Daily Archives: December 17, 2025

Top Tens – Heroes & Villains: Top 10 Heroes of Mythology (Special Mention) (2) Pan & Abraxas

Posted on by

Collage of public domain images – “Sweet, piercing sweet was the music of Pan’s pipe” in captioned illustration of Pan by Walter Crane (Wikipedia “Pan”) on left and trace of an image of Abraxas stone or gem “The Gnostics and their remains” by Charles W. King, 1887 (Wikipedia banner image for gnosticism) on right

 

 

(2) PAN & ABRAXAS

 

Io Pan! Io Pan Pan!

Iao Abraxas!

Pan, the original horny god with the groin of a goat or as Bill Hicks styled him, randy Pan the Goat Boy. God of nature, mountains, shepherds and s€xuality – also the source of our word panic, for the divine mad fear he could inspire in people, including as savior of Athens, the invading Persian army at Marathon.

As a Capricorn goat boy myself, I’ve long been a Pan fan. Ironically, the only classical Greek god reported as dead – in a historical legend by Plutarch, with a sailor during the reign of Tiberius reporting a divine proclamation from an island that “the great god Pan is dead” – but reports of his death, to paraphrase Mark Twain, were greatly exaggerated. Pan was the one god that endured more than all the others, even to the extent of embodying in horned and hooved form all classical paganism as a whole in modern romanticism and neo-paganism. Perhaps aptly enough, given the pun on Pan – as the word for “all” in Greek also being Pan.

One might call it Pan’s odyssey – from mythic Pan through medieval and early modern Pan to his romantic rebirth, Edwardian height of popularity, and ultimately contemporary Pan. There’s just too much Pan – or is that too many Pans? – out there.

Sadly, one of my favorite historical legends of how Christianity embodied Pan as its devil – may be just that, a legend dating back only to the nineteenth century (following the hypothesis of Ronald Hutton to that effect).

I still prefer the legend. In one of my story ideas, a somewhat lost and forlorn Satan muses to the protagonist (with whom he has occasional chats) of his origin from Pan (as one of his multiple-choice origin stories). The protagonist calls him out on his conflicting origin stories, to which Satan replies “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am legion, I contain multitudes”. But then he becomes sadly wistful “I would give anything just to dance in the moonlight again, when I was not evil but only wild and free”.

Another of my mythic idiosyncrasies is that I tend see a matching figure to Pan in Abraxas, even if the latter has nowhere near the classical pagan firepower as Pan in popular culture.

One reason is something of a physical resemblance in their half-animal half-human form. Where Pan is essentially a satyr as goat from waist down and with goat horns on his head, Abraxas is similarly animal from waist down and from neck up, only more so. For the former, Abraxas has much the same animal proportions of Pan – only more eerie or eldritch as instead of the lower half of goat, as Abraxas had a serpent (or serpentine tail) for each leg, anguiped rather than satyr. For the latter, Abraxas goes hard into animal head territory – instead of dainty goat horns on a human head, Abraxas has an actual animal head, with the head of a rooster. Serpentine legs and head of a rooster – if there’s a divine figure as more overt phallic symbol, then I don’t know what it is, particularly if you use the alternative word for rooster.

As to what sort of divine figure Abraxas is, well, that’s not entirely clear – Gnostic aeon or archon, classical or Egyptian god, or magical figure?

There’s even more direct parallels with Pan in the inscriptions and images on the prolific engraved ‘Abraxas stones’ that have been located in archaeology. There’s the salutation of Iao for Abraxas, echoing that of Io for Pan – and according to Egyptologist E. Wallis Budge, Abraxas was a Pantheus or Pantheos, that is, All-God.

I particularly have a soft spot for Abraxas from two sources for my personal mythos. One is the 1970 Santana album of that name, featuring its psychedelic cover art with the gloriously naked and voluptuous black magic woman as its centerpiece. The other is Piers Anthony’s Tarot trilogy, in which Abraxas is an unlikely candidate as the one true god, boosted by his golden priestess and devotee Amaranth, one of the s€xiest fantasy or SF female characters I have read. Iao Abraxas, indeed!

