Pan

From The Maze Where Realities Converge - the psychedelic encyclopedia of reality from The Ultimate Comment

The Hymn To Pan:

A horned man is a common symbol in shamanic cultures. The horns give a sense of power, of danger, of forces that are seen in life, but to which man has not yet attained. The twin horns represent duality, creation, sex and death, good and evil, dark and light, beauty and terror. Pan basically represents life in its most cosmic sense. Pan is the sum total of all mammalian, reptilian, human, fish, insect and microbial life. (Whether you want to include robots and aliens is up to you.) For this reason he is depicted as a sort of multi-beast, with human bits (both male and female), horns, wings, hairy legs and hooves, and sometimes reptile bits, fish bits, insect bits. He may have necrotic bits, like rotting flesh or dead stuff. He is often depicted with a light between his horns, representing spirit. Pan is sex. "He" is a hermaphrodite (the absence of neuter pronouns in this language can be pesky, can't it?) and is depicted with both male and female gentials, or with male genitals and breasts. This shows not only that he is the sum total of life, hence both male and female, but has all the symbolism of the interrobang - the unity of the doer and the thing-done-unto, the unity of sex and death, he is "all-begetter and all-devourer", or, in alchemical terms, the union of the principles of Solve and Coagula (dissolving and congealing) (see them written on his arms here?)

Pan is death. The union of sex and death is equated, by chaos magicians, with the methods of attaining ecstasy - death corresponds to meditation, trance and suchlike quiescent methods, while sex corresponds to methods like dancing, frenzy and.....can you guess?.... sex! Pan is emphatically not the Christian Satan. He does not represent wanton cruelty and evil . He does however, represent death, because - like that cat said in The Lion King - it's all part of the circle of life. Of course, he's not really good either. Pan is non-moral like Nature is non-moral. Pan may be pretty safely identified with the Wiccan 'Horned God', the Templar's Baphomet, the Celtic Cernunnos, the Gnostic Abraxas and the spanking-new Chaote god Thanateros (Thanateros=Thanatos+Eros=Death+Sex) and more tenuously linked to the Hindu Kali, Baron Samedi of Haitian voodoo and the Egyptian Horus, all being Sex 'n' Death gods.