PAN

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When Pan is dead, then nature can be controlled by the will of the new God, man, modeled in the image of Prometheus or Hercules, creating from it and polluting in it without a troubled conscience. (Hercules who cleaned up Pan’s natural world first, clubbing instinct with his willpower, does not stop to clear away the dismembered carcasses left to putrefy after his civilizing creative tasks. He strides on to the next task, and ultimate madness). As the human loses personal connection with personified nature and personified instinct, the image of Pan and the image of the devil merge. Pan never died, say many commentators on Plutarch; he was repressed. Therefore as suggested above, Pan still lives, and not merely in the literary imagination. He lives in the repressed which returns, in the pathologies of instinct which assert themselves, as Roscher indicates, primarily in the nightmare and its associated erotic, demonic, and panic qualities." --Hillman 

To grasp Pan as nature we must first be grasped by nature, both "out there" in an empty countryside which speaks in sounds, not words, & "in here" in a startle reaction - this Pan no one has better re-created than D.H Lawrence. Uncanny as the goat's eye, nature comes at us in the instinctual experiences that Pan personifies. But to speak of "personification" does the God injustice, since it implies that mankind makes the Gods & that nature is an impersonal, abstract field of forces, such as thought conceives it. Whereas the demonic shape of Pan turns that concept "nature" into an immediate psychic shock.

Western philosophical tradition from its beginnings in the Presocratics & in the Old Testament has been prejudiced against images - phantasia, in favor of thought abstractions. In the period since Descartes & the Enlightenment conceptualization has held preeminence; the psyche's tendency to personify has been disdainfully put down as anthropomorphism.

One of the main arguments against the mythical mode of thinking has been that it works in images, which are subjective, personal, & sensuous. This above all must be avoided in Western epistemology, & so likewise in the descriptions of the forces of nature. To personify has meant to think animistically, primitively, pre-logically. The senses deceive; images that would relay truth about the world must be purified of their anthropomorphic elements. The only persons in the Universe are literal human persons. Yet the experience of the Gods, of heroes, of nymphs, demons, angels & powers, of Sacred animals, places, & things, as persons indeed precedes the concept of personification. It is not that "we" personify, but that the epiphanies come as "persons."

Could we step back from our times, step out of the pretensions of the fearing Ego who would bring every atom of nature under its control? Then we might realise again that we are not the source of personified Gods. We do not make them up, anymore than we invent the sounds we hear in the woods, the hoof-prints in the sand, the nightmare pressure weighing on our chests.

For millennia & most everywhere, it was palpably evident that Divine & daimonic figures appeared as persons. But the scientific Weiltanschuung with its cut between observer & observed severed us from that witness, & its testimony became magical thinking, primitive belief, superstition, & insanity. Since the imaginal figures still occasionally broke in among the brightest & best educated, as in nightmares, these figures had to be made up by us. They could not be allowed their autonomy, else the scientific Universe itself could become a "nightmare."

Perhaps it wasn’t Pan or an echo, but rather Pan and Echo—one of the god’s favorite nymphs. James Hillman connects Pan strongly the the phenomenon of synchronicity, ‘since Pan like synchronicity connects nature “in here” with it “out there”’—a devilish shadow of our rational conceptions of time, space, and causality.

Perhaps all along, in the way in which the unfolding of this goat motif has resisted tidy explanations and cut-and-dried categories, the deft hand of the impish goat-god has been busily working away. Hillman has the last word:
In Longus’ tale of Daphnis and Chloe, Echo was torn apart by Pan’s herdsmen (for refusing him). Her singing members were flung in all directions. Let us say that Pan speaks in these echoing bits of information which present nature’s own awareness of itself in moments of spontaneity. Why they occur at this moment and not that, why they are so often fragmentary, trivial and even false—these questions would have to be explored through the mythology of the spontaneous rather than through either empirical or logical methods. We would have to penetrate further into the nature of Pan (and the nymphs) in order to fathom these manifestations that seem to want to remain renegade and wispy, half-pranks and half-truths …

