The Death of The Great Pan - The Problem of Interpretation

The Death of the Great Pan: The Problem of Interpretation
Author(s): Philippe Borgeaud

Source: History of Religions, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Feb., 1983), pp. 254-283
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Philippe Borgeaud
THE DEATH OF THE

GREAT PAN:
THE PROBLEM OF
INTERPRETATION
Introduced by Plutarch in the second century A.D. in his treatise "On

the Disappearance of Oracles," the story of the death of the great Pan
poses insurmountable problems to the history of ancient religions.
Few examples of narrative fragments from polytheistic antiquity have
given rise to so many interpretations in the field of Christian European culture. The allusions, the commentaries, the speculationstheological as well as literary and philological-since the sixteenth
century are innumerable. As a result, Plutarch's account, whenever it
is informed by the knowledge of specialists, a knowledge which would
situate it in a distant antiquity, becomes, in fact, a part of modern
European culture. And it is in this way that we fall once again under
its remarkable power of seduction; for great and numerous are the
theories, the scholarly fictions, and the personalities that have been
drawn to it. I shall proceed in two stages: after having presented and
commented upon Plutarch's text, I will juxtapose it with interpretations which have been made of it.
This study, carried out on the campus of the University of Chicago, benefited from
the comments of Prof. Arnaldo Momigliano and Prof. James Redfield, whom I wish to
thank along with Dr. Linda Easton.
? 1983 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0018-2710/83/2203-0001$01.00

History of Religions
255
"As for death among such beings, I have heard the words of a man who
was not a fool nor an imposter. 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 astounded and reasoned among themselves whether it were
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 finished there was a great cry of lamentation, not of one person, but of many, mingled with exclamations of amazement. As many persons were on the vessel, the story was soon spread abroad
in Rome, and Thamus was sent for by Tiberius Caesar. Tiberius became so
convinced of the truth of the story that he caused an inquiry and investigation to be made about Pan; and the scholars, who were numerous at his
court, conjectured that he was the son born of Hermes and Penelope."
Moreover, Philip had several witnesses among the persons present who had
been pupils of the old man Aemilianus.'
The difficulty proceeds first of all from the fact that this legend is a
hapax: not a single parallel, variant, or commentary has been handed
down from Graeco-Roman polytheism to aid the interpreter.2 Above
all, there is nothing in the entire Greek tradition that would suggest
that Pan would have been mortal. He is a god-little
matter that he
be theos or daimon3-an athanatos born immortal, as were the other
l Plutarch, Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbit, Loeb Classical

Library, vol. 5
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), pp. 401-3.
(Cambridge,
2
For the classical Greek representations of Pan, see my book, Recherches sur le dieu
Bibliotheca Helvetica Romana 17 (Rome: Institut suisse de Rome, 1979).
Pan,
3
For the meaning of these notions in Greek religion, there is the very useful study of
W. Burkert, Griechische Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche (Stuttgart,
1977), pp. 278-82; the state of Western discussion on the "demon" was the subject of a
significant focus by Marcel Detienne in his article, "Demoni," Enciclopedia Einaudi 4
(1978): 559-71.

256
Death of the Great Pan
theoi and daimones who received Olympian sacrifices (thusia).4

Plutarch's account is the only one that makes any allusion to his
death. The same is true of the expression "the great Pan": Pan is
never called megas in the Greek tradition proper; only a few inscriptions relating to Pan-Min from the upper Egyptian region of Coptos,
dating from the Alexandrian period, attribute this epithet to him in
the superlative (Pan ho megistos). But here we are in a context which
is clearly one of acculturation,5 so that we are reduced to saying that
Plutarch's account lies outside of the classical representation of Pan
and that it resists any attempt to interpret it in the light of what we
know from other sources about the myths and rituals of the Arcadian
god, or in the light of his religion in the form in which it spread
throughout the Greek world from the beginning of the fifth century
B.C. and in which we still find it, very much alive in Plutarch's time,
in certain provinces of the Roman Empire. This difficulty, moreover,
is underlined in Plutarch's text itself, for we read that the emperor
Tiberius, intrigued by the account given him of the event, asks his
scholars to undertake an investigation which ends in an impasse: the
imperial philologists conclude that this is, in effect, a case of the son
of Hermes and Penelope, the most traditional of Pans and the very
one known to Herodotus, an immortal whom the Athenians had
venerated since the time of Marathon.6 This is all another way of
saying that Plutarch's text, taken in isolation, deliberately presents
itself as an enigma the key to which has been lost.
4 For the distinction between
Olympian and heroic ritual (or funerary ritual) see
J. Rudhardt, Notions fondamentales de la pensee religieuse et actes constitutifs du
culte dans la Grece ancienne: Etude preliminaire pour aider a la comprehension de la
piete athenienne au IVe siecle (Gen6ve, 1958). On the symbolic configuration and the
meaning of thusia in Greek culture, see M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant, La Cuisine du
sacrifice en pays grec, with contributions by J.-L. Durand, S. Georgoudi, F. Hartog,
and J. Svenbro (Paris, 1979) (with bibliography).
5 A. Bernand, Pan du desert (Leiden, 1977). Also see the prologue to the collection
of Orphic Hymns: nJdvacyItoTov (verse 15; G. Quandt, Orphei Hymni [Berlin, 1962],
p. 1). These hymns, which were edited no earlier than the first century B.C., were the
product of a cultic community of Asia Minor. The epithet megas is traditionally
applied to a group of divinities of Samothrace, the Megaloi Theoi, as well as to the
mother goddess of Asia Minor, Cybele, Megala Mater. As B. Mueller notes (MEFAX
OEOS [Ph.D. diss.], Halens 21, no. 3 [1913]: 308) this designation is reserved for
those divinities which the Greeks felt to be of foreign origin; if the poets voluntarily
apply it to Zeus (in the superlative megistos), it nevertheless does not enter into ritual
usage on Greek soil per se, except in a few exceptional cases reserved for the mystery
divinities, whose cults the ancients considered to be born of another age: the great
goddesses of Arcadia, the great gods of the mysteries of Andania in Messenia. The title
is very frequent, however, in the Greek and Roman Near East and was widely
employed in texts on esoteric practices: tablets of cuises or magic papyri (see Mueller,
pp. 382-88).
6 Herodotus 6.105 ff.; cf. Borgeaud, pp. 195 ff.

257
Plutarch introduces the account of the death of the great Pan in his
dialogue "On the Disappearance of Oracles" with a definite end in
mind. His intention is to demonstrate that the demons, beings
intermediate to gods and men, may be mortal at times.7 These
demons, of which Pan appears as an example, are mantic beings,
inspirators of oracles. Their death, or their withdrawal from the
world, may serve to describe the object of Plutarch's dialogue: the
deconsecration, throughout the imperial lands, of oracular sanctuaries. The mysterious voice which announces the death of the great
Pan to Thamus undoubtedly has the characteristics of an oracle. It
resounds like those "voices" produced by certain divinities of untamed nature-such as the Latin Fatuus or Faunus-divinities,
clearly assimilated to Pan by the ancients, who cause their oracular
messages to echo in solitary places.8 Plutarch thus seems to suggest
that the news of the great Pan's death may have come from Pan
himself, as his last oracle. As for the groans and cries that answer
Thamus, these may come, as Mannhardt hinted,9 from the people of
the Pans, from those Pans (vassals of the great Pan?) who mourn, in
another of Plutarch's dialogues,10 the death of Osiris. This of course
remains hypothetical, but it nevertheless would tend to reinforce the
impression of circularity which a reading of the passage, taken by
itself, gives us. That which Plutarch relates is an enigma to Plutarch
himself. The fact that he makes use of this enigma in order to
7For Plutarch's sources and the origin of his own theory, see G. Soury, La
Demonologie de Plutarque (Paris, 1942). In the dialogue, "On the Disappearance of
Oracles," a few pages before the episode of the great Pan (De defectu oraculorum 11 =
Moralia 415), Plutarch introduces the "Hesiodic" example of the mortality of nymphs,
who live for ten phoenix lives, the phoenix itself living for nine crow lives, the crow
three deer lives, the deer four rook lives, and the rook nine human lives (see
R. Merkelbach and M. L. West, Fragmenta Hesiodea [Oxford, 1967], Fr. 304,
pp. 158-59 in which the whole of the accounts is presented). These obscure verses
perhaps allude to the close relationship that ties the nymphs to the trees. They
constitute the sole example in the Greek tradition (apart from the legend of the death
of the great Pan) explicitly related to the mortality of a category of divine beings. The
tombs of Zeus (in Crete) and of Dionysos (at Delphi) are only concerned with one
episode of an (initiatory) myth of these gods who nevertheless remain immortal. I do
not subscribe to the thesis of H. L. Levy's "Homer's Gods: A Comment on Their
Immortality" (Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 20 [1979]: 215-18), which postulates, following Jane Harrison, the existence of a pre-Homeric pantheon in which the
gods would have been mortal.
8 Ovid Fasti 3.285-328, 649-652; Plutarch Numa 15.
9
See p. 274 below.
10Plutarch De Iside et Osiride 356 D. This is a case of the episode in which Osiris,
closed into a sarcophagus-trunk by Typhon, is left to the sea. The first to hear of this
unhappy event and to spread the news of it are the Pans and the satyrs living in the
region of Chemmis (Panopolis); it is following this adventure that their names would
have been given to fears called panics.

