Transcription
Please welcome Professor [Applause] Hutton. Thank you, everybody. Mercy, Sophie.
What I want to do in this talk is to examine the way in which the main image of modern Pagan male deity came to emerge, and why I say emerge, because that is what it did. Although there were plenty of horned Gods around in ancient Pagan Europe, they were far from being dominant figures. The male deities most often represented in art, recorded in inscriptions or votive offerings, mentioned in literature, and given temples and shrines, not only didn't have horns, but were patrons of civilization and its functions, not of wild nature.
This pattern holds true in the European cultural memory during most of the Christian centuries. For example, a checklist of references to Pagan deities in English poetry produced across the whole time between 1300 and 1800 reveals the following pattern: favorite God of all is Jupiter, as the patron of rulers, but also the closest thing in the Pagan Pantheon to a Christian God, a patriarchal Sky deity. Second favorite is Neptune, who looks after sailors. Third is Mercury, symbol of commerce and communication and education. And fourth is Vulcan, symbol of industry. This pattern holds good for the whole of Europe and is stable from the Middle Ages right through to the end of the 18th century, when it changed dramatically and apparently for good.
This was part of the huge complex of forces which we call the Romantic Movement. One aspect of which was a feeling that at last Europe had got too much civilization. Instead of seeing commerce, industry and urban life as fragile entities threatened by the mighty powers of nature, nature was starting to be seen as the fragile entity threatened by the powers of commerce, industry and urbanization. For the English, the change may be expressed by a simple statistic: in 1810, 80% of the population still lived in the countryside and were employed in occupations related to agriculture. By 1910, 80% of the English lived in cities and towns and were employed in occupations related to commerce and industry.
So from the opening of the 19th century, a new cultural movement began stressing the need to reconnect humans with the natural world and their own instincts and imaginations. It demanded new deities. One of these was female: Mother Nature or Mother Earth, a Great Goddess represented by the night sky, the moon and stars, and the green earth. She emerges dramatically in European creative literature at this time, and my last lecture here was devoted to her. But my concern tonight is with her male counterpart.
In a European world soaked in the Greek and Roman Classics, this had to be a Greek or a Roman god to whom the European imagination turned. And he had, by definition, to be the one most intimately associated with the wild, disturbing, and exciting aspects of nature: Pan. After 1800, the references to Pan in English literature multiply so fast, simply because of his popularity between then and 1914, above all, he represents the most frequently cited deity in the entire body of English literature.
It is worth stressing what a remarkable alteration this was. At a few places in the backwoods of classical Greece, mostly in Arcadia, the wildest part, he was a leading local God. But his general reputation was that of a hick. Putting it more elegantly, Patricia Meril, in the best study of his overall myth, has called him, and I apologize for this, "a comic, grotesque little country god, kept under control by the laughter of the more civilized Olympian deities." Ouch. Putting it even more cruelly, Ken Dowden, author of one of the best surveys of Greek mythology, has termed him "the C-student of Greek gods."
It is true that medieval Christian writers sometimes gave him a larger and nobler role for two reasons. The first is his name is coincidentally the same as the Greek word for "everything." His actual name derives from pasture land, but if it's the same as the name for everything, he could be made into a universal deity of the natural world. And in the Middle Ages, he was. And the second reason for prominence in the Middle Ages is that the ancient Roman writer Plutarch told a story of how a ship's crew passing near Samothrace, an island, heard a voice mourning Pan's death. Nobody in the ancient world took this story seriously. But by synchronizing this event with the crucifixion, Christian writers could make it a symbol of the destruction of the Pagan deities by the passion and triumph of Christ.
