Pan in Arkadia

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"6000 feet beyond man and time" [Nietzsche]

Putting atleast 3 centuries between the current time and oneself is how Nietzsche believed one would lose their myopic perspective of the self and the world.

Arkadia is the edge of the cross-roads between the village and the wilderness. Pan is a liminal figure who is as pastoral as he is panic-attacking. He is marked by the noontime stillness as he plays his flute, which has a quality of a timelessness to it. In the arts, Arkadia was the symbol of the golden age virtuosity, when men lived akin to the gods, "a harmony with nature".

This renaturalization of man is a dire imperative given the travesty of J.-Xt.;

Nietzsche wrote:

"That entire labor of the ancient world in vain: I have no words to express my feeling over something so atrocious. — And considering that its labor was preliminary labor, that the foundation for a labor of millennia had just been laid with granite self-confidence, the entire meaning of the ancient world in vain!... Wherefore Greeks? Wherefore Romans? — All the prerequisites for a learned culture, all the scientific methods, were already there, the great, the incomparable art of reading well had already been established — this prerequisite for a cultural tradition, for a unity of knowledge; natural science, in union with mathematics and mechanics, was on the best of all paths — the sense for facts, the last and most valuable of all the senses, had its schools, its already centuries old tradition! Is this understood?

Everything essential had been discovered in order to set the work into motion — the methods, one must repeat it ten times, are the essential thing, also that which is opposed the longest by laziness and custom. What we have won back for ourselves today with inexpressible self-mastery — for we all still have the bad instincts, the Christian ones, somewhere in our bodies — the free view of reality, the careful hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest thing, the whole integrity of knowledge — they were already there! Already more than two thousand years ago! And, in addition, good, fine taste and tact! Not as brain training! Not as “German” education in company with loutish manners! But as body, as gesture, as instinct — as reality, in a word... All in vain! Overnight nothing but a memory! — Greeks! Romans!

The nobility of instinct, of taste, the methodical investigation, the genius for organization and administration, the faith in, the will to a future for man, the great Yes to all things, visible as the imperium Romanum, visible to all senses, the grand style not merely art but turned into reality, truth, life... And not overwhelmed by a natural event overnight! Not trampled down by Teutons and other clodhoppers! But ruined by crafty, sneaky, invisible, anemic vampires! Not vanquished — just sucked dry! ... Hidden vengefulness, petty envy become master! Everything wretched, suffering from itself, afflicted with bad feelings, the whole ghetto-world of the soul suddenly on top! — — One need only read some Christian rabble-rouser such as Saint Augustine to see, to smell, what kind of unsavory fellows came to the top thereby. One would be deceiving oneself utterly if one presupposed any lack of intelligence among the leaders of the Christian movement — oh, they are clever, clever to the point of holiness, the se Church fathers! What they lack is something quite different. Nature has slighted them — she forgot to give then a modest dowry of respectable, of reasonable, of clean instincts... Between us, they are not even men..." [Daybreak, 59]

The renaturalization of man and morality means saying, not just "society" - but a "culture complex", not just "sociology" - but a "theory of forms of domination."
It means High Definitions.
Refining all that we have inherited.
Unlearning all our scaffolds of consolations.
Becoming bolder. And more daring.

"Et in Arcadia Ego" - There is Death in Arcadia too.

Reality cannot be swept under some carpet, nor is self-deception of feigning amnesia to the world as it is a mark of the noble mind. You cannot wish away the modern dis/ease. But, as the paralyzing power of panic attacks grip us, the laughing satyr also liberates us through the vertigo of having stared into the abyss.

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It implants an urge to create our own meaning, to shape our world;

Nietzsche wrote:

"That lies are necessary in order to live is itself part of the terrifying and questionable character of existence.

"Life ought to inspire confidence": the task thus imposed is tremendous.

To solve it, man must be a liar by nature, he must above all be an artist. And he is one: metaphysics, religion, morality, science---all of them only products of his will to art, to lie, to flight from "truth," to negation of "truth."

This ability itself, thanks to which he violates reality by means of lies, this artistic ability of man par excellence---he has it in common with everything that is. He himself is after all a piece of reality, truth, nature: how should he not also be a piece of genius in lying!

In these moments in which man was deceived, in which he duped himself, in which he believes in life: oh how enraptured he feels! What delight! What a feeling of power! How much artists' triumph in the feeling of power!--- Man has once again become master of "material"---master of truth!--- And whenever man rejoices, he is always the same in his rejoicing: he rejoices as an artist, he enjoys himself as power, he enjoys the lie as his form of power..."

but also,

Nietzsche wrote:

"Today we are inclined to make the opposite judgement (which could itself be just as mistaken), namely, that ideas are worse seductresses than the senses, for all their cold, anaemic appearance and not even despite that appearance - they always lived off the 'blood' of the philosopher; they always drained his senses and even, if you believe it, his 'heart'. These old philosophers were heartless: philosophizing was always a kind of vampirism. When considering such figures, including even Spinoza, don't you feel something deeply enigmatic and strange? Don't you see the spectacle unfolding, this steady growing paler - this ever more ideally construed desensualization? Don't you sense in the background some long-concealed blood-sucker who starts with the senses and finally leaves behind and spares only bones and rattling? - I refer to categories, formulas, words (for, forgive me, what remained of Spinoza, amor intellectualis dei, is mere rattle, nothing more! What is amor; what deus, when they are missing every drop of blood?
In sum: all philosophical idealism until now was something like an illness, except where, as in Plato's case, it was the caution of an overabundant and dangerous health; the fear of overpowerful senses; the shrewdness of a shrewd Socratic. - Maybe we moderns are not healthy enough to need Plato's idealism? And we don't fear the senses because - "[JW, 372]

There is a fine line between apotheosis and anaemia that can get easily butchered..., but it is even more crucial today, we recover that spirit of the Artist that is not afraid, nor hesitant, in sketching out the world with bold strokes;

Nietzsche wrote:

"Mature epochs that have the right to be proud of their humanity are still so full of fear, so full of superstitious fear of the “cruel and wild beast” (although the pride these more humane ages feel is actually caused by their mastery of this beast), that even obvious truths remain unspoken for centuries, as if by agreement, because they have the appearance of helping bring the wild beast back to life after it had finally been killed off. Perhaps I am taking a risk in allowing a truth like this to escape: let other people recapture it and make it drink the “milk of pious reflection” until it lies quiet and forgotten in its old corner. – People should rethink their ideas about cruelty and open up their eyes; they should finally learn impatience, so that big, fat, presumptuous mistakes like this will stop wandering virtuously and audaciously about.

An example of this is the mistaken ideas about tragedy that have been nurtured by both ancient and modern philosophers. This is my claim: almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty. The “wild animal” has not been killed off at all; it is alive and well, it has just – become divine. Cruelty is what constitutes the painful sensuality of tragedy.

We clearly need to drive out the silly psychology of the past; the only thing this psychology was able to teach about cruelty was that it originated from the sight of another’s suffering. But there is abundant, overabundant pleasure in your own suffering too, in making yourself suffer, – and wherever anyone lets himself be talked into self-denial in the religious sense, or self-mutilation (as the Phoenicians or ascetics did), or into desensitization, disembowelment or remorse in general, or into puritanical penitential spasms, vivisections of conscience or a Pascalian sacrifizio dell’intelletto – wherever this is the case, he is secretly being tempted and urged on by his cruelty, by that dangerous thrill of self-directed cruelty. Finally, people should bear in mind that even the knower, by forcing his spirit to know against its own inclination and, often enough, against the wishes of his heart (in other words, to say “no” when he would like to affirm, love, worship), this knower will prevail as an artist of cruelty and the agent of its transfiguration. Even treating something in a profound or thorough manner is a violation, a wanting-to-hurt the fundamental will of the spirit, which constantly tends towards semblances and surfaces, – there is a drop of cruelty even in every wanting-to-know." [BGE, 229]

"Knowing is a Creating";

Nietzsche wrote:

"Tremendous self-examination: becoming conscious of oneself, not as individuals but as mankind.

The belief that the world as it ought to be is, really exists, is a belief of the unproductive who do not desire to create a world as it ought to be. They posit it as already available, they seek ways and means of reaching it. "Will to truth"--as the impotence of the will to create.

To know that something is thus and thus, To act so that something becomes thus and thus: Antagonism in the degree of power in different natures.

It is a measure of the degree of strength of will to what extent one can do without meaning in things, to what extent one can endure to live in a meaningless world because one organizes a small portion of it oneself.

The philosophical objective outlook can therefore be a sign that will and strength are small. For strength organizes what is close and closest; "men of knowledge," who desire only to ascertain what is, are those who cannot fix anything as it ought to be. Artists, an intermediary species: they at least fix an image of that which ought to be; they are productive, to the extent that they actually alter and transform; unlike men of knowledge, who leave everything as it is.

Nihilism as a normal phenomenon can be a symptom of increasing strength or of increasing weakness:
What does science mean in regard to both possibilities?
1. As a sign of strength and self-control, as being able to do without healing, comforting worlds of illusion;
2. as undermining, dissecting, disappointing, weakening." [WTP, 585]

We need no worlds or words of illusion.

It is not enough to just "cope" and "survive" through the labyrinth of modernity; it is a question of your self-love. How much can you project into the future than mere coping, mere getting-by?

Life is self-preservation, but life is About excess and flourishing and expansion in all directions.

Becoming aware of the dis/ease of modernity is a means, but one facet,, it is not the ends in itself. It is not enough to merely disentangle yourself from the times, but fine-tuning for high definitions and more sharper pixels requires a little estrangement from the times and from ourselves And from our history;

Nietzsche wrote:

"There is great advantage to be gained in distantly estranging ourselves from our age and for once being driven as it were away from its shores back on to the ocean of the world-outlooks of the past. Looking back at the coast from this distance we command a view, no doubt for the first time, of its total configuration, and when we approach it again we have the advantage of understanding it better as a whole than those who have never left it." [HATH, 616]

A little forgetfulness of the past is the necessary thrust for an effortless forwards momentum and envisioning the future from an overflowing excess;

Nietzsche wrote:

"Forgetfulness is not just a vis inertiae, as superficial people believe, but is rather an active ability to suppress, positive in the strongest sense of the word, to which we owe the fact that what we simply live through, experience, take in, no more enters our consciousness during digestion (one could call it spiritual ingestion) than does the thousand-fold process which takes place with our physical consumption of food, our so-called ingestion. To shut the doors and windows of consciousness for a while; not to be bothered by the noise and battle which our underworld of serviceable organs work with and against each other;a little peace, a little tabula rasa of consciousness to make room for something new, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for ruling, predicting, predetermining (our organism runs along oligarchic lines, you see) - that, as I said, is the benefit of active forgetfulness, like a doorkeeper or guardian of mental order, rest and etiquette: from which can immediately see how there could be no happiness, cheerfulness, hope, pride, immediacy, without forgetfulness." [GM, 5.2.1]

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Hillman wrote:

"Only when myth is led back into soul, only when myth has psychological significance does it become a living reality, necessary for life, rather than a literary, philosophical, or religious artifice. Scholarship belongs within this process as part of the psychological approach. How else approximate mythical reality than by immersion in its field, the contexts which breed it, the imagery it has shown throughout history. Scholarship then becomes a method of soul-making rather than mainly a method of knowing. The therapeutic revivification of the psyche and the renascence of myth – two inseparable processes that may be one and the same for insighting what we know are as important as knowing. The value of scholarship is thus to be judged not only for its contribution to intellect but as well for its contribution to imagination." [Pan and the Nightmare]

Cynicism after exposure to harsh truths can only be cured or off-put by learning to see with newer eyes... let that passion for life bubble again, a renewed thirst. Nietzsche called this phase, entering one's second childhood and starting again after the attack and recovery from modern nausea.