Pan and the Nightmare
James Hillman
"Panic, especially at night when the citadel darkens and the heroic ego sleeps, is a direst participation mystique in nature, a fundamental, even ontological experience of the world as alive and in dread. Objects become subjects; they move with life while one is oneself paralyzed with fear. When existence is experienced through instinctual levels of fear, aggression, hunger, or sexuality, images take on compelling life of their own. The imaginal is never more vivid than when we are connected with it instinctually. The world alive is of course animism; that this living world is divine and imaged by different gods with attributes and characteristics is polytheistic pantheism. That fear, dread, horror are natural is wisdom. In Whitehead's term "nature alive" means Pan, and panic flings open a door into this reality." --Hillman p.33, Pan and the Nightmare

This brilliant book brings Pan back to life by following C. G. Jung's famous saying: "The Gods have become our diseases." Chapters on nightmare panic, on masturbation, rape and nympholepsy, on instinct and synchronicity, and on Pan's female loves-echo, Syrinx, Selene, and the Muses-show the goat-God at work and play in the dark drives and creative passions of our lives. Hillman's insights present the archetypal figure in the depths of nature and archetypal psychology as a method of revelation.Pan and the Nightmare (which includes a full translation of Wilhelm Roscher's masterful 19th-century mythological-pathological treatise on Pan and the demons of the night) is the most radical study of this God ever undertaken.

The body of the work is a translation of a monograph by Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher, ‘Ephialtes: A Pathological-Mythological Treatise on the Nightmare in Classical Antiquity’. A co-founder with Nietzsche of the University of Leipzig’s Philology Club, Roscher is lauded by Hillman as a great example of the kind of nineteenth century scholar whose voluminous, wide-ranging knowledge and enthusiasm for the psychological reality of his subject led to flawed but valuable efforts of synthesis and comparison. As Hillman eloquently argues, the “psychological ferment” of the time (Roscher’s monograph appeared in the same year as Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams) means we “may not blame Roscher for the wide casting of his net nor for some of the odd fish he comes up with.”

Equally valuable is Hillman’s introductory essay, nearly as long as Roscher’s work, in which he applies his characteristically shrewd, penetrating and original psyche-oriented analysis to Roscher’s subject. Classic psychological concepts such as instinct, the uncanny, synchronicity and repressed sexuality are given fertile new frames via Pan’s irresistible force and the shock of the nightmare experience.

THE GREAT GOD PAN IS DEAD. 

"Plutarch mentions, that in the reign of Tiberius, an extraordinary voice was heard near the Echinades, in the Ionian sea, which exclaimed, that the great Pan was dead. This was readily believed by the Emperor, and the astrologers were consulted; but they were unable to explain the meaning for so supernatural a voice, which probably proceeded from the imposition of one of the courtiers who attempted to terrify Tiberius." Lempriere.

"This event occurred, supposedly in the first century A.D., during the reign of Tiberius, in a Roman world in which the rationalistic and evolutionary approach to religion had already done much to bring death not only to Pan but to many of the other greater and lesser Gods of the Greek Pantheon."

Robert B. Palmer, in the Introduction, to Dionyus, Myth and Cult, W.F.Otto, p. x. 

A cry went out through late antiquity: "Great Pan is dead!" Plutarch reported it in his "On the failure of the Oracles, " yet the saying has itself become oracular, meaning many things to many people in many ages. One thing was announced: nature had become deprived of its creative voice. It was no longer an independent living force of generativity. What had had soul lost it: or lost was the psychic connection with nature. With Pan dead, so too was Echo; we could no longer capture consciousness through reflecting within our instincts. They had lost their light and fell easily to asceticism, following sheepishly without instinctual rebellion their new shepherd, Christ, with his new means of management. Nature no longer spoke to us-- or we could no longer hear. The person of Pan the mediator, like an ether who invisibly enveloped all natural things with personal meaning, with brightness, had vanished... When Pan is alive then nature is too, so the owl's hoot is Athena and the mollusk on the shore is Aphrodite... When Pan is dead, then nature can be controlled by the will of the new God, man, modeled in the image of Prometheus or Hercules, creating from it and polluting in it without a troubled conscious... As the human loses personal connection with a personified nature and personified instinct, the image of Pan and the image of the devil merge. Pan never died, say many commentators on Plutarch, he was repressed... Pan still lives... in the repressed which returns, in the psychopathologies of instinct which assert themselves, as Roscher indicates, primarily in the nightmare and its associated erotic, demonic, and panic qualities."
James Hillman, A BLUE FIRE: pp.97-98 (originally in "Pan": 24-25,33, 54)