Having said this, neither of these notions actually promoted Pan into a popular figure. He was rarely mentioned in the world of medieval and early modern writers, and in England, not a single major poet or novelist wrote about him between the mid-17th and the mid-18th century. His sudden popularity among the Romantics, therefore, was a real revolution in taste. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and Hazlitt all celebrated him in the form in which he was to gain more and more admiration for the next 100 years: as the personification and guardian of the shrinking English countryside. Specifically, he was God of the countryside as viewed by a city dweller, usually a Londoner on holiday in Pan's woods and fields. It's forever summer, and usually a fine summer at that. He was the patron of shady nooks in which humans could relax in the heat of the day, of soft grass in which they could drowse, of leafy lanes along which they could ramble. Pan's countryside was one in which nobody ever worked, in which indeed the normal population of grubby agricultural laborers and artisans was completely invisible. In an emergency, as Matthew Arnold discovered, the God could even be invoked in Kensington Gardens to preside over a moment of relaxation, retreat from business and traffic jams.
In this guise, Pan appears in the work of a succession of distinguished writers spanning the rest of the 19th and early 20th centuries, including Algernon Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, John Cowper Powys, Kenneth Grahame, and Robert Louis Stevenson. It is the mark of a true cultural icon, however, that it features not just in the work of first-rate authors, but of the second, third, and fourth rate, including those whose outpourings never rose above publication in short-lived magazines. And that is certainly true of Pan between 1895 and 1914. Pan reached the apex of his popularity. In the words of Patricia Meril again, who has made the definitive study of this phenomenon, "he represented the one fashionable subject upon which every minor poet thought that he or she could turn out a ditty." By 1907, it was almost inevitable that the unpublishable novel of E.M. Forster's literary anti-hero Ricky would be entitled *Pan Pipes*.
The commonplace nature of the image and the ease with which it could be trivialized should not be allowed to obscure its power. The 19th century English had made the God the expression of all the aspects with which the Romantics had invested the natural world: sublime, mysterious, and awe-inspiring; benevolent, comforting, and redemptive. Pan was pitted against both the perceived ugliness, brutality, and unhealthiness of the new urban and industrial environment, and the perceived aridity and philistinism of the new science. He offered peace and joy, a return, if only for a few hours, to the lost innocence of a silver wonderland. He could, in fact, be made the epitome of a language of nostalgia for a lost Paganism, a religion of joy and self-expression and reunion with the natural world. That religion could, in turn, be contrasted with Christianity, a faith which many writers came to associate not only with guilt, authoritarianism, and repression in its 19th century reforms, but with the destruction of the natural environment, physical as well as moral.
This is, in fact, exactly what happened. Right from the start, in the work of those same early Romantics who popularized the cult of Pan, by the end of the 1810s, Shelley, Hunt, and Thomas Love Peacock were not only celebrating the God in writing, but putting up altars, hanging garlands, and pouring libations to him. This group died or dispersed in the 1820s, but there were still some Pan worshippers around in subsequent decades, such as the painter Edward Calvert, who maintained a shrine to the God in his back garden.
The threat was enough to disturb some devout Christians, one of whom happened to be a distinguished poet, and who in 1844 made a passionate attempt to strike back at it. This was Elizabeth Barrett Browning in "The Dead Pan." She was a very good poet, but not invariably, and perhaps not in this poem. But it is so relevant that I shall quote it:
"Twice the hour when one in Zion hung for Love's sake on a cross,
When his brow was chill with dew, and his soul was faint with loss,
When his priestly blood dropped downwards, and his kingly eyes looked thrown-ward,
Then Pan was dead. By the love he stood alone in his sole Godhead stood complete,
And the false gods fell down moaning, each from off his golden seat.
All the false gods with a cry, rendered up their deity.
Pan! Pan! was dead. Oh ye false, vain gods of Hell,
Ye are silent evermore. And I—
Dash down this old chalice, whence libations ran
Of your—see the wine crawls in the dust, worm-like as your glories must,
Since Pan is dead."
She was wrong, even as she wrote. The chalice was being filled anew, for the flood of poetry and prose in praise of the goat-foot God only strengthened as the century wore on. Furthermore, as it drew to a close, the full subversive potential of the image came at last to be realized in a number of different ways.
