The Death of Pan (pdf) version 2

The “death of Pan” was a phenomenon that occurred before or around the time of Christ in the sense that it was reported that a loud voice was heard (by sailors) that stated “Pan is dead”. As with all mythological information, at one level it is propaganda whilst at another it is history by allusion and at another it is true, especially when the culture absorbs it – in this case a culture with mythological roots right back to prehistory.

As such therefore, Pan’s death is another marker of transition at the beginning of fuller historical record keeping. This keeping of history may indeed have spelt an end to the dominance of mythological thought by the increasing use of rationality to unlock the nature of the physical world whilst banishing the complex mental world of allusion. At the same time though, Pan was manifestly not dead as he had been absorbed into the pantheon of Rome via Greece. He was a goat god that helped the Olympians overwhelm the preceeding Titans (associated with Saturn), to impose Jupiter on the celestial throne. We have encountered this process in the gap between Minoan Crete and classical Greece where Zeus appeared. In fact, Cretans came to be called liars because they retained part of the ancient matriarchal principle of the male king who must die, like the year, after a year and a day.

The illustration on the right is by Bob Jefferson. It first appeared on the cover of Talks on Beelzebub's Tales by J.G. Bennett. These talks sought to make accessible the deliberately challenging master work of G.I. Gurdjieff especially for those coming to these ideas for the first time, and originally delivered in talks to the students of the Sherbourne Academy for Continuous Education.

The Cretans not only said that Zeus was born on Crete (as per Greek myth) but also that he died there. This was infuriating for the new male order which had created immortal male gods to displace the matriarchal practices of the Mediterranean. The Goddess Metis was effectively recycled through Zeus’ head, in a virgin birth and “with a shout, fully formed”, to be reborn as Athena thus disposing of any previous divine female history. In this way her Parthenon was so called because she was born without a second parent and was always a virgin herself with resonances for the Virgin Mary. Thus, the appearance of parts of the previous pantheon into the new Olympians represents the inevitable process of reshaping the past familiar forms.

The new mind of classical times gave birth to now-familiar disciplines such as logic. In logical analysis, the facts are deduced without mechanisms such as allusion, metaphor and simile. In logic there has to be cause and effect that can be proved. It means nothing that a river looks like a snake. However, in the latter, high-level and intuitive, description there is a strong poesis that can integrate water, erosion, headwaters, and flood plains into a holistic overview. It is a powerful communication of a subtle truth not accessible to analytical thought, but communicated these days by schematic diagrams.

Download PDF of the superceded chapter 10 of Sacred Number