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The Great God Pan

Pan is the god of woods and fields, of flocks and shepherds, and the generative force that lives in nature. He is at home in caves and grottos, wanders up mountain and down valley, and amuses himself by dancing with or chasing nymphs. Fond of music, he is the inventor of the syrinx, or shepherd's pipe, which he himself plays irresistibly well.

Pan is a very old god, having been first worshipped in Arcadia as early as the 6th century BCE. He was born in the hearts of a shepherding people whose lives depended on goats, and so it was natural they would embrace a fertile, playful, omnivorous and endlessly curious goat-God as their own.

Due to superstitious fears, a sudden fright without any visible cause was ascribed to Pan, and called a Panic terror.

Through the centuries, the Greeks never forgot old Pan and built shrines to him everywhere. There is even one hidden away in a shallow cave under the Acropolis, As the name of the god signifies all, Pan came to be considered the personification of Nature’s endless, joyful abundance. Throughout the West, he also became a cultural representative of all the Gods of paganism –by lending his horns and hooves (and randy nature) to the Christian Devil, and later as a beloved archetype of the Neo-Pagan renaissance.

Everybody has heard of Pan, a Greek god with the physique of a small man with a goatee beard and reed pipes, and the hind-quarters, horns and sexual habits of a goat.