258
introduce into his dialogue an argument for which he has a particular

need does not mean that he has explained its primary meaning, nor
that he pretends to have done so. Quite the contrary, the enigmatic
character of the tradition which he astutely relates is brought to the
rescue of a faulty argument: every mystery carries with it an element
of authority which inheres in its power to seduce.
There is very little likelihood that Plutarch would have conjured up
this story. The author of the Delphic dialogues, the priest of Apollo,
and the exegete of "Isis and Osiris," is no mythmaker. He comments
on that which tradition transmits to him. In the present case, he takes
pains to indicate all the links of this tradition. This does not mean,
however, that the story which he relates is true in the sense of a
historical matter of fact. What is true, and presented as such, is a
rumor that spreads through Rome during the reign of Tiberius
concerning the death of the great Pan. That the origin of this rumor
(a mysterious voice arising from an island off the coast of Acarnania)" had a historical witness (and, beyond this, a historian whom
tradition can name)12 is a well-known narrative device-adding to a
mystery by placing it within a probable framework.'3
The account which Plutarch transmits to us is organized according
to a mirror construction: the invisible addresser (the voice heard
calling from the nocturnal shore of Paxi) enjoins a first addressee
(Thamus) to repeat further on (at Palodes) his message. Issued from
the invisible and reflected back by man, the message returns to the
invisible; but it then transforms itself into wails and cries of surprise,
and while it was first emitted by a single voice, it is a plurality of
beings which serve as its echo.14 This double transformation guaran" The little island of Paxi, located to the north of the Echinades, was probably a
desert island ("ohne bekannte antike Siedlungsreste," E. Meyer, Der Kleine Pauly
[Munich, 1972], vol. 4, col. 576); as was the enigmatic Palodes (or might this be the
modern Livari Corydon?). It is helpful here to recall that Icarios, the father of
Penelope (herself the mother of Pan) previously ruled over this inhospitable region
(Strabo 10.2.9). On problems of navigation in this region, see P. M. Martin, "La
Tradition sur les passeurs de la c6te acarnanienne, legende ou r6alite?" in Litterature
greco-romaine et geographie historique, melanges offerts & Roger Dion, ed. R. Chevallier
(Paris, 1974), pp. 45-53.
12 Epitherses the grammarian, native of Nicaea, is a character known elsewhere:
Stephanus Byzantius, s.v. "Nikaia"; his son, the rhetorician Aemilianus, also: Seneca
the Elder Controversiae 10.5, 25; Anthologia Palatina 9.756. Cf. Pauly's Realencyclopidie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, ed. Georg Wissowa et al. suppl. 3
(Stuttgart, 1918), col. 23 (hereafter cited as Pauly-Wissowa).
13 Such is the opinion of Kathleen O'Brien Wicker, among others, in Hans Dieter
Betz, ed., Plutarch's Theological Writings and Early Christian Literature (Leiden,
1975), p. 158: "Legends characteristically begin with the naming of the witnesses,
cf. Lk. 1:2."
14 Notable here is the clever reversal of what would be the "normal"
experience of the
echo: instead of being projected by man to come back to him, sent back (and

259
tees this account an authenticity already promised in the repeated

occurrence (at Paxi, then at Palodes) of a dead calm which might
have appeared accidental without it. Within the logic of the account,
the second episode (Thamus' repetition of the message at Palodes)
thus takes on the function of authenticating the truth of the first (the
communication of the message to him at Paxi). If Thamus had
repeated the message in the same place that he had heard it, the cries
of surprise and of mourning which answered him would have seemed
quite suspicious to the auditors of the account. The account would
have thus been awkward. The separation in space of the two episodes
also responds to a logical requirement:it allows for the invisible to be
split into an addresser and a (plural) addressee, and for the appearance of the man Thamus to serve simply as the vehicle for a message
which does not concern him. The account bears witness, by means of
the clever mise en scene, to the truth of its own message. We are
drawn into lending an ear to the supernatural. The news of the death
of the great god Pan means nothing (at first) for the men who hear it
pronounced: they only retain the fear felt in the sudden hearing of a
"voice." But it seems to mean something to the universe from whence
it comes, to this "invisible," peopled by beings who recognize who is
being spoken of. Established in an apodictic way, while still remaining wholly inexplicable, the truth of the death of the great god Pan
takes on the status of a "monster," of a prodigy about whose reality
there can be no doubt, but whose meaning demands subsequent
interpretation. The enigma, presented in this way, becomes an oracular sign, a sign about which one is obliged to ask questions. And this
is precisely what happens at Rome, in the court of Tiberius.
If there is a point which, seemingly, no one has tried to clarify in a
serious way, it is the interest which Tiberius, as the account tells us,
accorded to Thamus' adventure. His interest is great enough for him
to mobilize a team of "philologists" (a term which here probably
means specialists on myths, knowers of "logoi"). Commentators refer
us to the curiosity this emperor had for all that concerned the
supernatural and to the delight he took in detailed mythological
research. Tacitus, who does not like Tiberius, emphasizes his credulousness. It is nevertheless fitting here to acknowledge that the traits
which he condemns are those of a religious attitude and behavior
common to his time. Tiberius is hardly exceptional, especially, as in
transformed) by nature, the message of the death of Pan comes from nature and
returns there, sent back by man. This reversal (to the extent to which it retains a
familiar structure in the "event") creates an effect of probability. Let us remember
that,
for the ancients, the echo is purposely plaintive and is tied in to Pan
through an
ensemble of symbolic traits (cf. Borgeaud, pp. 144-46).

260
the case in point, when nothing less than the death of a god is at
issue. Such a phenomenon merited an investigation. It must be
emphasized that this death has been presented as history: the tradition repeated by Plutarch does not describe a mythic event that ritual
would repeat (as the rituals of Adonis or Attis, to which much
fruitless effort was extended to square this account; see pp. 271-72,
278-79 below), but a definite fact, an event to which any periodicity was
wholly foreign. The great god Pan really died under Tiberius-the
text tells us as much. Such an event could fit well into the climate of a
period of imperial history marked by the frequency of signs and
portents, as well as by the consequence in the Roman Empire of
movements of the Messianic-revolutionary sort.15 It appears certain
that, in such a context, Tiberius would also have heard tell of the
death of the Christ-that is to say of a man accused of having
claimed to be king, and whom some claimed to be god, executed in
Judea under the rule of the procurator, Pilate. Pilate, a magistrate
appointed by the emperor, would certainly have been in contact with
him. A tradition related by Tertullian16 would have it that Pilate sent
a dossier on the religion of the Christians of Palestine to Tiberius a
short time after the death of the Christ (Eusebius17dates this report
A.D. 35). According to Tertullian, the emperor proposed that the
Senate recognize the divinity of Christ, that is, that it accord to
Christianity the status of a religio licita, which was refused. It may be
that Tacitus'8 obtained the knowledge he had of the trial of Christ
from this official report.'9 The rumor announcing the death of the
great god Pan, which would have reached the ears of an emperor
already preoccupied (for obvious political reasons, given the tense
situation in Palestine at that time) with the coming of a new god who
had died (and been resuscitated) during his reign, would have constituted a troubling coincidence. The date at which the rumor of the
death of the great god Pan reached Rome is unfortunately unknown.
15On the notion of revolutionary Messianism as a "riposte a l'agression de la culture
hellenistique et romaine" in the eastern and North African provinces of the empire, see
the suggestions of P. Vidal-Naquet, "Du bon usage de la trahison," in Flavius
Josephus, La Guerre des Juifs, trans. Pierre Savinel (Paris, 1977), pp. 79-80. The
author refers to M. Benabou, La Resistance africaine a la romanisation (Paris, 1976).
16
Tertullian Apologeticus 5.
17Eusebius, Chronica (ed. R. Helm, Die Chronik des
Hieronymous [Berlin, 1956],
pp.18 176-77), and Historia ecclesiastica 2.2.1-4.
Tacitus Annales 15.44.
19On this affair and on the historical value of this passage of Tertullian, see Marta
Sordi, II Cristianesimo e Roma (Bologna, 1965), pp. 26-28, 415-16. See also, by the
same author, "I primi rapporti fra lo Stato romano e il Cristianesimo," Rendiconti dell'
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 8th ser., 12 (1957): 73 ff. I wish to thank Prof.
Arnaldo Momigliano who was kind enough to indicate these references to me.

261
When Pilate's message reached the capital, Tiberius had already been
on the throne for twenty-one years (since September 17 of the
year 14). We can thus never know if the two events (the death of Pan
and the death of Christ) might have been connected from the
start-or in what way. Out of an interest in thoroughness, we should
not exclude the possibility that the two events might have enjoyed,
for certain minds of the age, some vague relationship. That the
Christians, in the person of Eusebius who took up the matter again
two centuries later (see p. 266 below), would have hoped to find a
direct relationship between the two is not aberrant. It would be
superfluous, in any case, to underline the fact that the equation of the
death of the great god Pan with the defeat of the pagan gods (an
equation not made before Eusebius) is quite obviously foreign to the
minds of Tiberius and his peers, who were not Christians.20
I think that it is at once more practical and more reasonable to
consider the death of the great god Pan as a portent which takes its
political and cultural place in a series of no less extraordinary signs
which, from the end of the republic, mark a period characterized by
profound upheavals. The reader of Plutarch, for example, would
remember that shortly before the death of Antony (the "new
Dionysos") the Bacchic thiasos invisibly crossed through the streets
of Alexandria in the night, sounding out its music before leaving the
city behind.21 This invisible throng could not help but evoke that
which cried out at the news of the death of the great god Pan. So
does the voice of which Vergil speaks, which arose out of the silent
forest upon the death of Caesar: vox quoque per lucos vulgo exaudita
silentis ingens.22
With which god was Plutarch's account concerned? Of a certain
strange Pan whose epithet, megas, would seem at first glance to
designate an Asiatic appurtenance, and thus suggest an esoteric
nature.23The expression Pan ho megas, as well as the name borne by
the ship's pilot ("Thamus" is not found at all in Greek literature prior
to Plutarch, except in Plato's Phaedrus, where it designates an
Egyptian king imagined by Socrates, to whom the god Theuth introduced the invention of writing),24evokes an Orient which is more or
20
G. Papini ("II Cesare della Crocifissione," Nuova Antologia 69 [1934]: 40-56)
believed that Tiberius was converted. He bases this upon a misinterpretation of
Tertullian's text. Cf. E. Ciaceri, Tiberio successore di Augusto, 2d ed. (Rome, 1944),
p. 21342.
Plutarch Antonius 75.4-5.
22
Vergil Georgics 1.476-77.
23
See n. 5 above.
24
Plato Phaedrus 274d-e: Phaedrus does not take Socrates' Egyptian invention
seriously. W. Spiegelberg ("Die Name Samaus und Thamots, Thamts," Zeitschrift fur

262
less fantastic, adorning its powers of seduction with an exotic wisdom.