One was to turn Pan into the "Green Jesus": a wise, protective, powerful, and gentle divine figure to whom humans scarred by so-called civilized life could turn for comfort and healing. This work was first accomplished by Maurice Hewlett in 1899 in a novel which portrayed the horned God as the only real deity in the world, honored by all creatures except humans, modern humans who have cut themselves off from him, as from nature. Under Hewlett's pen, pantheism, nature worship, became Pan-theism. This notion was developed by a number of other writers in the early 20th century.
But by far the most famous and widely read appearance of the God as the loving Redeemer came in 1908, in the seventh chapter of Kenneth Grahame's *The Wind in the Willows*, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn." This chapter is totally irrelevant to the plot of the book, and after the general tone of comedy and irony, its sudden seriousness and intensity is startling. Pan is shown as the guardian of nature, the protector of the young and innocent, the finder of the lost, and his manifestation is treated as a real religious epiphany. The only reason why Grahame managed to avoid provoking a major religious row is that the book seems to suggest that animals have Pan, just as humans have Christ. The whole point of *The Wind in the Willows*, however, is that its animals actually live like humans, and so the message of the chapter is left deliberately and deeply ambiguous.
Pan's gentle protector and savior, however, was just one development of the God's form. To other writers and artists, he appealed precisely because he was not a safe God, but a dangerous and bestial one. As such, he could be used as a battering ram against respectability. After all, traditional Christian mythology already had a figure who is a much more obvious parallel for the horned God than Jesus, and one directly opposed to him. Fascinatingly, if Christ influenced the image of Pan in Victorian culture, Pan seems to have influenced that of Satan. From ancient times until the 19th century, the Christian devil was represented in many different forms, most commonly with clawed feet, long ears, and wings. Only in the 19th does he acquire a goat's horns, eyes, and hooves as his standard equipment, and this process seems to have been part of the reactions to the literary cult of Pan.
Certainly by the 1900s, the God was regularly featuring in poems, drawings, and stories as a tempter, but in the positive sense of leading humans, modern humans, away from a stifling social conformity and repression. Already in the work of Aubrey Beardsley, E.M. Forster, Max Beerbohm, and several others, he was the deity of those who "tuned in and dropped out." This role was strengthened still further after World War I, even as the more twee, sentimental image of Pan as gentle god of nature began to wane in a harsher and grittier literary taste.
To give some indication of the sheer pitch of emotion with which Pan could be visualized, I shall provide just one example of his appearance to a group of modern worshippers in a short story by Algernon Blackwood, "The Blessing of Pan."
"He came with blessing, with the stupendous presence. There was joy—the joy of abundance, natural life, pure as the sunlight and the wind. He passed among them. There was great movement, as of a forest shaking, as of deep water falling, as of hairbell shedding its burden of dew that it has held too long. Because of love, he passed among them, touching every head. The great hand swept with tenderness each face, lingered a moment on each beating heart. There was sweetness, peace, and loveliness, but above all, there was life. He sanctioned every natural joy in them, and blessed each passion with his power of creation. Yet each one saw him differently: some as a wife or a maiden desired with fire; some as a youth or stalwart husband; others as a figure veiled with stars or cloaked in luminous mist, hardly attainable; others again, the fewest, these not more than two or three, as that mysterious wonder which tempts the heart away from known familiar sweetness into a wilderness of undecipherable magic, without flesh and blood."
