The Horned God of the Witches

by Jason Mankey

  Seven hundred years after Servius, the European Renaissance began in present-day Italy, and with it came the return of the Greek and Roman gods of antiquity. For the first time in a thousand years, the goddesses and gods of antiquity could be found once more in European art and literature.143 By the middle of the fifteenth century, cities such as Rome were overrun with images of classical deities, including, of course, Pan. This does not mean that people were actively worshipping the gods of antiquity, at least not intentionally. The reflowering of pagan imagery probably stemmed from a desire to express ideas such as romantic love, joy, drunkenness, and passion, things that Christian icons and figures are poor at bringing to life.

  When writing about Pan during the Renaissance, many writers picked up where Servius left off. Encyclopedists of the Renaissance wrote about Pan in a variety of ways, but their favorite seemed to be as the god of everything or all. The English encyclopedist Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was full of praise for the god Pan and found symbolism in every hoof and horn of the god.

  To Bacon, Pan had pyramidal horns reaching to the heavens, “since the sublimities of nature, or abstract ideas, reach in a manner to things divine; for there is a short and ready passage from metaphysics to natural theology.” 144 He calls Pan’s physical body “the body of nature” and equates his beard to the power of the sun. Like Servius, the panpipe is representative of the heavens and denotes “consent and harmony.” Pan’s shepherd’s crook represents the ways of nature, “which are partly straight and partly crooked.”

  Bacon’s Pan is also cosmic, related to nearly all the goings-on in the world. Pan’s sisters are the “Destinies, or the natures and fates of things,” because the “chain of natural causes links together the rise duration, and corruption; the exaltation, degeneration, and workings; the processes, the effects, and changes, of all that can any way happen to things.” Bacon finishes his ruminations by once more equating Pan directly with nature and labeling them both “perfection.” 145

  Pan’s Rebirth in the English Countryside

  The most important reflowering of Pan took place not in Greece or Rome but in England, where he would become the most written about male deity in all of English literature.146 That achievement is especially notable when one considers that Pan was rarely written about in England before the nineteenth century. For most of us, the poetry of the Romantic (1798–1837) and Victorian (1838–1901) eras was something we were forced to read in high school English class and then quickly forgot about. But the poetry produced during those hundred or so years would have a tremendous impact not just on Pan but on the Horned God as a whole.

  To quote British historian Ronald Hutton, the poets and writers of those eras provided a “language” that we still use today when talking about the Horned One.147 The flowery words many of us use about and to the Horned God were directly inspired by this period of literature; and many of the works written about Pan two hundred years ago continue to fit nicely into modern Witch ritual. We also know that early Witches such as Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente read the poems and literature that helped set Pan’s cloven hooves firmly in the modern world.

  There’s a very real-world reason Pan reemerged in nineteenth-century England: the Industrial Revolution. In 1810 about 20 percent of the population in England lived in large cities, while the other 80 percent lived in more rural areas. One hundred years later, the rural-urban divide had effectively flipped, with 80 percent of England’s population now living in cities and only 20 percent continuing to live in the country and other rural settings.148 That’s a drastic sea change in culture, especially to have happened in such a short period of time. The result of this was that people began to feel disconnected from the countryside they (or their forebears) had once inhabited and began looking for an entry back into that world.

  It should be pointed out that the majority of poets were city dwellers, but like the Greeks of Athens and the poets of Rome who romanticized Arcadia, English poets began to romanticize England’s lost rural landscape. Many attempted to find a connection to the natural world through Christianity, but not surprisingly, Jesus as a wild god of the forest just doesn’t work very well. Because Christianity lacks an explicit connection to the natural world, they turned to classical Greece and found Pan as the god of all in the Orphic Hymns (which had recently been translated into English) and in the works of Bacon and other Renaissance-era encyclopedists. It also helped that many of England’s most prominent poets chose to write about Pan, inspiring those who came after them.

  There were two different “Pan motifs” during this era, and both of them are still with us today when we talk about the Horned God. The first is the “Orphic” or “Cosmic” Pan; this is the Pan of everything or all, who is the very embodiment of nature. Often this is a god who can be heard or felt but seldom seen. When people today write about the Horned God in the abstract or as an all-powerful, always-present deity, they are referencing this version of Pan.

  The second version was (and is) the “Rustic” or “Intimate” Pan. To the poets of the nineteenth century, this was the Pan who ruled over the eternal English countryside, preserving nature and keeping the industrial world away from what was left of England’s romanticized pristine wilderness. This was a Pan who could be seen if one knew just where to look. This was also the Pan whom people prayed to (then and now) and who was a presence and force in people’s lives.

  English poets also presented the world with a much more sanitized version of the god. Nymphs were mentioned in passing, but generally as a way to lament lost love. The Pan of the English countryside was not the god of rape or panic sexuality, but a god of love and natural beauty. This is an important change, and another example of how the Pan of this period reflects how many Witches talk about and understand the Horned God today.