This seems to be just the sort of thing that would have excited
Tiberius' curiosity. Pan, under other names, was certainly not
unknown to Tiberius, whose knowledge of Greek mythology we have
already indicated and who, for example, we know had a sanctuary
built for this god behind the theater of Antioch.25 We should also
note that a Palestinian town (located in Trachonitis) which bore the
name of Pan (Paneas, Panias, or Paneion; today the Syrian Banyas,
on the northwest slope of Mount Hermon) was christened Caesarea
by Philip the Tetrarch, son of Herod the Great.26 In this Paneas
which became the Caesarea of Philip, Herod the Great had had a
sanctuary built to the divinity Augustus near the famous Pan sanctuary (the vast cave from which the Jordan rises).27 The Pan of
Caesarea, neighbor of the god Augustus, was certainly not unknown
to Tiberius. An inscription found in the cave calls him Diopan.28 This
name, as it was emphasized,29 reminds us of Pan, the son of Zeus,
whom Aeschylus distinguished from Pan, the son of the Cretan goat
(Aigipan). This could be the great Pan, as distinguished from a lesser
(less noble) Pan.
Tiberius had yet another reason, a greater and more personal one,
for taking an interest in Pan. We know that this emperor was
dgyptische Sprache 64 [1929]: 84-85) recognizes in Thamus a Greek transcription of an
Egyptian name which was common in Plato's time, but which is in no way royal. This
name is TDj-n-'mw, meaning "Gott (Onuris) hat sie (die Feinde) gepackt." The
onomasticon of Greek papyri from Egypt knows of a series of names close to Thamus:
Thamots, Thamis, Thanots, etc. (cf. F. Preisigke, Sammelbuch griechischer Urkunden
aus Agypten [Strasbourg, 1915-81]); in every case these are feminine names.
25 Domninus, cited
by Joannes Malalas, Chronographia (J. P. Migne, Patrologia
Graeca [Paris, 1865], 97:361).
26
Josephus Bellum ludaicum 1.21.3.
27 Josephus Antiquitates ludaicae 15.360-64; cf. Bellum ludaicum 3.514; Solinus,
Collectanea rerum memorabilium, 35.1; Stephanus Byzantius, s.v. "Panis"; Cedrenus,
Historiarum compendium 323 (J. P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca [Paris, 1894], 121:359);
Philippe Le Bas, Voyage archeologique en Grece et en Asie Mineure. Inscriptions,
vol. 3, pt. I (Paris, 1870), pp. 463-64; starting with Marcus Aurelius, coins bear the
image of the temenos of Pan at Caesarea Paneas: W. Wroth, Catalogue of the Greek
Coins of Galatia, Cappadocia, and Syria, Catalogue of the Greek coins in the British
Museum (London, 1899), 21:299 and pl. XXXVII, 7; see also R. Stillwell, ed., The
Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites (Princeton, N.J., 1976), p. 670, s.v. "Paneas."
An annual festival brought numerous pilgrims to this sanctuary to view a "miraculous"
ritual in which the god caused the victim sacrificed over the spring to disappear (Ti ToV
taitovogS uvdcIt dq(pavtqyivEaoat napaSo6do;: Eusebius Historia ecclesiastica 7.17).
Eusebius reports how the Christian senator Astyrios, in the third century, brought an
end to this ritual by invoking the Lord, who caused the victim carried off by the water
to reappear. On this episode, see Sordi (n. 19 above), pp. 290-91.
28
Corpus inscriptionum Graecarum 4538 (G. Kaibel, Epigrammata Graeca ex
collecta [Berlin, 1878], no. 827 b.).
lapidibus
29
Kern, "Diopan," in Pauly-Wissowa (Stuttgart, 1905), vol. 5, col. 1046.

263
particularly inclined to the practice of astrology.30 We find, in this

period, that Pan had not only long held a place in astrology in the
form of the constellation Capricorn (a goat with the tail of a fish, a
Mesopotamian symbol, reinterpreted by the Greeks as if it regarded
the mythology of Pan), but that this constellation had been the birth
sign of Augustus, that Augustus had had his effigy engraved on silver
coins on the reverse of his own portrait, and that the same sign had
been made the emblem of the legions.31 Capricorn would remain a
symbol of Augustus as founder of the Roman Empire, as attested by
numismatic evidence of the imperial record.32An announcement to
Tiberius of rumors circulating in the capital to the effect that the
great Pan was dead came to signify, for this ardent follower of
astrology, that a threat perhaps hung over the empire he had inherited from Augustus (his father by adoption). F. H. Cramer, and
after him P. Boyance, underlined the political importance of
30 F. H.
Cramer, Astrology in Roman Law and Politics (Philadelphia, 1954),
pp. 99-104.
31 On
Capricorn, see H. G. Grundel's article "Zodiakos," in Pauly-Wissowa, 2d ser.
(1972), vol. 19, cols. 462-709; and his "Imagines zodiaci," in Hommages a M. J.
Vermaseren (Leiden, 1978), pp. 438-54; cf. W. Hiibner, "Corpore semifero, Ekphrasis
oder Metamorphose des Steinbocks?" Hermes 108 (1980): 73-83. A relationship
between Pan and Capricorn is attested from the Alexandrian era (Pseudo-Eratosthenes
1.27, see n. 38 below); cf. W. H. Roscher, "Die Elemente des astronomischen Mythus
vom Aigokeros," Neue Jahrbiicherfir Philologie und Paedogogik, vol. 151 (1895) or
Jahrbiicherfur classische Philologie 41 (1895): 333-42; see also the dossier cited on the
subject of Pseudo-Eratosthenes: K. Robert, Eratosthenes catasterismoi reliquiae
(Berlin, 1878) 1.27. On the relationship between Capricorn and Augustus, see Boll and
Gundel, "Sternbilder, Sternglauben und Sternsymbolik bei Griechen und Rdmern," in
Lexikon der griechischen und romischen Mythologie, ed. W. H. Roscher, vol. 6,
Nachtrdge (1937), col. 972; Cramer (n. 30 above), p. 99. The "classical places" are
Suetonius Augustus 94.11 and Manilius 2.507-08. Cf. H. Mattingly and E. A.
Sydenham, The Roman Imperial Coinage, 5 vols. (London, 1923-33), 1:48, 61-64,
pl. 2.29. On the renowned Gemma Augustea of Vienna, the sign of Capricorn and the
eagle of Jupiter frame the figuration of Augustus: cf. F. Eichler and E. Kris, Die
Kameen im kunsthistorischen Museum (Vienna, 1927), pp. 52-56.
32 Under Tiberius, "The divine
Augustus is commemorated on sestercii by the
interesting device of the Capricorn, his natal sign, supporting a shield encircled by an
oak-wreath and by his statue on a processional car drawn by four elephants"
(Mattingly and Sydenham, 1:101; cf. pl. vii, 112). Capricorn is also found on the
African issue struck for Galba (ibid., pp. 180, 188). In 75 and in 79, under Vespasian,
the sign of Capricorn bearing the globe, accompanied by the cornucopia, is found on
the reverse of the portrait of the emperor (ibid. [1926], 2:24, 27); under Titus and under
Antoninus Pius between 140 and 144 (ibid., 3:118); under Pescennius Niger, at
Antioch, coins were still struck bearing the effigy of Capricorn (between 193 and 194):
"The capricorns holding the shield, on which are seen stars ('lusti Aug.') apparently
represent the fortunate horoscope of the 'Just' Emperor. As a natal sign of Augustus
the capricorn had attained such fame that it was probably willingly adopted as such by
many of his successors" (ibid., 4, pt. 1 [1936], p. 21; cf. pl. 2.5).

