The Great God Pan is the most well-known of the horned male Gods, Originating from the remote mountains of Arcadia in Greece. His lower body is goat like and his upper half is human except for his goat’s horns and ears. Pan is celebrated for his love of playing music and his vigorous and tireless ability to copulate. Pan can induce states of joy, panic and fear, thus linking Pan with overwhelmingly ecstatic emotions which he may be considered by some, to be the deity of mood disorders such as manic depression.

Pan is the Lord of Nature, free, wild, rustic, animalistic and primal. He upholds natural laws and is a glorious envoy for revelling in wild life force to the excess of hedonism. Pan negotiates the balance between the lives and needs of animals and people. As a God of fertility, unbridled male sexuality and carnal desire, he embodies wild ecstasy and emanates an intoxicating merriment that saturates the soul with a drunkenness of lust, pleasure and hypnotic possession.

In history Pan was considered responsible for causing individual, possession-like disruptions of the psyche, termed: panolepsy, which was to be possessed by the Great God. Panolepsy was to exhibit signs and symptoms of being in a type of divine possession, whereby the person became overcome with intense elation, excessive fits of laughter, maddening laughter/mania, and fear. This manifestation had the potential to reduce human beings to their most animalistic instincts, Thus Pans appearance can induce the unrest in the psyche that lifts the veils from one’s eyes to see into the deep recesses of oneself whilst being bathed in the hedonistic heights of 'any' excess.

Due to Pan's dual nature as both divine and animal he exhibits the fine balance between disorder and harmony, the primal and the cultivated. Pan encompasses all that which lays within the human experience tapestry from the heights of primal ecstasy to the survival instincts of red in tooth and claw.

Pans wisdom

After excessive merriment and frolicking Pan retreats to his cave which can reinstate (essential) harmony in the utter chaos of hedonism, This Great God shows us that if we can self-regulate some semblance of managing our own excessive emotional states we can scale the broad & breadth of the human experience.

Great highs and great lows may well be the domain of Pan and his children. Pans offspring are often the risks takers and rebels and those perhaps most unsuited to be caged and confined within the parameters of modern society. Therefore finding ways to express the 'wild' within is essential for fulfilment in today's world.

Pan abhors self-denial, external restraint, and others attempting to impose taming. To honour Pan is to celebrate him in all guises and all of the emotional states. When we hit the wall of our own excesses its sometimes important to remember to withdraw for a while for balance and to replenish ourselves before the next wild revelry.

Pan reminds us to that all of nature is interconnected and although we are small players in the fabric of the wild world our own actions can bring about consequences that can be far reaching.

We honour Pan outdoors, we whisper to him in the breeze and we thank him in sexual desire, heightened pleasure, wild lust & and for our on-going survival.