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Posts tagged ‘Pan’

  1. Pan: A Clergyman’s Redemption in Margery Lawrence’s How Pan Came to Little Ingleton

    ‘Oh great god Pan, I know Thee! – I thank Thee – I bless Thee . . . Thee and all Thy People great and small – for indeed, indeed beneath the mantle of the God whose name is Love, is there not room for all in His world to shelter?’

    I’ve only recently begun to read the magical fiction of Margery Lawrence (1889-1969), and admittedly, am wondering why I have never encountered her before, as the more I read about her, the more fascinating she sounds. A prolific author, she wrote over thirty novels and short story collections. Curiously though, there seems to be a dearth of critical scholarship analyzing her work.

    I have yet to find a full biography of Lawrence, but here’s what I’ve managed to cobble together from various sources.

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    October 28th 2021

    Posted by in Occult, Pagan

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

    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.

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    September 17th 2021

    Posted by in Book reviews, History, Pagan, Queer

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

    “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.

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    July 16th 2021

    Posted by in Occult, Pagan

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  4. Pan: the unformed Pan in DH Lawrence’s animist vision – II

    “The collective problem, then, is to institute, find, or recover a maximum of connections. For connections (and disjunctions) are nothing other than the physics of relations, the cosmos. Even disjunction is physical, like two banks that permit the passage of flows, or their alternation. But we, we live at the very most in a “logic” of relations. We turn disjunction into an “either/or. ” We turn connection into a relation of cause and effect or a principle of consequence. We abstract a reflection from the physical world of flows, a bloodless double made up of subjects, objects, predicates, and logical relations.

    Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Medical (1997)

    Continuing from the previous post in this series, here are some further explorations of D.H. Lawrence’s animist vision of Pan. Again, the main texts I’ll be drawing from are the novella St. Mawr and the essay Pan in America. Both the essay and St. Mawr were conceived in 1924, when Lawrence was living in New Mexico.

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    April 24th 2021

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  5. Pan: the unformed Pan in DH Lawrence’s animist vision – I

    “What were you talking about?” asked Mrs. Renshaw, simply curious. She was not afraid of her husband’s running loose.
    “We were just saying ‘Pan is dead’,” said the girl.
    “Isn’t that rather trite?” asked the hostess.
    “Some of us miss him fearfully,” said the girl.
    “For what reason?” asked Mrs. Renshaw.
    “Those of us who are nymphs–just lost nymphs among farm-lands and suburbs. I wish Pan were alive.”
    D.H. Lawrence, The Overtone (1913)

    I came to the works of D.H. Lawrence late in life, having been more or less put off his writing by Kate Millet’s fierce and funny taking to pieces of his infamous novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover in her 1970 book Sexual Politics. Millet charged Lawrence with both misogyny and phallocentrism, so I admit, I didn’t look any further than that, and it’s only in the last decade or so, that have I begun to read Lawrence attentively. This post is the first of a two-parter examining Lawrence’s animist vision of Pan with reference to his novella St. Mawr and his essay Pan in America.

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    April 16th 2021

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  6. Pan: The vengeance of the wild in “The Music on the Hill”

    “I’ve been a fool in most things,” said Mortimer quietly, “but I’m not such a fool as not to believe in Pan when I’m down here. And if you’re wise you won’t disbelieve in him too boastfully while you’re in his country.”
    The Music on the Hill

    One of the aspects of writing for a blog I enjoy is that I don’t have to intently focus on any one topic for a prolonged period – I can just hop to and fro between areas of interest as the mood takes me. Sometimes though, this produces a considerable ‘gap’ between posts. So it is, after a nine-year pause, I return to the subject of Pan.

    Throughout the Pan-themed literature of the early twentieth century, there runs a common theme: that the lure of Pan promises a return to a rural idyll – a nostalgia for both wild landscape and reunion with natural life. A distinctly antimodern turning away from the industrialized world, and the restrictions and regulations of polite society. Pan both guards and beckons into this wild terrain, opening up vistas of possibility beyond the ordered world of civilization. Yet the encounter with Pan can be terrible too; the call to encounter the wild is profoundly disturbing, and the unwary trespasser into Pan’s domain may get more than they have bargained for. Continue reading »

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    January 5th 2021

    Posted by in History, Pagan, Queer

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  7. Pan: Lord Dunsany’s “The Blessing of Pan”

    “What concerns Pan is fit to be sung before all mankind. Indeed his doings are most honourable.”
    Lord Dunsany Alexander & Three Small Plays 1925

    I ‘discovered’ the writings of Lord Dunsany in my early twenties, initially through reading HP Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror in Literature and, almost at the same time, coming across a collection of Sidney Sime’s illustrations of Dunsany’s fiction. Continue reading »

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    December 2nd 2011

    Posted by in History, Pagan

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  8. Pan: “disreputable objects of pagan licentiousness”

    “Shocking things go on here. You wouldn’t believe it! Licentiousness! Orgies! …. Even bingo. Oh yes.”
    Lurcio (Frankie Howerd), Up Pompeii

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    September 5th 2011

    Posted by in History, Pagan, Queer

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  9. Pan: Adolescent Panics in Forster and Saki

    “God went out (oddly enough with cricket and beer) and Pan came in.In a hundred novels his cloven hoof left its imprint on the sward; poets saw him lurking in the twilight on London commons, and literary ladies in Surrey, nymphs of an industrial age, mysteriously surrendered their virginity to his rough embrace.”
    Somerset Maugham, quoted in Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, p48

    For this post, I’m taking a cue from Patricia Merivale’s Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times (Harvard Univ. Press, 1969). Merivale’s book is particularly useful as she focuses on the great upswell of appearences of Pan in English prose between 1890 and 1918. Literary representations of Pan in the fin de siècle change dramatically, from Pan as an essentially benevolent and transcendental figure, to a much darker character. Continue reading »

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    June 1st 2011

    Posted by in Pagan, Queer

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  10. Pan: an odd sort of god

    “Down the long lanes and overgrown ridings of history we catch odd glimpses of a lurking rustic god with a goat’s white lightning in his eyes. A sort of fugitive, hidden among leaves. and laughing with the uncanny derision of one who feels himself defeated by something lesser than himself.”
    D. H Lawrence, Remembering Pan

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    May 6th 2011

    Posted by in Pagan, Queer

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