The Demanding Goddess: Cybele in Catullus 63

 

Engraving by Giacomo Bossi

      Everyone with any interest in ancient Roman poetry is likely to know several of Catullus’ playful erotic carmina: probably the lament on Lesbia’s sparrow (3), the lyrics on counting kisses (5 and 7), or the invitation to a party at which one might wish to be all nose (13).  Those somewhat better acquainted with Latin are likely to be familiar with his extremely abusive poems of invective charged with obscene imagery such as 88 with its attack on Gallus for incest or the memorable Catullus 16 the opening line of which is “I will fuck your face and your ass.” [1]

     Less familiar, probably, are the poems which some in antiquity, perhaps even the author, may have considered the chef d’oeuvres of the collection, the so-called carmina maiora or carmina docta (61-69), the chief theme of which is marriage.  Now, though Catullus is best-known for the incidental expressions of sexuality associated with lust and indecent raillery, he recognized that, both biologically and socially, erotic desire aims ultimately at marriage, stable families, and offspring.  The poet was engaged with each of these three manifestations of desire, though the first two, the non-reproductive, uses of eroticism excite more modern interest than the recommendation of stable marriage and thus have dominated his reputation.  Number 63 demonstrates how, even as he recommends socially conservative behavior, he provides an altogether sensational exemplum, though accompanied by a moralizing theme.  

     The chief figure in Catullus 63 is Attis whose worship, in association with that of Cybele, had been imported from Phrygia into Greece in the fourth century B.C.E.   The cult spread to Rome where it was accepted as a part of government-endorsed religious practice in the early third century B. C.E. in obedience to a Sibylline oracle promising divine aid in the Second Punic War.  In spite of that official approval, however, Attis must have seemed to most Romans a foreigner, and the self-castration of her devotees, the Galli, a thoroughly barbaric custom.  Catullus’ account of Attis’ story, related the rare excited galliambic meter, is meant to seem exotic and thrilling, though owing more to the style of the Grand Guignol than the travelogue.  Just as Gothic novels were set in Italy (if not more distant lands), which seemed vaguely mysterious to many Britons, for Catullus the far-off origins of Cybele’s rites heightens the drama while reassuring the Roman reader such things were for civilized men a mere side-show.

     Cybele was far from alone among Near Eastern deities to obtain a following in Rome.  The patriotic and historic observances that constituted the mos maiorum, the way of the ancestors, involving worship of Jove and the Olympians principally through sacrifice, had come to seem unsatisfying to many.  Some sought spiritual sustenance through a variety of foreign divinities, such as the Celtic Epona, but by far the largest group of gods imported from other lands were from the Near East, including the Persian Mithras and the Syrian Sol Invictus.  Others include the original worship of Dionysos (and the related ceremonies of Zagreus and Orpheus), the Eleusinian mysteries (which feature a dying and reborn goddess instead of a god), the Pythagorean Mysteries (though Pythagoras was a Greek, many aspects of Pythagorean belief have been thought to be non-Greek), and Christianity, which in its early forms included mysteries from which the uninitiated were barred.  The most common pattern, though, the one on which Frazer constructed the magnificent volumes of The Golden Bough, featured myths of an earth goddess, a Magna Mater, and her consorts.  Surely extending back into the Neolithic Age, these couples include the Mesopotamian Tammuz and Inanna, the Levantine Adonis and Aphrodite, the Egyptian Osiris and Isis, and the Phrygian Cybele and Attis.

     The Great Mother embodying the fertility of the earth which meant so much to our archaic ancestors, meant less to the urban Romans of Catullus’ time.  He, and others of the poets called by Cicero neoteric, or new style, like poets in the last hundred years, abandoned a grand and lofty epic style to focus on personal life and varied the old myths to express what were to them more contemporary themes. 