264
astrologers in the early Empire:33Tiberius himself promulgated an

edict against the "Chaldeans" whose prophecies were often tied to
conspiracies.34 Already in the year 11, a famous edict of Augustus
prohibited the questioning of diviners concerning the death of anyone, and the law saw to it that any divining seance be limited to two
participants, the diviner and his client, and that the result remain
secret.35 What was feared was precisely the spreading of rumors
analogous to the one which announced the death of the great god
Pan. Yet, if it appears that Tiberius did nothing to further the
existence of the Chaldeans, it was undoubtedly to assure himself the
astrological monopoly he held in the person of his inseparable
Thrasyllus.36
Thanks perhaps to the pen of Tiberius, but more probably to that
of his nephew (and adopted son) Germanicus, who dedicated it to
him, the Latin adaptation of Aratos' Phainomena37 presents Capricorn in the framework of a mythology borrowed from the Alexandrians, but reinterprets him in terms of the Augustan ideology. This
poem born of the imperial family explains (in verses 554-60) that
Capricorn takes its origin from the Cretan Pan, ally of the gods in
their war against the Titans. Collaborating, through the panic
(created by the terrifying sound of his marine conch), with the rise of
the Olympian reign of Zeus, Pan-Capricorn (foster brother of the
young Zeus, hidden in the mountains of Crete) thus appears to be
intimately tied to the founding of the cosmic order (redistribution and
equalization of the divine powers).38Would not this reign of Jupiter,
33 Cramer; P. Boyanc6, "L'Astrologie dans le monde romain," Bulletin de l'Academie
Royale de Belgique 61 (1975): 266-85. Also see the classic works of A. BoucheLeclercq, Histoire de la divination dans lantiquite, 4 vols. (Paris, 1882); and
F. Cumont, Astrology and Religion among Greeks and Romans (London and New
York, 1912).
34Cf. Tacitus 2.32; Suetonius Tiberius 36.
5 Cassius Dio 55.31; Cramer, p. 99; Boyance, p. 277.
36 Cf. Suetonius
69; Tacitus 6.21.
37
Regarding this text written under Tiberius and generally attributed to Germanicus,
see the recent C. Santini, II segno e la tradizione in Germanico scrittore (Rome, 1977);
cf. L. Cicu, "La date dei Phaenomena di Germanico," Maia 31 (1979): 139-44;
A. Le Boeuffe, Germanicus, Les Phenomenes d'Aratos (Paris, 1975). D. B. Gain (The
Aratus Ascribed to Germanicus Caesar [London, 1976], p. 20) refuses to make a
decision: "My opinion is that the evidence does not allow one to say whether the
author was Tiberius or Germanicus."
38 This poetical theme, which
goes back to a work attributed to Epimenides of Crete
(Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, pt. 3, B [Leiden, 1950], no.
457, Fr. 18 = Hermann Diels und Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker
[Dublin and Zurich, 1951], 1:37, Fr. 24), was used to good effect in an astronomical
poem by the Alexandrian Eratosthenes; this poem is cited by the literature known as
catasteristic (cf. Pseudo-Eratosthenes 1.27). On the transmission of this literature
(which draws upon the genre of metamorphosis) as far as Rome, see K. Robert; and
J. Martin, Histoire du texte des Phenomenes d'Aratos (Paris, 1956), pp. 58-125.

265
"the greatest age of the gods" (divorum laetior aetas), as the text
relates, be understood here as the archetype for the reign of Augustus?
The verses that follow, which portray Capricorn presiding over the
astral apotheosis of the emperor, seem to support such a hypothesis:
"While the nations are frightened and the country filled with fear, O
Augustus, Capricorn raises your numen up to the skies, on his
heavenly body which is that of your birth, and restores it to the
maternal spheres" (verses 558-60). The death of Augustus, who rises
toward the heavenly spheres, borne up by Pan, creates on earth a
kind of fearful panic which threatens the order and equilibrium of the
Roman Empire.
It is in this context of an imperial ideology rich in astrological and
mythological metaphor that it is fitting, I believe, to cast the interest
accorded by Tiberius upon the rumor circulating in Rome which had
come from the eastern provinces39to announce the death of the great
Pan. This "prodigy," toward which Tiberius could not have remained
indifferent, perhaps signaled to his mind or those of his contemporaries, the imminence of a danger that would threaten the power he
had inherited from Augustus, or perhaps the possibility of a doubt
relative to the astral immortality of the emperor. At this point it is
possible for us to understand the satisfying, and above all prudent,
nature of the philologists' response: if this great Pan is none other
than the Arcadian venerated at Athens, the son of Hermes and
Penelope (and not the Cretan son of the goat, foster brother and ally
of Zeus, metamorphosed into the heavenly Capricorn), then there is
no cause for concern. For the Roman Empire, the threat is thus
exorcised: a definitive silence falls over an enigma which has been
rendered, purposely, indecipherable.
This silence of polytheistic antiquity was broken by Christianity.
Fascinated by the enigma, it wanted to resolve it. And this undertaking, for us, doubles the difficulty of the problem. For, from this
point on, it is in terms of a completely different symbolic universe, to
which the Greek god is quite obviously foreign, that Western tradition, first in the third century A.D. and later from the sixteenth
century to the present, has pursued its reinterpretation of Plutarch's
text. The account of the death of the great Pan paradoxically
introduces Pan into the context of Christian legend. In other wordsand this brings me to my point-this account comes to be located
from the start, in the world of Western learning, on a border which
separates two distinct symbolic universes. Undeniably a product of
39 The
legend locates the proclamation of the death of Pan in the region of EpirusAcamania; Epitherses, who is supposed to have reported this and to have been a
witness to it, is a native of Bithynia (Nicaea). Thamus, the pilot, is Egyptian.

266
polytheistic antiquity, it nevertheless finds itself taken up, on the level

of interpretation, by Christian legend. Western culture, in introducing
this account into its own meditation, places it in a perspective which
we cannot ignore. It would be naive to think we could turn our backs
on the emotional charge which a tradition such as ours must lend to
this account, naive to think it possible to approach it without
prejudices while drawing upon a particular history of interpretations.
In effect, as a result of the fascination exerted by this enigma, all the
solutions which have been advanced are marked, consciously or not,
by the seal of the collective imagination.
The first interpretation is that which Eusebius proposed in the fifth
book of his Praeparatio evangelica (see 18.13). The bishop of
Caesarea, after having cited the whole of the Plutarchan passage,
comments on it in the following manner: "It would be worthwhile to
inquire into the time of the death of this demon. It is in the time of
Tiberius, an age about which it is written that Our Savior, living
among men, drove far from the lives of men all of the race of demons
[pan genos daimonon]. This to the extent that certain demons threw
themselves at his knees, supplicating him .not to deliver them into
Tartarus [an obvious allusion to Luke 8:31: Kati clapeKdXkovaTo6v
In this way, then,
'iva [iL attIdln atotoS eig T'rlv fp3uooovdancXkOev].
we know the time of the purification of demons, which is not far
removed from the aforementioned time, much in the same way that
the suppression of human sacrifice closely followed the proclamation
of the good news."
This interpretation is founded upon the "folk etymology" of Pan's
name understood from the time of Plato40as meaning "all" (a play on
the words Pan and pan) and interpreted by Eusebius (perhaps
following Plutarch, but in a different sense) as symbolizing the
totality of demons, that is to say, the gods or demigods of GraecoRoman polytheism cast out by the Christ.
The second reading of the death of the great Pan rests upon the
same etymology but yields an interpretation which is quite the
opposite: the "all" whose death was proclaimed under Tiberius is the
Christ himself. This exegesis of a pantheistic sort appears in the
sixteenth century, especially with Rabelais, who made it famous by
placing it in the mouth of Pantagruel in chapter 27 of the Quart livre
(which appeared in 1552). The oldest testimony to this interpretation
dates back to the Silva di varia leccion (1542) of the Spaniard Pedro
Mexia. We find it again penned by the hand of a friend of Cardinal
40
Plato Cratylus 408c-d; cf. Hymnus Homericus ad Panem (Homeric hymn to Pan)
19.47; Hymni orphicorum 11.1; Cornutus Theologiae graecae compendium 27.

267
du Bellay, Guillaume Bigot, in his Christianae philosophiae praeludium, published in Toulouse in 1549. We must bear in mind
nonetheless that the sixteenth century also held to the interpretation
of Eusebius which was equally current at that time.4'
From that time, in the wake of Plutarch, Eusebius, and the
sixteenth century, a tradition of thought on the subject was begun
among European thinkers and artists. The history of that tradition
was eruditely outlined in several works by the philologist Gustav
Adolf Gerhard which appeared in 1915 and 1916,42as well as in a less
well-known study which we owe to Louis Karl.43The literary history
of Pan's fortune in Western thought was itself the object of an
important book by Patricia Merivale, Pan the Goat-God: His Myth
in Modern Times.44I refer the reader to these studies for a deeper
analysis, my purpose here being no more than to indicate certain
points of orientation which relate to the theme of the death of Pan.
By way of Goethe, Heine, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Michelet,
Turgeniev, D. H. Lawrence, to name only a few, the evocation of the
death of the great Pan has served to express a major contradiction
within our culture; it erupts forth like some mysterious and dramatic
author in the mingling of Christian waters with the pagan. "What a
spring of salvation for every suffering being," wrote Heinrich Heine,
"was the blood that flowed on Golgotha.... The Greek gods of white
marble were inundated with it; made ill by an inward horror, they
could never recover. Most of them, it is true, had been for a long time
carrying within themselves the evil which had gnawed them, and fear
was enough to precipitate their death. The first to die was Pan. Do
you know the legend as told by Plutarch? This legend of ancient
sailors is quite remarkable. Here then is the story ...."45
41 See the
very rich article by M. A. Screech, "The Death of Pan and the Death of
the Heroes in the Fourth Book of Rabelais: A Study in Syncretism," Bibliotheque
d'Humanisme et Renaissance, travaux et documents 17 (1955): 36-55; cf. A. J.
Krailsheimer, "Rabelais and the Pan Legend," French Studies 2 (1948): 158-61.
42 G. A. Gerhard, "Der Tod des grossen Pan," Sitzungsbericht der Heidelberger
Akademie 6 (Heidelberg, 1915): 3-52; "Zum Tod der grossen Pan," WienerStudien 38
(1916): 343-76.
43 Louis
Karl, "Sur la mort de Pan dans Rabelais et quelques versions modernes," in
Melanges offerts a M. Emile Picot membre de l'lnstitut par ses amis et ses telves,
2 vols. (Paris, 1913), 1:267-73.
44
Patricia Merivale, Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969). Particularly centered upon American and
English literature, this work nearly totally ignores the German sphere, widely covered
by Gerhard and by E. Maas, "Miltons Heilige Nacht," Internationale Wochenschrift
fir Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 5, no. 34 (1911): 1057-76.
45 Heinrich
Heine, Ueber Ludwig Boerne, bk. 2 (1840), Sdmtliche Werke (ed.
Hamburg, 1862), 12:73.