  There’s another dimension to the return of Pan that can be written about only in a book for Witches: I have to assume that Pan’s reemergence in the modern world was something that he desired, or perhaps the world needed. Why were people suddenly writing about Pan? Could it be that the god was whispering in their ears once more? Did Mother Earth choose to awaken Pan from his nap in an effort to save the earth or at least remind humans just how beautiful the natural world is? When writing about history, it’s easy to place the emphasis on human agency, but my gods aren’t passive. In most cases, they have sought me out, not the other way around. Romantics and Victorians may have been looking for something like Pan, but I also think he was looking for them.

  Since Pan is a deity who has inspired tens of thousands of poems, essays, and novels, it would be easy for me to quote from those materials extensively for the next forty or so pages. However, that seems like overkill, so instead I’ll simply share some of my favorite examples of Pan in English literature, focusing on more prominent poets whose works have had a lasting impact. It’s also my hope that what’s shared here will inspire you as a follower of the Horned One, and that you’ll love all of it as much as I do.

  Pan in English Poetry and Literature

  The first major poet to adopt Pan as a continuing motif was William Wordsworth (1770–1850), who most often wrote about Pan in the Orphic style, as a god heard and felt but never truly seen. Wordsworth’s most famous poem is the multi-volume The Prelude, an autobiographical work detailing his development as a poet and human being. The eighth book of the Prelude is titled Retrospect: Love of Nature Leading to Love of Man, and it’s here that the reader discovers Pan the “Invisible God, thrilling the rocks/With tutelary music,” protecting a flock of goats from “all harm.” 149 The Prelude was written over a period of fifty years, but the lines above about Pan most likely date from sometime between 1799 and 1805.

  Contemporary with Pan as the “Invisible God” is the depiction of the god in Wordsworth’s 1806 poem “Composed by the Side of Grasmere Lake,” where Pan as nature offers solace from a world full of violence and misery:

  Clouds, li
ngering yet, extend in solid bars

  Through the grey west; and lo! these waters, steeled

  By breezeless air to smoothest polish, yield

  A vivid repetition of the stars;

  Jove, Venus, and the ruddy crest of Mars

  Amid his fellows beauteously revealed

  At happy distance from earth’s groaning field,

  Where ruthless mortals wage incessant wars.

  Is it a mirror?—or the nether Sphere

  Opening to view the abyss in which she feeds

  Her own calm fires?—But list! a voice is near;

  Great Pan himself low-whispering through the reeds,

  “Be thankful, thou; for, if unholy deeds

  Ravage the world, tranquility is here!” 150 (emphasis mine)

  A little less than ten years later, Wordsworth would write in the poem “O’er the Wide Earth” how the longing for nature dwells within the hearts of all people and how we all quest for something like Pan:

  O’er the wide earth, on mountain and on plain,

  Dwells in the affections and the soul of man

  A Godhead, like the universal PAN;

  But more exalted, with a brighter train.151

  While there’s nothing to suggest that Wordsworth ever worshipped the god Pan, the same can’t be said for English poet and essayist Leigh Hunt (1784–1859). Today Hunt is mostly a footnote in the careers of the much more gifted poets he influenced, John Keats (1795–1821) and Percy Bysshe Shelley152 (1792–1822), an influence that included the god Pan. Though most scholars tend to scoff at the idea that Hunt worshipped the god Pan, his surviving correspondence sometimes suggests otherwise. In a letter to friend and fellow writer Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792–1862), Hunt connects decorating with evergreen branches to ancient paganism and suggests to his friend the following:

  If you all go on so, there will be a hope some day that old Vansittart 153 and others will be struck with a Panic Terror and that a voice will be heard along the water saying—“The Great God Pan is alive again!”—upon which the villagers will leave off starving, and singing profane hymns, and fall to dancing again.154

  It’s hard to tell exactly if Hunt and those in his orbit truly worshipped Pan in a religious sense, but they most certainly felt drawn to the god and classical paganism. The poetry and prose that arose from their quill pens expressed an undeniable appreciation of the god. In 1821 Shelley wrote to a friend that “I am glad to hear that you do not neglect the rites of the true religion. … I ascended alone, the high mountain behind my house, & suspended a garland & raised a small turf altar to the mountain-walking Pan.” 155

  Shelley’s “Hymn of Pan” (1820) portrays not a universal god, but a god whose primary gift to the world is his music. Pan’s pipings in the poem are so sweet that even the god Apollo is envious of them. What touches me in the poem are how Pan’s songs tell the story of the world:

  I sang of the dancing stars,

  I sang of the daedal Earth,

  And of Heaven, and the giant wars,

  And Love, and Death, and Birth.156

  Sadly, at the end of the poem, Pan’s pipings turn sorrowful when his heart is broken, but that too is the story of life.

