Pan: From Arcadia to Arkham – Panic terror and HP Lovecraft – I

Posted by Phil Hine in Occult, Pagan  |  July 16th 2021  |  About poster:

“Before the laurel-draped mouth of the Corycian cave sat in a row six noble forms with the aspect of mortals, but the countenances of Gods. These the dreamer recognised from images of them which she had beheld, and she knew that they were none else than the divine Maeonides, the Avernian Dante, the more than mortal Shakespeare, the chaos-exploring Milton, the cosmic Goethe, and the Musaean Keats. These were those messengers whom the Gods had sent to tell men that Pan had passed not away, but only slept; for it is in poetry that Gods speak to men.”

HP Lovecraft and Anna Helen Crofts, Poetry and the Gods (1920)

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is not an author that one might immediately associate with Pan, yet Pan is present in various guises throughout his fiction and poetry, perhaps more recognizably so in his earlier prose, and more menacingly in his later works. To begin this series of posts on Lovecraft and Pan, I will take a look at the appearance of Classical themes in Lovecraft’s early work, where the Arcadian ideal is, for the most part, untainted by terror.

Lovecraft, from an early age, was enthralled with Classical literature and mythology, reading translations of the works of Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, Phaedrus, Juvenal from the age of six. He describes in his letters visiting the museums of Providence and Boston, and collecting plaster casts of Greek sculpture. Moreover, he believed that he had direct visionary encounters with Pan and other denizens of myth:

“When about seven or eight I was a genuine pagan, so intoxicated with the beauty of Greece that I acquired a half-sincere belief in the old gods and Nature-Spirits. I have in literal truth built altars to Pan, Apollo, Diana and Athena, and have watched for dryads and satyrs in the woods and fields at dusk. Once I firmly thought I beheld some of these sylvan creatures dancing under autumnal oaks; a kind of “religious experience” as true in its way as the subjective ecstacies of any Christian. If a Christian tells me he has felt the reality of his Jesus or Jahveh, I can reply that I have seen the hoofed Pan and the sisters of the Hesperian Phaëthusa.” ¹

As a consequence of this passion for the Classics, Lovecraft began his writing career in earnest. Indeed, his oldest preserved work is The Poem of Ulysses; or, The Odyssey: Written for Young People – a synopsis of Homer’s Odyssey in 88 verses, written in 1897. Lovecraft returns to The Odyssey in his novella, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927) which bears obvious similarities to Homer’s epic.

In 1901, at the age of eleven he composed a series of poems issued as a book – Poemata Minora which he dedicated “To the Gods, Heroes, and Ideals of the Ancients.” It is in the second volume of Poemata Minora (written the following year) that his poem “To Pan” appears:

“Seated in a woodland glen
By a shallow reedy stream
Once I fell a-musing, when
I was lull’d into a dream.

From the brook a shape arose
Half a man and half a goat.
Hoofs it had instead of toes
And a beard adorn’d its throat

On a set of rustic reeds
Sweetly play’d this hybrid man
Naught car’d I for earthly needs,
For I knew that this was Pan

Nymphs & Satyrs gather’d ’round
To enjoy the lively sound.

All too soon I woke in pain
And return’d to haunts of men.
But in rural vales I’d fain
Live and hear Pan’s pipes again.”

The themes of “To Pan” are entirely familiar – it is the bucolic Pan of Georgian pastoral literature, encountered in a dream-like state, far removed from worldly concerns, and not surprising, given that most of the translations of the Classics that Lovecraft had read were from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. It is an example of the “risk-free” Pan that D.H. Lawrence complains of in his 1924 essay Pan in America (see this post). But I should not be too hard on the eleven-year-old Lovecraft. His championing of the pastoral tradition came in the form of his essay The Despised Pastoral (1918) published in his own periodical, The Conservative:

“The English pastoral, based upon the best models of antiquity, depicts engaging scenes of Arcadian simplicity, which not only transport the imagination through their intrinsic beauty, but recall to the scholarly mind the choicest remembrances of classical Greece and Rome. Though the combination of rural pursuits with polished sentiments and diction is patently artificial, the beauty is not a whit less; nor do the conventional names, phrases, and images detract in the least from the quaint agreeableness of the whole. The magic of this sort of verse is to any unprejudiced mind irresistible, and capable of evoking a more deliciously placid and refreshing train of pictures in the imagination than may be obtained from any more realistic species of composition. Every untainted fancy begets ideal visions of which the pastoral forms a legitimate and artistically necessary reflection.”

Direct Classical influences continue in Lovecraft’s early tales such as The Tree (1920) with its Arcadian setting (Syracuse, in the 4th century BCE), its premise the very Greek themes of hubris, vengeance and transformation – that the pursuit of art for any other reason than its own sake, will lead to disaster, particularly when one is dealing with the goddess of fortune, Tyché. The “bee-keeper” who tells the narrator the story is possibly a nod to the Greek god of beekeeping, Aristaeus. Even though the location of The Tree is a “chosen haunt of dreaded Pan” yet the natural world of this locality – Mount Maenalus – remains sylvan, occupied by “fauns and dryads” and there is little sense of the malevolence of landscape that appears so vividly in Lovecraft’s later works. Yet at the same time, there is a hint of the idea that to love art too much, to live too much within the dream-world is itself dangerous. It seems to be Kalos’ (his name translates as “beautiful” or “noble”) love of solitude, for the company of fauns and dryads, for art itself, which comes between him and Musides (“son of the Muses”). It’s certainly possible to read a homoerotic dimension into their relationship, and the Muses, in Greek myth, are certainly prone to jealousy. Such close, intimate yet opposed friendships recur again in Lovecraft’s tales, such as “The Hound”, “Herbert West: Reanimator”, and “Hypnos”.

In Poetry and the Gods written in collaboration with Anna Helen Crofts, again in 1920, Pan makes another appearance. Poetry and the Gods is not a tale of horror, but nonetheless, it displays some characteristic Lovecraftian themes. The protagonist, a woman named Marcia, is, we are told, suffering a malaise because she has ” been born too late, too early, or too far away from the haunts of her spirit ever to harmonise with the unbeautiful things of contemporary reality?” She falls into a dream-state, and is delighted by the promise of “a new age of song, a rebirth of Pan”, and is visited by Hermes, who addresses her thusly:

“O Nymph more fair than the golden-haired sisters of Cyane or the sky-inhabiting Atlantides, beloved of Aphrodite and blessed of Pallas, thou hast indeed discovered the secret of the Gods, which lieth in beauty and song. O Prophetess more lovely than the Sybil of Cumae when Apollo first knew her, though hast truly spoken of the new age, for even now on Maenalus, Pan sighs and stretches in his sleep, wishful to awake and behold about him the little rose-crowned Fauns and the antique Satyrs. In thy yearning hast thou divined what no mortal else, saving only a few whom the world rejects, remembereth; that the Gods were never dead, but only sleeping the sleep and dreaming the dreams of Gods in lotos-filled Hesperian gardens beyond the golden sunset. And now draweth nigh the time of their awaking, when coldness and ugliness shall perish, and Zeus sit once more on Olympus.”

Hermes carries Marcia to Olympus, where she is brought before Zeus, and a group of human beings – “messengers whom the Gods had sent to tell men that Pan had passed not away, but only slept”. They are: “the divine Maeonides” (Homer), Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe and Keats. Zeus is seeking another such messenger, and it is Marcia’s destiny, he has decreed, to find this paragon: “Search thou unceasingly for our messenger, for in him wilt thou find peace and comfort. By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find all that it craveth.” The story closes some years in the future, with Marcia being read to by her poet-lover “whose name is luminous with celebrity”.