268
The scenario to which the analysis of such an account invites us

becomes, little by little, that of the eruption and nocturnal or
marginal development of "paganism" once the victory of the diurnal
and administrative world of Christianity had been secured. If the
great Pan, as Rabelais would have it, is none other than the Christ, it
is then as an "image" (in the theological sense) that the face of the
Arcadian announces that of Christ and survives him, in a circuitous
way, as a retroactive and impertinent expression, while remaining a
wild and ever-potential vessel for the "good news." If, on the contrary, as Eusebius would have it, this goat is the devil, then he carries
away with him in his flight, to the extremities of the visible and the
speakable, outside of the consciousness or in its nocturnal interstices,
the horde of demons which had until that time peopled a transparent
and light-filled world, as in the case of another representation which
Christianity ascribes to polytheistic antiquity.46
That the god Pan could have thus become the symbol of Christ as
well as of the demon, or even that of the point of contact in their
confrontation, the dreamworld stage for their discrimination; that the
enigmatic episode of his death could have served as a pretext because
of which no one-as all were overcome by the success of the
enigma-could in the end qualify as an "insignificant case";47all of
this derives from an exceptional conjecture whose genesis I will not
attempt to explain in detail. Let it suffice to say that Pan, already in
the time of Christ, and by means of a folk etymology first used by the
poets and philosophers of the classical age before being taken up
again by Eusebius and Rabelais, had become for certain religious
thinkers (the Stoics and Orphics in particular) a universal figure, a
god of the whole, while still retaining his classical traits. The philosophical and mystical reinterpretation originates from a store of
classical images. As hunter or goatherd, close to men but living in
solitary places, sometimes frightening and sometimes protecting those
who have strayed, Pan seems to be marked by a radical coincidentia
oppositorum, which is present from earliest times and which does not
cease, until the victory of Christianity, to fuel both philosophical and
mythological forms of religious reflection. His is the fusion, in one
body, of the beast and the immortal; the coincidence of music and
noise, of desire and fear, of seduction and repulsion. Be he the "good
shepherd" or the stinking lascivious goat, the seductive musician or
46
See Michelet, La Sorciere (Paris, 1862).

Karl; according to this author, the legend of the death of Pan "has become more
popular in Western literature than many legends whose meanings are clearer, or whose
moral tone is more elevated." He does not ask himself the reason for this.
47

269
the amorous animal from whom the nymphs are put to flight, the god
of possession and enthusiasm or even the sarcastic agent of the fearful
panic which his name and pagan identity evoke for Christian
culture-it makes no difference. The result remains that Pan, once
believed to signify "all,"ends up being translated for us at one time as
demon, at another as savior. And this new oscillation, this new
translation of the coincidentia oppositorum which had already been
at work in his ancient form, now comes to signify a nostalgia which
has come into being and which turns its regard toward antiquity.
Weighted against the Church's victory over the witches' sabbath is the
dream (neither more nor less imaginary) of a pagan eschatology, of
the possibility of a return to the natural gods. Starting with the
Romantic period, the poets, perhaps inspired by the symbolic
analyses of a Creuzer, took pleasure in thinking of the possible
coming of a "gracious son of Pan,"48 all the while preparing the
ground for the Victorian (and post-Victorian) representation of a
Christ reconciled with Pan. It is in this way that Louis Karl is able to
cite a Hungarian poetess, Minka Czobel, who, in her collection
Opalok (1903) presents Pan and the Christ crucified side by side, or
Pan meeting the Christ crucified and leaving flowers at the foot of the
cross. The iconography would soon present a D. H. Lawrence
(author of Pan in America) split in two with his face treated, in the
same image, as both the goat god and the crucified Christ.49
Such is the climate in which the philological and religio-historical
interpretations of Plutarch's account are elaborated. Such interpretations, relevant to the human sciences, now merit a brief and schematic
review on our part. It was necessary for us, at first, to evoke the
evidence and the roots of a Christian conflict of interpretations
relative to the death of the great Pan. Such a conflict has not failed to
have repercussions on the so-called secular interpretations of philologists and of historians of antiquity: while the expression of a
mentality desirous of exorcising pagan origins-which it sees as being
no more than a repressed disagreement, but troubling nonethelessthis conflict never ceases to exert its influence, behind the scenes,
upon every interpretation which the scientific disciplines have had to
offer.
48 A. Rimbaud, "Antique" in Illuminations, Oeuvres Completes, edition 6tablie,

pr6sent6e et annot6e par Antoine Adam (Paris, 1972), p. 127. Cf. F. Piper (Mythologie
der christlichen Kunst [Weimar, 1851], pp. 254-57), who defines Crotos, the son of
Pan and muses' wet nurse, as "the personification of the jubilant rhythm of the Bacchic
dance."
49
Merivale, pl. 15.

270
On the side of the philologists, the Christian reading of Plutarch's

text was abandoned in the middle of the nineteenth century. One of
the last of this group to make explicit reference to it, the great
Welcker in his Griechische Gbtterlehre finds himself limited to
imagining a moving and complicated scenario:50the history of the
death of the great Pan, according to Welcker, would have been
imagined piecemeal by a particularly lucid contemporary of Tiberius
who had an inspired presentiment of the approaching end of a
polytheism destined to perish under the blows of a young and
vigorous Christian religion. This is nevertheless an artful scenario, as
it lends to paganism a fiction which Christianity enhances in its
interpretation, in such a form as betrays a nostalgia for pantheistic
origins on the part of the latter.
Half a century later, with Gruppe (1895), while the interpretation is
equally Romanesque, the content is no longer romantic in the least,
and every reference to Christianity has disappeared. Plutarch would
have been inspired by a lost satirical work, a sort of pamphlet whose
function would have been to ridicule the scholarly credulousness of
Tiberius' satellites. The fiction (in the sense in which de Certeau
speaks of a "theoretical fiction")51 would be seen as working in the
service of a cold rationality, in search of a purely historical causality.
The perspective indicated (admittedly in an oversophisticated
manner) by Gruppe52 would not be taken into consideration by
subsequent research. If the Christian interpretation seems to have
definitively lost its academic prestige, it is on behalf of a reading
which nevertheless remains determined by a problematic which is
religious. Theology does not give way to history, but to the history of
religions in the sense in which this discipline had, in its beginnings, a
comparative object as well as one of conflict in the double concern
with which it is still preoccupied: in measuring the gulf between its
object and Western rationality, and in its own break with JudaeoChristian revelation.
Two important contributions have appeared since that time, from
which every interpretation advanced in the twentieth century would
take its inspiration. The first, which we owe to the medievalist and
orientalist Liebrecht,53was intended to remove a misunderstanding.
50 F. G. Welcker, Griechische Gotterlehre
(Gottingen, 1860), 2:670.
51M. de Certeau, L'Ecriture de I'histoire (Paris, 1975), p. 313.

0. Gruppe in Bursians Jarhresbericht 85 (1895): 274 (recension of W. H. Roscher,
"Die Legende vom Tode des grossen Pan," Jahrbucher fur classische Philologie 145
[1892]: 456-77).
53F. Liebrecht, ed., Gervais de Tilbury, Otia imperialia (Hanover, 1856), pp. 179-80;
and "Tammuz-Adonis," Zeitschrift der deutschen morgendlandischen Gesellschaft 17
52

271
Numerous oriental parallels (most especially Muslim) would show,

according to this scholar, that Pan had, by error, stolen into a story
which did not concern him: Thamus, presented by Plutarch as a
human character and placed in a role manifestly not his own (ship's
pilot), would in fact himself be the god whose death was ritually
proclaimed-that is, the famous Tammuz (the Syrian Adonis) whose
cult survived in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean beyond the
advent of Islam.54 The legend of the death of the great Pan thus
appears as the fruit of a secondary elaboration which we owe to
voyagers who had been witnesses to a ritual whose meaning they had
not understood. W. H. Roscher, editor of the famous Lexikon der
griechischen und rdmischen Mythologie and a great specialist on Pan,
in 1892 adopts an analogous explanatory schema, all the while trying
not to lose Pan himself:55the ritual in which one mourns the death of
the god, according to him, is one consecrated to the god of Mendes
(identified with Pan from the time of Herodotus),56an Egyptian ritual
carried out by the ship's pilot-that Thamus whose Egyptian origins
Plutarch clearly specifies.
This ritualist interpretation (following the two variants proposed
by Liebrecht and Roscher) might have passed unnoticed were it not
for Salomon Reinach who, in a famous article which appeared in
1907, claimed it to be his own, while refining the scenario. His desire
was to give, to this fruit of the scientific imagination, the guarantee of
a philological demonstration within the rules, which he presented
under the guise of a reading of the text. The "text" requiring an
emendatio was to be, in this case, the oral tradition upon which
Plutarch drew-that which was corrupt being the first witnessing
itself, the victim of a faulty hearing of the event. What must have
been heard, the voice which came from the Acarnanian shore, did not
proclaim, "Thamus, the great Pan is dead," but "The very great
Thamus is dead."57 Thamus assuredly represented the Syrian name
(1863): 397-403 (reprinted in F. Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde: Alte und neue Aufsdtze
[Heilbronn, 1879], pp. 251-60).
54 On Tammuz, cf. W.
Rollig, Der kleine Pauly (Munich, 1975), vol. 5, cols. 507-8
(with bibliography).
55 Roscher; cf. article "Pan" in W. H. Roscher, Lexikon der griechischen und
romischen Mythologie (Leipzig, 1897-1909), vol. 3, cols. 1347-1406.
56 Herodotus 2.46.
57
Not ?OaCoio... FInv 6 s;yaC T?0vrcK? but ?apoOSq
ItavipyaS T0vrlKcC. Reinach
("La Mort du grand Pan," Bulletin de correspondance hellhnique 31 [1907]: 5-19), is
unfaithful to the text of Plutarch in which the call addressed to Thamus is separated
from the announcement of the death of Pan by the designation of the place in which
this announcement is to be repeated: "6or6Tavyevq Kazd TO6
rnahi)X6?,daTrdyyatov t
nrlv 6 pLyac TtOVlqKE."