     Thus Catullus 63, far from a conventional hymn, piously remembering and praising the goddess Cybele and her consort Attis, and then asking favors, is in fact, the opposite, a horrified rejection of her orgiastic rituals and, in particular, the self-castration of her ministrants [2].  This shifts the story’s significance from  a celebration of fertility and life, in effect a tribute to sexuality, to a tale of a “belle dame sans merci,” a cautionary tale about the hazards of ecstatic religious practice.  Cybele here resembles that negative feminine archetype of the lover to be feared, different aspects of which are exemplified in ancient Greece by the Sphinx, Pandora, Eos (as Tithonus’ lover), and, in the Odyssey, Circe and Calypso, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis.  The lovers of goddesses typically come to grief, and those associated with the cyclic turn of the agricultural year must die, since, for the farmer, death is fruition and ripeness [3].

     The mythic about-face is marked by the identification of Attis, not as a Phrygian, but as a Greek who had traveled to Asia Minor.  He has then from the start an identity in part as a mythic figure and in part as a Greek Everyman.  Once his furor departs and he realizes what he has done, he laments his rashness in joining in Cybele’s rituals in a foreign land and thus deserting his home, leaving behind such Hellenic institutions as “the market, the wrestling-place, the racecourse, the playground” [4]  His mistress Cybele is more tyrannical than loving, manifesting in a “fearsome” [5] aspect to Attis, since his emasculation a “sterile man,” a mere “serving-girl” held in thrall by “madness.” [6].  Thus the poem ends with the persona, not inviting the deity as in Sappho’s hymn to Aphrodite but rather praying “may all your madness be kept far from me” [7].

     Attis’ principal ἁμαρτία is not, as Cybele alleges, his disloyalty to her, but rather his unnatural hostility to love, his “overwhelming loathing of sex” (“Veneris nimio odio,” l. 17), an attitude shared by a variety of other religious enthusiasts to whom erotic energy was wasteful, an obstacle to salvation or enlightenment.  Though a world-wide commonplace of ascetic practice considers celibacy to intensify spiritual power, physical castration is nonetheless profoundly abhorrent to most, a radical and unreversible assault on the individual’s well-being, going beyond such measures as fasting and mortification of the flesh.  Whatever the effect on religiosity, emasculation is a deeply antisocial act, undertaken in the interest of one’s own soul, but hostile or, at any rate, indifferent to any civic role.  The foundation  of every social order is householders in stable family units who produce wealth, defend against enemies, and reproduce the next generation. 

     Indeed, as many critics have noted, the chief theme of the entire group of carmina maiora is marriage.  Numbers 61 and 62 are epithalamia, while 64 is about the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, and about Theseus breaking his promise of marrying Ariadne.  65 is an introduction to 66, which details the marital concord between Queen Berenice and her husband; 67 is about the failure of a marriage and 68 about Catullus' reflections on his own adulterous relationship.  Attis’ story in this context is a cautionary exemplum urging identification with the most conventional of virtues: social conservatism, orthodox religion, and patriotism.  That it accomplishes these anodyne ends by a lurid tale, related in a jangly meter describing weird sexual rituals and ecstatic states of possession is typical of that sort of moralizing which titillates by relating misconduct, at once relishing and condemning the violators of norms rather like an exploitation movie.  In a way the poem also resembles a horror film in which an average person is swept up in bizarre violent behavior to which the reader may vicariously thrill while safely out of danger.  Apart from its thematic emphasis on marriage which is never foregrounded, the poem is a sort of thriller with its breathless rush of tumbling lines leading to a fierce theophany.  The reader of the poem can experience enthusiastic excitement and its opposite, rueful depression while secure in the conviction that he would never be tempted to emulate Attis. 

 

1.  “Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō.”

2.  Among the countless parallels of this universal theme are Eve in  the Bible as well as Judith and Salome (one virtuous and one wicked beheader).  In English tradition the ambiguous figure of Mogan le Fay is relevant as are the numerous fairies who, in balladry, capture lovers to carry off to another world as captives.  The persecution of witches is a world-wide indication that the motif did not remain always in the realm of the imagination. 

