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?)