272
for the unhappy Adonis. The confusion would have been born purely
from a coincidence with the ship's pilot, whose name was also
Thamus, having heard (as had the other passengers with him) the call
as being addressed to himself. The question of understanding why a
ritual which was, in short, quite familiar (the one which mourns the
death of Adonis) came in this way to be transformed into an aberrant
legend becomes, for Reinach, no more a problem than that of
knowing who it was who could have celebrated such a rite on those
deserted rocks.58All the same, he teaches us that the ritual proclamation of the death of the god and the groans that answer it on the part
of his devotees could only have taken place in one and the same
location. And since a choice must be made, Reinach opts for Palodes.
Frazer,59who again takes up this interpretation, admits to preferring
Paxi. As for the legend which they have definitively destructured,
neither of the two bother themselves with explaining its success. The
discovery of its origins has rendered null and void any analysis of the
account as it had been transmitted by Plutarch.
Without realizing it, Liebrecht had, in 1856, established the general
framework for a series of interpretations which were to enjoy great
success, at least until 1968. The repeated attempts in this directionRoscher to Hermansen60and on to Hani61-if they do justice to the
ingeniousness of their authors, today appear to us as so many
variations on one and the same narrative structure, and as depending
upon what may even legitimately be called science fiction. It is in this
framework that Gerhard, in 1915, proposes the scenario of a veritable
"Society of Pan" (eine Pan Gesellschaft) consecrating itself, on the
shores of the Ionian Sea, to a ritual of mourning the death of the
great Pan (Pan ho megas) who, mourned by the lesser Pans (the
Paniskoi, revealed to the attention of the scholarly public by
Mannhardt),62appears as a providential survival from the obscure
ceremonies in which lay the origins of tragedy: those famous choruses,
of which Herodotus spoke,63 instituted at Sicyon to commemorate
58
Reinach satisfies himself in noting offhandedly that one must surely have run into
(these merchants) all along the coast.
Syrians
59
J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 12 vols. (London, 1911), 3:7.
60
G. Hermansen, "Die Sage vom Tode des grossen Pan," Classica et mediaevalia 2
(1939): 221-46. See also A. D. Nock, "6 [s?yaS Fldv rT?vrlcK," Classical Review 37
(1923): 164-65; G. Meautis, "Le Grand Pan est mort," Muste Beige 31 (1927):
51-53.
61 J. Hani, "La Mort du grand Pan," Association Guillaume Bude, Actes du VIlle
congres (Paris, 1968), pp. 511-19.
62 W. Mannhardt, Baumkultus (Berlin, 1875), pp. 90-93 (cf. his Antike Wald- und
Feldkulte [Berlin, 1877], pp. 132 ff., 148).
63
Herodotus 5.67.

273
the death of Adrastus, which have been thought at times to prefigure

the "song of the goat."
For Albin Cook,64 in 1925, the "great Pan" becomes the "great
Zan," a more ancient Zeus, known to be dead (one could see his tomb
in Crete). This would be the case of a god close to Adonis-Tammuz,
born of an old Illyro-Dorian matrix of which ritual traces would have
survived at Palodes in Epirus, in the city of Bouthrote to be exact, up
to Roman times. Not knowing all too well who the Zan was whose
death they nevertheless celebrated, the inhabitants of this region
would have, in their perplexity, come to the same conclusion as that
offered by the passengers of our ship: that this Zan was Pan. The
numerous postulates upon which this interpretation is based show
themselves to be wholly whimsical. We know that Zan, far from
being an ancient form of Zeus, is a poetic form created from a
Homeric accusative. The identification of the Cretan Zeus and
Tammuz is not postulated previous to a Nestorian commentary on
the Holy Scriptures. As for the existence of an old Illyro-Doric
stratum and its unlikely relationship with the Syrian Tammuz, it is
obscure at best. Finally, the location of the Palodes as being near to
Bouthrote is far from being a sure one; and even if it were,,we are
unaware of anything pertaining to Bouthrotian cults and so on.
Hermansen,65in 1939, preferred to think of the recollection of the
Attis-Adonis festivals (see p. 278 below). Haakh,66 in 1958, returns
to Reinach's interpretation and specifies the modalities of the
Syrian ritual. Hani,67in 1968, proposes the ritual of Osiris which for
him suggests the Egyptian name of the ship's pilot and the lament of
the Pans in Plutarch's treatise on Isis and Osiris. We can see how the
object of this ritual is metamorphosed from one "version"to the next.
But how much greater are the consequences from the moment that
this Pan, this goat of Mendes, this Adonis, this Zan, this Attis,
Osiris come to be seen as unalterably representing
or-finally-this
the "dying god" and thus responding, each in its own way, to the
expectations of a period crowned by the work of Frazer.
We glimpse how this sort of interpretation, periodically put into
use, has as its inevitable result the presentation of the death of Pan as
a precursor to the death of Christ, to the extent that the religion of
dying gods announces, be it only imperfectly or in a deceptive
manner, the religion of the Crucified. In this sense it may be said that
64
65
66
67
Albin Cook, Zeus, 3 vols. in 5 (Cambridge, 1925), 2:347-49.

Hermansen.
H. Haakh, "Der grosse Pan ist tot," Das Altertum 4 (1958): 105-10.
Hani, pp. 511-19.

274
such interpretation reformulates, in philological or historical terms,

the old Rabelaisan interpretation of Pan-Christ ("le nostre tout").
Parallel with the explanatory model inherited from Liebrecht and
from Reinach we encounter, beginning with Mannhardt, a second
sort of interpretation which no longer looks to ancient religions of
salvation for its arguments, but to popular legends and traditions.
Mannhardt-as we have mentioned-distinguished the great Pan
from the plurality of Pans. This plurality, to which ancient tradition
attested with increasing strength, would show that one must locate
this god in the class of nature spirits which incarnate the growth
process and the death proper to the vegetable and animal worlds. A
forest spirit conceived in the form of a goat, analogous to the Greek
satyrs, to the Italic fauns, to the Scottish Urisks, and to the Slavic
Ljeschie, Pan becomes, in the writings of Mannhardt, a folk demon
belonging essentially to a religion which, from classical antiquity to
modern Germany, continued without a break. The account of his
death is not surprising: it enters into a series of popular accounts
(Germanic) which concern themselves with beings of this class (forest
spirits), in which it is a case of a message announcing their deaths,
and of lamentations which arise at such news. This rapprochement,
still implicit in the Baumkulte of 1875, is formally established with
the Germanic legends, in the Antike Wald- und Feldkulte of 1877.68
The American Archie Taylor, in 1922, and later the Dane Inger M.
Boberg in 1934, again take up and enlarge upon the dossier of these
Nordic parallels to the death of the great Pan with other studies,
regularly bringing new versions to light.69Here is an example which is
striking in its resemblance to Plutarch's account, and which is cited
by Mannhardt,70Gerhard, and Taylor. The case in point is a Tyrolian
story: "A butcher went down near midnight from Saalfelden to
Pinzgau by a forest path. From a cliff a voice called out to him:
'Butcher, when you pass close to the great rock of Unken, cry out in
the direction of the rock face "Salome is dead!"' 'I can do that,' the
butcher answered, laughing. Arriving at the foot of the great boulder
before dawn he cried out three times that which he had been told.
Then, from the depths of the mountain, there resounded many highpitched groans and lamentations, and the butcher, filled with fear,
hastened back on his way."
68W. Mannhardt, Baumkultus,
pp. 90-93, and Antike Wald- und Feldkulte,
pp. 132 ff., 148.
69 A. Taylor, "Northern Parallels to the Death of Pan," Washington University
Studies 10, no. 1 (1922): 3-102; I. M. Boberg, Sagnet om den store Pans dbd (Uppsala,
1934) (with German summary).
70
Mannhardt, Antike Wald- und Feldkulte, p. 149.

275
This example, however, privileged as it is to our point of view,

remains unique. As a general rule, the reaction provoked by the news
of the death does not remain anonymous and is not limited to
lamentations. The most frequent form in which this type of legend
presents itself is illustrated by a Lusitanian variant: "A dwarf once
drew near to a farmer of Dettersberg while he was plowing and asked
him to tell Hubel [enigmatic feminine name] that Habel [enigmatic
masculine name] was dead. When the farmer recounted his strange
adventure at the noonday meal, a small woman who had never been
seen before appeared in a corner of the room and ran out of the
house in the direction of the mountain, letting out cries of lamentation. She was never seen again."71
The addressee in these cases may be a maidservant brought into the
family whose origins are unknown if not explicitly supernatural. The
message she receives, in every case, makes manifest its appurtenance
to a nonhuman world (savage or domestic universe): in her flight,
often, she lets fall an object which is thenceforth shown as a curiosity.
A large group of such accounts (attested to since the sixteenth
century) brings cats into the scenario: "A member of the family
declares that the neighbor's cat has just been killed. A black cat lying
nearby, in the foyer, cries out 'Robert is dead' to the great astonishment of the terrified family, and with these words, disappears through
the chimney."72The versions of this group very frequently allude to
the universe of the devil (the witches' Sabbath in particular).
This collection of traditional accounts, of which the basic narrative
structure is constant, may be found throughout a vast territory of
northern Europe: Brittany, England, Ireland, Switzerland, Germany,
Austria, the Tyrol, and the Scandinavian countries. Yet it is not
solely indigenous to the Germanic sphere, as Mannhardt would lead
one to believe, but also to the Celtic and Finno-Ugric spheres
(numerous variants are attested in Finland and in Estonia).73 These
accounts set up a mediator (a human and mundane character) and
three characters or groups of characters, in the following sequence:
the mediator hears a voice or encounters a character who enjoins him
to announce, upon his return home or in a certain place, that a
mysterious individual (Salome, the cat king, Robert the devil, the
father of the person to whom the message is to be communicated) is
dead. As soon as the mediator has transmitted this message (whose
71
72
Taylor, see in particular p. 24, n. 10.

