Episode 102: On Pan, with Gyrus

"What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river?" With this question, the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning opens her famous poem "A Musical Instrument," which explores nature's troubling embrace of savagery and beauty. It seems that Pan always raises questions: What is he doing? What does he want? Where will he appear next? Linked to instinct, compulsion, and the spontaneous event, Pan is without a doubt the least predictable of the Greek Gods. Small wonder that he alone in the Greek pantheon sports human and animal parts. In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Gyrus, author of the marvellous North: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Cosmos, to capture a deity who, though he has made more than one appearance on Weird Studies, remains decidedly elusive.

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REFERENCES

Gyrus, "Sketches of the Goat God in Albion"
Gyrus, North
James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare
Pharmakon, philosophical term
Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive
Philippe Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece
Hellier, television docuseries
Weird Studies, Episode 98 on exotica
Pink Floyd, Piper at the Gates of Dawn
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Clayton Eshelman, Juniper Fuse
Plutarch “On the Silence of the Oracles”
Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger
D.H. Lawrence, “Pan in America”
Jim Brandon, The Rebirth of Pan