The wine of oblivion flowing from our whole organic soul, our cornucopia is what helps us remember ourselves in a wider arc of becoming.

We must be able to enter into subjectivity without reeling from anxiety and constantly watching over our shoulders of hurting reality. We are as real as that reality. Such a sure footing self-trust comes either with inherited instincts or long periods of self-discipline. The 8-path.

We must be able to overcome any resignation to reality or clinging to it religiously, if we are to be artists also.

We must be able to fantasize deliriously as direction-givers, to raise a toast to our world, like a man lifts his bride across the threshold.

Apollo defines all that we are Against.

Dionysos defines all that we are For.

To the noble artists of the future.

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[url=[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]Shamans, Satyrs, and Cyborgs[/url]

Bourgeaud wrote:

In antiquity the Arcadians were often called proselênoi, "those who preceded the moon."
Pan's Arcadia, this land of men older than the moon, belongs to the sphere of representations. But in a symbolic system, the image chosen is not an arbitrary sign. The name of Pan, the Arcadian landscape, have a deep resonance in Greek myth. A whole horizon momentarily opens, as if through a gap in the curtain of history, into the furthest-back existence of this figure, whose traits were, however, redesigned at the end of the fifth century B.C. in the context of an ideology specific to the classical period."

Huntsman and at the same time protector of game, keeper of goats, one who made fertile the little flocks, Pan seems in this land dominated by a pastoral economy, where hunting had not been reduced to the level of a sport, to have had a function much like that of the Master of Animals, afigurewell known among hunting peoples and those in the early stages of herding. "Most ancient and most honored"—so he appears to us, at least in his homeland, where his sanctuaries were real temples or even whole mountains not, as in Attica and the rest of the Greek world, simple caves, which he had to share with other divinities." [The Cult of Pan]

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"Hermes' son is rejected by his mortal mother, but no mischief or evil intention of his own brings on his aban­donment; Pan is cast out because he frightens people, because he is disgusting. The infant Pan, a shaggy, bearded baby with horns, who laughs, is repellent. But we must go on to stress that he is repellent only to humans: the gods, and especially Dionysus, for their part find him charming. Pan is evidently the symbolic embodiment of the repressed. But everything man flees and rejects in order to distinguish himself from the animals makes him like to the gods. The myth seems to say: if we refuse the beast, we shall never know how to resemble a god. A double and liminal figure, always transformed already, only to leave him at the precise spot where animality corresponds to the divine." [ib.]

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"Direct heir of Old Night, the Arcadian is privileged with the power of assisting at any moment at the rebirth of humankind. He stands upon the cultural threshold. One step forward and he is your complete Greek and (more important to the eye of history), a democrat; one step back and before your eyes he becomes again a savage. This liminal position entides him to a certain prestige. Ardor (thumos) is the quality Pausanias praises when he compares the character of the best of the Arcadians, Philopoemen, to the balanced mastery of an Epaminondas." But this ardor is not without excess, and one feels in Plutarch an undertone of reproach beneath his admiration of this same Philopoemen.100 Ardor, violence—and also awkwardness, which some- times caused the Greeks to smile: they enjoyed reporting the coarse be- havior of an Arcadian delegation at the Macedonian court, who were unable to restrain themselves at the sight of Thracian dancing girls.

This ardor is reported primarily in the sphere of war. According to Ephorus, the combativeness inherited from their Arcadian origin se- cured the Pelasgians their expansion and their glory. From the time of Homer the Arcadians had afirmreputation as warriors: they know how to make war and are specialists in close combat. Xenophon describes them on the way to battle: nothing held them back, "neither bad weather, nor the length of the journey, nor the mountains in their way." Lykomedes of Mantinea in 368 B.C. proudly reminds us that the Arcadians alone could call the Péloponnèse a fatherland: they are the only autochthonous inhabitants, and from this it follows not only that they form the most important Greek population, but also that they are gifted with the greatest physical strength and are the most courageous." [Borgeaud, Cult of Pan]

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"The crime of Lykaon marked a break, the end of an epoch in which man and animal were still confused. The ritual of Mount Lykaion, for its part, seems to define a space organized around the opposition between man and animal. If the "human victim" of this sacrifice looks back to the myth of Areas, to this special ancestry restored by Zeus, the exclusion of the lycanthrope, who must shun human society, helps define the limits of the social sphere.

The wolf is placed in a peripheral space. This zone around the edges, which the myth refers to the ancestral expulsion of Lykaon by Zeus, can be seen as a spatialization of the time before time; the borders where the wolf prowls signify an origin. The liminal is the proper home of beginnings, and this point is stressed by apparent ambiguity in the shift from myth to rite. As interpreted by the myth, the lycanthrope of the rite recalls not only an original horror, the criminal ancestor who is outcast and hunted from the human world; he also signifies the repulsion this horror provokes in mankind. Witnessing such a crime, the sun recoiled. And so the lycanthrope recoils; he leaves his ghastly meal and is required, even though he is now a wolf, to abstain from human flesh. He goes away, as Zeus went away, and as Lykaon went away. In contrast to the god, he is expelled horizontally and stays within reach; his territory intersects that of hunting and herding. On the other hand, in contrast to the god, who saw it all and kicked over the table, he has let himself be tricked and has tasted of human flesh: one single human morsel slipped in among a quantity of animal food. To divine omniscience corresponds human fallibility, subject to the chances imposed by the ritual. To anger and the lightning correspond horror and flight. To transcendence finally corresponds spatial depar­ ture. Anteriority (the reign of Lykaon, characterized at the same time by bestiality and by the sharing of meals with the gods) turns into a spatial exteriority where an initiation takes place. Antediluvian time marked by the abundance and the disorder of a "golden age" is replaced in the rite of passage by the "wilderness" where roams the wolf. After enduring an experience like that of the Spartan krupteia, the "wolf" comes back from this liminal space after a period of nine years. As Burkert has well shown, this return is equivalent to an integration into adult society: the wolf who recovers his human clothes is from that time on an Arcadian, an areas." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]

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"Guardian of the venerable Arcadian sanctuaries," a god who treads the heights, Pan first intervenes as an observer, a privileged witness of all that happens far from the protected space where mankind lives and works.
The artists liked to think of Pan as present in the farthest West too, near the source of the Hesperides. As hunter and herdsman, the goat-god was used to watching and waiting; he comes upon scenes played out in the theater of nature, the sphere proper to his motion, at the limits of human territory. But we should not reduce his contact with the fringes of the event to a simple allegory, "representing free nature." When Pan, on Italian ceramics, serves as a sign, the sign is not univocal. He is the reflex of a landscape that means more than mere locality.
When Pan looks on at such a scene, he reflects by his presence not only a placement in "geographical" space but also a classification of the phenomenon (as a luminal experience) to which he is spectator; its meaning thus becomes clearer. The same point holds for those frequent images in which the goat-god, himself often cause of passion or subject to desire, watches an erotic adventure: the appropriation of Chrysippe by Laios, of Hippodamia by Pelops, of Europa by Zeus, of Amymone by Poseidon, the judgment of Paris.

Pan undeniably identifies a landscape, but one that is more than a spatial location. He is, after all, a god, and a sign not of the picturesque but of the supernatural. The panic landscape is a space where strange phenomena take place, irrespective of human will and power. The point is already in Plato, although not at all mythologically expressed. In the Phaedrus Socrates is described as threatened by delirium; the scene un- folds on the banks of the Ilissos; we are at the very gates of Athens, but the landscape, characterized by water and shade, is sacred to Pan and the nymphs, and it is the hour of Pan (noon)." [Borgeaud]

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"The loss of the sense of belonging is, in fact, an essential aspect of the collective phenomenon known as panic Son of Hermes according to the most prevalent tradition, Pan is well acquainted with cunning tricks. The origin myth of panic tells also of the invention of a strategem: Poly- aenus tells how Pan, when general of the army of Dionysus, invented panic while on campaign with Bacchos in India: "He passed the word by night to the army of Dionysus that they should cry out at the top of their voices; they cried out, and the rocks gave back the echo, and as the hollow of the glen echoed, their power appeared far greater to the en­ emy, who therefore, struck with terror, fled. Honoring this strategem of Pan's, we sing of Echo's affection for Pan, and the common and noc- turnal terrors of armies we call after Pan."

However, the involvement of Pan with panic goes beyond the fact that he invented it as a trick. There are closer connections. A panic is not just any kind of trick. It is a sudden and unpredictable condition. This unpredictability of Pan's action in panic reflects a characteristic of his father Hermes'.

The messenger-god appears and produces a sort of "panic" in the old man.

F. Cassola links this suddenness, this unpredictability of Hermes' arrival, with the word hermaion, which means good luck. Hermes is god of the windfall or stroke of luck—and almost literally manifests himself in the hermaion. Similarly Pan, the son of Hermes, a god we hear but do not see, manifests in the paneton his ineluctable and disturbing presence.