3.  Self-castration is not, of course, a monopoly of Cybele’s devotees.  For a discussion of the practice in general, see, for instance, J. Wade, “The castrated gods and their castration cults: Revenge, punishment, and spiritual supremacy,” International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, vol. 38, no. 1 (2019).  Daniel F. Caner in “The Practice and Prohibition of Self-Castration in Early Christianity,” Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Nov., 1997) focuses on the early Christian church of whom the most notable example is Origen.  Cf. in more recent times the Russian Skoptsy and the Hindu hijra (whose act finds precedent in Shiva’s severing of his penis, described in the Mahabharata and which is echoed among the members of Dera Sacha Sauda in India today).  

4.  Ll. 50-73 the specifics are “foro, palaestra, stadioo, et guminasiis” l. 60.

5.  “Ferox,” l. 78.

6.  “Vir sterilis,” l. 69; “famula,” l. 90, “furoris”, l. 79.

7.  “Procul a mea tuus sit furor omnis,” l. 92.

The Apotropaic Priapos and Male Sexuality

     Priapos is a deity who rarely appeared in literature. A latecomer to the Greek pantheon, with his exaggerated phallus, his place in Hellenistic times is surely a concession to the archaic practices honoring the earth goddess and other forces of fertility and generation displaced by the Olympians. Imperfectly fitting into the new order, Priapos assumed a role on the sidelines, providing a rustic air and did comic turns, becoming an odd sort of scarecrow while continuing to offer himself as an intercessor generally friendly to human interests. Many later depictions of the god cast a stark light on the use of male sexuality in aggression, assault, and violence.
     Strabo notes that Hesiod did not mention Priapos. Doubtless an Eastern importation, like Dionysos, sometimes named as his father, the worship of Priapos was considered by the ancients to have arisen around Lampsakos in the area of the Hellespont where, according to Pausanias, he was “more revered than any other god.” [1] His significance in this era is clearly marked though broad. As Diodorus Siculus puts it, “the generative member, since it is the cause of the reproduction of human beings and of their continued existence through all time, became the object of immortal honour.” [2] People’s “continued existence” is dependent, of course, not only on human reproduction, but also the productive fertility of the soil and the flourishing of wild and domestic animals. Priapos’ figure is represented in a second century stature with an overflowing basket of produce at his crotch. [3]
     In the most remote rural areas Priapos maintained this function most fully. With an aristocrat’s romanticism reminiscent of Yeats’ longing for Innisfree Catullus sketches a “turf cottage” roofed with “osier-twigs” in which Priapus receives honors and in return brings prosperity to his poor devotees. [4] Priapos’ general beneficent associations take the form of patronage of fishermen for those living by the sea [5] to whom he ensured a good catch as well as protection from sudden death. For centuries sailors carried small phallic charms as amulets against shipwreck.
     With sexual power comes sexual anxiety. His originary myth itself is radically ambivalent. His prodigious penis is no gift but rather inconvenient and impotent, due to Hera’s jealous curse. [6] in spite of his imposing outsize member, Priapos had a poor reputation as a lover. He is generally described as ill-favored in appearance and many Priapic legends such as those in Ovid narrate tales of unsuccessful sexual assault. [7] In a number of the poems of the Priapeia the god complains of impotence. Tibullus has Priapos deliver an instructive lecture on the seduction of youths only to end by declaring that his own erotic desire has brought him nothing but suffering and failure, exposing him to ridicule as an absurd instructor in love. [8]
     Priapos’ sexuality, then, could be represented as a generative dynamo, an expression of the vitality of nature itself, but he also could self-reflectively doubt his virility. Yet this does not exhaust the modes of male sexuality he embodies. Classical eros, not to speak of modern, allowed another, and darker, form of desire. The Classical lover may be the stricken victim of passion one finds in in a good deal of Ovid, or he may be the pleasure-loving sybarite of many lyrics in the Anthology. In a third alternative, less commonly recognized, he is an aggressive delighter in sexual assault against those of lower status: slaves, prisoners, common prostitutes.
     We are by now familiar with the assertion that rape is a crime of power and domination rather than ordinary sexual pleasure, yet the role of a similar dynamic in many other relationships is often underestimated. In contemporary language such aggression is explicit in the common use of terms as “fuck you,” “up yours,” “you suck” and the like. They are the modern forms of the notorious opening line of Catullus Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō ("I will sodomize you and face-fuck you") [10]
     A phallus to assure fertility seems natural enough, but in what way does a man with an erection serve as an effective guardian? The poems of the Priapeia (and other similar poems) leave no doubt. Priapos’ prodigious member is frightening because he threatens to sexually attack the trespasser, male or female indifferently. Priapos’ role as guardian of gardens may have gained popularity because the deity seemed a quaint and semi-comic rustic to sophisticated urbanites, but it rests on the male member’s potential as a weapon capable of inflicting suffering. Indeed, many Priapic poems suggest that the statue’s huge member might be used as a club with which to beat intruders.
     While Priapos does epitomize male sexual desire with its impetuous mandates and at times identifies this drive with the fundamental motive power of nature visible in both wilderness and cultivated land, he also represents male vulnerability. With few exceptions, of which Priapos is the most prominent, the ancient Greeks and Romans preferred to minimize male genitals in statues and drawings of naked men. Though ithyphallic figures of Shiva and of the Egyptian god Min and other divinities are not unusual, to the Greeks and Romans there was something vulnerable, absurd, and comic about going around with an erection. Finally, the male member was also commonly used as an emblem of power. There could be no clearer sign of patriarchy than the penis associated not with love but with physical punishment.