 

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD-TIER – OR IS THAT PAN-TIER?)

Top Tens – Comics: Top 10 Comics (Special Mention) (1) Mad

Posted on by

The literal face of Mad Magazine – Alfred E. Neumann – on the October 1982 magazine cover parodying Time Magazine’s Man of the Year

 

 

(1) MAD (1952 – PRESENT)

 

What, me worry?

Ah – Alfred E. Neuman with his iconic gap tooth grin and catchphrase as Mad Magazine’s fictional mascot and cover boy. According to Wikipedia, he actually preceded Mad as a visual image in advertisements and a presidential campaign postcard for Roosevelt, although the magazine named him and converted his original appearance as an idiotic figure to a more mischievous devil-may-care trickster – “someone who can maintain a sense of humor while the world is collapsing around him”. Amusingly – given his origins from a presidential campaign postcard – Mad Magazine has proffered him periodically as a joke presidential candidate from 1956 onwards with the slogan “You could do a lot worse…and always have!”

I was raised on Mad. Indeed, it was hereditary – I inherited it from my mother, who had classic collections of Mad from when she was a teenager and passed them on to me when I was a teenager. (I’m not too sure her parents – my grandparents – were impressed by this subversive publication – they were pretty straightlaced). And it has been a huge influence on my sense of humor and worldview ever since, mirroring its wider influence on parody and satire in popular culture. If you want to understand me, know that Mad Magazine is etched deep within my psyche (paired with Catch-22 and as part of an eclectic kaleidoscope with The Devil’s Dictionary and TV Tropes):

 

The film and television parodies – particularly as drawn by Mort Drucker, possibly the finest caricaturist ever (sadly passed away on 9 April 2020).

 

Spy vs Spy! Featuring the titular literal black and white Cold War-eque spies (drawn as, ah, bird-like people things?) outwitting each other with traps within traps

 

Don Martin – Mad’s Maddest Artist! And his recurring Fonebone character!

 

Dan Berg and his “The Lighter Side of” slice of life cartoons!

 

Sergio Aragones – with his “A Mad Look At’ recurring features and his marginal doodles (or “Drawn Out Dramas”)!

 

The classic Mad Fold-Ins!

 

And so on. Nothing was sacred for Mad’s subversive satire and sense of humor – sacred cows make the best hamburger – “Mad’s satiric net was cast wide. The magazine often featured parodies of ongoing American culture, including advertising campaigns, the nuclear family, the media, big business, education and publishing. In the 1960s and beyond, it satirized such burgeoning topics as the sexual revolution, hippies, the generation gap, psychoanalysis, gun politics, pollution, the Vietnam War and recreational drug use”.

Robert Boyd from the Los Angeles Times summed up Mad Magazine for me as well as himself and other fans, with the apt line “All I really need to know I learned from Mad magazine” – “Plenty of it went right over my head, of course, but that’s part of what made it attractive and valuable. Things that go over your head can make you raise your head a little higher. The magazine instilled in me a habit of mind, a way of thinking about a world rife with false fronts, small print, deceptive ads, booby traps, treacherous language, double standards, half truths, subliminal pitches and product placements; it warned me that I was often merely the target of people who claimed to be my friend; it prompted me to mistrust authority, to read between the lines, to take nothing at face value, to see patterns in the often shoddy construction of movies and TV shows; and it got me to think critically in a way that few actual humans charged with my care ever bothered to.”

And it forever tainted the way I view films and television – much as it did critic Roger Ebert:

“I learned to be a movie critic by reading Mad magazine … Mad’s parodies made me aware of the machine inside the skin—of the way a movie might look original on the outside, while inside it was just recycling the same old dumb formulas. I did not read the magazine, I plundered it for clues to the universe”.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD-TIER)