, the worshippers of the
Old Religion, the admirers of Pan. They still dance to the strains of his
pipes.
In continental Europe, as well as in Britain,
some worshippers of the ancient Celtic and Graeco-Roman gods had refused to
convert to Christianity, and the rites they performed were interpreted as
magical rites. The Celts worshipped a horned male god that may have reminded
the Romans of the god Pan; a minor god to be sure, but one who could drive
you into a 'panic' terror when you encountered him at noontime. This
combination of horned gods, one Celtic, one classical, produced a very
powerful deity around which the pagani rallied.
Up to the time of the Norman Conquest, records
show that the people were openly pagan while their rulers may have been
nominally Christian. A legal enactment could Christianize vast numbers of
people even if they continued to practise the Old Religion. The enactment
symbolized the Death of Pan, but the populace testified to his life. In his
short history of Christianity, the author Marty tells us that it is possible
that the Church's prohibition against representing the Crucifixion as a lamb
on a cross was due to the desire to differentiate the Christian from the
heathen god. The lamb, being a horned animal, was liable to be confused with
the horned deity of the pagans.
The Old Religion, the worship of the Horned
God, was apparently a worthy opponent for Christianity. It is said that if
the word 'God' were substituted for the word 'Devil' in all
Christian-written material on Paganism one would have a fairly accurate
account of the prevalence and intensity of Pagan worship. Christians
stigmatized the worshippers as witches, called their god Satan, and turned
their groves into churches. In the process they made Satan's presence felt
more, and increased his stature as well as the number of his so-called
devotes. Witchcraft emerged as a black practice dangerous to followers of
God.
It is in witchcraft that Pan - the symbol of
Nature - still lives. His worship has ever lingered in field and fold. The
new religion was left to the urban centres. Leland recorded the little
prayers to Pan still intoned by devotees of 'la vecchia religione' in
Tuscany. The Farrars use the name of Pan in their specimen rituals of "The
Witches Way', where he is still equated with Herne and Cernunnos. The
dualistic philosophy of early Christian theologians only added to the
problem of evil and helped create Satan. Beginning with the Fall of Rome in
476 CE, through the Dark and Middle Ages, the Age of Reason and the
Renaissance, we find only the Christian conception of Satan. It is to this
Satan, 'history' tells us, that men and women sold their souls. Any
references made by early theologians to ancient history after the rise of
Christianity were used to l'einforce this new Satan and to fortify belief in
him. So effective was this inspired campaign that the social and religious
rebels of today really believe they worship Satan, and traditionalists and
religionists really believe Satan is the god of these non-Christians. Such
fraternities and sororities have taken the inverted pentangle as their
common sigil for His Satanic Majesty as being a vestigial representation or
the goat physiognomy.
Thus, with complete credulity and perhaps
justification, Pope Paul VI could say "So we know that this dark and
disturbing Spirit really exists, and that he still acts with treacherous
cunning." This pronouncement was made in 1973. This year the Pope
re-affirmed the traditional view of the Evil One. Thus the long and
successful career of Satan, and hence the belief on the part of some sick
souls that Satan can indwell, command, direct, use and destroy human life.
One of the first pagan sites to be
re-consecrated at Rome was a temple on the Tiber island, the round Temple of
Faunus, the Roman Pan, which Pope Simplicius (468-53 CE) named St Stephano
Rotondo. Goats had been sacrificed there. The ancient myths were long
remembered, even among those Christians with esoteric knowledge of the
ancient mysteries. The grand master of Byzantine painting, who worked
between 1300 and 1320 CE on the decoration of the Protaton church on Mount
Athos, bore the name Panselinos, attesting knowledge of the ancient myth of
Pan and the Moon Goddess. As in numberless instances in pagan art the
pan-pipe is the regular accompaniment of the shepherd, so the Good Shepherd
is, in Christian art, often represented with a pipe of seven reeds or
straws, the classic syrinx of Pan. This primitive musical instrument with
which shepherds were supposed to call back their flocks to the fold, like
other pastoral emblems, soon began to be used in an allegorical sense by the
early Fathers. Thus Gregory Nazianzen, after describing the anxiety of a
shepherd, who, mounted on an eminence, fills the air with the melancholy
strains of his pipe, recommends the spiritual pastor to follow his example
and try to win souls to God by persuasion rather than the staff. The syrinx,
or Pandaean pipes, was regarded as typifying the music of the Gospel, which
recalls the wanderers and guides the sheep in the right way.
The Neoplatonist and Christian philosophers
made Pan the synthesis of paganism. When he had lost his uncontrollable
sexuality, he came to personify the grand totality of a state of being.