1. Pausanias 9.31.2 The earliest systematic study of Priapos, Richard Payne Knight’s fascinating Discourse on the Worship of Priapus A discourse on the worship of Priapus, and its connection with the mystic theology of the ancients, focuses on this aspect of the god. As an eighteenth century rationalist to Payne the phallus was “a very natural symbol of a very natural and philosophical system of religion.” He wrote that the ancient “mystics” using such imagery promulgated a religion free from “vulgar superstition,” an accusation he is too restrained to make explicitly against his Established Church. In spite of this discretion he suppressed the book and it was not publicly published for decades.

2. Diodorus Siculus 4.6.1-4 “laughter and sport”

3. In the Cortile de Belvedere, Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican Museums.

4. Carmina 19.

5. The Greek Anthology contains four dedications to Priapos of gardens and six for Priapos of the beach.

6. The curse is said to be in revenge for Paris’ preference of Aphrodite. I have found no earlier authority for this that the scholiast on Apollonius of Rhodes 1.932, and Kerenyi sniffs at the story as "a cheap theme, and certainly not an ancient one" in The Mythology of the Greeks, vol. 1 Gods of the Greeks.

7. For instance in 75 his penis is “exanimis” and “inutile.”

6. Fasti 1.6 and 1.9. Some of the finest English poems on impotence are from more or less libertine writers such as Rochester and Carew.

9. Elegies 1.4.

10. Carmina 16. The poet directs his invective at his friends Furius and Aurelius who had apparently called his lyrics -- with likely particular reference to Carmina 5 -- molliculi (“soft” or perhaps “effeminate”). In turn he accuses them of passive “feminine” sexual roles. His threat to sexually penetrate them is to him evidence not of homosexuality but of masculine power.

Notes on Pan

Mythology is always elastic and dynamic, and Pan strikes me as more given to shape-shifting than some. A divinity that might have seemed likely to dwell in the humbler precincts of Olympus, half beast in fact, and patron of backward herdsmen, Pan developed into a personification of both principal god and devil. Though an importunate sexually aroused serial rapist, Pan has been as well the occasion for a vision of Ultimate Reality. These observations stubbornly would not cohere, so I present them as a series of notes.




