Introduction

Robert B. Palmer's introduction to his translation of Walter F. Otto's Dionysus: Myth and Cult (p. ix-xi)

Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas,

Can ye listen in your silence?

Can your mystic voices tell us Where ye hide? In floating islands, 

With a wind that evermore

Keeps you out of sight of shore? 

                            Pan, Pan is dead.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING The Dead Pan

W H E N Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote these lines which sound so pessimistic and so limited to any lover of the beauty and truth of Greek mythology, she had in mind a famous passage out of Plutarch's De Oraculorum defectu {Mor. 419 A-E) in which it was reported on good authority that Pan had died.

But let Plutarch tell the story (Philip is speaking): 

As for death among such beings [i.e., deities], I have heard the words of a man who was not a fool nor an impostor. The father of Aemilianus the orator, to whom some of you have listened, was Epitherses, who lived in our town and was my teacher in grammar. He said that once upon a time, in making a voyage to Italy, he embarked on a ship carrying freight and many passengers. It was already evening when, near the Echinades Islands, the wind dropped, and the ship drifted near Paxi. Almost everybody was awake, and a good many had not finished their after-dinner wine. Suddenly from the island of Paxi was heard the voice of someone loudly calling Thamus, so that all were amazed. Thamus was an Egyptian pilot, not known by name even to many on board. Twice he was called and made no reply, but the third time he answered; and the caller, raising his voice, said, "When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead." On hearing this, all, said Epitherses, were astonished and reasoned among themselves whether it was better to carry out the order or to refuse to meddle and let the matter go. Under the circumstances Thamus made up his mind that if there should be a breeze, he would sail past and keep quiet, but with no wind and a smooth sea about the place, he would announce what he had heard. So, when he came opposite Palodes, and there was neither wind nor wave, Thamus, from the stern, looking toward the land, said the words as he had heard them: "Great Pan is dead." Even before he had fin- ished, there was a great cry of lamentation, not of one per- son, but of many, mingled with exclamations of amazement.

This event occurred supposedly in the first century A.D., during the reign of Tiberius, in a Roman world in which the rationalistic and evolutionistic approach to religion had al-ready done much to bring death not only to Pan but to many of the other greater and lesser gods of the Greek pantheon. Later, however, Christian legend was to suggest that Pan had died on the very day when Christ had mounted the cross. It is this later tradition which leads to the hymn of triumph with which Mrs. Browning's poem ends:

Oh brave poets, keep back nothing, 

Nor mix falsehood with the whole!

Look up Godward; speak the truth in Worthy song from earnest soul; Hold, in high poetic duty,

Truest Truth the fairest Beauty!

                        Pan, Pan is dead.

One god had been substituted for another, but the world of godhead remained inviolate.

It is far different today in what has been called "The Post-Christian Era." Since the time of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, three great revolutions have occurred which have changed the world into a miindus saecularis. These are the revolutions in thought led by Darwin, Marx, and Freud—the revolutions which came with the exploitation of the concepts of the theory of evolution, of the social nature of man, and of the unconscious. Twentieth-century intellectual man has increas­ingly divorced himself from his former identity as homo religiosus and has embraced instead a philosophy of the non-transcendent. The non-religious man (the term would mean almost nothing in the ancient world) has become a reality.

Mircea Eliade has done much to characterize him:

The non-religious man refuses transcendence, accepts the relativity of "reality" and may even come to doubt the mean­ing of existence. . . . Modern non-religious man assumes a new existential situation; he regards himself solely as the subject and agent of history, and he refuses all appeal to transcendence. In other words, he accepts no model for hu­manity outside the human condition as it can be seen by the various historical situations. Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.