PANIC! PANIC

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Paul Newman 

In the first century AD, during the reign of Tiberius, a group of travellers were sailing to Italy.  It was evening; the wind dropped and the ship drifted near Paxi.  The crew and passengers were awake; many had not finished their afternoon dinner wine.  Then, from the island of Paxi, a voice was heard calling Thamus, who was the Egyptian pilot, not known to many on board.  Twice his name was called but he did not reply.  The voice grew loud and impatient, adding “When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead.”  All were astonished by this and wondered whether the instructions should be carried out.  Thamus said that he would carry out the order, provided the water was navigable.  They drew towards the island; there was neither wind nor wave.  From the stern, Thamus cried, “Great Pan is dead!”  Before he could finish, a great cry of lamentation arose from all the animals, plants and rocks, mingled with exclamations of dismay and amazement.

This famous passage is taken from Plutarch's De Oraculorum Defectu.  Christian legend has it that Pan died on the very day Christ was nailed to the cross.  The cry across the water came when the agony was over and Christ had had left his mortal body to rise into heaven.  He had displaced Pan as the ascendant deity.  The old order of the nature spirits had been defeated by monotheism. 

DISPLACED BY CHRIST

Originally Pan was the shepherd-god from the mountains of Arcadia. He was said to avenge anyone who interrupted his regular nap by appearing before them and paralysing them with horror. From Pan we derive “panic” or the sudden fear that seizes one alone in the forest.  He is the horned face peering between the leaves and the god of vegetation.  His name has been translated as ‘All’, for he stands for every manifestation of nature.  He is raw, undirected energy, the dance of blood along the arteries, the rising sap.  He is sexual desire running amok, the god of unfettered bodily instinct, the lord of death, decay and dissolution.

This definition leans on scholarship, on the interconnective nature of language, plucking the goat-god from his forest setting and transforming him into something akin to everything and nothing. But this is exactly what Pan evolved into: the horror of the all-engulfing ‘everything’ that makes the individual feel he is ‘nothing’, a spark of identity in the meaningless void.

Why should Pan be displaced by Christ? Is the Saviour of the World the antithesis of Pan? In a manner of speaking, yes. Where Christ attempts to improve or ‘better’ this world of ours - by streaking its essential violence with notions of morality and duty - Pan stands for anarchy and outrage, the intractable nature of phenomena. For Pan is the rule of nature, embracing all the things we fear, yet see reflected in the world, whether in the crunching rapacity of the food chain or in mindless destruction wreaked by a flood or earthquake. It is nature unredeemed by moral structure or pure idea.

PAN LIVES

Is Pan dead, as Plutarch's anecdote suggested? Or is this most ancient of deities still with us, gnawing at the edge of the microchip, lurking in the corners of those virtual realities in which we try to escape? Despite the depletion of his forest habitat, innumerable subsequent Pan-encounters have taken place, when men and women, standing alone in some unfrequented or formerly sacred spot, have felt an excessive, inexplicable panic.  Mountaineers on high precipices have been known to come over cowed and depressed, seized by an engulfing cloud of misery.  The force has been so potent that it has led some close to the brink of suicide.

Novelist and Governor General of Canada, John Buchan, recalled an incident in the Bavarian Alps.  He was walking through a pinewood with a local forester when the panic swept over both of them. Without speaking, they broke into a headlong run until they collapsed exhausted on the highway below.  Another patriotic writer, Rudyard Kipling, referred to a mysterious site in the neighbourhood of his house in Sussex, "full of a sense of ancient ferocity and evil.  I have sometimes felt a secretive and menacing feel all around me, holding me expectant and always on guard.  Yes, and in this ancient wood everything is evil..."

In the Adams country of Ohio, the impressive Serpent Mound, with its seven enormous loops and open jaws, is a place of sanctity and power.  On a clear, sunny autumn day in 1977, a sociology professor was standing alone on the serpent's head musing, when he was overwhelmed by a most disturbing sensation, “the most coldest, most abject terror I have ever experienced.”  It seemed to be preying upon him and took the shape of a pattern of swirling leaves.  The leaves surrounded him; he felt himself almost faint with horror, until the energy vortex died away and he was left alone and deeply perplexed on the monument.

A third witness provided this account. “Where I live now near Deal, Kent, is only a few minutes from the sea and a narrow beach backed by chalk cliffs from 100 to 300 feet high.  Several years back, I decided to go night fishing for bass beneath these cliffs...I cast my line and sat waiting for a bite.  As I sat there, the warm night suddenly grew cold.  An icy wind tainted with an indescribable foulness was blowing towards me from the face of the cliff directly behind me. I had a terrifying sensation of being attacked by some supernatural force.  My whole mind was dissolving into a whirling black chaos and my physical strength seemed to be draining away.  I felt myself to be the direct focus of an emanation which was unendurably evil and unbelievably powerful.  Somehow, like one groping in a nightmare, I managed to dismantle my rod and stumble to where the motorcycle was propped at the foot of the cliffs.