To my mind, the most remarkable of all the works in this genre was a novel by Lord Dunsany, published in 1927 and called *The Blessing of Pan*. The God himself never actually appears in the book. Instead, he leaves his pipes on the edge of a typically quiet, pious, and commonplace, and frankly, stiflingly boring English village somewhere in the Cotswolds. And the pipes are picked up and played by one of the village children. At once, the Pagan past begins to return, "like something green coming bubbling out of the deep well," and seduces the inhabitants one by one. Near the end, the vicar is left deserted in a parish church from which he senses that all the power has departed, even his own wife having run off to join the revels in the woods up by the old standing stones. He appeals to his bishop for help, only to find himself up against a modern, rational churchman who has no time for such wild stories and just suggests that he's worrying too much, that we're living in a modern secular age, and he shouldn't be surprised to see his congregation dwindling. He's sent back to put up with it, to find he has no congregation left. He eventually decides to seek a martyr's death by interrupting a major ceremony of the revived old religion, and the reader of the book prepares for a tragic ending. It never happens. Instead, at the critical moment, the magic seizes him as well, and he turns into the high priest of the Pagan rites. The story concludes in simple and unexpected happiness. The village settles down to a new existence of paganism, harmony with nature, and green economic self-sufficiency. The neighboring communities just write it off as a bit eccentric, and the church just writes it off as yet another congregation lost to modern indifference.
Today, however, the book in this genre which is best known to people in general is Dion Fortune's *The Goat-Foot God*, published in 1936. It suggests that both Paganism and Christianity address important needs in the human spirit, but that an excess of Christ had put Western spirituality out of balance. As a result, she called for the return of Pan, to whom she referred rather charmingly as "Vitamin P," to restore the balance and the health of modern civilization.
The very obvious area in which Victorian English mores could be challenged was that of sexuality. And the half-goat's nature of Pan made him a first-class challenger. In particular, he could function as the liberator of those types of sexuality which were either being repressed or forbidden. Into the repressed category fell the female libido. Somerset Maugham later recalled how in the 1900s, "God went out, oddly enough, with cricket and beer, and Pan came in. In a hundred novels his cloven hoof left its imprint on the turf. Poets saw him lurking in the twilight on London Commons, and literary ladies in sylvan nymphs of an industrial age mysteriously surrendered their virginity to his rough embrace."
Among women writers who were seduced by Pan were Eleanor Farjeon, who stooped to kiss his feet, "sweet white feet washed with the earth's first dews," and Teresa Hooley. Hooley's prayer to Pan is an appeal for rescue from the drone of Christian churches and the screech of machines. The juxtaposition there is characteristic of the time. It includes an appeal to Pan: "to burn, kindle in me from gold goat eyes undying fire, red flame flowers of beauty, white hot jewels of desire." Um, it should be pointed out that she also wrote devout poems to Jesus, but never seems to have expected him to burn her in any way.
By 1900, the horned and horny God had also become the patron of gay sexuality, that which was not merely repressed but condemned and proscribed. And it is no coincidence that around that time he featured prominently in the work of such great gay writers as Oscar Wilde, E.M. Forster, and "Saki" (Hector Munro). When E.M. Forster's gay hero Maurice, in a novel which he didn't dare publish (it was published in 1969), comes out to himself as gay, he describes himself as "now realizing that he has become a creature of the forest and the night," and those are precisely the domains of the Victorian and Edwardian Pan.
To my mind, the bravest treatment of this theme in the period was Forrest Reid's novel *The Garden God* from 1908, in which a schoolboy and his male friend come out to each other by invoking Pan. In doing so, they set loose memories of a previous incarnation together in ancient Greece, when they were allowed to be lovers without fear of prosecution, and reaffirm their love for each other.
The most remarkable exchange on the subject, however, began with Victor Neuberg in 1910, a relatively minor poet, though not an insignificant one, who wrote an entire volume of poems to celebrate the joys of mating with Pan. This is *Pan's Triumph*:
"The odor of thy hair, thy feet, thy hands,
Shall bring again the Pagan Spring, and from our Bacchic union, men shall know
To cast the veil from the sad face of Woe.
But Pan, Pan, Pan, and all the world shall be
Mingled in one wild burning ecstasy."
Here, Pan is actually being quite polite. In Neuberg's poetry, in others of his poems from the collection, Pan is clearly the one on top and behaving like very rough trade indeed. One does wonder with whom Neuberg was actually sleeping at this period. And the answer is, it was not Pan, but the next best thing: Aleister Crowley.
