Domain: The wild, shepherds and flocks, panic, appetite, the untamed Symbol: The pan-pipes (syrinx), goat's legs and horns, the shepherd's crook Roman Equivalent: Faunus
Overview
Pan is the goat-god of the wild — half man, half goat, with horns, a shaggy hide, and cloven hooves. He belongs to the mountains and forests of Arcadia, the god of shepherds and their flocks, of everything that lives outside the walls of the city and the rules that come with them. Usually named a son of Hermes, he is old, rustic, and unashamedly bodily: he embodies raw appetite, lust, and the animal part of things that the more polished Olympians keep at arm's length. He plays his reed pipes in the wilderness, chases nymphs, sleeps in the noon heat, and answers to no council of gods.
He is the closest the Greek imagination comes to a god of pure instinct — not evil, but wild, the presence you feel when you are alone in a dark wood and something moves and your whole body seizes without asking permission.
Key Myths
Panic. Pan gives his name to panic — the sudden, irrational terror that seizes a crowd or a lone traveler in wild and lonely places, especially at noon or in the dark. It was said to be his voice in the emptiness, the dread of the untamed itself. In the story of the battle of Marathon he was credited with sending fear into the enemy ranks, and the Athenians honored him for it.
Pan and Syrinx. Pursuing the nymph Syrinx, who fled his advances, Pan watched her transformed into a stand of reeds at the river's edge to escape him. Sighing into the reeds, he heard the wind make a plaintive music through them — and cut them to different lengths to make the first set of pipes, the syrinx, which he carries ever after. His signature instrument is a monument to a desire that could not be caught.
The god who died. Pan is the one Greek god reported to have died. In a famous account a sailor hears a voice across the water crying that "great Pan is dead," and the news is met with mourning. Later readers took it as a sign of the old wild religion passing away — the untamed god, uniquely among the immortals, subject to an ending.
Related
- The Devil — The Major Arcana card whose horned, goat-formed archetype he embodies: appetite, instinct, bondage to the body
- Hermes — His father; the boundary-god who fathered the god of the boundary-lands
- Dionysus — His fellow in the wild ecstasies, the untamed and the intoxicated
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- Mythology
- Greek Mythology Index