Book Review: Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return

Posted by Phil Hine in Book reviews, History, Pagan, Queer  |  September 17th 2021  |  About poster:

The resurgence of my interest in exploring the various representations of Pan has kept me alert to new treatments of the goat-foot god, and I was rather excited, only a few weeks ago to find, on Twitter, the announcement of a new book by Paul Robichaud; Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return (Reaktion Books 2021, Hardback, 344pp, 34 illustrations, 13 in colour). A quick message to the author, then an email to the publishers, and I had a review copy pdf ready for me to avidly read.

Pan tracks the various manifestations of the god from antiquity to the present day. Paul Robichaud eloquently surveys Pan’s appearance in mythology, art, literature, esotericism, and popular culture; explores the contradictions of the god from the pastoral to the sinister, and shows how he embodies anxieties related to humanity’s relationship with wild nature.

The first chapter, Mythic Pan, explores the cult of Pan in Ancient Greece; from the god’s Arcadian origins, his arrival in Athens, to his appearances in the pastoral tradition of Theocritus and Virgil. Robichaud, seemingly effortlessly, traces the representations of Pan in ancient myth and literature through the Greek and Roman worlds, closing the chapter, appropriately enough, with the purported death of Pan as reported by Plutarch and Eusebius.

The second chapter, Medieval and Early Modern Pan, explores Pan’s reappearance in the Renaissance and offers a few fleeting glimpses of the god – not yet twinned with the Devil – in Medieval manuscripts. Pan creeps into Renaissance painting; he pops up in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel; he reveals himself in poetry, in comedy, and in the philosophical writings of Francis Bacon. In popular culture Pan takes on the form of a demon in France; in England, he turns up as Robin Goodfellow. In baroque art he assumes a bestial form; he flits through Milton’s Paradise Lost and metamorphoses into an allegory of Christ. With the dawning of the eighteenth century, Pan takes on new forms. For Dryden, among others, Pan becomes a stand-in for the exiled James II. For dramatist John Gray (famous for The Beggar’s Opera) Pan becomes a defender of the forest against human despoilment – a mantle the god will take up again.

The third chapter, Pan’s Romantic Rebirth focuses on the rebirth of Pan during the Romantic period of the late eighteenth century, which saw a renewed interest in the Classics and all things Greek. Beginning with Thomas Taylor’s 1787 translation of the Orphic Hymn to Pan, Robichaud traces the wild god’s tracks through the works of William Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and all-round bad boy, Lord Byron. He also examines how Pan appears in the work of less well-known figures such as James Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, and Felicia Dorothea Hemans. Pan’s many appearances in the poetry of the Brownings – Elizabeth and Robert – is given a lengthy analysis. Robichaud points to a distinctly sexual Pan – unusual for the Victorian period – in the works of Walter Savage Landor. It is also during this period that Pan voyages to America; first through the writings of Emerson, and then into the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wandering travelogue, The Marble Faun. Having recently read The Marble Faun myself, with an eye to writing about Pan’s appearances in the novel, I am can only admire Robichaud’s eloquent summary of Hawthorne’s sprawling novel.

In the late Victorian period, Pan begins to attract the attention of the decadents. Beginning with a look at Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1881 essay, Pan’s Pipes – in which Stevenson grapples with the god’s contradictory nature, Robichaud then turns to the appearances of Pan in the works of Oscar Wilde, with its teasing homoerotic undertones, and Wilde’s call for Pan to return and revitalize England. From Wilde, Robichaud moves on to fin de siècle bad boy Algernon Swinburne, and Knut Hamsun’s 1894 novel Pan. Robichaud then considers the arrival of the god into late Victorian visual culture, in the form of the art of Burne-Jones, the Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin, Aubrey Beardsley, and the Australian painter Sydney Long. He then explores Pan’s flowering musical career, in the works of Offenbach, Debussy, and Mahler. Pan’s more terrifying aspects figure in Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher’s Ephialtes (1900), the first modern study of the god, which would influence the psychological approaches of Jung and Hillman.