Crowley's reply in 1913 is much more famous, being his "Hymn to Pan." It is, in fact, one of the most powerful poems about bisexuality ever written. I shall now recite it. And there's only one way to recite Crowley's "Hymn to Pan," and that's with gusto. So a run-of-the-mill, mainstream, monogamous heterosexual like myself will now embrace Crowley's Pan.
"Thrill with lissome love of the light!
Oh, Man! My man! Come careering out of the night
Of Pan! Oh, Pan! Oh, Pan!
Come over the sea from Sicily and from Arcadia!
Roaming as Bacchus with thorns and pods,
That's leopards and nymphs and satyrs for thy gods,
On a milk-white steed!
Come over the sea to me, to me!
Come with Apollo in bridal dress,
Shepherdess and Pythoness!
Come with Artemis, silk and shod,
And wash thy white thigh, beautiful God,
In the moon of the woods, on the marble mount,
The dimpled dawn of the amber fountain,
Dip the purple of passionate prayer
In the crimson shrine, the scarlet snare,
The soul that startles in eyes of blue
To watch thy wantonness weeping through
The tangled grove, the gnarled bole
Of the living tree that is spirit and soul and body and brain.
Come over the sea, oh Pan! Oh Pan!
Devil or God to me, to me!
My man! My man!
Come with trumpets sounding shrill,
Over the hill!
Come with drums low muttering,
From the spring!
Come with flute and come with pipe!
Am I not ripe? Yes, I who wait
And writhe and wrestle with air that has no boughs
To nestle my body, weary of empty clasp,
Strong as a lion and sharp as an asp.
Come, oh come! I am numb with the lonely lust
Of the devil-dung!
Thrust the sword through the ging fetter!
All Devourer, all Begetter!
Give me the sign of the Open Eye,
And the token re of thorny thigh,
And the word of Madness and Mystery!
Oh, Pan! Oh, Pan! Oh, Pan! Oh, Pan!
Pan! Pan! Pan! Pan!
I am a man, so do as thou wilt,
As a great God can!
Oh, Pan! Oh, Pan! Oh, Pan! Oh, Pan!
Pan! I awake in the grip of the snake!
The eagle slashes with beacon claw!
The gods withdraw! The great beasts come!
Oh, Pan! I am born to death on the horn of the Unicorn!
I am Pan! Oh, Pan! Oh, Pan!
Pan! I am thy mate! I am thy man!
Go of thy flock! I am gold! I am God!
Flesh to thy bone, flower to thy rod!
With hooves of steel I race to the rocks,
To solace stubborn to equinox,
And I rave and I rape and I rip and I rend,
Everlasting world without end!
Mannequin, maiden, minad, man,
In the might of Pan! Oh, Pan! Oh, Pan!
Pan! Oh, Pan!"
As Pan had so clearly become the favorite Pagan God of modern times, it was absolutely inevitable that when some 19th century writers began to suggest that the witches persecuted in early modern Europe had been followers of the old Pagan religion, he should be represented as their favorite male deity. He was made so in the most early influential work to present this argument, Jules Michelet's *La Sorcière* in 1862. As Michelet's witches were feminist nature lovers with an uninhibited lifestyle, there really was no other God that they could have. The convergence of his image with that of the devil made the link all the easier.
The big change of the mid-20th century was that Pan got cut loose from his classical roots and turned into an archetype. The notion of archetypal deities was, of course, one pioneered in the history of religion by writers such as Sir James Frazer and taken into the realms of psychology, most prominently by Carl Jung. In respect of the horned God, the vital work was undertaken in 1933 by Margaret Murray, who assembled all the images and references to horned deities which she could discover from the ancient European world and asserted that they all represented the same one: the main male deity of the old religion of Europe and the Near East.
