Much of that which is reflected back from modern literature and film is largely derived from the 19th and early 20th century fascination with all things magical and mystical.

Pan (from the Greek, “All”) was the god of wild places, of Nature red in tooth and claw.

The phenomenon of the terror that grips otherwise rational, intelligent individuals when they are placed in a situation where they are out of touch with civilization may be familiar those who have taken wilderness trips for hunting or fishing purposes.

The transformation from mild-mannered reporter to paranoid borderline psychotic is truly chilling to see. This, to the Greeks, was the Panic terror that in Greek Myth had caused whole armies to flee.

The later 20th Century projection of this deity in the mainstream media as a rather ineffectual and humorous sort of Satyr is so far from the reality that it is hardly worth consideration at all.

Late 19th and early 20th century writers tended to concentrate on the frightening aspect of Pan, the uncontrollable power of nature personified. Arthur Machen, H.H. Munro (Saki) and even Dennis Wheatley (amongst others) considered this aspect, that of the Lord of the Hunt, a God who can bring madness and dreams. He must be approached with laughter and with song, for his pipe can call up ecstasy for the true worshipper, or death for the unprepared.

Keen eyed and swift of foot, Pan did not live on Olympus with the rest of the Greek pantheon, but made his home in the world of men and beasts.

Machen, like most writers of the mid to late 19th century, found the dionysiac qualities of Pan to be profoundly unsettling, as did his audience. His generation also represented the creators of that sprawl of progress eating up the countryside that later writers such as Milne and others found so unpalatable.

In “The Wind in the Willows”, in that curiously adult seventh chapter titled “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, A.A, Milne presents a radically different view of Pan, that of benevolent healer and preserver of animals hurt, lost or distressed. The clues to his presence there are very similar to those presented in the earlier works; the soft piping, the sense of majesty and great power, yet the effect upon the protagonists of the story, who are animals rather than human, is one of comfort and love.

Milne of course writes from the viewpoint of one who has rejected the sprawl of ‘progress’, and who longs for an idyllic (and largely imaginary) past, where inhabitants of a land are in harmony and at peace with their surroundings.

Munro, in his rather ironic way, deals with characters that, being outsiders, are unable to fit in with their surroundings and pay the price for attempting to impose their modern ways on the land. Thus his point is similar to Milne’s, but his protagonist is from the other side of the fence.

Wheatley, writing in one of his ‘Black Magic’ thrillers, has one of his protagonists invoke the Great God Pan to protect his party from attack by an evil entity. The book itself may be pure melodrama, but it may also be the last representation (outside occult literature) of the powerful nature of Pan, before he was buried in a sea of cute and non-threatening imagery.

Came the voice of Destiny, Calling o’er the Ionian Sea, “The Great God Pan is dead, is dead. Humbled is the horned head; Shut the door that hath no key- Waste the vales of Arcady.”