THE DEEP ONES: "The Death of Pan" and "The Tomb of Pan" by Lord Dunsany

"The Death of Pan" and "The Tomb of Pan" by Lord Dunsany

Discussion begins May 10, 2023.



"The Death of Pan" first published in Fifty-One Tales (1915)
"The Tomb of Pan" first published in the March 26, 1910 Saturday Review (London)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?903621
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?903669

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Food of Death: Fifty-One Tales

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/fotd/fotd04.htm
https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/fotd/fotd52.htm

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1TigQUy5fE

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Dunsany
https://tinyurl.com/46djn7uu

I've been too distracted to participate in our recent reads, but the combination of Lord Dunsany and what I knew to be very short stories lured me back today.

Looking forward to what the crowd has to say on Wednesday.

As literary deployments of Pan, these are allied to the raft of "sylvan dread" stories we read a while ago. While there isn't too much dread here - except presumably on the part of the Arcadian maidens - the motif of people complacently assuming that Pan is dead (or powerless, or never existed at all) is shared.

The popularity of the death of Pan is at least parly due to Plutarch's story about the supernatural announcement that The great god Pan is dead!, though similar stories about other gods, like those about Zeus' tomb on Crete, don't seem to have engendered any similar literary afterlife.

"Arcady" is an old French-derived form of "Arcadia", the Greek region especially associated with Pan.

This resurgent Pan is decidedly less menacing than Machen's Great God Pan from a generation earlier!

Plutarch is the ultimate source for "The great god Pan is dead!" but it's the transformation of the anecdote by Eusebius and other Christian authorities that gave it staying power and cultural cache. Implicit is the vanquishing of Pan by Jesus, where the two are competing "shepherd" deities. The fin de siecle valorization of Pan (continuing to and through Aleister Crowley among others and arguably visible in these pieces) is thus a rejection of Christianity.

In "The Tomb of Pan," though, the contrast is with the "enlightened people," suggesting that the opposition is between ancient enthusiasm and modern rationality.

Some observations on "The Death of Pan":

"London" is perhaps taken to represent cultural modernity, while "Arcady" is not merely a geographic place, but the state of contemplating antiquity.

The appearance of the "small star" gets its own short paragraph. What does it portend, I wonder? Is it perhaps Venus, "the evening star" which is often the first light to be revealed by darkening dusk?

Pan is revived by laughter, possibly in his umbrage at being laughed at, but more likely in the way that it tickles his persistent vitality. The laughter doesn't come from the alien Londoners but from the Arcadian girls, for whom he has an established appetite.

"Who is buried in Pan's tomb?"

No one is buried in Grant's tomb, because they are entombed above ground. Dunsany seems to suggest that no one is buried in Pan's tomb, because it is a mistaken and/or mendacious cenotaph.

This one reminds me of one of my favorite poems by Ishmael Reed:

DRAGON'S BLOOD

just because you
cant see d stones dont
mean im not building
you aint no mason. how
d fuck would you know.

Does Pan chase the maidens or the maidens Pan?

>8 alaudacorax:

Surely the former, literally chasing maidens being a well-established pastime of Pan.

>9 AndreasJ:

I wondered if, perhaps, Dunsany wasn't deliberately being a bit ambiguous.

I agree that Pan is supposed to be understood as the pursuer, but the point is taken! "Pursuit" is left quite vague.

Both of these very short pieces end with an emphasis on laughter, as a way of reviving Pan ("Death") or as his own validating utterance ("Tomb"). That puts me in mind of Crowley's formula, most succinctly expressed in The Book of Lies, contrasting the "Comedy of Pan" with the "Tragedy of Man." The Universal Comedy is "that man should think he hunteth, while those hounds (Love & Death) hunt him." The Particular Tragedy arises as individuals resist their fates.

The identification of Christianity with humanity and tragedy is implicit in Crowley's complex of ideas (e.g. The World's Tragedy). I've encountered a sophisticated independent presentation in Ruprecht's Tragic Posture and Tragic Vision, which champions the gospel of Mark as a tragic "performance," focusing on the garden of Gethsemane, and indulging in a full comparison of the four canonical gospels with respect to this episode.

There is a literal stage comedy Pan and the Young Shepherd from 1906 that continued to be staged through the 1920s. Glancing at the text in Google Books, I see that it concludes strangely with a (mocking?) song for the Christian Epiphany before Explicit Comedia Juvenis Pastoris.