Panic may also be understood as an attribute proper to the hermetic nature of Pan, a specialization of traits already present in his father Hermes. With Hermes, suddenness takes the form of a godsend or windfall. Hermes is a guide who puts us on the right road: to abundance (profit, or the fertility of flocks) or simply homeward (when we are lost). As ally or provider, Hermes is unexpected. In panic sudden- ness shows another face: it takes the form of surprise, a collision with an unfamiliar that remains unfamiliar, a sphere of pure conjecture. Pan, seen this way, is something latent in Hermes, or his dark side—and yet, like Hermes, Pan comes to help us. Pan is also an ally with his panic; he was, for instance, an ally of the Athenians at Marathon. But his action is negative; he helps those he loves by creating disorder among their enemies. Furthermore, he is an ally who does not show himself. After all, how can we say where he is? He remains ineluctable. When we begin to come upon images of Pan the warrior, Pan in arms, it is only as a token to signify that he has a military function, that he interferes with warriors." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]

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"Claude Meillier provides an analysis of panic as a psychological-religious phe­ nomenon consisting of hallucinations linked either to a state of exhaus­ tion and excitement or to a deprivation of environmental stimuli. Without exhausting the complex (polysémie) symbolism of the event, his observation, which is supported by clinical work, does bring out a possible relation between panic and the particular type of environment where it most often occurs. If we are to believe Clara Gallini, panic fear originates in the psychology of the huntsman. It occurs as a result of the weakness or exhaustion that overtakes a man at risk in the forest, one who is not up to confronting its hidden perils. Panic is a condition of alienation resulting from this stanchezza and breaks in as if nature were taking her revenge. Military panic was connected with Pan at a rela- tively late date, and this secondary connection, which was derived from the god's role in the hunt, could come about only through the gradual elimination of another god, Phobos, an obscure divinity to whom the power of fear and batde properly belonged.

Pan does not replace Phobos; rather, in panic, he produces a spe­cial version of him. Panic, after all, is phobos—phobos panikos, as Polyaenus has it.
Phobos, son of Ares, is first and foremost a specialist in war. Pan is a pastoral divinity, son of the peaceful Hermes.
Pan may be some kind of warrior, but he never takes part in combat. That is the difference between him and Phobos. Pho­bos, Ares' son, shows himself in the broil of battle; he puts to flight; he embodies our fear of the enemy. Pan, by contrast, acts at a distance. He does not actually know how to fight; rather, he helps his friends by means alien to war. He intervenes to replace combat by a bloody pa­ rodie mockery of itself. He comes before, or after, Phobos: when he interferes, the warrior is cut off from war and in fact knocked loose from all contact with reality.

Pan's position on the fringe of combat is significant; it probably, in fact, provides the key to the meaning of panic. This god, whose eyesight is excellent, looks on from afar: he is often represented as an aposkoposy a lookout.
Aeschylus, the veteran of Marathon, speaks of Pan as a high god, a hupatos, the peer of Apollo or even of Zeus. He is a lookout, stationed on the heights or on the edge of a cliff; here he looks out for justice and proportion.
One chapter of Pseudo-Eratosthenes' Catasterisms, which in turn re- fers to an ancient source (he cites Epimenides), tells us that Pan, son of the goat (Aïx) and foster-brother of Zeus, helped the latter in his struggle against the Titans. The passage explains the mythical origin of the constellation of Capricorn.

Capricorn is in form like Aegipan, from whom he derives. His lower members are animal, as are the horns on his head. He was honored [by catasterism] as foster-brother of Zeus. Epimenides, author of the Cretan History, says that he was with him on Ida when he made war on the Titans. He is thought to have discovered the salt-water conch, thanks to which he provided his allies with what is called "Panic noise," which put the Titans to flight. Once Zeus had seized power, he placed Aegipan among the stars, along with the goat his mother.

Two vase paintings contrast Pan with Athena in a military context. On an Italian amphora in the Bari museum, the goddess is watching over a batde with calm attention while Pan, on Athena's left, equipped with a lagobolon and accompanied by a deer, is running away from the scene; he turns back in mid-flight and observes the scene with his familiar gesture, that of the aposkopön. This gesture has been studied by Ines Jucker. It conveys a sense of watching from afar, of keeping one's dis- tance, and perhaps also of fright. It is the gesture of one who draws back. Even though hunting and war are closely related when looked at from the angle of shared symbolic elements, even though both are placed outside the city, the two are not to be identified. Even though hunting sheds blood, it is still an activity of life and is metaphorically erotic. On the vase in Bari, Pan and the deer run away because they are out of place in the scene: the warrior band, intent on murder, disrupts the natural order to which hunting belongs." [Borgeaud]

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"If we now pass in review Pan's interventions in military history, we observe that panic either makes battle impossible (at Phyle, Stratos, Megara, Apollonia) or else follows the batde and falls upon an enemy already vanquished; in these latter cases, the victims are barbarians (Persians or Gauls). When the Greeks find themselves victims of panic, they withdraw and go home, as though the batde they had planned has turned out to be something quite unfitting. Panic, in other words, is equivalent to a bad omen. Plutarch actually says exactly this, in connection with Pompey, who at Pharsalia went on anyway and was de- feated. Panic overtakes a special, artificial human community: the army in the field. It suggests the standing possibility of regression to a stage of cultural development prior to the balanced condition secured by the power of Zeus. The soldier will cease to recognize his fellows. Panic dissolves the bonds of a litde society characterized by a high degree of reinforcement and involution, placed as it is outside the territory proper to the city. The most likely victim of panic is the mili- tary camp as it sleeps motionless in the silence of the night, animated only by the secret whispers of the sentinels and pickets, by passwords and counter-signs. Panic thus typically attacks a model of order and disrupts it.

In the Homeric Hymn to Pan the young god's appearance at his birth is so frightful that it makes his nurse run away.

The double withdrawal (human terror, departure of the god for Olympus) that marks Pan's very first appearance among men in the Homeric Hymn clarifies the meaning of panic; the disorder there created results from an excess of distance between the divine and the human, a discontinuity that causes men to miss their footing, lose contact with reality, and succumb to the god's hallucinations: των φαντασιών αίτιος ό Πάν, says Photios's dictionary.

Panic is a collective disorder: essentially, a breakdown in communica­ tion. Pan keeps his distance. One may, however, also have the opposite problem. We learn from various texts that there is also danger in exag­ gerated closeness between Pan and mankind. When distance is insufficiendy maintained, another sort of madness lies in wait: a man may be invaded by the god and become deranged. In that case it is a matter of individual disorder.

Pan's powers of derangement alternate between one of these poles and the other. In panic, Pan seems to evade all apprehension. In posses­sion, by contrast, he makes himself known, he reveals himself; someone possessed by Pan (inspired by Pan—the panoleptic) actually borrows his behavior from the god who invades him." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]

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"At the beginning of Euripides' Hippolytus, everyone is worrying about Phaedra. The young queen has changed color; she is extremely weak and can no longer stand; she stays flat on her back in the palace, refus­ ing to eat, talking only of how she longs for the mountains and far-off meadows. Actually she is the victim of Aphrodite and sick with love for Hippolytus; the landscape she longs for is, in fact, that where he hunts. But the chorus does not know this, and is thrown back on guess­ work. From its observation of the symptoms, it hazards a diagnosis:

Are you possessed [ενθεος], young woman, either by Pan or Hecate, or do the dread corybantes make you stray about, or the Mother of the Mountains? Or do you wear yourself out unhallowed through failure to offer the sacred meal to Dictynna the huntress?

Phaedra's condition is like that of a person possessed by some god of wild nature, probably as a consequence of some wrongdoing or ritual omission. The term entbeos, possessed, whether one understands it (with Dodds) as "containing a god" or (with Jeanmaire) as uin the hands of a god," signifies that a person is as close to the divine as one can be. This closeness is disturbing. A god invades or takes over a man only when angry. One of Euripides' other female characters, the young wife of Jason, poisoned by the veil sent by Medea, is suddenly dreadful to look upon (δεινόν ην θέαμ' ίδεϊν): she changes color, begins to tremble, falls. A servant thinks the poor girl must be subject to the anger of Pan or some other divinity and raises the ololugê (άνωΚόλνξε): this ritual cry, which is proper to women attending a sacrifice, marks the moment when the victim, now consecrated (ιερόν), is invaded by the god. These two examples illustrate folk belief of the fifth century B.C. and show us that under certain circumstances, Pan could take control of an individual, invade him, and impose upon him a condition that is psycho-physiologically abnormal, and also sacred. He shares this power with a whole group of divinities: Hecate, the corybantes, the Mountain Mother, Dictynna.

Hecate and the Mother are gods to whom (among others) folk belief attributed epilepsy, called by the Greeks a "sacred disease" (hiera nosos). The Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease collects superstitions re­ lated to this mysterious sickness, and tells us that "if the patient imitate a goat, if he roar, or suffer convulsions in the right side, they say the Mother of the Gods is to blame. . . . When at night occur fears and terrors, delirium, jumpings from the bed and rushings out of doors, they say that Hecate is attacking or that heroes are attacking." Accord­ing to the scholiast on the passage in Euripides describing the moment when Medea's victim becomes "dreadful to look upon," "the ancients believed that those who suddenly fall are struck in their wits by Pan or Hecate." "Those who suddenly fall" are epileptics. And in fact the development of the "fit" in Euripides' description of it fully bears out the commentary of the scholiast: white foam dribbes from the queen's mouth, her eyes roll back, her skin becomes bloodless. The servant thinks she is witnessing an acute attack and concludes that the young woman has fallen victim to the anger of Pan or some other divinity. The epileptic is invaded by a god; surely this is because the god is angry. To cure this shameful sickness, folk tradition made use of purification and incantations (καθαρμοΐσί τε χρέονται καί επαοιδησι) as in cases in­ volving people "polluted, blood-guilty, bewitched by men, or [having] committed some unholy act."

The connection between epilepsy and Pan, a connection that springs to the servant's mind, is clarified for us by a set of common Greek be- liefs according to which small livestock {probata) and especially goats are particularly subject to the sacred disease. It was generally thought that too much goat's meat and also clothes made of goatskin encour- aged the development of this sickness; conversely, and by the logic of homeopathy, epileptics were instructed to sleep on goatskins and to eat the flesh of this animal. It is thus hardly surprising that the goat-god, patron of goatherds and lover of goats, should have some rights with respect to epilepsy. Hippocratic medicine, which set out to construct a rational science, was elaborately critical of any belief that sickness came from the gods. In the case of epilepsy, it had its work cut out for it. In fact, even the terms for the "sacred disease" that we might think of as "secular" are religious in origin: epileptos and epileptikos mean "one who is grasped, carried off" and belong to a group of words formed on the model of theoleptos "grasped, carried off by a god." Thus we find numpholeptos, phoiboleptos (or phoibolarnptos), putholeptos, metroleptos, mousoleptos, erotoleptos, and finally panoleptos (or panolemptos). Epilepsy is only a particular version of theolepsy. It can be caused by Pan, by the Mother, or by other gods, but it is never ascribed to Apollo, the muses, Eros, or the nymphs. And when the gods (Pan and the Mother in- cluded) take over someone, the result need not look like an epileptic fit. Phaedra is also possessed by Pan, and her condition is quite different from that of Jason's young wife." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]

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"First of all, nympholepsy is a specific type of inspiration. Socrates, who finds himself in Phaedrus's company on the banks of the Ilissos, in a district sacred to the nymphs, Pan, and Achelöos, and who is about to give a speech on madness, warns his friend:

"Hear me out in silence.
The place seems to be really divine, so that you need not be surprised if in the course of my speech I am subject to recurrent attacks of nympholepsy. Just now my utterance nearly broke into dithyrambics" (Plato Phaedrus 258 c-d).