Chapter Four – Pan in the Twentieth Century – examines Pan’s influence in the modern period.  Beginning with a look at Pan in children’s literature, Robichaud explores the manifestations of Pan in the works of J.M. Barrie, in the character of Peter Pan. Peter Pan is a far cry from the Pans of Swinburne or Wilde, yet Robichaud successfully demonstrates the common threads – Pan as the traverser of the worlds – that of the every day and the imaginative realm of Neverland. He then turns to that other great influence – Kenneth Grahame, finding Pan as a friend to animals and quintessential god of the English countryside – an “Edwardian Idyll”. Walter de la Mare’s Pan poems are examined, along with the Canadian poet Bliss Carman.

Turning to queer representations of Pan, Robichaud first examines Forrest Reid’s 1905 novella The Garden God, and its theme of an ill-fated tryst between two schoolboys. As Robichaud points out, Reid’s dedication of the novella to Henry James – published only a decade after the Wilde trial – so shocked James that he broke off all contact with Reid. A far more dangerous (and homoerotic) Pan emerges in the work of E.F. Benson’s The Man who Went too Far (1912), H.H. Munro’s 1911 tale The Music on the Hill (See this post for my own analysis of this story), and E.M. Forster’s 1902 “The Story of a Panic” (see this post). Robichaud makes the point that, at a time when homosexual acts were a criminal offense, it is easy to understand how, for writers such as Forster and Munro, Pan represented an intrusion of the powers of nature that destabilized heterosexual culture. Pan’s disruptive sensuality is also a strong theme in the Irish James Stephens’ 1912 novel The Crock of Gold, which transplants Pan into Irish myth. Robichaud then turns to the work of D.H. Lawrence, and in particular, his 1924 essay Pan in America, and the 1925 novel St. Mawr (see posts tagged D.H. Lawrence).
The exploration of Pan themes in Lawrence’s work is followed by a look at Pan in the works of Aldous Huxley, Stephen McKenna’s moral tale The Oldest God, and Lord Dunsany’s satirical The Blessing of Pan (see this post).

Robichaud follows with a look at another English manifestation of Pan, in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1929 novel The True Heart, then crosses the Atlantic again to find Pan’s presence in the work of William Faulkner, poets Ezra Pound and Robert Frost. A brief discussion of Pan in the work of W.B. Yeats follows, then Robichaud returns again to Pan’s musical career in the works of composers such as Sibelius, Ravel, Elgar, and Holst, to name but a few.

Chapter five – Pan as Occult Power – is a wide-ranging examination of Pan’s esoteric manifestations. Beginning with Neoplatonism,  Robichaud shows Pan’s influence as a symbol of cosmic unity in the writings of Athanasius Kircher – a prefiguration of Eliphas Levi’s Baphomet, which he then turns to. He follows Ronald Hutton in asserting that Pan’s association with the Devil dates no further back to the nineteenth century, and points to the influence of Levi’s Baphomet figure and Stanislas de Guaita’s 1897 work, The Key to Black Magic in popularising this identification. He then turns to an examination of the Pan-fictions of the occult revival – Arthur Machen, Aleister Crowley, Victor Neuburg, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune. After a discussion of Fortune’s ‘Rite of Pan’,  Robichaud then moves to the rise of modern Witchcraft and the Horned God, discussing Pan’s appearances in the work of Margaret Murray, Gerald Gardner, Rosaleen Norton, and their configurations of the god as a power both ancient and cosmic, sensual and sexual, profane and perverse.

Chapter six is entitled, Contemporary Pan. Robichaud points out that Pan, so present in earlier decades, almost vanishes entirely from the high culture in the post-WW2 period, as the elitism of high modernism and classical studies gave way to popular culture. His first examination of Pan’s presence is in Robert Graves’ 1955 The Greek Myths, and its debt to Margaret Murray’s witch-cult. He then turns to the works of American poets – Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Merill, following through with New Zealand poet Allen Curnow, and the Welsh Zoë Brigley, who focuses on the sexual violence in the myth of Pan and Syrinx. Turning to contemporary fiction, Robichaud seeks Pan in the writings of Stephen King, Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume, and Nina MacLaughlin’s Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung – a retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the viewpoint of the nymphs and goddesses suffering the predatory attentions of male gods and heroes. He continues with the allusions to Pan in Amy Herzog’s 2014 play The Great God Pan, and its exploration of sexual abuse.

