Via Tecta (Sacred Way)

A Selection on ‘PAN’, by Jason Hine

September 30, 2024 | Nicolas for Hygeia | No Comments

PAN, by Sam-Weber

“The word ‘panic’ originated from the Greek word Panikon meaning ‘fear caused by Pan’. Pan, the God of nature and wildness, is one of the hidden powers behind panic. Beneath panic, beneath anxiety, there may lie power and wildness. To put it another way anxiety may be repressed or unconscious wildness.

Wildness may be the solution to anxiety. Instead of fearing Pan, we may need to come to know his nature, to be conscious of our wildness, to embrace our own animalistic power. Pan can help us to be larger than our fears, to move from the small self into the big connected ecological Self and to embrace our true wild indomitable feral nature.

Pan can help us to turn our despair into love, our hopelessness into sacred vision, our striving into playfulness, our anxiety into power, our battlefields into ceremony and the wasteland in our soul into an abundant garden.

Every time we are able to consciously hold our body feelings of fear in our solar plexus, our anxiety decreases and our power increases. If we are able to follow our feelings of fear all their way to their root, we may find fear alchemically transforms into power.

At the very root of fear, at the deepest level of our being, there may lie its seeming opposite; immense, indestructible, unspeakable power. If we access this deep well of our being wild power will surge up from the earth and cascade down from the heavens, it will flow through our body like a river.”

Pan and the nymphs. Fragment. Fresco from Pompeii.

“It seems as if the greatest people of our age are getting old, perhaps the world itself is getting old. Yet bees still swarm around flowers making honey, the world still has honey and a fire in its secret heart; it is alive and radiant. The great God Pan still jumps up every springtime and whenever we act with wild playfulness and joy. He is here at the birth of the new, whenever any shoot bursts forth from any seed, bringing renewed life and magic. He hopes perhaps to teach people how to rebirth the human world and bring nature and human culture back into union. The temples are abandoned, but the vine still climbs over the walls. Whenever Pan dies and is dismembered he comes back stronger than before. He is the archetype of indestructible life, dying and being reborn, the unbroken thread of eternal life that runs through the cycle of dying and rising bios life, ever recreating and renewing itself, reminding us how to be fair gardeners of the earth.”

‘Vision Antique’, Artwork by Paul Berthon.

I wrote this about my first encounter with Pan a few years ago:

“One evening I found myself walking in a dark forest in the deepening twilight. I heard animalistic noises and shouts up ahead and although I am used to moving through the woods at night for some reason I felt afraid. Some kind of ritual or ceremony was happening ahead. As I approached, my fear and anxiety increased; I feared perhaps that I had stumbled upon some dark ritual or sacrifice. As I got closer, I saw people around a fire drumming. Some ceremony was occurring. My fear became even greater and at the height of the ceremony out jumped Pan. Leaping and dancing with horns on his head. Wherever he trod flowers emerged from the ground. My fear came to an end and I joined the dance, I was lost and I was found. I briefly glimpsed the way home for humanity, the way to break the shackles that hold us, the way to transform the wilderness in the soul of modern man into an abundant garden, carried on a wave of wild joy born out of the return of the wild God Pan out of the darkness and reborn into the light of our world.”