Although seemingly innocuous, there is a shadow of menace in Poetry and the Gods for when Zeus proclaims: “Weep not at the bleakness of thy life, for the shadow of false faiths will soon be gone, and the Gods shall once more walk among men” he is perhaps referring not only to Christianity, but the modernity that Lovecraft finds equally unpalatable: “The day now dawns when man must answer for centuries of denial, but in sleeping the Gods have grown kind, and will not hurl him to the gulf made for deniers of Gods. Instead will their vengeance smite the darkness, fallacy, and ugliness which have turned the mind of man; and under the sway of bearded Saturnus shall mortals, once more sacrificing unto him, dwell in beauty and delight.” This return of the ancient gods, and the overthrow of “false faiths” perhaps is a foreshadowing of the waking of Great Cthulhu.

Lastly, for the present, I want to turn attention to another of Lovecraft’s stories written in 1920 – The Temple – a war story.  A manuscript found in a bottle on the Yucatan coast tells recounts the tale of Karl Heinrich, a Count no less, and the captain of the submarine U-29. His narrative commences with the brutal torpedoing of a British freighter, and the sinking of its lifeboats, after which the corpse of a seaman is found gripping the rail of the submarine. He is “rather dark, and very handsome; probably an Italian or Greek” and in his pocket is found an ivory carving of a youth’s head, crowned with laurel. Another officer, Lieut. Klenze, takes the carving. As they dump the body overboard, one of the more superstitious crew members claims that the corpse swam away. Count Heinrich, a stern rationalist, will have none of this. But things now start to slip. The crew are plagued by nightmare and suicide, and Heinrich has to shoot a couple of them. Schools of dolphins are swarming about the U-29. A sudden explosion destroys the submarine’s fuel tank, killing two crewmen. The rest of the crew mutiny, and Heinrich has to shoot them. Klenze becomes steadily more unhinged, giving voice to poetry and “tales of sunken ships” whilst the Prussian Heinrich maintains his scientific, rational observation of the undersea world. The submarine descends to the ocean floor, with the dolphins still following. Klenze goes mad, saying “He is calling! He is calling! I hear him! We must go!” He finally goes to his death, and Heinrich cannot get out of his mind “the youthful, beautiful head with its leafy crown”. Heinrich at lasts beholds a ruined city of “immemorially ancient splendour” on the ocean floor. His studied rationality seems to wither and he becomes lyrical in his description:

“In the centre yawns a great open door, reached by an impressive flight of steps, and surrounded by exquisite carvings like the figures of Bacchanals in relief. Foremost of all are the great columns and frieze, both decorated with sculptures of inexpressible beauty; obviously portraying idealised pastoral scenes and processions of priests and priestesses bearing strange ceremonial devices in adoration of a radiant god. The art is of the most phenomenal perfection, largely Hellenic in idea, yet strangely individual. It imparts an impression of terrible antiquity, as though it were the remotest rather than the immediate ancestor of Greek art.”

Heinrich espies a temple, and realizes that ”The head of the radiant god in the sculptures on the rock temple is the same as that carven bit of ivory which the dead sailor brought from the sea and which poor Klenze carried back into the sea.”  He is no longer sure of his senses, he feels he is hallucinating, seeing a “phosphorescent glow” in the temple, and sensing “a sensation of rhythmic, melodic sound as of some wild yet beautiful chant or choral hymn, coming from the outside through the absolutely sound-proof hull of the U-29”. The impulse to enter the temple overwhelms him, and donning a diving suit, he prepares to do so. The end.

As Géza Reilly (2017) points out, the sinking of the British freighter at the beginning of The Temple is doubtless based on the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915 by the German submarine U-20, with the loss of over a 1,000 passengers and crew. The sinking caused outrage in both Britain and America. Lovecraft’s feelings about the Lusitania were expressed in a poem entitled “The Crime of Crimes”, which begins:

“Craz’d with the Belgian blood so lately shed,
The bestial Prussian seeks the ocean’s bed;
In Neptune’s realm the wretched coward lurks,
And on the world his wonted evil works.”

