Landscape of Panic

We tend to think of nature as being essentially benign and long since tamed by m
an,but its gods and spirits can still inspire fear. Patrick Harpur recounts some
everyday tales of daylight terror.
A friend of mine once pointed out to me the place in the New Forest where the las
t person to die of panic had been found; the corpse crouched against a tree,its t
eeth bared in a rictus of fear. This had happened in about the 1920s, he thought
; but it sounds, despite its rural setting, very like what we now call an urban
legend. I wonder how many other woods or wild places are credited with a death b
y panic the idea that someone,out in Nature, can be suddenly overwhelmed by a see
mingly causeless irrational terror. It is a state named after the Greek god Pan
because it is he who personifies the wilderness, inhabiting caves, dells, grotto
es and woods; he who, with a terrible shout, causes the wayfarer to flee uncontr
ollably.
The sudden onset of panic is not only found in myth and legend, however. On a su
nny summer s afternoon in 1953, my father and uncle were sea fishing off some roc
ks near Waterville in Co Kerry. Both were young veterans of the Second World War
; my dad had been decorated more than once for bravery. At one point, my uncle t
old me, his line had snagged on something underwater. As he tried to tug it free
, he had the distinct feeling that something was holding it. A kind of horror be
gan to creep over him, as if the something were intelligent and terrible. He gla
nced over at my father who,deathly pale,was already watching him. As one, they t
hrew down their rods and ran for their lives, not stopping until they were back at
their hotel.
Common sense tells us that,in Ireland,the cause of panic might lie
closer to home than Pan.The Tuatha de Danann , also known as the Sidhe, the fair
ies, or, more in hope than expectation, the Good People, are as likely to harm as
help us,dealing us a blow or stroke, abducting our children, blighting crops if we
offend them. And we can, famously, offend them simply by trespassing on one of
their haunts,whether a fairy fort or rath, or one of the threshold zones they favour
,such as fords, bridges or sea shores. They do not want too much to be known abo
ut them, according to the poet WB Yeats; and folklorist Katharine Briggs notes t
hat they are dangerous if they see you before you see them. Incidentally,while t
wilight is traditionally the liminal time preferred by the fairies for their app
earance, Pan s hour is noon. If incidents of panic do not literally occur at this
time, they do take place in the heat of the day.
My supervisor at Cambridge, the Yeats scholar Tom Henn, had an experience simila
r to my father s which he describes in his autobiography ive Arches. As a teenage
r, in 1915, he was fishing a tributary of the Shannon near Paradise his family s e
state in Co Galway when, as he writes,an overpowering fear attacked me,utterly co
ld in quality,and terrible because of its irrationality in that sunlit, lonely p
lace. I remember that I dashed out of the water,up and out of the hollow and ran
and ran, sweat-sodden, till after a mile or so I came within sight of a cottage
.There was nothing following me.
According to her autobiography Time out of Mind,the medium and author Joan Grant
her two books about ancient Egypt, Winged Pharaoh and The Eyes of Horus, were r
eceived psychically was staying with her husband Leslie at a shooting lodge, nea
r Grantown-on-Spey in Scotland, in August 1928. One day they' went to Rothiemurc
hus. intending to climb towards the Cairngorms. However, it was a beautiful Sept
ember day, too hot for serious hiking, and so they settled for a gentle walk. No
thing could have been farther from my mind than spooks," wrote Joan, "when sudde
nly I was seized with such tenor that I turned and in panic fled back along the
path. Leslie ran after me, imploring me to tell him what was wrong. I could only
spare breath enough to tell him to run faster, faster. Something - utterly mali
gn, four-legged and yet obscenely human, invisible and yet solid enough for me t
o hear the pounding of its hooves, was trying to reach me. If it did I should di
e, for I was far too frightened to know how to defend myself. I had run about ha
lf a mile when I burst through an invisible barrier behind which I was safe."
Some years later, the local doctor told Joan that two hikers had been found dead
at the exact location of her terror. Both men were under 30; the weather had be
en fine; they had spent a good night under the shelter stone on the highest ridg
e (they had written to that effect in the book that was kept up there), "They we
re found within a hundred yards of each other sprawled face downward, as though
they had fallen headlong when in flight." The doctor performed a postmortem on t
hem both. "Never in my life have I seen healthier corpses" he said. "Not a thing
wrong with either of the poor chaps except that their hearts stopped. I put 'he
art failure' on the chit, but it is my considered opinion that they died of frig
ht."
To be seized by panic depends in part on who you are, it seems, since Joan's hus
band was oblivious to the centaur-like pursuer. Yet the encounter also attaches
to a particular place if the case of the dead hikers is anything to go by. On th
e other hand, Tom Henn subsequently went fishing several times at the place of h
is panic and experienced nothing like it again. Like all anomalous events, panic
is partly to do with us and partly not, partly from within us and partly withou
t.