Ibid.
M. Boberg, "Noch einmal die Sage vom Tode des grossen Pan," Classica et
mediaevalia 3 (1940): 119-32, esp. 129.
73I.

276
meaning escapes him), a third individual or group of individuals-the

unknown addressee-manifests himself. Often it is a dwarf or a sprite
who, unknown to everyone, is present in the narrator'shouse, or even
a cat who laments loudly or, on the contrary, rejoices, at times before
precipitously leaving that place in order to accomplish some important mission (to replace or succeed the one who has died). In other
words, a human character, through a mysterious message which he is
charged to transmit to he knows not whom, suddenly finds himself
the witness (and actor) in a drama concerning the "other world," the
world of nature spirits who maintain, in this Christian context, a
narrow relationship with the demonic world. The reading of Plutarch's account in the light of folkloric parallels thus ushers in an
interpretation which echoes that of Eusebius-that of a demonic
people lamenting the death of their king who has been vanquished by
the Christ.
This brings us to the formulation of a statement of significant
consequence: the two "secular" keys proposed by specialists in the
history of religions as means of explaining Plutarch's account (first,
the "ritualist" key which reduces the account to an awkward relationship of an ill-interpreted rite of lamentation with the death of a god
and second, the "folkloric" key which brings this account into line
with a series of popular European stories of analogous structure
concerning the death of a wild or demonic spirit) appear to us to be
an unconscious transposition of the two major axes of traditional
Christian interpretation: the Pan-Christ or the Pan-Devil. The first
introduces Pan (or his translation into Tammuz) in the context of
rival religions which are at the same time close to Christianity; the
second rejects him into the wild or nocturnal space which constitutes,
on the margins of Christian lands, the satanic kingdom of pagan
survivals. That such a homologous relationship should come to
light-between, on the one hand, a means to scientific explanation,
and, on the other, a discussion carried on by poets and thinkers
auxiliary to the Christian tradition-need not come as a surprise to
us. One had to wait until twenty years after the posing of the
academic problem (with Liebrecht and Mannhardt) for the question
of the death of the great Pan to catch the imagination, all of a
sudden, of the scholarly world; from the short article by Salomon
Reinach (1907) to the vast studies of Gerhard (1915 and 1916).74The
relative silence that follows the latter arises perhaps from the fact that
dilettantes in the field, finding themselves overcome by such an
enormous mass of erudition, were discouraged from making further
74
Gerhard (n. 42 above).

277
contributions. But previous to this, and over a very short period of

time, many were those who wished to get their word in: Frazer,
Maas, Nestle, Weinreich, as well as the essayists Garello and Schoff
and Karl.75Italy, France, Germany, England, and the United States
were all caught up in this little prewar debate. This sudden scholarly
effervescence (1907-16) manifests itself at the end of the richest
period of literary and artistic reflection on the figure of Pan. This
"Pan-revival" period, still colored in England by the Victorian
ideology, extends from 1890 to 1914.76It seems that, following this
period, the rage had passed, in spite of the efforts of D. H. Lawrence.
It is thus at the time in which the figure of the goat-god imposes itself
in its most visible manner upon artists and writers (cf. the imposing
mass of documents presented by Patricia Merivale) that the scholarly
world, in its turn, rediscovers Pan and interrogates the enigma of his
death in terms which, unbeknown to itself, are the fruits of an already
long tradition.
But from that time on, with the exception of a few recidivists, the
period of enthusiastic interpretations was over. In 1922, the Germanic
scholar Archie Taylor concludes his vast study of the "Nordic
Parallels to the Death of Pan" with a statement of skepticism: these
parallels, as striking as they may appear, prove nothing with regard
to ancient tradition. They are ultimately explicable through the banal
phenomenon of an auditory hallucination, from which the legend of
the message of death would have been expanded, in analogous forms
and diverse places, without any one account having necessarily
influenced any other. Content with having discovered a universal and
positive origin for the Panic corpus, Taylor leaves to others the
trouble of investigating why such a legend, born from such an
atemporal source, could come to be associated with the name of Pan
rather than any other name; and of resolving the problems which
such an association raises in the field of Greek mythology. In 1934, in
his thesis on the folk motif of the death of Pan, Inger M. Boberg
basically subscribes to Taylor's interpretation, all the while striving to
understand better, from a strictly folkloristic point of view, how these
legends could have organized themselves, as groups of variants, in
relationship to one another.
75 E. Nestle, "Zum Tod des
grossen Pan," Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft 12
(1909): 156-58; 0. Weinreich, "Zum Tod des grossen Pan," Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft 13 (1910): 467-73; M. L. Garello, La morte di Pan (Milan, 1908); W. H.
Schoft, "Tammuz, Pan, and Christ. Notes on a typical case of myth-transference and
development," Open Court 26 (1912): 513-31; and "Tammuz, Pan, and Christ. Further
notes on a typical case of myth-transference," Open Court 27 (1913): 449-60.
76
Merivale (n. 44 above), p. 194.

278
Scorning Taylor's skepticism, while referring once again to Mannhardt and Reinach, Hermansen in 1939 makes the final attempt to
render the Nordic legends and the ancient legends of the death of Pan
as one and the same myth, memory or trace of a forgotten or poorly
integrated ritual. These two "folkloric survivals," the one ancient and
the other modern, would serve as witnesses to the influence exerted
by the (assimilated or confused) cults of Attis and Adonis. The
memory of Adonis (mediated by Thamus) in the ancient legend
would have as its echo the memory of Attis (whose cult was brought
by the Roman legions to the northern border of the Empire) in the
Nordic legends. Bothered by the evidence for a "missing link" (no
variant of the message of death, apart from Plutarch's account of the
death of Pan, being attested in the Balkans and in southern Europe),
Hermansen indulges in a demonstration of scholarly acrobatics,
reducing Pan to Adonis in order to identify him better with Attis, or
even with Mithra, before returning, in a learned and doctrinaire
manner, to his well-considered conclusion. We will not follow the
meanderings of this interpretation (which was already outdated in its
own time), which rests upon the addition of poorly founded hypotheses, and which was deservedly criticized in an article by I. M.
Boberg.77
We cannot help but recognize that the interpretation of Taylor and
Boberg, fragile and disappointing as it appears (it does not at all
explain the precise narrative structure which the legend takes, nor
does it explain its details and different versions), has not been
replaced by one superior to it. Undeniably, its advantage lies in the
fact that it puts an end to all diffusionist speculation on the transformations of the rituals of Adonis and Attis into the legends of modern
European folklore. In recognizing the fact of a formal relationship, in
the absence of all observable historical derivations, between an
ensemble of northern European legends and ancient legend, it solves
a puzzle; but it forces us at the same time to interpret this relationship
in a new way. The formal analogy raised between the account of the
death of the great Pan and the northern European legends does not
necessarily signify a relationship of meaning but indicates, if nothing
else, the double occurrence of a single narrative structure. From the
moment that the ancient account becomes the most ancient known
example of this sort of legend, we would perhaps be tempted simply
to consider it as a literary archetype to which all the others, under the
77
See Boberg to whom G. Hermansen ("Der grosse Pan ist tot," Classica et
mediaevalia 3 [1940]: 133-41) responds with disdaining scorn without offering a real
argument.

279
effect of a late influence on the part of scholarly culture, would have

borrowed their structure. This (which would be very difficult, if not
impossible, to prove) explains nothing. We thus do best by holding to
our statement of this relationship in structure, unless we are simply to
dismiss it, too, as a simple coincidence.
When Taylor proposes to explain this coincidence through a
reference to a universal psycho-physiological experience (the anguished audition of inexplicable natural sounds, spontaneously transformed into auditory hallucinations) he does not resolve even one
part of this problem. It is impossible that such phenomena could, on
occasion, be a cause which would confirm on the level of popular
beliefs the contents of legends as they present themselves; this experiential horizon, if it contributes at all to the "credibility"of narratives,
takes into account neither the narrative structure itself nor the
content of that which is stated. On the level of a scientific explanation, we cannot pass from rumor to legend. From one to the other
there is a break which no alchemy can efface.
It is for this reason that I propose to regard the account transmitted by Plutarch, as far as we might compare it with the European
legends, to be inscribed with a structural ensemble, a system of
transformations whose coherence and the play of whose variants
depend neither upon chance nor genealogy, but upon a pure logic.
The formal "relationship" explains itself through a simple and efficient structure open to reinvention in different contexts in the service
of a narrative that is desirous of establishing an interpenetration of
the visible and the invisible.78This hypothesis offers the advantage of
explaining the extraordinary reception given the ancient text (from
the sixteenth century onward) by Western scholars: molded, in its
structure, by a stamp from Christian imagery, this account of foreignness would have struck familiar chords; it would have fascinated
them. But this does not imply that this would have meant, for the
ancients, something analogous to that which modern Europe understood it to be. The recurrence of a narrative structure does not imply
a recurrence of meaning. The latter depends in each case upon a
particular cultural context in which the account is articulated (in
terms peculiar to it). Bound up with this context is the symbolic
configuration which determines the meaning which the opposition of
the visible and the invisible takes whenever it appears.
78 For other
(Hindu, Greek, Shakespearean) examples of comparable narrative
procedures which were intended to point up the interference between the visible and
invisible, see Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, "The Boundary between Myth and Reality,"
Daedalus 109 (Spring 1980): 93-125.