SWALLOWING TERROR

In the anecdotes cited, we have seen how people are in fear of Pan, this preying ‘everything’? But supposing an individual, instead of fleeing, stands fast and draws the experience into his lungs. Supposing he lets the black cloud engulf him and take him over? What happens if you swallow terror?

Perhaps, like Eve biting the apple, one gains insight. One gets to know – taste – the fear it for what it is. Depression has been defined as “withheld knowledge” (John Layard) and the act of absorption is one of learning. It is feasible that the first priests and shamans were those who imbibed or swallowed Pan. They invoked and trafficked with the vast ‘all’ that cowed and diminished other members of the tribe. These priests visited the mortuary houses, the places of bones and lost souls, and communed with whatever spirits lingered. They drank the desolation and menace and later regurgitated its secrets in babbling oracular pronouncements, like the Sibyl at Cumae, or in gnomic directives to the tribal elder.

If courageous, these shaman-priests were not invariably noble or honest. Having empowered themselves, they secured privileges and, in a world motivated by bartering and self-advancement, used their resources prudently. For this knowledge of Pan endowed them with power, and power, as everyone knows, corrupts. Hence we find the degradation of religion in certain cultures, like the Carthaginian, wherein priests devise mindless holocausts in order to propitiate the ruthless ‘all’ by duplicating the raw justice of nature.

PITILESS INSTINCT

A secondary use of Pan is through the stirring and awakening of collective frenzy or the mingling of single identity into a group identity. The phrase ‘mindless mob’ is often applied to a crowd that acts destructively. Mob instinct functions at the least discriminatory, least inhibited level. Normally abhorred, such behaviour has its uses, both today and thousands of years ago. For instance, it can be effective in warfare. Warriors like the Viking berserks, who believed themselves the fury of Odin incarnate, invoked this force. If you intend to kill as many enemies as possible, it is best to set aside niceties and distinctions. Instead you should let yourself be possessed by surging, pitiless instinct. Being ‘all’, Pan eliminates that sense of individual value that exercises control and restraint. The ‘self’ is eliminated – you have ‘let yourself go’, as they say. Another expression - “He entirely lost his head” – is also appropriate. For Pan is ‘mind-less’ in that he stands for orgy rather than order, rampage rather than restraint. 

DRAWING THE FEAR

In the accounts of Pan quoted, fear is writ large. The witnesses speak of an invisible thing that is encompassingly powerful. It appears hostile, dissolving the mind, draining strength from the body. If we try to rationalise such a sensation, what does it amount to, this everything-terror? Our dread of the red-in-tooth-claw element in nature? Our shrinking from a cosmos whose immensities threaten to swallow us?

It is partly that, yes. But it seems to grip people who are alone or in the wilderness. The sensation is connected with silence or absence of language. For civilisation not only involved de-sacrilisation, or the gradual annexing of sacred places for worldly and commercial purposes, but de-terrorisation or drawing the fear from the world.

How is fear taken out of the world? By absorbing or swallowing like the shaman-priests or, alternatively, by identifying and overcoming. Consider these words: polio, scarlet fever, diphtheria, Asian flu, measles, mumps. For parents, such nouns once held a primitive terror-charge. In contemporary Europe, these death-dealers have now been caught in a net of knowledge and made to respond to treatment. Terror has been drawn like a carious tooth. So civilisation can be measured by our ever-increasing grasp of the phenomenal world. In other words, the more words and clinical victories, the less fear.

So Pan is the opposite of civilisation – of knowledge in the academic sense. It is that atavistic ‘unknowing’ that lies outside the labels and categories that reassure and comfort. Pan is the ‘everything’ hidden from us, the ‘nothing’ that will reclaim us, the mystery that escapes reference or definition.

But each year our knowledge increases? Doesn’t this mean that the domain of Pan is shrinking? Will there come at time when everything is known and there will be nowhere for Pan to hide? This seems doubtful. For each new strand of knowledge leads into a labyrinth which compels a vastitude of questions and theorems. While seeking a Grand Unifying Theory, we are confronted by a Black Hole. At this point an old paradigm collapses and a fresh task begins – namely, re-assembling the universe. 

