The Goat-Foot God

Came the voice of Destiny,
Calling o'er the Ionian Sea,
"The Great God Pan is dead, is dead.
Humbled is the horned head;
Shut the door that hath no key---
Waste the vales of Arcady."

Shackled by the Iron Age,
Lost the woodland heritabe,
Heavy goes the heart of man,
Parted from the light-foot Pan;
Wearily he wears the chain
Till the Goat-god comes again.

Half a man and half a beast,
Pan is greatest, Pan is least.
Pan is all, and all is Pan;
Look for him in every-man;
Goat-hoof swift and shaggy thigh-
Follow him to Arcady.

He shall wake the living dead---
Cloven hoof and horned heard,
Human heart and human brain,
Pan the Goat-god comes again!
Half a beast and half a man---
Pan is all, and all is Pan.
..........Come, O Goat-god, come again!

........(From "The Rite of Pan.")

Descriptions:

God made manifest in Nature.
Is the same everywhere. He's elemental force-that's all he is.
He comes up from the earth under your feet, just as spiritual force, the sun-force, comes down from the sky over your head.
Unleash the Pan Within and send it forth in search of the Cosmic Pan.

His slanted agate eyes gleaming and kindley. He was the keeper of all wild and hunted souls for which no place could be found in a man-made world. They were coming down onto the fundamental realities of life which cannot be shaken, to which all things must come in the end. She began to feel safe and secure. ...This was the real invocation to Pan-the surrender to bed-rock natural fact, the return to Nature, the sinking back into the Cosmic life.

Purpose:

Break away from limitations and find fullness of life.
Stir up repressions.
Invoking Pan opens up the subconscious.
Rouse the Pan Within, and he makes contact with the Great God, the First-begotten Love, who is by no means merely a Cosmic Billy-goat.

Civilisation had lost touch with its foundations, and, sick in heart and head in conswquence, was groping desperately for fundamentals. Everything was ripe for the return of Pan, as Pan had probably known when he answered the cry of his invoker.

Descriptions of Experiences:

Pan's touch turns everything brightly coloured, everything suddenly becomes vivid, exciting, perilous.
A curious cold exhilarating fear, a touch of panic.
There would be a sudden rush of repressed emotion, like the bursting of a mill-dam.
Once again he was adrift in time and space and was afraid. But at the same time he felt a strange exhilaration and sense of flowing power.

He knew the thing shi whole being ached for-life, more life, fullness of life- the blessing of Pan.

It seemed to him as if something in his own mind opened like a door, and the two minds coincided. There was no closing-down of the one consciousness as the other opened, they were intercommunicating.

Then gradually the panic fear passed away and its place was taken by a profound peace. Then the peace gave place to a curious tense thrilling, like a great organ-note sounding in the soul. Then that too gradually died away.

He, for his part, did not know quite what to expect, and so could not decide whether he should be disappointed that more that was spectacular had not happened, or satisfied that so much had already come about. Looking back over the weeks that had passed since he had started to break out of the luminous opacity that was his opal, he could not deny that things had happened....Was all this the fruit of his invocation of Pan? He began to suspect that it was. For after all, what was an invocation of Pan, in the first instance, save a resolution to break out of the opal? He had given permission to his own subconscious to come up to the light; then he had gone on to invoke the primordial forces of life to declare themselves, not only had he let loose the Pan within, but he had called upon the Great God Pan with-out.

To Perform the Incantation:

The ability to perform a composition of place-constructing a scene in your imagination.
Deliberately wake the Inner Pan till it burst its inhibitions and the two sides of ones Nature join up.
Steadily, deliberately, under control all the time, as the ancient priests did it-by means of ritual. But it was the Priestess who would have to do it.
Once things begin to stir they soon get up pace, and if you haven't got them in hand, well, they're soon out of hand.
In order to get an invocation of the old gods to work, something in the nature of a self-starter had to be provided. As St. Ignatius so truly said in another context: "Put yourself in the posture of prayer, and you will feel prayerful." Country-fold, when a pump won't suck, pour a little water down it; this seals the valve, and the pump gets going. So it is with invocations.

Could be invoked at will by simply thinking of him in a particular way, which consists in identifying oneself with him instead of looking at him.

General Info:

When it comes to conceiving transcendent things, minds vary enormously in their capacity, and the trained mind is a very different matter to the untrained; and the mind that is conditioned by music and incense and dim lights has very different capacities to the mind that goes at the job in cold blood.

The magician surrounds himself with the symbols of a particular potency when he performs a magical operation in order to help himself concentrate.

After all, what had his quest of Pan been save a hunger for the primative and vital amid all the sophistication and devitalisation of this life.And Pan was leading him back to the primitive along the path of his own evolution. Provided he had the courage to sink down through his own subconsciousness he would pass through the darkness and tragedy and come out into the radiance.

What is the word of power that brings any god, save adoration? It is the heart not the tongue that invokes. Lift up your heart unto the Lord and never mind about your hands, whether that lord be Adonai or Adonis. When he had asserted to himself the Divine Right of Nature, he had evoked Pan quite effectively. Each time he had renewed the asseration Pan had answered. Each time he had doubted the natural divinity, the god had withdrawn. There is a life behind the personality that uses personalities as masks. There are times when life puts off the mask and deep answers unto deep. Unless there is elemental life behind the personality, the loveliest mask is lifeless.

"I see now that you have been working with power all along. Anyone who means business always works with power. You got Pan at the first go-off; whether he is subjective or objective doesn't matter. You mean business, and that is an effective evocation."
"Can you get any of the gods that way?"
"No, you can't, because the rest are highly specialized, and you have got to get each one in his own particular way. But Pan is All. You can get him any old way simply by wanting him. And he can introduce you to Parnasus if he sees fit."
"He will introduce you to every blessed thing you've got in your subconscious, and to every blessed thing in the racial memory that's behind you, and to the biological memory behind that, to the morphological memory of all your organs, and to the physiological memory of all your functions---"
"Odd isn't it, that an old billy-goat can teach you all that?"
"Well, you see, the billy-goat stands for unrepression, or at least so I have always understood from those who keep goats."
"Of course the whole thing is simply the opening-up of the subconscious, only there's a dashed sight more to the subconscious than most people suspect; or at any rate, than anyone with a reputation to lose is prepared to say on paper."

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