Pan Pandering

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The Greek god Pan has had a rough go of it.  And I don’t mean that his name is a homophone for an essential kitchen item in English.  No, Pan was mistreated by early Christians, made evil, and then good, before finally being largely forgotten.  We’ll start with the bad and move to the good.  As I discuss in one of my publications, Pan was considered evil by medieval Christians for a few reasons, apart from being a “foreign god.”  First, he was associated with nature.  Early Christians weren’t naturalists.  They were looking to escape the world (a trait that continues to be manipulated by politicians even today).  Not only that, but Pan had goat legs and horns.  While horns could be used to represent any deity, including Yahweh, the combination with goat legs suggested Pan might be demonic.

Image credit: Walter Crane, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Nobody knew what demons looked like.  They are incorporeal, after all.  As I point out in Nightmares with the Bible, the fact that the rarely used Hebrew word for demons is roughly translated to “hairy ones” added to Pan’s sins.  This was a common Hebrew phrase for goats, and over the course of many centuries, when people had the irresistible urge to draw the invisible, they gave Satan the Pan treatment.  Goat lower half and horns on his head.  In many esoteric groups the goat, i.e., Pan, became a symbol of demons.  All of this has a rich and detailed history and it literally demonized Pan.  Yes, he was all for free love, but he was a musician, after all.  Then something interesting happened.  

When the King James Version of the Bible was first printed, the biblical books each began with an illuminated letter.  The book of Psalms began with an L.  This letter was inscribed with an image of Pan.  What the devil was he doing in the Good Book?  Well, by 1611 Pan was considered a type (or foreshadowing, if you will) of the good shepherd.  And we all know who the Good Shepherd is, right?  Not only that but his name, “Pan,” translates to “all” in English.  Since Jesus is “all” to Christians, it was appropriate that he be symbolized by Pan.  This ancient force of nature had gone from being the Devil to representing God.  Indeed, he could, at the same time, be symbolic of both.  Now this is quite an accomplishment for any entity, let alone a rustic god who was never an Olympian.  Pan isn’t much discussed in Christianity today, but he had a fascinating place in its view toward goats, both bad and good.

The Devil, You Know

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I’m the first to admit that I’m behind the times. Too much of my free time is spent reading weird news or going to used book sales to keep abreast of what’s happening in the adult world. If it weren’t for my wife sending me news stories via the internet, I would still be wondering why Gorbachev isn’t helping to hunt down Osama Bin Laden. Since I’m captive to a religious worldview, I was interrupted in my calculations by the news that Ted Cruz is, allegedly, Lucifer. My research had me on the trail of Santa, since the simple transposition of two letters would give us the title of the Zoroastrian prosecuting attorney. And, I figured, it was fairly safe to out St. Nick when Christmas is still eight months away. Hopefully I’ll still find something in my stocking come December. I kind of figured that when we found the real devil he would be a Republican in any case. Even as I write this, Cruz is out of the race. I thought the Devil never gave up.

I wonder where else in the civilized world would politics be such a joke. Can you trust the opinion of a man named Boehner? It’s easy to change your name—just ask anyone who came through Ellis Island. They’re laughing at us, folks. Seriously, they are. I don’t get much email, but I’ve had two international missives asking me what’s going on over here. It’s a good thing I don’t know, otherwise I’d have to try to explain. You see, the Bible doesn’t say much about Satan at all. In the Hebrew Bible there is no devil. By scraping together the few references to “the Satan” and morning star, some have said the alleged Ted Cruz of ancient times was clearly in the Bible. Somewhere between the Testaments he showed up. By the time Jesus was old enough to climb temple towers, he was there. In the meantime the Zoroastrians had come down from the North Pole…

Then there’s the fact that when he’s not wearing a conservative suit and announcing a female running mate, the Devil is described as looking like Pan. Goat horns, goat feet, but always the torso of a man. And he’s red, just like the Coca-Cola red of Santa’s suit, and states like Texas. It’s a good thing I don’t read any more conspiracy theories than I already do. You’d probably find me tootling away on my pan-pipes waiting for a bus in the Port Authority. No, there’s a reason I stay away from the real news. It might interrupt my fantasy world. And, I’m afraid, it might actually be more entertaining. And don’t worry about my Christmas—I plan to have an eleventh-hour conversion, just in time to have a chimney installed in my apartment. If I can only be sure I get it done before February.

There's something political going on here...

There’s something political going on here…

Footprints in the Snow

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A friend keenly aware of my interest in the unusual sent me a story about the “Devil’s Footprints” that sometimes occur in snow. The article focuses on an instance in England in 1855 but which was reprised in 2009. The prints, made by a bipedal, cloven-hoofed animal, surmount tall barriers and occur on rooftops as well as on the ground. Such a phenomena is not limited to England. Associated with the Jersey Devil, similar unusual trails were reported during the flap of sightings in the early part of the last century here in New Jersey. As the piece on Mental Floss states, this is most assuredly not diabolical work, but it does make me wonder why people associate the unknown with the Devil.

