
Pan
Pan (pàn) noun
Greek Mythology.
The god of woods, fields,
and flocks, having a human torso and head with a goat's legs, horns, and
ears.
[Middle English, from Latin
Pân, from Greek Pan.]
Pan had many attributes as a god.
He was the god of goats, and sheep, and their shepherds. He was the god of
bee
keeping. He was also a god of music, playing upon the reed pipes he made from
the transformed body of the nymph
Syrinx
(the one that got away). It was said that this music could inspire panic (the
root of the word) in any who heard it. Sometimes he was a minor
god of the sea. He was a god of prophesy and was also famous for being
randy (Greek women with a track record were known as Pan girls). Above all he
was the god of nature: meadows, forests, beasts, and even human nature.
![]() |
Pan's worship spread far
beyond Greece into many neighbouring countries such as
Egypt,
and local equivalents of him seem to have appeared all over the world,
either by diffusion or coincidence. Pan-like deities existed everywhere.
In Greece there were rustic gods such as Aristaeus (flocks, agriculture,
bee-keeping, vineculture), Priapus (the same) and Silenus (vineculture
and knowledge).
Then there were the satyrs, an entire
race of Pan-like beings, who lounged in woods and by streams, eating,
drinking and fornicating, and not much else. The Romans called them incubi or
fauns, and the iron age
Celts
were said to believe in dusii. These were not gods but nature spirits, and were
not worshipped but only believed in, and perhaps propitiated.
Did
Disney,
with its numerous occult influences, make a palatable version in Peter Pan?
Chapter xxi. The Great Pan Is Dead from
_Hamlet's
Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission
Through Myth_
Pan feverishly pursued a nymph,
Syrinx, who was transformed into a reed to escape his
attentions.
Somewhat irate, Pan bound together reeds of different lengths, and in so doing
engineered a unique and melodious instrument.
"I maintain, then, that there is
a spirit coiling and roiling in the bowels of the earth, radiating out from
the mouths of caves, flashing like a slow-motion
lightning
along fault lines, sprinkling out with the
water
from springs and wells,
pulsing
like heartbeats along certain barely-recognized runways across the land."
-- Jim Brandon, _The Rebirth of Pan: Hidden Faces of the American Earth Spirit_(1983)
![]() |
Trance
music in Morocco is magical in origin and purpose, concerned with the evocation
and control of spiritual forces. In Morocco musicians are magicians. Gnauoa
music is used to drive out evil spirits. The music of Jajouka evokes the God
Pan, God of Panic, representing the real magical forces that sweep away the
spurious. It is to be remembered that the origin of all arts -- music, painting,
and writing -- is magical and evocative, and that
magic
is always used to obtain some definite result. - W. S. Burroughs
release - _The Pipes Of Pan: Jajouka_
by Brian Jones and
The
Master Musicians Of Jajouka. Jajouka
is a small village in the foothills of the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco,
where Great Pan is still honored. Transcending
time,
space and religion, and traveling from ancient
Egypt
through numerous cultures wearing various
names, he survives in Jajouka not only as a myth, but as
reality
- in the Master Musicians of the Pipes of
Pan.
![]() |
604
entity Pan
ambient
abstract entity Pan Sonic
release: _Aaltopiiri_ CD on Blast First (
2001)
![]() |
_Aaltopiiri_ offers the listener a wide range of
flowing,
atmospheric sounds and rhythms. Recorded at their studio in Barcelona, the pair
choose an improvising approach to recording their music. "When we are in the
studio everything is recorded straight on to tape. We might do several takes
of a song, but there are no overdubs," explains Mika. Mainly recorded on analogue
equipment, some of which is designed and built for them by long time friend,
Geri Lehtinen, a physics expert. "For me the most important thing in our music
is the sound itself," says Mika. "The structure is secondary. For different
kinds of tracks, of course, were looking for different kinds of sounds. But
I still don’t know myself what is in a sound that attracts me. There’s some
kind of nature in the sound itself, some kind of
information."