Pan’s Sphere

     Pan’s name was derived from “pasturer,” and the god governed the opposite pole of Zeus’ royal court: those semi-wild heights, unowned by any so free to all, where sheep or goats could find fodder. His pipes resemble those used by Greek shepherds from the third millennium BCE. Like the land that could sustain domestic animals, he was a blessing, with the epithet of “luck-bringer,” but at times, both in the mountains and on the battlefield, he could bring on panicked terror as well. He personifies sexual desire, but sometimes pursues females with selfish passion, according to the stories of Echo and Pitys. His frightening aspect could be beneficent as in Pheidippides’ report of his aiding the Greeks by causing panic among the Persians is told by Herodotus, [1] but it gave even the Arcadians pause. His intimate appeal to the individual is perhaps implied in the fact that the archaeological remains reveal a great many dedications but few dedicated temples. Offerings to Pan were often left in the wilderness.
     Philologists tell us that the folk etymology pan = all (accepted in late antiquity) is inaccurate, yet it has a broad unfocused appropriateness for a deity of generation, and Pan has often been used to represent paganism as a whole. Human awe at the ability of life to generate new plant and animal life led to exaggeration of his sexual characteristics and his frequent ithyphallic representation in art.
     These characteristics are attested by the poets. Pindar refers to Pan’s archaic identity as an attendant of the Great Mother, a role consistent with his association with fertility. [2] Stories of Pan’s human mother (said to be Penelope in her wild older years) [3] doubtless encouraged people to feel closer to Pan than to the full Olympians. In Euripedes’ Helena Pan’s capacity for exciting terror is the focus, here with reference to the rape of a naiad. [4] Pan stands at the very opening of Theocritus’ Idylls. In an atmosphere both rural and erotic, Thyrsis praises the Goatherd’s music as second only to Pan’s, associating both with ample meat to complete the festive note, yet he also refers to the threat of Pan’s anger when disturbed at his siesta. One delights in food and in love only if one also is liable to the pains of a lack of either. The same interdependent complex is implied in Theocritus’ VIIth Idyll in which the poet appeals to Pan for success in love, but incidentally refers to the custom of flagellating Pan with onions when food proves insufficient.


Pan in Plato

     In his Cratylus Plato echoes Hesiod’s muses who warned humans (whom they called “mere bellies”) that, while they may deliver the truth, they also “know how to speak many false things as though they were true.” [5] Socrates tells Hermogenes that Pan is “double-formed” because “speech signifies all things (pan), and is always turning them round and round, and has two forms, true and false.” [6] This striking anticipation of modern concepts of the inherent limitation of language occurs in a dialogue which has, quite appropriately, itself been viewed with uncertainty by readers who cannot tell what is meant to be Socrates’ position on the issue of whether the signifier is linked to the signified or is wholly arbitrary. Socrates changes his mind, or at least the direction of his argument in mid-dialogue. Further, the lengthy presentation of fanciful etymologies has been considered satirical by some and serious by others.
     Socrates does trace a pattern in these weird imaginative speculations on the origins of words: the repeated mention of flux. To him this signifies a fundamental doubt at the basis of the world-view of the “name-givers” which has led them to insert hints of instability into the verbal code. “Namemakers believed everything to be in flux. Suppose it should prove that although those who gave the names gave them in the belief that all things are in motion and flux—I myself think they did have that belief— still in reality that is not the case, and the namegivers themselves, having fallen into a kind of vortex, are whirled about, dragging us along with them.” [7]
     In the end Socrates is not so distant from Huang Po who directed his listeners to gaze to the Mind behind phenomena, reinforcing rather than negating everyday experience in the process. Lacking the nonverbal intuition by which both Greek and the Chinese thinkers apprehended truth, Cratylus can only play the part of the absolute skeptic.
     In the Phaedrus Pan was Socrates’ god of choice to whom he offers a most philosophic prayer, directing his words also, in a pleasantly ecumenical gesture, to “whatever gods may be present.” Socrates asks for inner perfection and for only such possessions as a reasonable man can handle, noting that the only true wealth is wisdom. [8]


