Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros.

“The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He has been called the Father of all the Gods, but most of his children have been stillborn.”

So says a character in The Music on the Hill, one of the slightly more serious stories from Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis (1911). Saki’s Pan is a youthful spirit closer to a faun than the goatish creature of legend. But being a gay writer whose tales regularly feature naked young men (surprisingly so, given the time they were written) I’m sure Saki would have appreciated the Roman statue above. There’s nothing chaste about this Pan with his “token erect of thorny thigh” as Aleister Crowley put it in his lascivious 1929 Hymn to Pan, a poem which caused a scandal when read aloud at his funeral some years later. The Roman statue was for a long while an exhibit in the restricted collection of the Naples National Archaeological Museum where all the more scurrilous and priapic artefacts unearthed at Pompeii were kept safely away from women, children and the great unwashed. These are now on public display and include the notorious statue of a goat being penetrated by a satyr.

Aubrey Beardsley rarely wasted an opportunity to include a faun, satyr, herm or Pan figure in his early drawings, whether suitable or not. His title page for Oscar Wilde’s Salomé featured a herm (censored by the publisher) which had nothing to do with the play, and there’s a Pan figure brandishing pipes in his earlier How King Arthur Saw the Questing Beast, from the Morte D’Arthur. Beardsley was an increasingly celebrated artist by the time he was asked to illustrate the Keynotes series of novels for John Lane in 1893 and with Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, the notoriety of the artist joined forces with an author whose weird tale was condemned as obscene, even as it established Machen as a uniquely gifted writer. Machen knew Crowley via The Golden Dawn and his tale of femme fatale Helen Vaughan was followed by an eruption of Edwardian paganism with Saki’s stories, A Touch of Pan and Pan’s Garden by Algernon Blackwood, The Blessing of Pan by Lord Dunsany, The Goat-Foot God by Dion Fortune and others. There’s even that curious moment in The Wind in the Willows whose seventh chapter, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, finds Mole and Rat having a mystical encounter:

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

If the 18th century looked to the Classical world for order—especially where architecture was concerned—the 19th century seemed to find in Pan a spirit contrary to a world which was altogether too ordered, regimented and industrialised. Artists and writers in Germany seemed to think so when they named their Symbolist periodical after the pagan god. PAN was founded in 1895 and featured a stunning range of fin de siècle talent:

The journal PAN, which was published in Berlin between 1895 and 1900, is regarded as one of the most important voices of Art Nouveau in Germany. Edited by Otto Julius Bierbaum and Julius Meier-Graefem, the journal published numerous illustrations by well-known, and also unknown, young international artists. Additionally, there were full-page original designs, a simple modern typeface, vignettes and other forms of illustration. Some of the more well-known artists who published in PAN include Peter Behrens, Franz von Stuck, Max Klinger, Käthe Kollwitz, Auguste Rodin, Paul Signac and Félix Vallotton. Like the journal Jugend, PAN was critical about the artistic policy of the German Empire under Wilhelm. The journal attempted to present the very best of contemporary art, without showing preference for any particular school or movement, in order to allow comparison with classical art.

Cover by Franz Stuck.

PAN is featured regularly in books about the art of the period but for a long time there was next to nothing about the periodical on websites. That’s changed thanks to the Heidelberg University Library which has the bound collection whose cover is shown above available to view as high-res scans or to download as a single PDF. The text is in German, of course, but there’s a wealth of gorgeous Art Nouveau designs within, as well as many fine illustrations.

Joseph Sattler.

Man, Myth & Magic #1 (1970). Cover illustration is a detail of Elemental aka The Vampires are Coming aka Pan by Austin Osman Spare.

William Burroughs and Brion Gysin regularly mourned the death of Pan in the modern world, despite Burroughs invoking Pan’s spirit (among others) at the opening of Cities of the Red Night while Gysin maintained a lifelong devotion to the panpipe music of the Master Musicians of Joujouka. Pan Books still survives, albeit as a shadow of its former self, and filmgoers have found themselves lost in Pan’s Labyrinth; I produced a mis-proportioned Pan portrait of my own in 1986. There are many other examples to be found. Something about the primal archetype which Pan represents won’t be buried so easily. Pan isn’t dead; far from it, he’s as lively as ever.