In doing so, she accomplished two considerable achievements. The first was that whereas for over a century writers and artists had been dreaming of Pan relocated in an English setting, Murray drove home the point that he had actually been worshipped there. The second was that she had cut him loose from his name and his classical Greek setting. For two hundred years, English education had been grounded in Greek and Roman literature and absorbed its images. Now this classical bias to culture was waning, and people were ever less likely to recognize its motifs. Murray told the world that Pan had only been one aspect of the universal horned deity who had possessed other names closer to England. In particular, she asserted he was called Cernunnos in Northwestern Europe, where he was probably the greatest deity. In saying this, she was making a wholly characteristic exaggeration, for strictly speaking, Cernunnos is only recorded from one site in the Paris Basin, but few of her readers would have known that. And she roped in figures who had not hitherto been associated with pagan gods, like Shakespeare's "He," the hunter, turned into an archetypal wild figure by the German folklorist Jakob Grimm, as in Grimm's fairy tales. It was Margaret Murray who made Cernunnos another name, the English name, of the horned god of the old religion.
This sequence of events explains how it was that after almost two centuries in which Pan had been treated as the personification of the English countryside and the redeemer of an alien civilization, he suddenly all but vanishes from English literature. He had been renamed Cernunnos or Herne, or subsumed under an archetype, the horned God. And the reason why people had stopped writing poems or novels about his return was that he effectively had come back. By the end of the 1940s at the latest, a genuine operative Paganism had reappeared in England, which made the horned God its chief deity. This was Pagan witchcraft, or Wicca, which deserves scholars' notice both as a significant, relatively newly appeared international religion, and, just for the record, the first fully formed religion which England had ever given to the world.
We thus have a perfect progression. Romantic poets started the dream that a horned God was the main Pagan deity of the English countryside. Historians of sorts then produced the dream that such a God had actually been worshipped there. Just over 150 years after the start of the process, he actually was being worshipped there and bids fair to be one of the most significant Western deities of the present century.
In telling the story, and I think I've told the whole of it for the first time, my whole tone has suggested that this God, and indeed all deities, are cultural constructs predicted by the human need. That is to say, it could sound as if they have no objective existence, but are poetic images to express and realize human emotions. This approach is wholly in keeping with the secular tone of modern scholarship. The only discipline which till now has departed from this rule is that which was once called Divinity and was still recently called Theology. It's a sign of how long ago the Regius Chair I hold was founded that it still bears the name of Divinity. This attempted to work out what the Divine seemed to be trying to tell us. Significantly, this has now been largely replaced by the new phenomenon of Religious Studies, which starts from the sensible premise that nobody can tell what the Divine is trying to say for sure, even if it exists in any particular form. Instead, Religious Studies seeks to study what other people think the Divine is saying, thereby regarding religion primarily as a social phenomenon. This is a secular approach which suits me perfectly well as a historian, by enabling me to concentrate upon observable phenomena and practical results.
But there is another way of looking at it. This has been a story of how a minor Pagan deity from a backwood at the far end of Europe came to occupy a powerful place in the imaginations of hundreds of thousands of modern people, if not millions, who rarely themselves had any literal belief in him. It has also been the tale of how hundreds of thousands came eventually to believe in him. We historians call this cultural process. It could also equally plausibly be called revelation. My simple duty as a scholar drives me to remark that just as I have no firm evidence that the horned God, or any other deity, actually exists, so I have no proof that he does not. The mere possibility of his existence playing an active part in this story, of course, provides a radically different reading of it.
It seems not inappropriate to end by remarking that the whole question of the true nature and purpose of human life, and of its relationship with the rest of the cosmos, does remain completely open. Which is why theology, divinity, and religious studies will go on. In that sense, I've been concentrating upon a ridiculously small issue amid that great question and ignoring the vast mystery surrounding it, which no historian is qualified to inspect, let alone to answer. In saying this, however, I've almost talked myself out of an academic job, let alone a long-established chair of divinity, and so I had better shut up. [Applause]