For Plato, as we know, inspiration is a form of dis-association whereby the speaker is no longer responsible for what he says (cf. Ion, passim). So is nympholepsy. Confirmation comes from Aristotle: in the Eudemian Ethics the philosopher reviews a number of hypothetical explanations of happiness. Happiness may be by nature (like skin color), it can be learned or acquired by practice—unless someone is happy "like people who are nympholeptic or theoleptic, as if their inspiration is initiated by something supernatural" (καθάπερ οι νυμφόληπτοι και θεόληπτοι, των ανθρώπων, επιπνοία δαιμονίου τινός ώσπερ ενθουσίάζοντες).
In this case happiness would be a kind of gift, like the gift of Melesagoras.

However nympholepsy is not always linked with possession and en­ thusiasm as a form of inspiration. It can also take the form of a literal rapture; there is a whole group of myths about young people rapt or carried off by the nymphs. The best known is Hylas, Heracles's young lover. While looking for spring water, he came upon the choir of nymphs; they drew him deep into the water, where he disappeared for ever. Some rationalizer cited by the scholiast on Theocritus (ad 13.48) claimed that Hylas was drunk and simply fell into the spring. Thus demystified, the story would be stripped of its rich symbolism. To be carried off by the nymphs, even though in the Greek religious under­ standing it is very much like dying (the person involved disappears from the world of the living) is also something more: the nymphs carry their victim into a situation that looks like death only to those who remain behind; the missing person enters a new mode of existence, becomes hieros.

Theocritus calls the nymphs "dread divinities" (deinai theai). The scholiast adds: "Dread, because of the fear that seizes those who meet them; this fear causes nympholepsy."
In this sense, nympholepsy means neither inspiration nor rapture. The term here names the mad­ ness of those unhinged by fear. Such madness threatens those who see the reflection of a nymph while leaning over a spring. Nympholeptic, in this case, still means "seized or struck by the nymphs," but in the sense in which we say someone is struck or stunned by some impressive experience. To be struck in this way implies a different kind of imme­ diacy from inspiration or rapture. The victim is neither invaded by the nymphs nor carried off by them. He remains out of contact, but stu­ pefied, and cut off from any other interest.

To sum up: whether he is inspired, disappears, or goes mad, a man seized by the nymphs leaves the normal world and goes beyond the limits of human life. The nympholept is transported elsewhere and be­ comes a supercultural, superhuman creature, whom the Greeks could style hieros.

This digression on nympholcpsy will help us come to terms with cer­ tain aspects of panic possession. The two phenomena arc, in fact, closely related. The nymphs occupy the same landscape as Pan and share with him their cult places: the banks of the Ilissos (where Socrates fears an attack of nympholepsy) and the caves at Vari and on Cithaeron (also known for their nympholeptics) were sacred to Pan as well as to the nymphs. Restricting ourselves to the issue of possession, let us note that the danger of nympholepsy is particularly great at noon, which is also the hour specially set aside for Pan's appearance and his anger. The word panoleptos, formed in imitation of the better-known numpboleptos, confirms this relationship on the level of vocabulary.

Pan is often enough enraptured by masculine or feminine beauty, but the Greeks then thought of the result as a pursuit or a rape. The god does not take his victim home with him. He may nonetheless invade someone, take possession of him (which is to say, dispossess him) to such a degree that this person's communication with his fellows is radically disrupted. Panolepsy in its epileptic form, as one can reconstruct it from a reading of Euripides, is quick and violent. It is a whole-body condition that leaves the victim no energy to fantasize. We have, however, noticed that the "fit" that overtakes Jason's young wife is in certain respects not unlike the much less spectacular illness that afflicts the amorous Phaedra. Phaedra displays the same preliminary symptoms (change of color, great weakness of the body), but in her case, they are less violent. And in her case, fantasy begins its work. It carries the heroine off to mountain landscapes and distant meadows. The queen, whose bodily form is shut up in the palace, in the dark, seems to wander through the domain of the god who has invaded her; she strays about. She roams, as docs Pan (as does Hippolytus, actually, but her companions do not know that) when the hunt leads him up hill and down dale. She behaves exacdy like the nympholepts or panolepts described by Iamblichus, who seem at certain moments constrained, and at other moments wander the mountains.

Jason's young wife undergoes the attack of the god in the shape of an epileptic fit; the amorous Phaedra displays the symptoms of deep mel- ancholy. Whereas the nymphs cause their victims to disappear, panic "rapture" can be specified in Greek medical terms as a range of effects from epilepsy, which is a complete derangement, to melancholy, which is an estrangement rendering the victim inaccessible to his companions. From the point of view of ancient medicine, this range of effects is quite natural. In the Hippocratic treatise on Epidemics, we find an explicit statement that "melancholies regularly become epileptics, and epileptics melancholies; as between these two conditions, it all depends on the direction of the illness: if it affects the body, it is epilepsy; if the mind, it is melancholy." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]

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"Certain texts show us a Pan capable not only of derangement but also of radical transformation, whereby the victim changes his nature. Nonnos mentions a Pan lussöön, "mad," who can shatter an enemy fleet with his sharpened claws (or horns, or hooves, θηγαλέοι,ς όνύχεσσυ). The participle lussöön relates this fury to personified madness, to the mythical Lyssa. This latter appears not infrequently in Greek mythology. She plays a terrifying and bewitching melody upon her flute, and thus transforms her victim into a mad dog or a furious wolf. Heracles, who suddenly begins to pant like a dog, sets off after his children in a hunt unleashed by the goddess; the Bacchae, styled by Euripides "the quick dogs of Lyssa," track Pentheus like their prey;  Actaeon's dogs go mad and rend their master under the influence of this same Lyssa. It even seems that ety- mologically Lyssa means "she-wolf," in the sense of "she who turns one into a wolf." As Nonnos speaks of him, Pan shares the power of Lyssa.

Pan's appearance beside Lyssa serves to convey a sense of ghasdy error. Burkert observes that Actaeon's dogs are de­ scribed as acquiring partially human qualities at the very moment when they go mad; the hero turned stag is killed by creatures who, in their turn, are no longer just animals but act like huntsmen carried away by rage. Pan, grandson of Lykaon the wolf-man, is evidently a specialist in such metamorphoses.

An astonishing passage in Apuleius, which is also marked with the sign of Pan (the story is told by Syrinx), tells us to beware the ferocity of ewes at noon: "For when the sun is in his force, then seem they most dreadful and furious with their sharp horns, their stony foreheads, and their poisonous bites wherewith they arm them­ selves to the destruction of mankind." This madness, which is very like that which overtakes Pan himself in Nonnos, helps us to understand a speech by one of Theocritus's goatherds:

It is not fit, shepherd, not fit at noon for us To play the syrinx. We fear Pan. His hunt Is over now; he's tired and rests. Then is he touchy, And the bitter bile is sitting in his nose. But you, Thyrsis, would sing the woes of Daphnis And try the powers of the bucolic muse.

Bucolic ("of the cowherd") is here opposed to pastoral ("of the goat­ herd") (βονκολίκόν versus αίπολικόν). The dangers of noon relate to small animals, not to herds of cows. At noon one must avoid attracting Pan's attention by doing anything direcdy connected with his sphere: that of the syrinx and small livestock. Those who disregard this danger expose themselves to the anger of the god, to his madness. Noon is typically silent and motionless; it is the still point of the day.  Pan is the god of noise and movement; if we wake him at this hour when he should be asleep, we are in effect inviting him to fill up this silence and stillness. Pan is a god who should not be approached in silence. Consequendy, noon is the moment of the day when there is the greatest danger that he may invade us, dispossess us. In his anger, Pan would be capable of transforming the shepherd, protector of the flock, into his worst enemy, the wolf. In his madness the goat-god himself and the flocks he tends could turn as violent as carnivores. In its extreme ver­ sion, panolepsy maddens its victim and makes of him something sub­-human. To disturb Pan at noon is to flout a divine law (ου 0έμις, says Theocritus's goatherd). By the same token, Pan looks favorably on those who sleep at noon and who respect his slumbers. There is, for instance, the legend of the child-poet Pindar being fed by bees, who put honey in his mouth at noon while he sleeps in the landscape of Pan and nymphs. We have an epigraphic text that tells of a noontime dream that came from the god and allowed a critically ill child to be miracu­ lously healed. In another dream (also at noon), Pan appears to the pirate chief in Longus's Pastorals to tell him the cause of his anger and the cure for the panic that has overwhelmed his crew.

Possession results from a failure of ritual—whether owing to negli­ gence, recklessness, or actual impiety makes litde difference. Phaedra loses control of herself (according to her women) because she has not honored as she ought some god or goddess of wild nature; therefore, she is swept away, drawn in fancy to the realm of this divinity. The gen­eral similarity with Dionysiac mania should be noted. The latter breaks out in its most violent form when people refuse to recognize Dionysus's divinity or to accept his cult; its mythical victims are people like Pen- theus or Lycurgus. In Euripides' play, the Bacchae themselves had at first refused to accept the new god. Lyssa, whose power is close to Pan's, turns up also in the sphere of Dionysus (she can be seen in Aeschylus and Euripides, driving on the maenads). The Homeric Hymn to Pan takes note of the deep bond between the goat-god and the god of maenads by stressing Bacchus's particular pleasure in welcoming the newborn Pan to Olympus." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]

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"The mountain sanctuaries of Arcadia, whose sacred character is sometimes further marked by the existence of an area where men have no right to enter (the abaton of Mount Lykaion).

The underlying idea remains abduction, not death: Hylas, Astakides, and the van­ished children (whose beauty is not irrelevant) have been carried off, ravished by the nymphs.