Update: Take me into insanity | A Guardian piece about the Joujouka pipers.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peake’s Pan
• Art Nouveau illustration
• Jugend Magazine
• Arthur Machen book covers
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• Hadrian and Greek love
• The Chronicles of Clovis and other sarcastic delights

Light play on the river Thame by net_efekt.

…the major products of Mr. Blackwood attain a genuinely classic level, and evoke as does nothing else in literature an awed convinced sense of the imminence of strange spiritual spheres of entities.

The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood’s fiction includes both novels and shorter tales, the latter sometimes independent and sometimes arrayed in series. Foremost of all must be reckoned The Willows, in which the nameless presences on a desolate Danube island are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note.

Thus wrote HP Lovecraft in 1927 as part of his lengthy overview of horror fiction, Supernatural Horror in Literature. Lovecraft was enthusiastic about many of Blackwood’s weird tales, rating him as one of the contemporary masters along with Arthur Machen. A year before his essay he prefaced The Call of Cthulhu with a Blackwood quote and regularly referred to The Willows as one of his favourite stories. Blackwood’s tale continues to find enthusiasts today, among them the Ghost Box music collective whose Belbury Poly CD titled after the story manages to reference in the space of 44 minutes Blackwood, Machen, CS Lewis and The Morning of the Magicians.

If your curiosity is sufficiently piqued by this point, you can read the story online at Wikisource or Project Gutenberg. Or you can listen to a reading in a new posting at LibriVox. The perfect thing for autumn and the month of Halloween.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Horror in the shadows
• Wanna see something really scary?
• Ghost Box
• The Absolute Elsewhere

Scariest thing in the Coulthart household, easily out-classing anything on children’s television (Doctor Who monsters included), was the cover of the third Pan Book of Horror Stories. My parents had a small collection of paperbacks from the early Sixties which included some horror and occult fiction. My sister and I found this book one day while rooting in an old suitcase and were both mortified by it. I seem to remember there being dares to go and look at it again and also have vague recollections of at least one nightmare occurring as a result. A shame there isn’t a larger scan available since I’m curious to know who the artist was.

A few years later I was reading the Pan series myself although I never went back to this particular one. Herbert van Thal’s selections got off to a good start, reprinting old horror classics with newer fiction, but soon degenerated into detailed and repetitive tales of dismemberment and blood-letting, the kind of stuff that makes you think “cool” when you’re a teenage boy but which is otherwise worthless. Most of the writers in the later books are unheard of elsewhere which makes me suspect they were probably hacks earning a quick couple of quid writing under pseudonyms. The strangest thing about volume three now is looking at the contents list and seeing that we had stories by William Hope Hodgson and Algernon Blackwood in the house all that time and I never knew it.

Update: The cover artist was W Francis Phillips.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Druillet meets Hodgson
• A playlist for Halloween
• Ghost Box
• Le horreur cosmique

Q: What do you get when you cross analogue synthesizers, samples from obscure public information films, the graphic design of Pelican Books, Arthur Machen, HP Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, CS Lewis, Hammer horror, the Wicker Man and the music from Oliver Postgate’s animated films for children?

A: the CD releases by artists on the Ghost Box label. Ghost Box describe themselves as “an independent music label for artists that find inspiration in library music albums, folklore, vintage electronics, and the school music room” which, if you’re familiar with the reference points, is exactly what you get. A rather wonderful blend it is too, some of the tracks on Belbury Poly’s The Willows (named after Algernon Blackwood’s stunning horror tale) are how I expected Stereolab to sound until I heard them and was rather disappointed.

Favourite of the Ghost Box releases I’ve heard to date is (perhaps inevitably) Ourobourindra by Eric Zann (the “artist” here is named after Lovecraft’s haunted musician from The Music of Erich Zann). The website description—”Eric Zann’s radios, oscillators and recordings conjure eldritch, echoing spaces and invoke the voices of the dead that whisper within them”—again is a pretty accurate summation of this atmospheric and sinister audio collage. “Sinister” is a term that can be applied to much of this music and the Ghost Box founders, Julian House and Jim Jupp, declare in a Wire feature this month that matters spectral are of particular concern, hence the label name. Ourobourindra works especially well in this regard, sounding like the product of someone working through a trauma caused by viewing the seance scene from Dracula AD 1972 at too young an age. This is one I’ll be playing on Halloween.

Ghost Box music can be purchased online here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Penguin book covers
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• The music of the Wicker Man
• The Absolute Elsewhere