Give the devil his due

It is difficult to imagine two more antithetical deities than Athena and Pan. Athena, one of the Olympian Twelve, was both parthenogenically born and a virgin; was the patron goddess of the two greatest city states of Hellas, Athens and Sparta, and a proctectress of cities in general; was a mistress of strategy in war and stratagems in peace; and invented the plough, rake, ox-yoke, horse-bridle, and chariot, as well as handicrafts for women. Above all, she was associated with mental power and technology, and her symbol was the owl. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, Zeus’s first wife was the Titaness, Metis, ‘she who  of gods and mortals knows the most’. When she was pregnant with Athena, Zeus managed by trickery to put his giant of a wife into his belly, for he had heard that after their daughter she would give birth to a son who would supersede him in power and wisdom. He subsequently forgot about the whole situation until one day he had a splitting headache and was advised that Athena was ready to emerge. Hephaestus, the smith-god, acted as midwife and, taking a golden axe, clove Zeus’s skull, out of which sprang Athena in the guise of a warrior, fully-armed.

Pan, on the other hand, was not one of the Olympians; he lived with his feet (or hooves) planted firmly on the Earth, where he kept his rustic court of cowherds, goatherds, shepherds and satyrs, as well as nymphs of forest, stream, pasture and mountainside. Arcadia was his earthly paradise, and there he spent a good deal of time drinking, chasing nymphs and sleeping off his debauches. He invented the Pan-pipes and was a master of prophetic utterance. Crucially, he was said to be the only god to have suffered death. He certainly had a shadow side and inspired irrational fear or ‘panic’ (a sensation derived from his name) by sudden loud shouts from forest or cave in the stillness of noontide that seemed to come from within the victims themselves and made their hair stand on end. His horns, beard, tail and goat-legs gave birth to the medieval image of the devil. According to Graves, Pan stands for the ‘devil’ or ‘upright man’ of the Arcadian fertility cult, which closely resembled the witch cult of North-western Europe.

Pan’s father Hermes, whose first act after running away from home as a little boy was to steal a herd of cattle from Apollo, was also a fine musician and invented a pipe made from reeds. He too was born in Arcadia, where he appears as a god of flocks (particularly sheep). He was a trickster and a liar, who had the ‘luck of the flocks’ and was considered to preside over all forms of magic. He was psychopompos, whose job it was to conduct the souls of the dead to the Underworld.

Virgil’s Eclogues, originally named Bucolica (i.e. ‘cowherd songs’), enshrine a surprisingly complex world, often through the medium of song contests between goatherds and other pastoral folk, in which a sense of encroaching disorder promoted by city and empire clouds the celebration of an ardent life lived in harmony with Nature. It is complex because it is not a world of escapism so much as one of prophetic stirrings (which is Nature at its deepest). And if it is Pan’s world, then it has been breached by the sons and daughters of Pallas Athena. As Corydon sings in the second Eclogue:

                              Pallas, quas condidit arces,

Ipsa colat: nobis placeant ante omnia sylvae.        [lines 61-2]

(Tr.: ‘Let Pallas dwell by herself in the cities she has built; but let my chief delight be the woods!’)

The reason Athena has proved such a headache for philandering Zeus is that she, not her unborn brother, has turned out to be his supplanter, and a terribly persuasive and thoughtful one at that. She is the goddess of our Western Civilisation, which takes its cue from classical Athens. Her mirror-shield (the one she lent to Perseus so that he did not have to look directly at the Gorgon, Medusa, when he was slaying her) is a symbol of all the subsequent technology that has acted as a barrier to mankind’s direct experience of Nature. Like the Lady of Shalott we are ‘half-sick of shadows’, and yet our solution to the sickness is more mirrors. Athena was the goddess of weaving, and now she presides over the worldwide web. What she offers us is a sterile, technologically-engineered immortality (a word that is only a letter’s width away from ‘immorality’).

Pan, on the other hand, so despised by the Olympian Twelve, is the god of the fear and joy of mortality. The very joy of the things of this earth lies in their transience, and in the transience lies man’s fear. This is the sudden panic that grips us: the knowledge that we are mortal and subject to the processes of Nature, some of which―like decay―can seem horrifying. We ought to face this reality without false aids like mirror-shields: this the pastoral world well knows.

The Eclogues have cast a long shadow, influencing much of subsequent Western literature. Shakespeare’s As You Like It is a fine example as is, nearer our own time, Andre Gide’s Fruits of the Earth (1897). In his preface to the French edition of 1927, Gide described the book as ‘this manual of escape, of liberation…’, hinting perhaps at the freedom that can be won by embracing one’s mortality rather than spending life building false immortalities through gadgetry and ideology. Here is Menalcas addressing Nathaniel in Book I, with Nathaniel’s brief reply:

‘Nathaniel, I will teach you fervour.

‘Our acts are attached to us as its glimmer is to phosphorous. They consume us, it is true, but they make our splendour.

‘And if our souls have been of any worth, it is because they have burnt more ardently than others.

‘Great fields, washed in the whiteness of dawn, I have seen you; blue lakes, I have bathed in your waters―and to every caress of the laughing breeze I have smiled back an answer―this is what I shall never tire of telling you, Nathaniel. I will teach you fervour.

‘If I had known more lovely things than these, it is of them that I should have told you―yes, yes, of them and not of any others.’

‘You have not taught me wisdom, Menalcas.’

‘”Not wisdom, but love.”’

Suppress him as they might, the Athenians could not kill off Pan. Even today there is a profound saying among the English: give the devil his due.