Robichaud then turns his attention to Pan and the New Age movement, starting with an account of the founding of the Findhorn Community and Robert Ogilvie Crombie’s visionary encounters with Pan. He then turns to a “mysterious esoteric writer” – the pseudonymous “Leo Vinci” and his 1993 book Pan: Great God of Nature (NB: I knew “Leo”, and worked for Neptune Press, owned by the Atlantis Bookshop, at the time of the book’s publication) which again, is a part record of the author’s magical encounters with Pan, and the mapping of Pan’s journey onto the Tree of Life. Moving onwards to more recent works, Robichaud turns to Mélusine Draco’s 2016 book Pan: Dark Lord of the Forest and Horned God of the Witches.

Returning once more to Pan’s presence in music, Robichaud begins with Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and moves quickly through to the presence of Pan in the work of Mike Scott, lead singer and songwriter of the Waterboys, and Scott’s own experiences with Pan. Then it’s the turn of the Pan hymns of Van Morrison and Paul Weller, the hauntological music of Julian House and Jim Jupp’s Focus Group, Belbury Poly, the American Animal Collective, and others. Robichaud then turns to contemporary comics and children’s fiction; taking in Stan Lee’s 1959 I laughed at the Great God Pan, and George Pérez’s late 1980s run of Wonder Woman in which Pan features prominently. He points to an “authentic, but fading Pan” in American children’s author Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.

On to film and television. First to be considered is the 1926 silent horror, The Magician, based on the 1908 novel of the same name by Somerset Maugham. Then Robichaud moves on to the 1958 comedy Merry Andrew, starring Danny Kaye, and the 1964 fantasy 7 Faces of Dr. Lao. Two British horror films in which Pan is not directly present, but which Robichaud nonetheless feels are Pan-inspired, are the 1968 Hammer classic The Devil Rides Out, and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). Pan next shows up in the eighth season of Dr. Who, in its final serial The Daemons in which Dr. Who’s nemesis, The Master, awakens a horned, goat-legged alien. According to the Doctor, all horned god myths are but folk memories of the daemon alien race. ¹ Robichaud switches from sci-fi to pop culture, noting the “alluring spell” cast by the dance troupe Pan’s People, regularly featured on Top of the Pops across the 1960s-70s, before turning to the “dark fantasy” of del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and Jean-Jaques Annard’s 2007 Sa majesté Minor.

Robichaud then turns his attention to depth psychology, first examining how Jung thought of Pan, then to James Hillman influential 1972 book, Pan and the Nightmare, and then to a more recent work, Sukey Fontelieu’s 2018 The Archetypal Pan in America: Hypermasculinity and Terror, which argues that contemporary American culture’s panicked responses to public crises point to a “cultural complex animated by the Pan archetype.”

Finally, Robichaud offers his Conclusion, writing in the current pandemic – another term which evokes Pan. He sees a resonance between the scapegoats of the ancient world, banished into Pan’s wilderness, and the contemporary scapegoating carried out against immigrants and Black Lives Matter protestors for example. Robichaud says that the plight of those exiled warrants our empathy, but also invites us to consider how we are all connected. So too with the looming disaster of global warming – do we succumb to Pan’s panic, or take responsibility for the planet?

Some final thoughts. If you are interested in Pan in any way, from his presence in literature or art to his magical presence in myth and vision, and the myriad ways that his shape flits throughout human history, be it on the edges or in our midst, then Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return is simply a must-purchase. It is, without doubt, the most wide-ranging treatment of the goat-foot god I’ve ever read, combining thorough attention to detail and research, yet at the same time highly accessible to a general reader. Illustrated throughout, with 8 colour plates, referenced and indexed. There are a couple of curious elisions – there’s no mention of Pan in the works of H.P. Lovecraft (see this post) nor does Robichaud discuss Alan Moore’s 1999 to 2005 series Promethea, with its depiction of Pan’s rape of the goddess Selene, but these are very minor niggles on my part. This book is a tremendous achievement and deserves a treasured place on the bookshelf of anyone who hearkens to the call of Pan.

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