Pan's violent antipathy to civic space is amusingly expressed in an epigram from the Greek Anthology, where the god in spite threatens to come to town. Nothing could have brought him to such an extreme resolution except his despair at the death of his lover, the cowherd Daphnis. The goat-god, whose resorts must seem doubly divided from the city (by his supernatural standing, as much as by his spatial distance), could bring there nothing but disorder. Artemidoros in the Oneirocriticus insistendy makes the point that to dream of Pan dressed as a city dweller appearing in public space means nothing but catastrophe and upheaval, while his appearance in the natural wilderness betokens success and happiness. To some degree, the disorder provoked by Pan (whether it troubles individuals with possession or collectivities with tumultuous panic) is direcdy the effect of a simple displacement. Pan brings with him into the political universe the properties of the space where he is at home. As a setting for wanderings that are agitated, un­ certain, and unstable, this space slips out of proportion. Huntsmen and herdsmen are led about there in response to the movement of animals as much as by their own cunning. This movement, these arcs, which are more or less irrational and uncertainly related to their center, find more explicit expression in the chase, and also in dancing, which is typical of the divinities found there: Hecate, Artemis and the nymphs, the Mother of the Mountains with her corybantes, Dionysus and the maenads. The Homeric Hymn to Pan describes the resdess mobility of the goat-god: "He wanders this way and that through the thick copses, sometimes trailing along the delicate brooklets; sometimes in turn he wanders the rocks where the sun climbs, making his way up to the highest peak, a watcher of flocks. Often he runs across the great white mountains, often he drives his beasts through the dales and kills them; he is quick to fix his gaze."

While the stress here is on Pan as huntsman, the Homeric Hymn does not pass over his role of herdsman: well acquainted with rocky paths, the god rises to the peak whence flocks are observed .

As the guard of litde flocks, Pan is a guide (an inscription from Tegea calls him prokathegetês) who knows how to lead the beasts from summer grazing to winter pastures. Euripides takes note of his knowledge of the routes that lead from mountain to plain when he describes him driving the golden ram, a royal badge for Thyestes, from Arcadia to Argos. A Thessalian legend told how the herdsman Kerambos, because he refused to pay attention to Pan's advice when told to bring his flocks down from the mountain before the coming of winter, lost his sheep and was himself turned into an insect (the Cerambyx, a great beede with pincers shaped like the pastoral lyre). Transhumance is evidently the necessary condition for bringing order to a territory that human beings can occupy only provisionally. In taking charge of pastoral space and of the periodic rhythm of its exploitation, it grants herding a standing among civilized activities. Thanks to transhumance, the herdsman escapes the nomadic life—which (for the Greeks) would cut him off from humanity. To refuse transhumance would be to give oneself up to disorder, without recourse. The Thessalian shepherd who insists on staying in the mountains for the bad weather sees the snow cover his sheep and his paths vanish. In this formless and confused landscape, he can no longer find his way, nor any solid ground. The directionless snow comes before him as the mark of Pan's hostile power. We can already see that this disorientation, and the unheralded death it brings on the shepherd and his flocks, in a small way echoes the tumult and murderous imbalance that on a grand scale overtakes an army subject to the god. In our study of panic properly so-called, we shall see more clearly how readily Pan's hallucinatory powers interact with the effect of snow.

On the level of pastoral activity, the snow has the effect of turning the mountain over to Pan. He is left sole master of the peaks, along with his nymphs, whom the people of Delphi called "white young girls"; the god then "traverses peaks struck by winter." Pastoral activity thus turns out to be ambiguous; it places mankind in a space bordering this sterile whiteness, and makes him neighbor to the nomad, damned to wandering. Let us remember that the goats who make up the flocks of Pan are themselves ambivalent animals, on the borderline between wild and domesticated. Yet for all this, pastoral activity is defined as an ac- tivity of civilization: the cycle of return (transhumance) comes to call him back. And Pan himself oversees the enactment of this cycle, he who never comes down to the city of men, unless to confound them.

In Arcadia more than anywhere, Pan is lord of mountains. He does not live in a cave; rather his premises are called (by those few authors who describe them) kalië, aulis, or aulë. All three terms have to do with Pan as a herdsman. Kalië means a hut made of boughs that shelters the shepherd beside the sheepfold (aulis) that protects the flock against wild beasts. Aulê is another word for fold; Aelian speaks of it as an ac- tual place on Mount Lykaion; it is sacred to Pan and, he tells us, no wolf dares enter it; goats and sheep may shelter in this sanctuary, as may any animal pursued by a wild beast. Thus we see how in the care of this god the pastoral function (protection and increase) overflows and extends beyond the sphere of the human shepherd. Pan is the herdsman par excellence, even among undomesticated creatures.

Pan's sacred enclosure on Mount Lykaion, an asylum where he protects any animal pursued by a wolf, attests the survival of old beliefs in which Pan was divine master of the animal world, wild as well as domesticated. This sanctuary, which sets an inviolable limit to the murderous power of the wolf (and surely also of the huntsman), guarantees the survival of wild game and is an extension of Pan's power over animal fertility; we shall see that the Arcadians thought Pan responsible for the abundance, and correspondingly for the scarcity, of meat, whether ob- tained by hunting or by herding.
The landscape of choice for these savage goats was Crete; there was a story that Cretan goats knew how to cure arrow wounds and so taught mankind the use of the famous medicinal plant called diktamon.

That Pan has a share of the Indo-European heritage not only in his name but also on the level of religious representation seems to result from a comparison with a well-known figure of the Vedic pantheon, Pusan. The two gods, Pan and Pusan, display such exact and important similarities that several linguists have tried to ascribe to them a common etymology: Puçân would derive from a root pus, "make pros- per, nourish."
Pan the guardian and protector and Pùsân the nourisher, "the fattener," have a number of traits in common. Even though we have to admit that they are etymologically distinct, their names both refer to their pastoral function. They are approximate homonyms, and they are really homologous.

Protector of flocks and of riches, guide of travellers and the dead, Püsan retrieves stray animals and objects." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]

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"Thus Polybius explains the importance of music in Arcadian education:

For it is a well-known fact, familiar to all, that it is hardly known except in Arcadia, that in the first place the boys from their earliest childhood are trained to sing in measure the hymns and paeans in which by traditional usage they celebrate the heroes and gods of each particular place: later they learn the measures of Philoxenus and Timotheus, and every year in the theatre they compete keenly in choral sing- ing to the accompaniment of professional flute-players, the boys in the contest proper to them and the young men in what is called the men's contest. And not only this, but through their whole life they entertain themselves at banquets not by listening to hired musicians but by their own efforts, calling for a song from each in turn.

Polybius comments:

The primitive Arcadians, therefore, with the view of softening and tempering the stubbornness and harshness of nature, introduced all the practices I mentioned, and in addition ac- customed the people, both men and women, to frequent festivals and general sacrifices, and dances of young men and maidens, and in fact resorted to every contrivance to render more gende and mild, by the influence of the customs they instituted, the extreme hardness of the national character. The Cynaetheans, by entirely neglecting these institutions, though in special need of such influences, as their country is the most rugged and their climate the most inclement in Arcadia, and by devoting themselves exclusively to their local affairs and political rivalries, finally became so savage that in no city of Greece were greater and more constant crimes committed.

Society in Arcadia attempted a difficult balance. It tried to unite elements naturally at odds by force of institutions and to appease a latent violence through music.

As Dodds says, "Dionysiac experience is essentially collective or congregational, and is so far from being a rare gift that it is highly infectious." The manifestation of Pan most in this line—and most like a Dionysiac phenomenon (which need not imply borrowing)—is surely panic, not panolepsy. Panic is, after all, a collective state, which runs through a group like wildfire, while panolepsy (possession, enthusiasm, etc.) affects individuals and does not seem to be contagious. But panic is also opposed to maenadism in that it is not ritualized. An army is not a thiasos.

When the Greeks talk of possession (in the sense of enthusiasm or thcolepsy), they are less likely to name Dionysus than the corybantes, the nymphs, or Pan. From Plato on, the favored formula for inspiration is: "to act like a corybant." Iamblichus speaks of inspiration deriving from Pan, the nymphs, or corybantes. "Those who act like corybantes" believe they hear the music of the god who possesses them; they hear the flutes of the Great Mother inside their heads. The cory- bant is in an ecstatic state: such a person no longer perceives the human world. He is asleep with his eyes open, somewhere else. He is taken beyond the limits of the social world; like some panolepts, he is drawn to caves, wild thickets, springs. Something plucks him out of the city and goads him toward the realm of the goddess who possesses him: Cybele or the Mother of the Gods. When someone panics, by contrast, he hears nothing but noise (since he is cut off even from the source of his own fear). The corybant is abducted by the god, hurled straight into the divine world; he goes away, and is for a while evicted from the human condition.

The maenads and the corybantes take part in an organized and planned ritual. Panolepsy, by contrast, is in this respect like panic: wild and unpredictable. In panolepsy, however, Pan takes hold of isolated persons, who thereby become exceptional, asocial; in panic, he strikes human groups, which he knocks loose from culture by destroying all sense of the proper balance between man and god." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]

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"The goat-god, who is protector and especially herdsman of animals, also hunts. We see him sometimes playing relaxedly with a hare but his most frequent attribute after the syrinx is the throwing stick, the lagobolon used to kill these animals. The Homeric Hymn to Pan describes him in motion as "slayer of beasts" with a huntsman's keen eye- sight. Herding and hunting are two aspects of one function; this god who protects the balance of nature in the animal sphere also has in his care the limits set on activities that might threaten that balance. Artemis, prototypical huntress, is also mistress of animals, and knows how to punish men who go too far in killing, as in the case of Orion. There is also scattered evidence for a cult of Pan among huntsmen. Arrian warns them against forgetting Pan, Artemis, and the other divinities of wild nature. If these are not invoked before setting out, there may be malign consequences, described in an archaic curse formula: "For then the dogs hurt themselves, the horses pull up lame, and the men stumble".

For the ancients, the goat was midway between the wild and the domesticated. Pan is, then, just this side of the animal sphere where Artemis has full power: the sphere of the bear, the stag, the lion, and the wild boar. Conversely, the hunt of the wild goat was not proper to Artemis: the Cretans of the archaic period consecrated their handsome reliefs that portrayed this kind of hunting to Hermes and Aphrodite. Surely huntsmen must not forget the goat- god, but that is because he belongs to the landscape they explore, to the open country, the mountains, the marshes; similarily, fishermen honor Pan Aktios as god of river banks and ocean promontories where the goats come for fresh water and salt.