280
We may, indeed, point out a fundamental difference between the

Greek account and northern European legends of comparable structure. With the exception of the Tyrolean account to which we gave a
privileged position (but in which we might just as easily see a
weakened, if not truncated, variant, if we compare it to the entire
modern narrative), all of the legends of a message of death end with
an episode concerning a being originally from the world of the
invisible who flees from the human universe to be reintegrated into its
own universe. What is in play, and that which was placed in question
by the very same adventure as recounted in the account of the
message of death, is the clear separation of the human universe from
the savage or demonic universe. The modern narrative ends with the
reestablishment of a proper distance between the two, which had
previously been compromised by an intruder's secret presence in the
house. The adventure of Thamus, as we read it at the beginning of
this study, is altogether different. Far from expressing the dangerous
possibility of a passage between the visible and invisible worlds, it
does no more than place them in the presence of one another, face to
face. Its effect is that of the tearing of a veil. But the scene which then
appears remains decidedly outside the human. There is no intruder in
this story. Far from manifesting an exchange, the adventure of
Thamus reveals a failure in communication. And precisely in this it
presents itself as an enigma to interpretation, or as an oracular sign.
The absence of the intruder, which is compensated in the ancient
context by the doubling of the invisible (the voice of Paxi, to which
respond the voices of Palodes), is not a sign of weakening in the
narrative; quite the contrary, it lends to it its meaning. The third
episode of the ancient account (the episode which takes place at
Rome in the court of Tiberius) thus points, as we have seen, to the
underlying cultural context, and perhaps even to imperial history. In
the final analysis, nothing prohibited us from believing Plutarch nor
from trying, in a hypothetical fashion, to evaluate the reception
accorded to such a portent by the emperor and his entourage, which
was related in an equally integral form. The ancient account took its
meaning from an ancient and polytheistic context. Everything leads
to the belief that the northern European legends of the message of
death take their meaning (which is different) in the same way, from a
modern and monotheistic context. We shall leave this question open.
It seems vain, in any case, to search for a direct continuity between
the Christian tradition relative to the death of Pan and that related by
Plutarch. A rupture has been produced between the two which has
completely transformed the symbolic configuration within the scope
of which any possible reading of the account of the death of Pan

281
must operate. In no case may the Nordic legends serve to mediate

between the two. At best they allow us to bring to light better, as a
means of understanding, the distance that separates the two universes
in which the same account reads in different ways.
On the side of Tiberius, the question raised was one of knowing to
which Pan the enigmatic rumor reported by Thamus alluded: to the
Arcadian Pan or to another? The decision fell mainly to a choice
between the god of classical tradition and his Augustan reinterpretation. In choosing the first, Tiberius' philologists deliberately opted for
the paradox, being anxious to divert the insult (or the threat) which
the second might have represented for the emperor. Forced back into
the classical mythology of the goat-god, the death of Pan (which had
nothing to do with this mythology) at once lost its political impact
and, with it, all possibility of being interpreted.
From the Christian viewpoint, starting with Eusebius, the question
posed is altogether different. It is a question of the emblematic
identity of a god torn from his own context: Pan-Christ and/or PanDemon. The philologists of the Victorian age and their successors are
ancillary to this Christian tradition in the motivations which drive
them to look, under the mask of a goat-god, for the face of a dying
god or a representation of an eruption of the invisible. An incredible
amount of energy is spent in their refusal to recognize the true
identity of the other-in mistrusting it, in twisting it, in reinventing
it-an energy which seems to be determined, in the final analysis, by
the resistance of an object composed of nonsense. It was not all at
once that the symbolic grid arose by which-either through the effect
of an imitatio diabolica or with an innocent allegorical image-the
cave-manger of Bethlehem could evoke that of Pan, the good shepherd answer to the Arcadian goatherd; or by which an Adonis named
Thamus, well-known to the Fathers of the Christian church, could
cede to the Christians (according to Jerome79) the sacred grove
surrounding the Bethlehem cave. Those who would have recognized
79 In a letter to the
priest Paulin (Epistulae 58.3): "Bethlehem nunc nostram, et
augustissimum orbis locum de quo psalmista canit: 'veritas de terra orta est,' lucos
inumbrabat Thamuz, id est Adonidis, et in specu ubi quondam Christusparvulus vagiit
Veneris amasius plangebatur." This passage is part of an argument concerning the
ambiguity of sacred geography (given: holy places are too holy for a sinner to dare
visit; given: these places are unimportant because the Holy Spirit dwells in everyone,
according to the words of Paul). This is immediately preceded by an evocation of
Hadrian's profanation of Jerusalem; the attempt was to deduce that the cult of Adonis
at Bethlehem was also introduced by Hadrian. This is highly unlikely, as it is known
that Hadrian did not have the Christians but the Jews in mind when he romanized
Jerusalem and its cultus (cf. M. Sordi, II Cristianesimo e Roma [n. 19 above],
p. 427). Furthermore, this emperor, who was so taken with the Greek pantheon, was
only very mildly interested in the local divinities of the "barbarian" provinces

282
Adonis in Plutarch's Thamus remained curiously silent on the subject

of this last motif. Yet such would have allowed Reinach to make the
explicit connection between his micro-interpretation of the ancient
text and the vast horizon in which he considered it to be situated; a
horizon drawn, beginning with Charles Vellay in 1901,80around the
figure of Adonis. Is Christianity thus the final avatar of the religion
of a dying god? It seems to us today that the terms of this problem,
such as it has presented itself to the religious (or atheistic) consciousness since the beginning of this century, are borrowed from the
fathers of the Constantinian period.
The death of the great Pan which, from the Christian point of view,
the text of Plutarch presents as an enigma to be resolved, does not
belong to ancient mythology. A secondary elaboration probably
concocted with the aid of an astrological theme (itself the reinterpretation of the myth) and an artful narrative structure, Plutarch's text
itself pertains at best to anti-imperial political propaganda.
Far from working with a prolongation of a Graeco-Roman myth,
Christianity thus makes use of, and invests with a meaning proper to
its own mythology, a scrap which is bereft of meaning, an enigma
which had been refused by ancient polytheism. From polytheistic
thought to Christian thought-and this in spite of the fascination
which the first exerts upon the second-there is, in the case in
question, a radical discontinuity. From an event which refuses
analysis, we are thus brought to the analysis of our own tradition.
This minor yet extreme example reminds us, if such is necessary, of
the strength of illusion which is always at work when one culture
looks at another. The fascination with certain ruins, in particular,
remains a function of the mirage into which they are shaded-to the
credit of the restorations-before we even begin to attempt a sketch
that is properly archaeological. This phenomenon, quite analogous to
what has taken place in the fields of ethnography, and which Roland
Barthes called "the theft of language,"8' is most rightly that of a
(J. Beaujeu, La Religion romaine a l'apogee de I'Empire, vol. 1, La Politique religieuse
des Antonins [Paris, 1955], p. 258). It is thus difficult to understand how he would
have instituted the cult of Adonis-Thamus at Bethlehem. We have no other testimony
to this cult at that place (cf. A. M. Schneider, "Bethlehem," in Reallexikonfir Antike
und Christentum [Stuttgart, 1954], 2:224-28); but Jerome, who lived there, remains a
good witness.
80 Charles Vellay, Le Culte et les fetes d'Adonis-Thammouz
(Paris, 1901),
pp. 179 ff.; cf. M. Bruckner, Der sterbende und auferstehende Gottheiland (Tubingen,
W.
Graf Baudissin, Adonis und Esmun (Leipzig, 1911), p. 522.
1908);
81 For the elaboration and evolution of this
concept in the thought of R. Barthes, see
Claude Reichler, La Diabolie. La Seduction, la renardie, I'criture (Paris, 1979),
pp. 154-55.

283
culture that is more anxious to classify the words of others in the card
catalogs of its libraries than it is desirous of analyzing the doubtful
origins of its own taxonomies. The irony of history lies in the fact
that the exhausting of resources, as much through ruins as through
"savages," in the end forces us to regard more closely the treasure as
it presents itself to us.
University of Geneva


The Death of The Great Pan - The Problem of Interpretation

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The Death of the Great Pan: The Problem of Interpretation

Author(s): Philippe Borgeaud

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THE DEATH OF THE

Introduced by Plutarch in the second century A.D. in his treatise "On

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l Plutarch, Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbit, Loeb Classical

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Death of the Great Pan

theoi and daimones who received Olympian sacrifices (thusia).4

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Death of the Great Pan

introduce into his dialogue an argument for which he has a particular

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tees this account an authenticity already promised in the repeated

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Death of the Great Pan

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Death of the Great Pan

less fantastic, adorning its powers of seduction with an exotic wisdom.

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particularly inclined to the practice of astrology.30 We find, in this

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Death of the Great Pan

astrologers in the early Empire:33Tiberius himself promulgated an

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Death of the Great Pan

polytheistic antiquity, it nevertheless finds itself taken up, on the level

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Death of the Great Pan

The scenario to which the analysis of such an account invites us

See Michelet, La Sorciere (Paris, 1862).

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48 A. Rimbaud, "Antique" in Illuminations, Oeuvres Completes, edition 6tablie,

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Death of the Great Pan

On the side of the philologists, the Christian reading of Plutarch's

51M. de Certeau, L'Ecriture de I'histoire (Paris, 1975), p. 313.

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Numerous oriental parallels (most especially Muslim) would show,

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Death of the Great Pan

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the death of Adrastus, which have been thought at times to prefigure

Albin Cook, Zeus, 3 vols. in 5 (Cambridge, 1925), 2:347-49.

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Death of the Great Pan

such interpretation reformulates, in philological or historical terms,

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This example, however, privileged as it is to our point of view,

Taylor, see in particular p. 24, n. 10.

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Death of the Great Pan

meaning escapes him), a third individual or group of individuals-the

Gerhard (n. 42 above).

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contributions. But previous to this, and over a very short period of

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Death of the Great Pan