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As a character in world religions, the Devil can trace his (and, like God, he is almost always a male) origins to the Zoroastrians. Zoroastrian theology is a dualistic outlook: ultimate good versus ultimate evil, Good God versus Bad God. The idea synced particularly well with the burgeoning of apocalyptic thought that hovered in the air during the time that the people of ancient Judah came into contact with Persian thinking. The idea was toned down, of course, to a being with lesser powers than God, but still a real foe with which to contend. By the time of the New Testament, the Devil was ensconced and associated with the Persian accuser known by the title of “the Satan,” or the divine prosecuting attorney. How this character came to be associated with strange footprints in the snow traces an odd trail indeed. The key is the cloven hooves.

No description of the Devil exists in the Bible. The best evidence suggests that the horns, goatish bottom, and cloven hooves come from an association with the Greek demigod Pan. Why Pan was singled out as a particularly bad god is not known. He was popular in ancient Greece. It is certain that the Jews of Jesus’ time would not have recognized a cloven hoofed beast as devilish. The livelihood of too many relied on sheep and goats. Once the transformation took place in the imagination, unexplained cloven footprints appearing in the night suddenly became those of the Devil. As Stacy Conradt points out in her Mental Floss post, several suggestions have been made for creatures of the natural world and their snowy markers. We don’t know what makes the footprints, however, and winter is all the richer for it.

Spirit of Nature

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WindInWillowsThe Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame’s children’s classic, was a book I first read during my doctoral studies. In the UK professors are likely to be able to cite A. A. Milne and the fictional bits of C. S. Lewis as well as the current academic stars. Of course I’m over-generalizing. In my experience, however, I met many wonderfully rounded professors and I tried, during my too-brief stint in academia, to emulate them. My wife recently read The Wind in the Willows to our college-aged daughter and me. As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve had an accord for all our married life that I will wash dishes if she will read to me, and we have read well over a hundred books this way, from children’s titles to scholarly tomes. From my perspective, listening to a book read adds a layer of meaning to the text. The cadences, the intonations, and the editorial remarks all lend texture to the experience. I had quite forgotten, as it has been years since I’ve read the book myself, about the mysterious theophany in chapter 7, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.”

In a passage that is almost overwritten for today’s youth, Rat and Mole, in search of Otter’s lost son, encounter Him out on the river. The language is reverent, and languid. The two animals come upon a horned deity who is not named, and fall in worship. The fact that he has pan-pipes makes Pan an obvious candidate, but the description also reminds me on this autumnal equinox of Cernunnos, the horned god. The spirit of nature. I feel myself trapped in a world of cubicles and drywall and money. Who wouldn’t fall at the feet of even a pagan deity offering release from such shackles? We have allowed ourselves to be trapped here. We have bought into the system that enslaves us. “There is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing than simply messing about in boats.” Rat is my preacher; I am his acolyte.

Nature reminds us that we are evolved creatures and that civilization comes at a great cost. I never feel so alive as when I’m walking in the woods. I don’t pretend that I could survive alone, but having a position that requires growing heavier at a desk day-by-day feels out of sync with what I grew these feet to do and these eyes to see. Manhattan is a wonder, to be sure, but it too comes at great cost. Nashotah House was not a problem-free place, by any stretch, but it was in the woods. The trails on and near campus could restore a soul in the way chapel could never nearly approximate. So it seems appropriate to slip The Wind in the Willows onto my bookshelf next to my Bible, and to slip outdoors for one last untrammeled moment of summer before autumn begins.

Gods and Demons

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In ancient times people were sometimes possessed by gods. They were called “prophets” and they gained a breed of knowledge hidden from most other people. Demons were believed to exist, but they did not possess people. Instead, demons were used as explanations for misfortune, whether malevolently premeditated or not. Demons reflect, in today’s society, the concept of pure evil. Fr. Vincent Lampert, one of America’s 24 official exorcists, visited Montclair State last night to discuss evil, and according to the New Jersey Star-Ledger, he believes evil is a reflex of how people treat one another more often than a “figure with the hooves and horns.” No doubt there is a public fascination with demons, but few people understand their religious pedigree or what other explanations may be used to categorize them. According to the paper, Italy claims 300 exorcists – demonstrating that demons show culturally determined characteristics.

The 2005 movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose, lays out how science and religion differ on the issue of the demonic. Anneliese Michel, a young German woman, died in 1976 after being subjected to a prolonged treatment of exorcism. Her story was the “inspiration” for the film, and it raises the question of the reality of the demonic in the physical world. Fr. Lampert is more circumspect, noting that real life exorcisms are not as dramatic as those shown in the movies. He does, however, recall having seen a person levitate, but not during an exorcism. The human behavior he’s seen while on duty may all be readily explained by mundane physical and mental phenomena.

What does seem certain in all of this is that demons are not the behooved and behorned antagonists of films like Constantine or countless other graphic-novelesque portrayals of evil. Their Pan-based characteristics hearken back to the days when Christianity had to make plain its dismissal of foreign gods. In the ancient world hooves and horns were symbols of strength generally associated with powerful, if sometimes capricious, deities. In other words, what were one culture’s gods have become another culture’s demons. Movie makers understand the simultaneous revulsion and draw of the demonic character, but it seems that Fr. Lampert strives for a more balanced perspective. Evil has many faces, and most of them do not conform to Hollywood standards. Perhaps if all religions were respected demons would lose their power to torment and people would learn to get along with each other.