TOYS

A third method of dispersing Pan-terror is an elementary ploy of psychology? Namely, turning one’s back and re-directing attention into a task that soothes or stimulates. Pick up an anthology of Victorian poetry and open it at the selection accorded to Coventry Patmore. Quite likely you will find the poem Toys. It is about a widowed father who, after losing his temper with his eight-year old son, scolds him and sends him up to bed.   Later, overcome by remorse, the father goes up to the child’s room where he finds the boy quietly sleeping. And then he sees on the bedside table a cluster of tiny objects which the boy has arranged with delicate orderliness as a kind of consolation:

When I first read that, it struck a familiar chord. What does that remind me of, I asked? And then it occurred to me: the pathetic tidiness recalled one of those Beaker burials where the skeleton is crouched in foetal position and encircled by a ring of shells. Like the child who, in quietly patterning the shells and coins, had tried to restore form to his disrupted world - to defend himself against the explosion of anger in the parent he trusted and loved - the crouched skeleton in the bell-barrow had been provided with its own ring of shells or net of protection against the chaos beyond the grave.  

THE GREATEST TRICK ON EARTH

Could this be true? We express and evade our fear of death, of chaos, of Pan, by our tidy habits. We use such frail talismanic gestures as shells and coins to ward off those processes - death, anger, violent sorrow - that throw us into disarray or, finally, reduce us to mutable bone. It is perhaps the greatest psychological trick we have ever learnt, a brilliant strategy of self-distraction. Instead of letting the chaos flood through us, we filter it through a structure, a series of movements, a chain of events, with the addition of some chanted phrases, an artefact or two – in other words, we socially articulate our grief and terror by ritual procedure.

And that is why, after watching some gruelling tragedy such as Lear or Oedipus, we emerge inspired and purified. For drama, however gloomy, is an act of mastery. A well-structured tragedy spells out each stage of the hero’s descent. Even if the mishaps and miseries that befall the characters reflect our own lives, the fact of them being objectified provides relief. For once, we are as emancipated as the gods. We are the spectators of others’ follies - laughing with the Fool, crying when Cordelia dies, shivering at the plight of the outcast King. We have snatched ‘meaning’ out of the flux.

As Jung pointed out, our shadow-side may hoard dark, explosive impulses, but it is also intensely virile - rich in energy and spontaneity. Instead of being suppressed or outlawed, this vitality can be shaped and canalised into a socially acceptable incarnation? Then we no longer have Pan running amok or presiding over a flesh-ripping orgy - instead the free spirit is notated and harmonised by music and dance. At last the ‘mindless’ has been re-united with mind. The result is that haunting beauty so passionately voiced by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy.  

CIVILISATION AS REGULATED FRENZY

If this is true, what does Pan offer us today? Can the god provide a clue to civilisation? Maybe. Consider the building of henges and standing stones about which speculation is always rife. What do they stand for? All ritual circles are a kind of mandala, a statement of self. They are, if you like, precincts snatched from Pan - enclosures where the big ‘all’ is kept out and the small ‘all’ of tribal identity kept in. The ring of stones is a statement of separateness. Yet the god is permitted entry through the gaps - thresholds linking the human and natural worlds. Each stone is a person looking inward, facing a shared human reality. In such spaces, ritual and order reign. This orderliness is reinforced by the placing of such monuments with regard to the rising and setting of celestial bodies. Where Pan is raging, disorderly, spontaneous, the avenues, henges and barrows honour symmetry and proportion.

It may seem that I am crudely over-emphasising stark opposites, frenzy and control, as if the more moderate qualities don’t count. But even allowing for bias, accounts of early rituals are best translated as a kind of regulated frenzy or channelled savagery. Take funerary rites, for example, associated with grief today, but fear was once the dominant aspect. Vulliamy (1929) writes of how, when a notable man died in the Society Islands, the attitude was not: “So the chief is dead. Well, he was a good fellow, and we are sorry we will see no more of him,” but rather, “So the chief is dead! Let us howl and belabour ourselves, lest he be slighted and visit us with his terrible wrath!”

To avoid unwelcome visitations, a ‘ghastly pantomime’ would be enacted involving the whole tribe. Those who proved negligent in their participation might be severely punished or even killed. It would be easy to give dozens of examples of so-called ‘mourning’ rites, involving lacerations and mindless cruelty, but there is little point – one might as well buy a horror video and enjoy the real thing. The main point is that, during certain rituals, the spirit of Pan – or ecstatic chaos -  was invited to take possession.

Today few modern ceremonies allow us to go dangerously mad. Those looking for  equivalents find an outlet in substance abuse: “I got stoned” or “smashed out of my skull” or “blew my mind”. All three statements invoke Pan – pleading freedom from mind and responsibility – but the once-dangerous energy is dulled and sedated. In modern times, the closest one gets to the demoniacal side of Pan is the rampage-killer, high on drugs, who kills for pleasure or exaltation.

PANIC ATTACK

An experimental psychologist might object: “You’re talking nonsense. You say these people are invoking Pan. All they’re doing is working themselves into a lather. No god ‘enters’ them. They’re merely using up superfluous energy.”

