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Home  »  The Age of Fable Stories of Gods and Heroes  »  XXII. a. The Rural Deities


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Thomas Bulfinch (1796–1867). Age of Fable: Vols. I & II: Stories of Gods and Heroes. 1913.

XXII. a. The Rural Deities

PAN, the god of woods and fields, of flocks and shepherds, dwelt in grottos, wandered on the mountains and in valleys, and amused himself with the chase or in leading the dances of the nymphs. He was fond of music, and as we have seen, the inventor of the syrinx, or shepherd’s pipe, which he himself played in a masterly manner. Pan, like other gods who dwelt in forests, was dreaded by those whose occupations caused them to pass through the woods by night, for the gloom and loneliness of such scenes dispose the mind to superstitious fears. Hence sudden fright without any visible cause was ascribed to Pan, and called a Panic terror.

As the name of the god signifies all, Pan came to be considered a symbol of the universe and personification of Nature; and later still to be regarded as a representative of all the gods and of heathenism itself.

Sylvanus and Faunus were Latin divinities, whose characteristics are so nearly the same as those of Pan that we may safely consider them as the same personage under different names.

The wood-nymphs, Pan’s partners in the dance, were but one class of nymphs. There were beside them the Naiads, who presided over brooks and fountains, the Oreads, nymphs of mountains and grottos, and the Nereids, sea-nymphs. The three last named were immortal, but the wood-nymphs, called Dryads or Hamadryads, were believed to perish with the trees which had been their abode and with which they had come into existence. It was therefore an impious act wantonly to destroy a tree, and in some aggravated cases were severely punished, as in the instance of Erisichthon, which we are about to record.

Milton in his glowing description of the early creation, thus alludes to Pan as the personification of Nature:

  • “…Universal Pan,
  • Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance,
  • Led on the eternal spring.”
  • And describing Eve’s abode:
  • “…In shadier bower,
  • More sacred or sequestered, though but feigned,
  • Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor nymph
  • Nor Faunus haunted.”
  • —Paradise Lost, B. IV.

    • It was a pleasing trait in the old Paganism that it loved to trace in every operation of nature the agency of deity. The imagination of the Greeks peopled all the regions of earth and sea with divinities, to whose agency it attributed those phenomena which our philosophy ascribes to the operation of the laws of nature. Sometimes in our poetical moods we feel disposed to regret the change, and to think that the heart has lost as much as the head has gained by the substitution. The poet Wordsworth thus strongly expresses this sentiment:

  • “…Great God, I’d rather be
  • A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,
  • So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
  • Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
  • Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
  • And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”

    • Schiller, in his poem “Die Götter Griechenlands,” expresses his regret for the overthrow of the beautiful mythology of ancient times in a way which has called forth an answer from a Christian poet, Mrs. E. Barrett Browning, in her poem called “The Dead Pan.” The two following verses are a specimen:

  • “By your beauty which confesses
  • Some chief Beauty conquering you,
  • By our grand heroic guesses
  • Through your falsehood at the True,
  • We will weep not! earth shall roll
  • Heir to each god’s aureole,
  • And Pan is dead.
  • “Earth outgrows the mythic fancies
  • Sung beside her in her youth;
  • And those debonaire romances
  • Sound but dull beside the truth.
  • Phœbus’ chariot course is run!
  • Look up, poets, to the sun!
  • Pan, Pan is dead.”

    • These lines are founded on an early Christian tradition that when the heavenly host told the shepherds at Bethlehem of the birth of Christ, a deep groan, heard through all the isles of Greece, told that the great Pan was dead, and that all the royalty of Olympus was dethroned and the several deities were sent wandering in cold and darkness. So Milton in his “Hymn on the Nativity”:

  • “The lonely mountains o’er,
  • And the resounding shore,
  • A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
  • From haunted spring and dale,
  • Edged with poplar pale,
  • The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
  • With flower-enwoven tresses torn,
  • The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.”


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