Pan and Christ

     Herodotus suggests that Pan is, along with Dionysus and Heracles, a younger god [9] yet he adds that, among the Egyptians (who, he assures his readers, kept excellent records) he is considered to be very ancient. The archaic character of his role as producing fertility, both plant and animal, in wild regions, might seem to support the latter judgment, at least as far as a local cult in Arcadia is concerned. He shares with Christ, Dionysus, and Heracles the non-Olympian characteristic of a mixed human/divine parentage and a career including the human experience of death.
     Plutarch [10] tells the story of Thamus, the Egyptian ship’s pilot, who learned in a divine vision of the death of the god, news which eventually reached Tiberius who launched an investigation. As the date of this incident happened to coincide, roughly, at least, with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the story has been used to signify the end of paganism and the triumph of the Christian deity with his resurrection. For Eusebius it added to what he saw as considerable evidence that the pre-Christian gods has departed to make way for his god. [11] By the time of the Renaissance, the death of Pan had come to signify not the departure of the Greek deities, but Christ’s redemptive death itself. Orthodox authors such as Rabelais (for whom, of course, Panurge and Pantagruel are heroes) and Guillaume Bigot identified the two gods and treated Pan’s death as a figurative way of speaking of Christ’s own. [12] Rabelais says, “For my part, I understand it of that great Saviour of the faithful who was shamefully put to death at Jerusalem by the envy and wickedness of the doctors, priests, and monks of the Mosaic law. And methinks my interpretation is not improper; for he may lawfully be said in the Greek tongue to be Pan, since he is our all. For all that we are, all that we live, all that we have, all that we hope, is him, by him, from him, and in him. He is the good Pan, the great shepherd, who, as the loving shepherd Corydon affirms, hath not only a tender love and affection for his sheep, but also for their shepherds.” [13]
     This reading of Pan as a symbol of Christ reached England as well. In the month of “Maye” in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar Pan is simply a code-word for Jesus: “When great Pan Account of Shepherds shall ask.” (54) Milton follows in his “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” in which the shepherds find that “the mighty Pan/ Was kindly com to live with them below.” [14]



Pan and the Romantics

     Wordsworth and Byron both used Pan as the representative of a paganism which for them meant primarily aesthetic values. When Byron recounts the story from Plutarch of Pan’s reported death in “Aristomenes,” Pan represents paganism as a whole. The loss of the pre-Christian world-view seems to the poet an aesthetic loss.


How much died with him! false or true—the dream
Was beautiful which peopled every stream
With more than finny tenants, and adorned
The woods and waters with coy nymphs that scorned
Pursuing Deities, or in the embrace
Of gods brought forth the high heroic race


     For Wordsworth this meant a gentle soothing landscape picturesqueness as in the sonnet “Composed By the Side of Grasmere Lake” in which “Great Pan” “low-whispers” “tranquility is here.” One recalls that in “The World Is Too Much With Us” the poet wishes that, as a pagan, he might be made “less forlorn” by such entertainments as the “sight of Proteus rising from the sea;/ Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.” This is religion reduced to the amusement of sight-seeing.
     In Shelley’s “Hymn to Pan” the god is not, as in Wordsworth and Byron, the representative of a picturesque and charming mythology, but is instead a model for the very human experience of delusive desire.


“I pursu'd a maiden and clasp'd a reed.
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed.
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.”