But there is more than a simple revenge drama being played out here, or even the dangers of patriotism turning to zealotry. The temple at the bottom of the sea again points towards the ephemerality of modern civilization and rationality in the face of the power of the ancient past. Although the temple and city are certainly not R’Lyeh, nor is it as yet haunted by the Deep Ones, we can see perhaps the presentiment of those ideas. This is reinforced by the submarine – a veritable icon of man’s technological power and prowess, suddenly turned into a claustrophobic tomb, invaded by the chaotic forces of madness.

Then there are the dolphins that swarm around U-29, even following to the ocean’s floor. Dolphins had an important place in Greek views of the sea. Plutarch declared that the dolphin was the only animal to seek friendship for no advantage with humans. Stobaeus cites a passage that describes the shapes that righteous men take after death, one form of which is the dolphin. One of the most famous dolphin stories is that of the singer, Arion of Methymna, who, on the way home from a tour of Italy and Sicily, was taken hostage by the crew of his ship. The crew offered Arion the choice that he could either kill himself, after which they would bury him on land, or hurl himself into the sea. According to Herodotus, he sang a hymn to Apollo, before leaping into the sea, where he was carried ashore by a dolphin, who brought him to Taenarum. Taenarum is one of the locations which were thought to be entrances to the Underworld (for example, it is one of the locations from which Heracles entered Hades), and there was a shrine to Poseidon there. Hesiod’s body, after his death (cast into the sea by his murderers), was brought back to shore by a dolphin. Dolphins are mediators between life, death, and the divine. They are also linked to Apollo, particularly in his personality of Apollo Delphinius, protector of kouroi (“youths”). Perhaps then, the dolphins in The Temple can be thought of as psychopomps, and the ivory carving of the youth, a kouroi or ephebe?

Perhaps, but I think there is another Greek that fits the bill, and that is Dionysus. Dolphins have a close association with Dionysus. The seventh of the Homeric Hymns recounts how Dionysus is captured by the Tyrrhenian Pirates who, failing to recognize his divine nature, seek to ransom him and bind him. The god reveals his power, loosening his bonds, and causing vines and ivy to twine about the ship’s mast, and wine to flow. He transforms himself into a roaring lion and creates the illusion of a bear. The pirates, panicking, and overcome by madness, leap into the sea, and are transformed into dolphins – and in doing so, become revelers in the train of the god. In some versions of the story, the pirates are driven to madness by the sound of reed-pipes played by the god.

The insanity and madness that comes upon the crew of U-29, with the exception, until the last, of its icy aristocratic commander seems to me to echo the fate of the Tyrrhenian Pirates (who were known for their cruel disposal of their prisoners). The sea is the place of epiphany, a territory where life and death, past and present meet. The Dionysian impulse carried by the carving of the laurel-crowned youth and its owner sweeps rationality aside, makes reality febrile, yet at the same time, carries the promise of revelation. In The Temple the nature of that revelation is left open, but in his later tales, of course, Lovecraft makes that nature abundantly clear. Of which, another time.

Sources
August Derleth and James Turner H.P. Lovecraft: Selected Letters 1932-1934 (Arkham House Publishers, Inc. 1976)
Reilly, G. (2017). “All Things Are Noble Which Serve the German State”: Nationalism in Lovecraft’s “The Temple”. Lovecraft Annual, (11), 92-100. Retrieved July 16, 2021, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/26868537
S.T. Joshi, A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in his Time (Liverpool University Press, 2001)
Robinson Peter Krämer “Classical Antiquity and the Timeless Horrors of H.P. Lovecraft” in Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens (eds) Classical Traditions in Modern Fantasy (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Lovecraft Online
The Tree
Poetry and the Gods
The Temple

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