The sphere of Pan thus overlaps with that of Artemis, whom the Greeks saw as nourisher of wild game and goddess of hunting—but only partially, and his mode of action in this limited sphere coincides only partially with that of the Mistress of Animals. On the other hand, the goat-god has in one respect power where she has not. While she has to do only with wild animals, his dominion is over both wild and domesticated beasts, and the frontier between them. He is the unassuming patron of the huntsman and his game and also patronizes the shepherd's care of small flocks." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]

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"Goats seen in a dream, Artemidorus of Ephesus tells us, "do not pre­dict marriages or friendships or partnerships nor do they secure those that exist, for such goats do not run in a flock, but rather pasture sepa­ rately from one another; among the peaks and rocks they have trouble themselves and make trouble for the shepherd." The interpreter of dreams finds in the goat an implication explicit in the goat-god. "Panic marriage," to use Euripides' phase, is a violent coupling, to the last de­gree extra-marital. Two terra-cottas, one from Boeotia, the other from Asia Minor, show Pan sleeping with a nymph. But this god's experi­ ences of women, although they cover quite a range, are generally ephemeral and most frequendy unfortunate. In the Homeric Hymn, he is a lonely god. The nymphs perhaps call to him, but down from a rock "which the goat cannot reach". The poet seems to suggest tliat the goat-footed god cannot reach it either: the nymphs are mocking him. When Pan and die nymphs do come together, in the evening, after the hunt, it is only to dance and to sing. Passion surely draws Pan to the nymphs and animates tiieir dance, but detachment is preserved. This god, who has so much in common with Aphrodite, succeeds only at musical performance.

The isolated haunts of Pan, a territory devoted to the hunt and to the rearing of goats and sheep, are in principle closed to women. Pseudo- Heracleitus has it exactly right: this is a sphere of frustration. This landscape has been set aside for stricdy masculine projects—except that the maenads sacred to Dionysus can enter it, and die nymphs of Artemis. The ritual practices of diese creatures, midway between mydi and social actuality, are marked by a steady opposition to normal feminine behavior. The maenads, like die nymphs, flourish outside of social space. The nymphs have nothing at all to do with die city, while Dionysus's female companions, who are often wives and mothers, cut themselves off for a time from die cultural order to which they normally belong: Dionysiac frenzy tears them from the familial hearth and their marital duties and drives them for a time from the city, toward the wilderness, far from men. The nymphs, who live in caves, are at home in a landscape visited by the maenads; their kinship is with Artemis, and they are thus cut off from everything male—which does not prevent occasional contact when the chance is offered; in their transitory love affairs with shep- herds and huntsmen, they are the aggressors. Not uncommonly, in fact, they employ violence and carry off the object of their desire; rape, in that case, is a kind of death.

Aphrodite's powers, when mediated by Pan, are thus placed in an environment that negates their ultimate purpose: marriage. Pan's sexu- ality seizes whatever is available, or becomes perverted. It is by definition nonfamilial and wild. The poets like to call Pan duserös ("unlucky in love"). In this he is like Theocritus's goatherd, whose eyes mist over when he sees a buck coupling a goat. The shepherds practice two ex- pedients that they share with Pan, who may even have invented them: onanism and bestiality. Dio Chrysostomus transmits a tradition that onanism was taught Pan by Hermes, who "seeing his son astray day and night upon the mountain, in love with Echo and unable to secure her, had pity on his distress."

Panic passion is unstable for the same reason that it is violent and futile: it is entirely opposed to marriage. Just as Pan's landscape is detached from the city and its agricultural land, so his erotic behaviour remains detached from the institution that gives passion its acculturated form. Lucian finally makes this detachment explicit in one of his imaginary dialogues when Pan responds to his father Hermes: "Tell me, Pan, are you married yet?—Oh, no, father! I belong to Eros, after all, and I wouldn't want to get bound to one woman."

A solitary vagabond, a wanderer through snowy wastes, in frontier territories off the beaten track (mountains, gullies, rocks), Pan seems gripped by a constant and eccentric restlessness. The erotic life of this creature follows the pattern of his wanderings, and consists of a se- quence of passing encounters, furtive and violent couplings, often unnatural and altogether extramarital. An epigram by Agathias the Scholastic shows us how Pan's eroticism matches his landscape. That this little poem was written in the sixth century A.D. by a Byzantine scholar does not deprive it of all relevance. The epigram, after all, is a pure act of virtuosity. It strives for a purely formal originality, while the semantic content remains entirely conventional.

Pan of the crags, Stratonicus the plowman In thanks sets aside for you this unsown place. "Graze your flocks here," he says, "and joy to sec This ground of yours no longer cut with bronze.

Panic marriage is illegitimate, sterile, and violent like Pan's landscape; culture has abandoned this territory to the wanderings of the goatherd and huntsman.

At his birth Pan was rejected by his mother; this important element in the myth means a variety of things and should be analyzed from sev- eral points of view. On the most general level we can detect a fear linked to incest as latently expressed by the violence of this event—violence not marked by the playful tone of the Homeric Hymn. If we take it that the prohibition of incest generally functions to make possible exchange and communication in the form of marriage, we can then say that Pan represents this exchange and communication in an exaggerated form. The resdessness of the goat-god and his sexual promiscuity are just as contrary to marriage as is the introversion that is incest. Thus Pan on the erotic level turns out to be an anti-Oedipus. It is perhaps worth noticing in this connection that the figure against whom he defines himself in order to claim his territory is Demeter, a mother who does not succeed in separating from her daughter!

In Pan's case, it is excessive desire that opposes him to marriage and leads to the fragmentation and dispersion of his erotic objects. Panic sexuality is crippled by glut; it is cut off from its object, which vanishes in the end (cf. Echo, Syrinx), by a desire so intense that it cannot estab- lish a relationship with an objective purpose. We shall see that Greek accounts of panic eroticism bring us, very naturally, to the myth of Narcissus.

From the fifth century onward, the Greeks ascribed to this god the power of raising uncontrollable desire. According to one of Aristophanes' characters, he could make the whole male population of a city ithyphallic. In Menander's Dyscolos, the passion he inspires in young Sostratus for Cnemon's daughter has the look of an actual frenzy (supernatural possession). When Theocritus's shepherd prays the god to put in Aratos's power the young man his friend loves, he knows whereof he speaks: not only is pederasty one way of sacrificing to Pan, but the god, who in myth is himself gripped by desire, also has the power to affect whom he will with the pangs he knows so well himself. This power, whereby Pan shares the prerogatives of Aphrodite, allows him to be thought of as the father of lynx, the personification of violent regret and unlimited desire." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]

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"The syrinx was already an attribute of Pan's in the fifth century. In the mythological great tradition, not he, but Hermes was the inventor of this instrument. It is, however, certain that the notes drawn from his flute by the goat-footed god were infused with the symbolism that at a very early period adhered to this instrument.

The Greek syrinx was made up of a row of parallel reeds, all of the same length, fastened together with beeswax; the whole was braced together with metal or wood. Pitch was determined by plugs (of beeswax or the segments of the reeds themselves), which in each reed fixed the height of the column that gave the note. Beeswax, which "binds" the reeds (hence the epithet kërodetas applied to the syrinx by Euripides), is not symbolically neutral. Its stiff consistency contrasts with the fluid sound, which the Greeks from Pindar onward compare with liquid honey; Pan "sprinkles his own sort of honey." But if the music spread abroad by the flute is like the harvest of the bees, it is to an opposite purpose; honey carries here only its seductive qualities (it makes us drunk, we sink within its sweetness). Far from treasuring up goods in the manner of the chaste and laborious bee, Pan squanders, "sheds" his sound; he drowns the world with a siren's music. This seduction is first and foremost pastoral; the melodies sprung from the di- vine lips guide and fertilize the flocks.

The Alexandrians did not invent the erotic character of this music; it is already present in Euripides when he describes Apollo's service to Admetus; herding beasts among mortals, the god tunes his lyre to the shepherd's syrinx and plays pastoral wedding songs. But the shrill whisde of the syrinx is not made only for love songs. There is something disturbing about it, even funereal. In the Homeric Hymn to Pan, it sounds at evening, plaintive and unend­ ing, when the god comes home alone from the hunt. Later we shall return to the syrinx (whose music combines love and mourning) and to echo (whose deceitful sound combines music with noise). Let us here be content with one detail directly relevant to the Alexandrian stories just cited. When Pan pursues a girl, be she Echo or Syrinx, her song is preserved by Earth. It is the voice of one buried, which rises from a place beyond our reach, mediated by the echo or the reeds of the flute. Now the syrinx is sometimes an instrument that communicates with the other world: according to Euripides, the music of its mourning can reach as far as Hades. The Greek word synnx can, however, mean any long, hollow object. Although the meaning "Pan's flute" is attested as Homeric, the word is used in the Iliad to mean the sheath of a lance. In tragedy it can mean the axle nave of a chariot, in Polybius, a tunnel or mine.  Syrinx is etymologically related to Sanskrit surüngä, "subterranean corridor." Gaia's action in receiving the girl and sending forth reeds in her stead may suggest that the etymological sense of synnx plays some part in the legend. As for the echo, whose tone of mourning is also stressed in the Homeric Hymn to Pan,78 it receives in Pindar's Olympian 4 the concrete form of a girl who, when put in motion by the song of the syrinx, can carry a message as far as the halls of Persephone

Dance and music are among Pan's most fundamental traits—and among the traits most often ascribed to him in literature and in the plastic arts. The god is at one and the same time animalistic, a "leaper" who is deformed and unhappy in love, and also a completely musical creature who, when he likes, is irresistibly charming. These two aspects do not merely coexist; they coincide.

In the myth, the syrinx comes into existence as the object of desire escapes. Music, so closely associated with Pan's dance, seems thus to originate in a deficit. But we would be wrong to take it as a mere substitutive compensation. It is infused with supernatural power and is that which it replaces; it has all the overpowering force of passion—and its reality: it is the divine word diat in the pastoral world fertilizes the flocks, and in a wider symbolic universe leads mankind in a dance where, as Sophocles has it, we take wing under the sign of Eros and of Charis." [Borgeaud, The Cult of pan]

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"Apollodorus's fragment makes a great point of the echo, a noise that comes we know not whence, but which we ascribe to Pan and the nymphs. The relation between panic and the echo is a fundamental theme. It brings into reliet one way in which the Greeks felt the presence of the god Pan. The god is manifest in the echo. Pausanias writes that the people around Menalia in Arcadia could hear Pan play the flute. More than one Greek mountain was haunted by Pan's music: Cythaeron (Euripides' Bacchae: 951fF), Lykaion (Pausanias 8.38.11); and also the vicinity of Apollonia in southern Illyria (Ampelius Liber memorialis 8.7.10). Pan is somewhere; he is very near, but invisible; he is a disembodied voice. A sound can be heard, but one cannot tell from where.

Folk traditions that connect the echo with wild nature and its god are not, of course, restricted to Greece. There is no shortage of parallels, which need not lead us to posit some kind of diffusion extending all the way to the peoples of Siberia. When Lucretius speaks of the deceptive sounds heard in desert places among the rocks and mountains, he is quick to associate Pan with the old Roman god Faunus:

Such places the neighbours imagine to be haunted by goat- foot satyrs and nymphs, and they say there are fauns, by whose night-wandering noise and jocund play they com- monly declare the voiceless silence to be broken, with the sound of strings and sweet plaintive notes, which the pipe sends forth touched by the player's fingers; they tell how the farmers' men all over the countryside listen, while Pan, shak- ing the pine leaves that cover his half-human head, often runs over the open reeds with curved lips, that the panpipes may never slacken in their flood of woodland music. All other signs and wonders of this sort they relate, that they may not perhaps be thought to inhabit a wilderness which even the gods have left. This is why they bandy about these miraculous talcs, or they arc led by some other reason, since all mankind arc too greedy for ears to tickle.

