At a certain point in the ur-history of the World, A great cry is said to have gone out across the surface of the globe: The Great Pan is Dead (Pan ho megas tethneke in ancient Greek where we in the West first hear the tale of Pan -- though the old Egyptians claim him as one of the most archaic of all divinities)..

Giorgio de Santilllana gives the short factors in the interpretation of Pan: "This engaging myth was interpreted in two contradictory ways: On the one hand, it announced the end of paganism: Pan with his pipes, the demon of still sun-drenched noon, the pagan god of glade and pasture and the rural idyll, had yielded to the supernatural. On the other hand the myth has been understood as telling of the death of Christ [….]; the Son of God who was everything from Alpha to Omega was identified with Pan = 'All.' "

It gets considerably more complicated after the initial simplicities, the things that we know to be true, because, well, we know them to be true. The story of the Great Death and subsequent resurrection (but in very different forms from grasses to machines to paradigms), that a "Power has passed away, that succession is open," that an Epochal Event has occurred, cosmic cycles of unimaginable depth and astronomical portent become encoded, that telling becomes a small event seeded endlessly worldwide footing the bill of the Big Event, "each dying person is a messiah, and each messiah is a dying person"

The stories of Pan and his analogues roam throughout all extant records that mankind possesses, from the Ship of the Dead with Osiris on board, piloted by a kybernetes, (from which we get cybernetics, the non-living helmsman of the computer age, another pilot of the dead), to the tales of the 'Fanggen' from the Austrian Alps, a kind of Little People, or fairies perhaps, who turn into servant maids and were prone to vanish inexplicably causing panic (the word itself is from Pan hiding in the bushes and grasses, making noises, causing fear and trepidation); or the stories of the "Lubins," that haunted medieval Normandy, timid werewolf ghost packs that would flee at the slightest noise howling "Robert est mort, Robert ist Mort"; or the tales of the connection with the star Sirius, the Dog Star, with housecat cults in Germany, with cannibalism, weeping women, with the galactic plane of the ecliptic (!) and the procession of the planets as the whole message of Pan …and on and on, the miniscule time of the everyday, of our stories, our ordinary pan-demoniums and their embedding -- SOMEHOW -- into the great rotational stories of galactic Time, the incarnation of each era into the next somehow, through our stories, our figments, our arts, our fallacies as much as our truths, birth and death, Power succeeding Power, riding the powerless, the tripartite nature of the dialectic, of the Christos, on this hand but on the other hand, the only apparently eclipsed great time of the constant contact with cosmic cycles via tales of domesticity, and chiasmatically speaking, the domesticity of the Great Cycles of tens of thousands of years but always landing on its feet right here, right now! The dawn of the dead (mythos) turning into the death of the dawn (techné) …

Sloane Robinson

Robert Cheatham

Atlanta 2007