     (Mary Shelley for her part wrote a play Midas -- which I have yet to read -- with two lyrics by Percy to open with the music contest between Apollo and Pan.)
     Keats is far profound, original, and provocative in his use of Pan as a sort of objective correlative of negative capability. In Endymion [15] Pan is first described as a Romantic nature spirit ruling “desolate places, where dank moisture breeds/ The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth.” to whom “yellow-girted bees” offer their honey. He is associated with the sort of magic likely among farmers “Breather round our farms,/ To keep off mildews, and all weather harms,” yet for Keats he is above all mysterious. The “Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,” and “Dread opener of the mysterious doors/ Leading to universal knowledge.” At the hymn’s conclusion this has become a virtual mystic via negativa:


be still the leaven,
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal—a new// birth:
Be still a symbol of immensity;
A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;
An unknown


Pan and Neo-Paganism

     The earlier use of Pan to represent all pagan deities persisted into the nineteenth century, though the associated values altered. Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the extended exclamations of “The Dead Pan” maintains a conventional preference for the new god, “one in Sion/ Hung for love’s sake on a cross,” but her successors did not prove always so orthodox. To some post-Romantic poets, this god’s resemblance to the Christian devil in his horns and cloven hooves proved more an attraction than an impediment to his renewed worship as an icon of eroticism, forbidden pleasure in general, and the unconscious.
     This use of Pan as a mask to protest appears in Baudelaire. In “La Muse Malade” Pan is recognized as god of poetry together with Apollo, but the recognition is largely nostalgic. This belated author’s muse is characterized by “folie et l'horreur, froides et taciturnes.” In “L'École païenne” Pan is identified directly with revolution and his return with the end of the tyrannical reign of Christianity. Baudelaire details this view in The Painter of Modern Life [16] he maintains “The birthplace of Painting is the Temple. Its roots are in religion. The modern temple and the modern Religion are the Revolution. Thus let us create the Temple of the Revolution and the Painting of the Revolution . . . Pan must kill god. Pan is the people.”
     Varieties of this counter-cultural Pan are discernable in paintings by Burne-Jones such as Psyche and Pan [17] in which a dubious looking naked female stands well below an amorous Pan whose coiffure is positively architectural. The excitable Swinburne identifies Pan with élan vital in “A Nympholept”; the even more irregular Aleister Crowley made Pan a major symbol of his Thelemic mysticism and sang wildly of his wish to “Thrill with lissome lust of the light.” [18] Most readers of poetry can call to mind e. e. cummings’ balloon man, at first called “little” and “lame,” then “queer” and “old,” until the cat is let out of the bag and he is said to be “goat-footed.” [19]






1. Histories, (I, 105).

2. Pythian iii. 77, fr. 6. 1.

3. Apollodorus Epitome (7.38) says Odysseus’ Penelope conceived Pan after she was ousted for infidelity by the hero.

4. 167-190.

5. Theogony, ll. 26-28.

6. 408.

7. 439c.

8. 279.

9. Histories, II. 145.

10. Moralia, “The Obsolescence of Oracles,” 419.

11. Eusebius of Caesaria, Praeparatio Evangelica, Ch. XVII.

12. By the beginning of the 18th century this trend had become sufficiently pronounced to be ridiculed. Thus Fontenelle comments, “Ce grand Pan qui meurt sous Tibere, aussi bien que Jesus-Christ, est le Maistre des Demons, dont l'Empire est ruine par cette mort d'un Dieu si salutaire a l'Univers; ou si cette explication ne vous plaist pas, car enfin on peut sans impieté donner des sens contraires a une mesme chose, quoy qu'elle regarde la Religion; ce grand Pan est Jesus-Christ luy-mesme, dont la mort cause une douleur et une consternation generale parmy leg Demons, qui ne peuvent plus exercer leur tirannie sur les hommes. C'est ainsi qu'on a trouve moyen de donner a ce grand Pan deux faces bien differentes.” This passage and many more are included in O. Weinreich’s article “Zum Tode des Grossen Pan,” published in ARW 13 (1910) pp. 467-73).

13. Book. IV, Ch. 24. This is Urquhart’s version.

14. ll. 89-90.

15. The passages cited all occur in the episode in I, 232-306.

16. In Chapter 10, “Philosophic Art.”

17. See also “The Garden of Pan” in which a buff lad plays his pipes for a pair of lovers while gazing directly at the viewer.

18. “Hymn to Pan.”

19. “in Just-“