Lucretius's description of these beliefs, especially the centrality he awards the music of the god, suggests that he is following a Greek model. Faunus is no musician. Only in Greece, so far as we know, is the echo held to be a form of music made by wild gods rather than simply noises they stir up, or their voices. Furthermore, Lucretius describes the echo as originating in the "sweet mourning" (dukis querelas) of divine flutes. This notion of mourning is also derived from a Greek model. In the Homeric Hymn to Pan, Echo answers with a sound like mourning (peristenei) when Pan and the nymphs sing and dance.

For the Greeks, the echo brings to mind a quite specific meaning of music made by the gods of the wild: it suggests the hopeless love, mingled with jealousy and hatred, felt by Pan for the nymph Echo—a story we find told and retold in various forms from the Alexandrian period on down. Because it embodies Echo, the echo means failure, means that ineluctable sound, ever in motion, that is desired and slips away. As a result, the echo, as it seems to put the divine world (Pan and the nymphs) in communication with the human, no sooner mediates than it transforms. What entered the channel as music comes out, at the other end, as inarticulate sound. The echo begins to communicate, but vainly, and the result is illusion; the god does not appear, there merely lingers a disconcerting unexpectedly created opening to the unknown.

The Greeks never deny the relation between Pan and panic. The his- torians, it is true, usually speak only of immediate and naturalistic causes, but their recurrent use of such phrases as "the disorder ascribed to Pan" and "the fear we call panic" shows that their prudent rationalism was not generally shared and had to deal with widely held beliefs. Fur- thermore, a review of the panics they report reveals that most of them took place somewhere near a sacred cave of Pan." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]

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"Panic is connected with echoes; this in turn brings us to the legend of the nymph Echo, the ever-mobile, ineluctable object of Pan's vain pursuit. The god in this legend is an object of repulsion, something to be shunned. Panolepsy, by contrast, negates distance; in a "seizure" the effect of Pan, even to the point of madness or paralysis, is essentially an aspect of his capacity to attract and bind through music. Pan reminds us of the nurse who shunned the god at his birth; panolepsy evokes, on the human level, the charm that spread through Olympus when the young Pan arrived. Should there not be a myth corresponding to that of Echo on the other, the panoleptic side, a myth where the goat-god's seductive powers would take erotic effect without rejection?

As we know, Pan is usually unlucky in love (duserös). He is a goat- herd and does not understand love. We hear much of his attempts, but litde of his success.

Pan's effect on mankind, at the extremes, ranges from a fear that re- pels to an intrusion that deranges. The pattern established by these two poles of panic mania corresponds, in the sphere of the gods, to the pattern of Pan's relations with such beings as the Titans, Echo, Typhon, and Selene. To the contrast between fear and possession among mankind corresponds the contrast between repulsion and charm in the divine sphere. The myth suggests, furthermore, that in Pan's case there is a close relationship between insane derangement and erotic behavior.

Without the indirections of metamorphosis or disguise, without any of those precautions customary to the gods when they appear among mankind with good in- tentions, Pan bursts right upon them. He is playing the syrinx and wielding his rhabdos (staff). This latter attribute is proper to Pan's father Hermes; the rhabdos, a magic wand, puts to sleep anyone it touches; it charms and immobilizes. Here it acts to reinforce on the level of touch an impression transmitted also through hearing (the syrinx) and sight (the demas).

Contact with the divine entails the disap- pearance of the young man, who is detached from the sensible world. Hylas is the victim of his own charm (the myth dwells upon his erotic attractions: the nymphs cannot resist him); he is swept off into the void. In the Asiatic legend, by contrast, the sudden appearance of Pan does not carry the woodcutters into another world; it freezes them to the spot, in their bodies. The text stresses that they are victims of tham- bosy that is to say, of awful terror, of the horror that seizes one who sud- denly recognizes a god. Such an appearance, so far from reducing distance, makes it vivid, and forcibly brings to our attention the otherness of the divine. There is nothing rapturous about paralytic torpor; it is repulsive in nature. This contrast between the seduction worked by the nymphs and the thambos caused by Pan's appearance is all the more striking in that it seems to oppose divinities who, as we have seen, are closely linked, and who more often than not act in conjunction. Perhaps, after all, attraction and repulsion, charm and terror, should be seen as complementary aspects of a single phenomenon: the nymphs who beguile Hylas are the same creatures called "dread goudesses" (deinai theai) by Theocritus, and although his appearance is repellent, Pan nonetheless plays a seductive melody upon his syrinx." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]

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"In the Homeric Hymn Pan crosses the gap between earth and Olympus; he thus signifies a union, as well as an opposition, between mortal terror and divine delight. The escape of his nurse and the charm that spreads about Olympus have but one cause: the appearance of the mon- ster with his sweet smile. This monster is a musician. The syrinx, his most frequent attribute, instills inebriation everywhere; in the matrix of its harmonics, earth and sea and starry heaven melt together. It thus joins man with god and keeps the universe moving to its rhythm. But it can also disrupt the finely balanced order it reveals. Let it be slightly off-key, let there be a moment of irritation, and this ambiguous music sounds the strident note of Lyssa's flute, inciting frenzied anger. Pan's syrinx can even substitute for Athena's trumpet and signal terror.

Pan starts at the other extreme; here there is nothing but noise and disorder. Pan works upon the sense of hearing and makes it phan- tasmal; under his influence, nothing is taken for something—but this nothing (this echo), as the myth of Echo shows, is not really just anything: it derives in the last analysis from that otherworldly music, those faraway harmonies of the syrinx that lead the dance and the song of the nymphs. In panic, the extreme disjunction of man and god creates a gap where illusions flood in; thereby a collectivity of warriors—in its own way—experiences images as false as those driving the god to pursue the unobtainable Echo. There is a correspondence between the human group, disorganized and crippled by a fear whose cause resists identifi- cation, and the mythical image of Pan's confusion and ultimate rage when he finds himself seduced by an object who escapes his passion. Nor is panolepsy different: however weird and abnormal the behavior of the panolept, he nevertheless declares himself both impure and sa- cred. His madness is very close to certain kinds of divination and prophecy; behind the trembling of his body and the contortions of his face, we can glimpse the shudder of Eros joined to the smile of Pan. The relevant mythical paradigm is not a violent overthrow, but a deceitful seduction, which overtakes titanic or monstrous figures. The panolept is possessed.

When fear and desire are connected to Pan, they appear placed under the sign of inconstancy and illusion. Panic desire is as futile as panic fear; the one pursues a bodiless voice, or an illusory body, while the other is set in motion by a phantasmagoric enemy.

Repulsion and attraction thus have this in com- mon: their object escapes them. Faced with this vacuity, Pan's victim begins to generate images; delirious dreams and visions come to fill the empty space and thus correspond to the god's music, to the syrinx filled with the sighs of despised love.

In the case of the god, the "imaginary" and the "real" are contrasting twin aspects of a single nature. Music and noise, longing and animality, correspond. Pan is double in his essence, dipbuës as Plato says.  It cannot be so with his victims. Panic deception, as it carries them away, also splits them in two. We have seen how Phaedra's melancholy draws her helpless into wild nature, while her inert body remains immobile in the palace. She is lost to herself, subject to a force like that which separates another kind of melancholic, the lycanthrope or werewolf, from his hu- manity. There longing has a different character; it is not erotic but can- nibalistic. Nevertheless, the two phenomena are similar in that in both two incompatible personalities are simultaneously or alternately present. Lycanthropy as the ancients describe it is a form of split personality: the medical writers describe the victim as pale, feverish, and parched during the day, but all the same human and not dangerous, while at night he becomes a possessed creature (katecbomenos), who, we hear, prowls the cemeteries. In the field of panic disorders, a whole series of disasters share the orientation of lycanthropy: Actaeon's dogs eat their master; at noon the frenzied rams become carnivorous; the shepherds in a sudden frenzy tear at Echo's corpse. Panic madness, mythically defined as a longing that cannot obtain its object and thus generates an illusory object, may culminate in the imaginary metamorphosis of the subject. When Pan's victim is deceived in his object, he is driven back on him- self. He is deceived, ultimately, about himself. He becomes another, or supposes himself another. This illusion, which at the level of personal longing brings us back, no doubt, once more to the myth of Narcissus, takes another form on the level of collective fear, in panic: the soldier cannot recognize his own people or even his own language, and in the end a military camp divides into two antagonistic groups. Fear and long- ing, panic and possession ultimately derive from a single potent source." [Borgeaud, The Cult of pan]

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"When the mania breaks out, the victim of the god is often described as having
experienced a blow. Something strikes a man forcibly, makes him recoil, knocks him off the straight and reasonable path. Eumaeus in the Odyssey is called πλαγκτέ (which means both "starded" and "dis­tracted") at the moment when he hands his bow to an Odysseus thought by the suitors to be a mere beggar with no right to join in their contest.  Wheresoever the "blow' originates, it is seen as something out of place and untimely. The classic writers (particularly the drama­tists) employ a whole series of related metaphors having to do with various types of mania; the verbs paraplazein, parakoptein, parakrouein, parapaiein, and so on, are not exact synonyms, but they all evoke, in speaking of madness, the image of some element essential to personal balance (phrënes or nous, "mind") that is driven, warped, or deranged by a blow. Sometimes the stress is on the invalidity of the practical result (by analogy with striking a counterfeit coin), sometimes on deviation from the norm.

Similar expressions are used for more violent types of aberration: the terror that deranges (ekplêttô) or frenzy (paraplêttein). According to Josef Mattes, these lexical variants cluster around a single underlying representation: either one thinks of an organ (seat of the nous or of the phrenes), which holds its place in the body while it functions normally but when it is sick leaves that place or is even ejected from the body, or else, more plausibly, one thinks of some movement that strikes the pbrenes and shifts them from their usual locus. For our purposes it makes no difference what kind of organ is affected by the blow. The Greek understanding of the body and its psychic organs is a difficult problem, which can be left to the historians of medicine. The crucial fact from our point of view is that the individual comes up sharp against a reality the ancients called divine—often without further speci­fication. Most frcquendy, it must be observed, the Greeks do not tell us what aspect of divinity deals the blow. This docs not mean that they were unconcerned about the source of the disorder, but rather that it was outside the reach of normal human understanding. For this reason, when they are (exceptionally) in a position to give it a name, we must understand that we are dealing with a mania of a particular type. Now we know from Menander that the god Pan, who was able to make someone "apoplectic" (which means literally "diverted by a blow"), is one personification of this unknown force that strikes us. The moment has come to focus on a feature we have neglected so far, in spite of its remarkable evocative power: the whip.