Plutarch recorded the legend of sailors on the high seas hearing mysterious
voices proclaiming the demise of Pan. No doubt the voices mourning among the
waves did fortell the death of the old gods, epitomized in Pan, in the sense
of the birth of a new age and one which made the Graeco-Roman world shiver
with fear. The end of an era was portended. But memories of Pan remained in
our sub-consciousness, sublimated but intact. Old Pan, the shepherds' god,
had half human, half animal shape; bearded, horned and hairy, lively, agile,
swift and crafty, he expressed animal cunning. He preyed sexually upon
nymphs and boys indifferently, but his appetite was insatiable and he also
indulged in solitary pleasures. Sculptures retrieved from Herculaneum reveal
his bestial pursuits. The gods gave him the name Pan, meaning 'All Things',
not only because all things are to some extent like him in their greed, but
also because he is a universal tendency incarnate. He is the god of All
Things, doubtless indicative of the procreative current charging All Things,
all Gods, or all Life.
Payne Knight says that the Lycaean Pan of
Arcadia is Pan the Luminous; that is, the divine essence of light
incorporated in universal matter. The Arcadians called him 'the Lord of
Matter', as Macrobius rightly translates it. The ancient writer Damascius
tells us that the Orphic deity Phanes-Jupiter was also called Pan, the 'mingler
of all things'. A late second century CE relief in Modena Museum shows this
cosmic deity surrounded by a zodiacal mandala; a type of that which
surrounds the Cosmic Christ in Majesty in medieval paintings. Pan is
addressed in the Orphic Litanies as 'the first-begotten love', or creator
incorporated in universal matter, and so forming the world. He is described
as the origin and source of all things, as representing matter animated by
the divine spirit. Lycaean Pan was the most ancient and revered God of the
Arcadians, the most ancient people of Greece.
The modern occultist Kenneth Grant compares the
Greek Pan, 'All', with the Latin 'Omne', the Sanskrit 'Aum', Egyptian 'Amoun'
and Hebrew 'Amen', all designations of the Hidden God of the forest, the
Abyss, the deep, the underworld; any region withdrawn and without the range
of waking consciousness. Anciently Pan gave his name to the word 'panic',
the terror which fills all nature and all beinigs when the feeling that this
god is there disturbs the spirit and bewilders the senses.
The Arcadian god Pan is the best known
Classical example of the dangerous presence dwelling just beyond the
protected zone of the community boundary, 'beyond the pale'; Sylvanus and
Faunus were his Latin counterparts. (In Alexandrian times Pan was identified
with the ithyphallic Egyptian divinity Min, who was, among other things, the
guardian of desert roads.) The emotion that he instilled in human beings who
by accident adventured into his domain was 'panic' fear, a sudden groundless
fright. Any trifling cause then - the break of a twig, the flutter of a leaf
- would flood the mind with imagined danger, and in the frantic effort to
escape from his, own aroused unconscious the victim expired in a flight of
dread. His worship spread from Arcadia to Athens immediately after the
Athenian and Plataean victory over the Persians at Marathon in 480 BCE,
because he made the Persians flee in panic.
Yet Pan was benign to those who paid him
worship, yielding the boons of the divine economy of nature, bounty to the
farmers, herders, and fisher-folk who dedicated their first fruits to him,
and health to all who properly approached his shrines of healing. Also
wisdom, the wisdom of Omphalos, the World Navel, was his to bestow; for the
crossing of the threshold is the first step into the sacred zone of the
universal source.
At Lycaion was an oracle, presided over by the
nymph Erato, whom Pan inspired, as Apollo did the prophetess at Delphi. And
Plutarch numbers the ecstasies of the orgiastic rites of Pan along with the
ecstasy of Cybele, the Bacchic frenzy of Dionysus (the great Thracian
counterpart of Pan), the poetic frenzy inspired by the Muses, the warrior
frenzy of the god Ares-Mars, and, fiercest of all, the frenzy of love, as
illustrations of the divine 'enthusiasm' that overturns the reason and
releases the forces of the destructive-creative dark.
The condition as panolepsy was suffered by
ancient Greeks from Athenian teenagers to mighty Socrates himself, whereby a
person in the woods would be overcome by intense elation. This was
considered possession by Pan. Some would run away into the woods and never
return. Pan, as god of the hellenic witches, furnishes the traditional image
of the Devil; hence he must have played an important role in magical
ceremonies in later antiquity although the texts do not give a coherent
picture of this development.
In his book on the Tarot, Frank Lind says of
The Black Magician card that the central figure of the card is that of Pan,
the god of Nature, the cause of man's instinctive behaviour. In some Tarot
sets the Devil is represented with the extremities of a goat - the he-goat
being a prototype of Satan. The appearance of Satan as a goat was usual at
the witches' Sabbat. This Goat of Mendes, a combination of faun, satyr, and
Pan-goat, became in medieval times a definite synthesis of the
anti-divinity. At Mendes, the city of ancient Egypt, Pan under this form was
worshipped with the greatest solemnity.
