The Dead Pan and its Ancient Origins
By Unknown author - courtesy of Eton Collegeitem provenance image, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5688633
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an English poet two lived from 1806-1861. She was the first of twelve children and started writing poetry by the age of four, which her mother collected and published. When she was 15, she became chronically ill with intense head and spinal pain, spending the rest of her life on laudanum, and may have developed tuberculosis. She published her first adult collection of poetry when she was 32. She supported abolition and helped reform child labor laws and rivaled Tennyson for poet laureate when Wordsworth died. When she was 36, her writing attracted author Robert Browning and they courted and married in secret because of her father, who did disinherit her after he learned of the marriage. They moved to Italy when she was 38, where she later died. When she was 43, she gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning, nicknamed Pen.
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2292318
Pan was the ancient Greek god of the wild, of shepherds with their flocks, impromptu music, and the companion of the nymphs. He is depicted as having the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat and the body of a rather hirsute man. Pan seems to go back to the Proto-Indo-European word *Péh₂usōn, which relates to the modern word 'pasture' and to the god Pushan in the Rigveda, who is the god of meetings, marriages, journeys, roads, and the feeding of cattle as well as transferring souls to the other world of death. Pan worship centered around Arcadia, which was an isolated part of Greece, hidden away in the mountains, and without temples, but in groves and caves.
By No machine-readable author provided. Cnyborg assumed (based on copyright claims). - No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30142747
Pseudo-Plutarch wrote in De defectu oraculorum, The Obsolescence of Oracles, that of all the Greek gods, only Pan died. This reportedly was spread by a sailor named Thamus during the reign of Tiberius (14-37 CE), who received the message from a 'divine voice'. The message was received with groans and laments. Some have taken the message that 'all' the Greek gods died due to the pun in Greek.
It is on this that Browning based her poem, beginning with seeking out where the gods of Hellas (Greece) have gone, with a repeated call of 'Pan, Pan is dead.' Through the poem, the chaos that spreads through the world, affecting poets, forests, the stars, and more as a result of Pan (or all gods) being dead, saying '"We all now are desolate—/Now Pan is dead."'
You can read the poem here.
