Read The Horned God: Weird Tales of the Great God Pan ed. Michael Wheatley
I adore the designs on these British Library Tales of the Weird anthologies, and I am happy to say that the collection lives up to its gorgeous cover.
Phenomenal collection. Establishes an image of Pan simultaneously particular and broad; he is the other, that part of the world that we cannot reach but know is there, the old world and the other world and the natural world all at once. The primary interaction here is one of access: Pan represents an access to something else, either unattainable or attainable only with the sacrifice of our participation in society, moral rectitude, sanity, or life. These human constructs that limit our experience to a finite, structured whole are antithetical to Pan, and so the access he provides must negate them. It is from this deep pool of mystery that Machen draws his tale of cosmic horror, the terror of what lies beyond the veil of consciousness perfectly represented by the otherworldliness of Pan. It is where Egerton, Pain, Keller, and Quick draw their tales of sexual repression released in devotion and betrayal of the heteronormative ideal of marriage. It is from this strangeness that Blackwood constructs his tale of manic liberation, and his primitivist characters whose passion for purity and the rejection of modern civilization borders on eco-fascism. That Lawrence and Toksvig invert Christian morality and construct parallel understandings of devotion based in something older than Christ. That Forster offers an escape from the masculine ideal in the form of his bacchanalia. That Grahame's animal characters are given access to something extraordinary out of sympathy for their legitimate bestial nature, but are too human, and so must forget lest they cease to prioritize their sense of civilization and individualism.
The primary structural tool in these stories is a turn, wherein the natural/other/old/under worlds are at first peripheral, or even beneath the human characters before the primal power of Pan shocks them into a realization of their smallness, or their passion, or their (in)humanity. This is easily seen in a short passage from Saki, as his Sylvia stands watching a great stag being hunted, who at first has sympathy for the pain of the creature before: "In an instant her pity for the hunted animal was changed to wild terror at her own danger" (153). The shift from a paternalistic sense of pity to a horror at one's own positionality as that which is not all and that which cannot see all is characteristic.
Browning's poem obliterates this image of Pan. She sees not some surreality of Pan as god from beyond man, but as a painfully and cruelly human character. Adapting the myth of Syrinx, who tries to escape rape by Pan by transforming into a reed before Pan cuts down all the reeds of the lake to create his pipes. Browning's Pan, as sexually violent man, annihilates some piece of the natural world and of his victim "Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed / To prove it fresh from the river" (117). But this violent process, so human, in its destruction gives rise to beauty, as he creates his pipes "And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly / Came back to dream on the river" (118). Pan reconstitutes the beauty he has disrupted with the instruments constructed in his violence. This is not an unfamiliar, alien creature giving some access to a more legitimate or older view of the world than is accessible to humanity. This Pan is human, is cruel and is creative, and does not precede the natural world, but alters it in his image. That god we have imagined is other still cannot help but mimic us. We have not accessed the inaccessible. Pan makes use of "The only way since gods began / To make sweet music they could succeed" (118). He does nothing new, and nothing forgotten, but that single destructive/creative act that encompasses all experience, as we obliterate the world around us to create something new. He is not special. And he is careless of his victims, careless as man, more careless than a god should be, as "The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,— / For the reed that grows nevermore again / As a reed with the reeds in the river" (119).