Liber Oz tells us that "there is no god but
man". Grant comments that the underlying doctrine is obvious. When a man,
growing in consciousness by repeated acts of love under will, expands his
consciousness to embrace all other consciousness, he becomes Pan, ie One
with All. There is thus no essential difference between any one universe and
any other. Once consciousness has become cosmic in scope the many selves
vanish and the One Self alone remains. The process is detailed in the Divine
Pymander of the Thrice-Greatest Hermes, the father of Pan: "After this
manner, therefore, contemplate God, as having within himself the entire
Cosmos - all thoughts or intellections. If thou dost not make thyself
God-like, thou canst not know God; for like is intelligible only to like.
Expand thyself unto the immeasurable greatest, passing beyond all body, and
transcending time, enter Eternity, thus thou shalt know God. Conceive that
nothing is impossible unto thee; think thyself immortal and able to know all
- all sciences, all arts, the nature and way of life of every creature.
Become higher than all height, lower than all depth; comprehend in thyself
the qualities of all creatures, of fire and water, the dry and moist; and
likewise conceive thyself to be in every place - in earth, in sea, in
heaven, in the unbegotten, in the womb, in the young, in the old, in the
dead, and in the after-death state. And if thou canst know all these things
simultaneously - all times, places, deeds, qualities, and quantities - thou
canst then know God."
A well-documented invocation of Pan by Aleister
Crowley occasioned The Paris Working, a series of operations carried out by
him with Victor Neuberg, a poet who had published a slim collection entitled
"The Triumph of Pan". They trod violets with their bare feet to evoke the
spirit of the glade through which trots the lustful Pan. (Traditionally Pan
held a branch of pine, or was crowned with pine leaves.) The deity closest
to Crowley's heart, he was given the appropriate colour of crimson, the
colour of Geburah (Strength), the fifth sephira of the Tree of Life in the
Cabala, attributed to Mars. Geburah is also called Pachad (Terror), which
suggests the God Pan (opines Grant) and the peculiar nature or the strength
and terror associated with the god.
The manifestation of the God Pan occurs at high
noon. In Crowleyanity this is the Secret Silver Star shining at noon in the
depths of the earth. When Crowley was enthroned in Berlin as Baphomet, the
title he assumed when he joined the OTO, he copied as his seal the
Alexandrian gem displaying the conjoined ram and goat of Mendes-Pan, that he
had garnered from the "Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus" by Richard
Payne Knight. This was appropriate as Baphomet, like Pan, enjoined men to
lust and enjoy all things of the senses. The figure of Ammon was compounded
of the forms of the ram, as that of Pan was of the goat; the reason of this
is difficult to ascertain, unless we suppose that goats were unknown in the
country where his worship arose, and that the ram expressed the same
attribute.
Pausanias says he knew the meaning of this
symbol, but did not choose to reveal it, it being part of the mystic
worship. Crowley's seal design was based on an actual gem in the collection
of Charles Townley, on which the head of the Greek Pan is joined to that of
the ram of Ammon.
Orpheus and Hesiod composed hymns to Pan.
Whilst in Moscow, Crowley wrote his own Hymn to Pan, his most effective
poem, according to his biographer. Symonds says that as an evocation it
achieves its aim, and was used during many a magickal operation. After two
thousand years of Christianity one is thrown back by its ancient pagan
frenzy; it is the dance of Pan and the dissolution of consciousness. This is
the Dionysian aspect of life rediscovered by Nietzsche. Pan is the
Antichrist, symbol of lust and magic. After the poet Louis Wilkinson recited
the Hymn at Crowley's funeral in the chapel at Brighton crematorium on 5th
December 1947, the local Council declared: "We shall take all necessary
steps to prevent such an incident occurring again".
But the spirit of Pan yet walks abroad. In
Egypt, away from the pyramids and the tour buses, in the vicinity of skhmim,
where the god Min had his ancient cult centre Panopolis, crude phallic
figurines are still set up in the fields. This custom is likely to go back
to ancient times and the figures may be derived from the ithyphallic image
of Min. They are probably used today because their sexuality is thought to
stimulate crop growth and because an erect penis (Crowley's 'token erect of
thorny thigh') is thought to frighten away the evil spirits who threaten
crops.
And in a 'friendly pagan magazine from the East
Midlands, a classified contact seeks 'pictures of Pan for a tattoo'.
I can hear the echo of the Old Crow's words:-
"Thrill with lissome lust of the light,
O manl My man!
Come careering out of the night
Of Pan! Io Pan!
Sources and References
Boreard, Philippe - The Cult of Pan in Ancient
Greece, University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Grant, Kenneth - Aleister Crowley and the
Hidden God, Frederick Muller Ltd, 1973.
Laurence, Theodor - Satan, Sorcery and Sex,
Parker Publishing Company (NY), 1974.
Payne Knight, Richard - Two Essays on the
Worship of Priapus, privately printed, London, 1865.
Rose, H J - Ancient Greek Religion,
Hutchinson’s University Library, 1946.
SOURCE:
The great god pan
EXPOSING SATANISM IN SOCIETY
(Full-Length)
