Greek religion and mythology Essay

In Greek religion and mythology, Pan (Ancient Greek , Pn) is the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature of mountain wilds, hunting and rustic music, and familiar of the nymphs.1 His name originates within the Ancient Greek language, from the word paein (), meaning to stray.2 He has the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat, in the same manner as a faun or satyr.With his mother country in rustic Arcadia, he is recognized as the god of fields, groves, and wooded glens because of this, Pan is connected to fertility and the season of spring. The ancient Greeks to a fault considered Pan to be the god of theatrical criticism.3 In Roman religion and myth, Pans counterpart was Faunus, a nature god who was the father of Bona Dea, sometimes identified as Fauna. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Pan became a significant figure in the Romantic movement of western Europe, and also in the 20th-century Neopagan movement.4OriginsIn his early appearance in literature, Pindars Pythian Ode i ii. 78, Pan is associated with a mother goddess, perhaps Rhea or Cybele Pindar refers to virgins worshipping Cybele and Pan near the poets house in Boeotia.5 The neckcloth of Pan is unclear6 in some myths he is the son of Zeus, though generally he is the son of Hermes or Dionysus, with whom his mother is said to be a nymph, sometimes Dryope or, in Nonnus, Dionysiaca (14.92), Penelope of Mantineia in Arcadia. This nymph at some point in the tradition became conflated with Penelope, the wife of Odysseus. Pausanias 8.12.5 records the story that Penelope had in particular been unfaithful to her husband, who banished her to Mantineia upon his return.Other sources (Duris of Samos the Vergilian commentator Servius) report that Penelope slept with all 108 suitors in Odysseus absence, and gave birth to Pan as a result.7 This myth reflects the folk etymology that equates Pans name () with the Greek word for all ().8 It is more likely to be cognate with paein, to pasture, and to share an ori gin with the modern English word pasture. In 1924, Hermann Collitz suggested that Greek Pan and Indic Pushan efficiency have a common Indo-European origin.9 In the Mystery cults of the highly syncretic Hellenistic era10 Pan is make cognate with Phanes/Protogonos, Zeus, Dionysus and Eros.11 The Roman Faunus, a god of Indo-European origin, was equated with Pan.However, accounts of Pans genealogy are so varied that it must lie buried mystifying in mythic time. Like other nature spirits, Pan appears to be older than the Olympians, if it is true that he gave Artemis her hunting dogs and taught the secret of prophecy to Apollo. Pan might be multiplied as the Panes (Burkert 1985, III.3.2 Ruck and Staples 1994 p 13212) or the Paniskoi. Kerenyi (p. 174) notes from scholia that Aeschylus in Rhesus distinguished between two Pans, one the son of Zeus and collimate of Arcas, and one a son of Cronus. In the retinue of Dionysos, or in depictions of wild landscapes, there appeared not only a gre at Pan, but also little Pans, Paniskoi, who played the same part as the Satyrs.