In the Rhesus Hector alludes to a generally understood represen­ tation of panic phobos when he says that the army has been stirred by the whip that makes one tremble (μάστιγι τρομερή), the implement of Pan, son of Cronos. This reference to the whip enables us to place the blow given by the goat-god squarely within the symbolic context proper to pastoral; it is one of many images available to Greek con­ sciousness through close familiarity with animal husbandry. One myth, which we might call its myth of origin, actually makes of the whip (mastix) an emblem of the herdsman's world. This myth forms part of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and places the invention of the mastix in a setting where Pan is quite at home: the region of Mount Kyllene in Arcadia. Here we find that the mastix, like the syrinx, belonged first to Hermes, as god of herdsmen: it was given him by Apollo along with responsibility for flocks.

The whip is associated with a whole series of instruments (rhabdos, imasy kentron, etc.) used to drive animals; it is special, however, because it is exceptionally violent, and as a consequence seems to have been used quite infrequendy. In connection with large domesticated animals, it is the essential sign of man's superiority over brute strength; a proverb used by Sophocles tells us that "a great-flanked ox struck by even a small whip moves straight down the road." Nonnos also (it makes no differ­ ence whether he has noticed the fact himself or is using a literary phrase) speaks of a bull who obeys the whip (μάστνγι κελεύεται). The function of the mastix is the mastery of stubborn or recalcitrant animals; in a sense, it educates them. Xenophon in his essay on horsemanship advises against whipping a horse intended for war; the use of the whip may make the animal fearful and instill a tendency to abrupt and disorderly motion. The same author, however, recognizes that this implement, which inspires fear, can be useful for the correction of a refractory horse. It is high praise to say of one's mount that "she has no need of a whip"; the lexicographer Pollux dutifully includes this in a list of phrases relative to horses.
To be under the whip is to be treated as a recalcitrant animal or (which comes to the same thing) as a subject of the great king, a barbarian humbled by the blows of hybris.

Our sense of the confusion of man and animal can be confirmed from another point of view: the herdsman's whip is used mostly on oxen and horses, that is to say, on animals themselves involved in panic, in that they are caught up in its disordered mobility (tarachai). The pho­bos of Pan strikes horses and men together, and the cause (the first vic­ tim) of an army's panic is often an animal—this belief can be traced back as far as Xenophon. Aeneas the Tactician knew well that animal disorder could seep over into human fear, since he advises sending herds of goats (or other beasts) intoxicated and hung with bells to the enemy camp at night; the stirring of animals then transforms itself without a break into human disorder.

Therefore, when the whip has a role in mania, we are dealing with mania of a particular kind. The goat-god is immediately evoked, and he is the privileged embodiment of a particular aspect or sphere of madness; he stands for a landscape where human fear enacts its hallucinations with gestures borrowed from animal disorder. Here boundaries are blurred, and in our disorientation we hear the call of uncontrollable longing." [Borgeaud, The cult of Pan]

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"The cry of women proper to panic ritual is called kraugê by the Suda and the scholiast on Aristophanes. This word is not generally used of a call or of any kind of communication. The kraugê is an inarticulate cry. Aristode makes fun of an elegiac poet who chose to speak of poetry by the impossible metaphor "kraugê of Calliope." As applied to certain animal sounds, the word speaks of a use of the voice approximating pure noise—not a cry and certainly not a song. Kmugê in this sense can refer to the yelping of a dog, or to the croaking of a crow, to the bird-noise of a woodpecker, or certain bleatings of a goat.88 When produced by humans, a kraugê evidendy carries with it a negative force: in the mouth of an old witch with the voice of a grasshopper, it re- sounds as a charm harmful to small children. But it is most frequently heard in the environment of war. This is the cry women give when the dead are brought back from batde; it is also the cry that rises from besieged cities, or that an army gives when it is surprised and takes to flight. The vanquished cry thus, as does a man unexpectedly struck and attacked; a kraugê is at once a cry of fear and a cry that causes fear. It puts the attacker to flight. In Thucydides, the kraugê and olologê of the Plataean women on a stormy, moonless night evoked phobos among the Thebans who have gotten into their town. The connection of the kraugê (a cry close to a noise) with fear suggests that we should place it in the set of images proper to panic. We can find confirmation of this in a note by Hesychius: to express the predisposition of certain horses to shy, the old lexicographer tells us, the Greek language included the word kraugias, derived from krauße, which was used for a steed agitated by noise.95 The uncontrollable agitation of a horse, as we know, is a particularly clear sign of panic.96 A second, more explicit confirma- tion is provided by the Suday which takes for granted a connection be- tween panic and the women's ritual exalting Pan "with a cry {meta kraugês) : panic hubbub is from this point of view comparable to a cultic celebration.

the festival in honor of Pan brought about an equilibrium, midway between panic and possession.
this equilibrium is not achieved by the exclusion of panic and possession, but rather by a ritual that evokes them, perhaps the better to gain control of their effects. Enchanting music (flutes, tambourines, rhythmic beating of the hands and feet), dances approximat- ing animal leaping, drunkenness, erotic excitement—all these are joined to fearful cries. Similarly, during the night the tumult that fills the cave, joyful though it be, nonetheless becomes a hubbub like that of panic. Pleasure and desire are at the heart of this festival, which in Menander prefigures a marriage. But they are inescapably mixed with anxiety. It is surely not only to keep the god awake, to bring him joy, that one must struggle against exhaustion until dawn. The pannuchis of Pan, an initiatory festival quite as much as a festival of pleasure, also works to exor- cize fears and phantasmata—that is to say, phenomena attributed either to the absence of the god or to his excessive presence." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]

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"Pan brings with him fertility and its constant companions, beauty and wealth. Beauty and inner wealth are the philosophical prayer of Socrates in the famous invocation he speaks on the banks of the Ilissos in Plato's Phaedrus: "Friend Pan, and all who are gods of this place, grant me to become fair within. Let all that I have without be friendly to my inner state. May I believe the wise man rich. May I have such quantity of gold as would attract the trafficking only of the moderate man." But the gifts most proper to Pan, according to the inscription from Pharsalia previously cited, are laughter and good humor (a good spirit).

The text adds νβριν τε δικαίαν, "a just excess." Laughter and gaiety, prior to their philosophical interpretation, have a ritual function specified in the myth, according to which Iambe, whose jests restored to Demeter the will to live, was Pan's daughter. The goat-god's laughter, part and parcel of his sexual energy, openly invites man­ kind to renewed vital activity: care of infants, fertility of the fields, and fecundity of the flocks. This laughter belongs both to the goat-god and to those who celebrate his festival; it works to create or recreate com­ munication. It fits well with what Herodotos tells us about the ritual established at Athens: stirred, as we have seen, by something like re­ morse, and free of a war where its existence had been at stake, the city propitiates (hilaskontai) the god. The cult of Pan has something to do with a return to laughter

The krotos (sound of clapping), gelôs (laughter), and cuphrosunë (good humor) thus appear as constitutive elements of panic ritual, and this not only in the sense that festive gestures were an ordinary part of most Greek sacrifices. The same point can be made about the dance, which played a fundamental part in the cult of Pan. The god made his presence felt in the excited and turbulent chorus of his votaries. A cer- tain balance is achieved by the festival, which brings together in ritual the two extremes of Pan's potency, panic and possession, but in such a way that each shows only its positive aspect: the god is present without alienation and the distance between god and worshipper is kept to a minimum. By panic, Pan atomizes a social group (an army), fragments it, destroys its solidarity; by possession, he evicts the individual from his own identity. In his dance and festival, the individual, while remaining himself, loses himself. This is perhaps what the Pharsalian inscrip- tion cited earlier means by "just excess." The chorus simultaneously displays social solidarity with the extrasocial: it communicates with na- ture and the gods. The Epidaurus Hymn reminds us that Pan's music and dance restore a threatened cohesion. Dance, laughter, and noise become, in the festival, signs of a recovered closeness." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]

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Quote :

"The sailors of Salamis who in Sophocles' play have accompanied Ajax to Troy break into choric song when they suddenly, albeit mistakenly, come to believe that their king has recovered his sanity; they are carried away by hope and begin a joyful dance:

I shivered with love, in my joy I took wing. Ιο, Ιο, Pan, Pan! Ο Pan, Pan! who wanders the sea, from snow-covered Kyllene, your rocky peak, appear, Ο lord of the dances of the gods, so that you may be with me and draw me into the spontaneous dance of Mysia and Knossos. For now I am ready for the chorus.

The joy of a happiness once forgotten, now recovered, is so intense that a god is required to lead the dance; the goat-god will conduct them and inspire their gestures. God and man exchange in the dance a no-longer-hoped-for happiness. The transition from melancholy to joy is specially marked by Sophocles in his evocation of the journey of the god, who leaves harsh, icy Mount Kyllene and crosses the sea to the Troad, to his festival.

Pan is a god of tumult and animal disorder (panic and possession), yet Aeschylus tells us that he loves the dance (philochoros) and Pindar classes him as a "perfectly initiated dancer." Pan's dance (in a word) conjoins two terms of a transformation: before and after. The "perfectly initiated dancer" makes others dance and dances with them; his music calls forth harmony, that humane order in the dance of which Plato speaks. But he himself remains at the animal level; he leaps. Pan is called skirtôn (leaper) by an Attic vase inscription of the fifth century. Cornutus, author of a Stoic treatise On Greek Theology, would in the first century A.D. explain this by recourse to allegory: "His nature as a leaper and his love of play represent the eternal movement of the universe." Although this is obviously tendentious, it nevertheless interprets the traditional image of the god. Pan's dance, his animal leapings-about, are abundantly represented on Attic and Italian pottery of the classical era. It is sharply contrasted with the measured round dance of the nymphs as we see it on Attic reliefs and elsewhere.

Philostratos the Sophist, in his Eikones, imagines the scornful attitude of the nymphs toward Pan, whose leapings know no bounds. The goat-god always escapes from the balance, which he nevertheless invites. He retains contact with that prior sphere where things originate, and actually with the farthest part of it, with the frontier where directions reverse. He is the son of Hermes, and in his own way also a god of passages; his laughter, his erotic passion, his motions as of a young animal inaugurate a new order of things. Without him, we may suspect, peace when it concluded conflict would come as a dead letter, not growing into new harmony, but rather structured into rigidity." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]