  Written the same year as “Hymn of Pan” but not released until after the poet’s death in 1824, Shelley’s “The Witch of Atlas” also features Pan, but a god more akin to Wordsworth’s version of the Arcadian:

  And universal Pan, ’tis said, was there,

  And though none saw him,—through the adamant

  Of the deep mountains, through the trackless air,

  And through those living spirits, like a want,

  He passed out of his everlasting lair

  Where the quick heart of the great world doth pant,

  And felt that wondrous lady all alone,—

  And she felt him, upon her emerald throne.157

  John Keats’s “Hymn to Pan” (1818) is part of a much longer work, the Endymion, which begins with a group of shepherds gathering around an altar to pray to Pan. This “Hymn to Pan” nearly reads like an invocation to the god of Arcadia, touching upon most of the qualities attributed to Pan in the ancient world (minus the more unsavory ones, of course):

  Thou, to whom every fawn and satyr flies

  For willing service; whether to surprise

  The squatted hare while in half sleeping fit;

  Or upward ragged precipices flit

  To save poor lambkins from the eagle’s maw;

  Or by mysterious enticement draw

  Bewildered shepherds to their path again;

  Or to tread breathless round the frothy main

  And gather up all fancifullest shells

  For thee to tumble into Naiads’ cells,

  And, being hidden, laugh at their out-peeping;

  Or to delight thee with fantastic leaping,

  The while they pelt each other on the crown

  With silvery oak apples, and fir cones brown—

  By all the echoes that about thee ring,

  Hear us, O satyr king! 158

  The work focused specifically on Pan spans four stanzas, each as long as the one reprinted above and each just as beautiful.

  Before the Endymion, Pan featured in Keats’s “I Stood Tip-Toe upon a Little Hill,” published in an 1817 collection dedicated to Leigh Hunt. Here the poet’s love of Pan is not quite as evident, but Keats paints a beautiful picture of what lies just outside of our mundane field of vision. When peeking through a tangle of branches or bushes, I often feel like Keats’s narrator:

  So did he feel, who pull’d the boughs aside,

  That we might look into a forest wide,

  To catch a glimpse of Fawns, and Dryades

  Coming with softest rustle through the trees;

  And garlands woven of flowers wild, and sweet,

  Upheld on ivory wrists, or sporting feet:

  Telling us how fair, trembling Syrinx fled

  Arcadian Pan, with such a fearful dread.

  Poor Nymph,—poor Pan,—how he did weep to find,

  Nought but a lovely sighing of the wind

  Along the reedy stream; a half heard strain,

  Full of sweet desolation—balmy pain.159

  Here it’s not just Syrinx who is broken at the end of Pan’s chase, but the goat-god as well. And those first six lines! They read like the perfect start to a Beltane or Midsummer rite.

  The literary cult of Pan begun by Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Hunt only grew in intensity as the nineteenth century progressed. By the end of the century, it nearly turned into something of a requirement that the aspiring poet dedicate a few verses to the goat god of Arcady.160 In addition to inhabiting the eternal English countryside, Pan’s power began to be felt in cities as well. Poet Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) finds just enough of the natural world in London’s busy Kensington Gardens park in 1852 to invoke the god:

  In the huge world, which roars hard by,

  Be others happy if they can!

  But in my helpless cradle I

  Was breathed on by the rural Pan.161

  In his poem “Oak and Olive,” James Elroy Flecker’s (1884–1915) encounters with the god in the urban landscape of the early twentieth century include a full menagerie of nymphs and maenads:

  When I go down the Gloucester lanes

  My friends are deaf and blind:

  Fast as they turn their foolish eyes

  The Mænads leap behind,

  And when I hear the fire-winged feet,

  They only hear the wind.

  Have I not chased the fluting Pan

  Through Cranham’s sober trees?

  Have I not sat on Painswick Hill

  With a nymph upon my knees,

  And she as rosy as the dawn,

  And naked as the breeze? 162

  Flecker’s ability to see the divine all around while his mundane friends are “deaf and blind” to the wonders
of nature and the gods should be a familiar refrain to most Witches. How many of us have found a place full of wonder only for our nonmagickal friends to dismiss it out of hand?

  The power of Pan to enchant the urban landscape, as related by poets such as Arnold and Flecker, was not the isolated work of a few minor writers, but was an especially common motif in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The novelist W. Somerset Maugham wrote of this period, “Poets saw him lurking in the twilight on London commons, and literary ladies in Surrey and New England, nymphs of an industrial age, mysteriously surrendered their virginity to his rough embrace.” 163 But Pan embraced more than just the nymphs of the industrial age; he also embraced the gay men of the era.164 The result was a third facet to Pan by the end of the Victorian era: a god who embraced the (then) forbidden.

  Before concluding this chapter, there are three specific portrayals of Pan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that I think deserve some special attention. This first is from the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), who wrote so beautifully of Pan and his fellow Olympians that his 1866 collection of poetry, Poems and Ballads, was a genuine sensation on college campuses.165 Students at Cambridge and Oxford defiantly chanted excerpts in the late 1860s while much of the establishment looked on in horror. Swinburne’s praise of Pagan deity paints a picture of gods in love with joy and beauty, while Jesus and his father are portrayed as the architects of worldwide sadness.

  For our purposes, Swinburne’s most important poem might be “A Nympholept,” published in 1894 as part of the collection Astrophel and Other Poems. What makes “A Nympholept” so noteworthy is the near-absolute power of the god Pan. In Swinburne we see how the Horned God will be called to in the decades to come: