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"What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river?" With this question, the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning opens her famous poem "A Musical Instrument," which explores nature's troubling embrace of savagery and beauty. It seems that Pan always raises questions: What is he doing? What does he want? Where will he appear next? Linked to instinct, compulsion, and the spontaneous event, Pan is without a doubt the least predictable of the Greek Gods. Small wonder that he alone in the Greek pantheon sports human and animal parts. In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Gyrus, author of the marvellous North: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Cosmos, to capture a deity who, though he has made more than one appearance on Weird Studies, remains decidedly elusive.

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REFERENCES

Gyrus, "Sketches of the Goat God in Albion"
\nGyrus, North
\nJames Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare
\nPharmakon, philosophical term
\nStanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive
\nPhilippe Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece
\nHellier, television docuseries
\nWeird Studies, Episode 98 on exotica
\nPink Floyd, Piper at the Gates of Dawn
\nKenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
\nClayton Eshelman, Juniper Fuse
\nPlutarch \u201cOn the Silence of the Oracles\u201d
\nPeter Levine, Waking the Tiger
\nD.H. Lawrence, \u201cPan in America\u201d
\nJim Brandon, The Rebirth of Pan