Plutarch reported that a mysterious cry rang through late antiquity: "Great Pan
is dead!" Pan's death signifies the death of Nature as an animate power, the wit
hdrawal of the gods and daimons. But gods cannot die: thus Pan may well have mov
ed north to head, in the form of Wotan, the Wild Hunt [see FT136] which from tim
e to time swept like a destructive wind over the European countryside, maiming o
r deranging anyone in its path. He took cover behind the horned and hoofed Devil
of the Christians. He haunted the literary imagination - in English poetry he o
utnumbers his nearest Greek rivals (Helen, Orpheus and Persephone by nearly two
to one. Above all, he lived on in our nightmares, as Ephialtes - "he who jumps u
p" and then presses down on us so that we can neither move nor speak. Indeed. si
nce our modem mythologies of religion and science have outlawed Pan, the creativ
e voice of Nature has fallen silent and he is forced to appear inwardly, in the
caves and grottoes of the psyche, as an overwhelming instinctual force.
Yet was Pan perhaps present in the following tale from crop circle lore? In May
1990 Gary and Vivienne Tomlinson were out walking near the village of Hambledon.
They paused to watch the wind blowing over a cornfield. Vivienne, a 36-year-old
housewife from Guildford, had always been fascinated by the sight and sound of
wind and "can lose herself watching it". Suddenly the wind changed. It seemed to
blow from two directions at once, gathering strength, its whistling growing lou
der, "almost like a high-pitched pan-pipe sound. Then we felt a wind pushing us
from the side and from above," Vivienne reported. "It was forcing down on our he
ads so that we could hardly stay upright, yet my husband's hair was standing on
end. It was incredible... The noise was tremendous. We looked for a helicopter a
bove us but there was nothing. Gary still shivers at the memory' and how his hai
r stood on end." Is this an account of Pan's primaeval, paralyzing, hair-raising
'shout'?
The wind continued to swirl around them, and they saw the corn being pushed down
, forming a circle. "The corn swirled and then gently laid down. There was no fe
el of wind now or sound. It felt strange watching these ever-faster gathering ga
thering whirlwinds. They just seemed to increase; they were enveloping us quickl
y. I panicked, grabbed my husband's hand and pulled him out of the circle." Her
instincts were sound; whoever steps into a fairy ring or joins a fairy revel is
liable to be trapped.
As the personification of Nature, Pan is ambiguous. He is the protector of herds
men and shepherds; fishermen and hunters. His benign face persuades those of us
with a Romantic view that Nature is a smiling realm of peace and healing. But hi
s dark, frightening side connects us with our own deepest instincts of fear and
flight. This may not be a bad thing. If we are out for a gentle stroll in the co
untry and, suddenly, 'we find that the world we thought was passive and dead is
alive, animate and watchful, of course our first reaction is panic. It is we who
are then passive, paralysed, as the world begins to move. No wonder we run as s
oon as we can.
But this may be only the way we are whenever we break away from civilisation, ou
t of our safe habitat and into the wilderness. Pan helps us to stay in touch wit
h instinct, to break out of the defensiveness that can lead to paranoia, to prev
ent the protective city wall from becoming a prison. Pan introduces a bit of nec
essary wildness into our lives; he gives body to our airy-fairy spirituality; he
injects the nymphs of sweetness and Iight with a bit of hoof and goat-stink. Th
at Pan can be good for the is evidenced by Apuleius' tale of Eros and Psyche in
which Pan saves Psyche - the soul - from suicide after Eros has abandoned her.
Nevertheless, the perils of an encounter with Pan should not be underestimated.
In Memory Hold-the-Door, John Buchan - the former governor general of Canada and
author of such adventure stories as The Thirty-Nine Steps - recounts how in 191
0 he set out to climb a small peak called the Alpspitze in the Bavarian Wetterst
eingebirge above Partenkirchen. Accompanied by a young forester named Sebastian,
he reached the top at about nine in the morning (having left at 2 am). They bre
akfasted in a mountain inn before beginning the six-mile walk back down to the v
alley. "It was a brilliant summer day with a promise of great heat. But our road
lay through pleasant shady pine woods and flowery meadows" wrote Buchan. "I not
iced that my companion had fallen silent, and, glancing at him, was amazed to se
e that his face was dead-white, that sweat stood in beads on his forehead, and t
hat his eyes were staring ahead as if he was in an agony of fear, as if terror w
ere all around him so that he dared not look one way rather than another. Sudden
ly he began to run, and I ran too, some power not myself constraining me. Terror
had seized me also, but I did not know what I dreaded; it was like the epidemic
of giggling which overcomes children who have no wish to laugh. We ran - we ran
like demented bacchanals, tearing down the glades, leaping rocks. bursting thro
ugh thickets, colliding with trees, sometimes colliding with each other, and all
the time we never uttered a sound. At last we fetched up beside the much-freque
nted valley highway, where we lay for a time utterly exhausted. For the rest of
the road home we did not speak: we did not even dare to look at each other".
What, wonders Buchan, was it all about? "I suppose it was Panic," he surmises. "
Sebastian had seen the goat-foot god or something of the kind - he was forest-bo
rn, and Bavarian peasants are very near primeval things - and he had made me fee
l his terror." It is a terror, salutary or fatal, which we are always open to wh
enever we stray off the beaten track; a horror we are liable to hook whenever we
sink a line into the depths.
[end]