The objection is legitimate. But it can be countered by the question: what induces fury and ecstasy? Is it fired purely by the human body? For men and women are not sealed systems - they are in a constant of state of interaction with whatever is ‘out there’. Furthermore, most arguments are terminological ones. A berserk says he’s invoking Odin; a psychologist says he’s inducing a state of auto-intoxicated frenzy. Personally I’d go for Odin – it’s shorter and easier to pronounce.

In the contemporary world, Pan makes his presence felt through the common if unwelcome phenomenon of the ‘panic attack’. Usually attributed to stress, overwork and sundry mental problems, sufferers find it “difficult to cope”. Everything seems to “get them down”. A crowded street, a busy waiting room, a wooded lane - all produce fits of terror and shaking. Why? What is leaking into their systems and causing this? Arguably it is the same ‘all’ at work as thousands of years ago, inducing fear and alarm, yet qualitatively different from the primordial terror. The latter was induced by the prowling unknown - by the hostile wilderness beyond the campfire - while the modern panic attack seems to be caused by an excess of knowledge and obligation. To sufferers, it may seem as if the bedrock facts of their daily lives - all the laws, mortgages, emotional upsets, filial obligations – are dissolving and congealing into a single mass, formless, threatening and pitiless. In other words, Pan is penetrating our centrally heated skins and reminding us that knowing too much can be as frightening and chaotic as knowing too little. In a panic attack, meaning is withdrawn. Our securities are stripped away. We confront a shapeless abstraction whose indifference appalls. 

KARAIN

To conclude on a cultural note, Pan’s pipes were heard distinctly amid the undergrowth of Edwardian writing. With dry amusement, Max Beerbohm observed that “current literature did not suffer from any lack of fauns…  We had not yet tired of them and their hoofs and slanting eyes and their way of coming suddenly out of woods to wean quiet English villages from respectability.” Such tales often portrayed a puckish, playful figure, unlike the dark abstract entity evoked with relished revulsion in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894) and associated with black masses, bubbling slime and tainted sexual rites.

Another unsqueamish celebrant of Pan was the poet and magician, Aleister Crowley, who invoked the god for his ‘magick’ and allegedly drove himself insane in the process. If, as Dennis Diderot observed, constraint can be seen as annihilating the grandeur and energy of nature, Crowley’s poem Hymn to Pan stands as a gesture of almost violent complicity. With its bucking, attenuated rhythms, it was alleged to be effective in conjurations and was recited at his funeral at Brighton in 1947:

And there were other writers who unwittingly depicted the everything-terror. Often they are stories of nervous breakdown or descent into barking madness inspired by a glimpse behind the veil – or the revelation that the visible world is like stage scenery behind which hides a force which is menacing and baneful.

A story illustrating this is Karain by Joseph Conrad. Karain is a proud Malay chieftain who accidentally shoots his best friend, Matara, while trying to retrieve Matara’s sister – a village beauty – from her  relationship with a Dutch planter. After the murder, Karain is haunted by the shade of his companion. He is unable to rest – each step he takes is dogged. The only man able to lay the ghost is a holy man who accompanies him everywhere. When the old man passes away, Karain visits the crew of an English ship. He pleads that they should provide him with a piece of magic to protect him from the spectre. Initially the crew are dumbfounded. But then they respond by offering him a small Jubilee sixpence engraved with Victoria Regina, the “Great Queen” of Britain. Karain accepts the charm. The ghost is laid and the sailors return to England.

Later two of them meet up in the Strand and discuss Karain and the war in Malaya which has recently broken out. They speculate about the nature of the terror experienced by the chieftain. Then one of the seaman points across the street – “Our ears were filled with a headlong shuffle and beat of rapid footsteps and an underlying rumour – a rumour vast, faint, pulsating, as of panting breaths, beating hearts, of gasping voices” A version of what haunted Karain haunts those streets, a kind of unfocussed dread – “It is there, it pants, it runs, it rolls; it is strong; it would smash you if you didn’t look out…”

So a sensational tale of love and brotherhood, betrayal and revenge, broadens into a vision of an inimical something at the pulse of life. London may seem solid, but hiding behind its crowds and clanging trams, its veils of soot and oppressive facades, is the formless ‘all’, the melting-pot of chaos from which order, symmetry and civilisation are wrested.

NOTE. In this article I have made ‘Pan’ stand for a variety of manifestation. If one wished to substitute other names – like Dionysos, Odin or Mercury – this would be perfectly acceptable. But I have chosen Pan as the clearest vehicle, in that he pertains to ‘all’ and has deeply infused British and European culture. In The Birth of Tragedy, Frederick Nietzsche invokes Dionysos and Apollo as opposites that unite in early Greek drama.

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A fuller examination of this subject is found in the author's History of Terror.