THE TOUCH OF PAN

Again a footfall sounded far away upon an unruined world…and He was gone – back into the wind and water whence He came. The thousand faces lifted; all stood up; the hush of worship still among them. There was a quiet as of the dawn. The piping floated over wood and field, fading into silence. All looked at one another… And then once more the laughter and the play broke loose.

(The Touch of Pan: Algernon Blackwood)

In the miasma of confusion and bloodshed that characterised the first half of the 20^th century, one might assume men found little time for rural deities of past ages. But such an assumption would be groundless. At the turn of the century, a magazine called Pan flourished in Germany, devoting itself to Nietzschean ramblings, knights in armour and the salubriousness of Teutonic rusticity. The pipings of the goat-god reached England and were heard distinctly amid the undergrowth of Edwardian writing. With dry amusement, Max Beerbohm observed that “current literature did not suffer from any lack of fauns… We had not yet tired of them and their hoofs and slanting eyes and their way of coming suddenly out of woods to wean quiet English villages from respectability.”

Definitely Pan was not dead, as Plutarch's anecdote suggested, but still with us, gnawing at the edge of the microchip, lurking in the corners of those virtual realities in which we try to escape. Despite the depletion of his forest habitat, innumerable subsequent Pan-encounters took place when men and women, standing alone in some unfrequented, formerly sacred spot, felt an excessive, inexplicable panic. Mountaineers on high precipices would come over cowed and depressed, seized by an engulfing cloud of misery. The force was so potent that it led some close to the brink of suicide.

Novelist and Governor General of Canada, John Buchan, recalled an incident in the Bavarian Alps. He was walking through a pinewood with a local forester when the panic swept over both of them. Without speaking, they broke into a headlong run until they collapsed exhausted on the highway below. Another witness recalled a night fishing incident in that took place on a beach in Deal, Kent. As he cast his line and waited for the bass to come, “the warm night suddenly grew cold. An icy wind tainted with an indescribable foulness was blowing towards me from the face of the cliff directly behind me. I had a terrifying sensation of being attacked by some supernatural force. My whole mind was dissolving into a whirling black chaos and my physical strength seemed to be draining away. I felt myself to be the direct focus of an emanation which was unendurably evil and unbelievably powerful. Somehow, like one groping in a nightmare, I managed to dismantle my rod and stumble to where the motorcycle was propped at the foot of the cliffs.”

In May of 1966, Pan appeared in material form to Ogilvie Crombie, an Elizabethan scholar and member of the Findhorn Community, devoted to the promotion of all things natural. Walking down the Mound in Edinburgh’s Old Town, he had the sensation of walking naked “through a medium denser than air but not as dense as water.” This was followed by “warmth and tingling like a mixture of pins and needles in an electric shock” and then he saw, walking beside him, a brown-eyed shaggy-legged faun who played on his pipes and told him: “All human beings are afraid of me.”

Wild Man of the Pamirs

Not only was Pan still active amid the encroaching luxuries of civilised existence but other atavistic throwbacks made brief, enigmatic comebacks. Most suprisingly the Wild Man – the uncouth club-wielding brute of the medieval imagination – was encountered in the remoter regions of Asia.

In 1925, Major General Mikail Stephanovich Topilsky was pursuing the forces of the White Army through the Pamir Mountains of southern Russia. His troop drew attention of bare footprints in the snow which led to a cave by a cliff-face too steep for a man to climb. Nearby was a deposit of human-like faeces containing the remains of dried berries. Hearing a rustling disturbance in the cave, they opened fire with machines guns on what they thought was a band of soldiers in hiding. Out of the cave staggered a wild hairy man with dark eyes. Uttering inarticulate gasps of pain, he fell dead at the soldiers' feet. A doctor examined him and declared him not to be human. At first glance, he seemed to resemble an ape, but close inspection revealed that he was not anatomically different from man, possessing the same genitalia, only his body was covered with thick hair, his hands slightly wider, and his feet much wider and shorter than a man's. He had a flat nose and Mongol type of face with slanting forehead, large, even-shaped teeth and massive lower jaws. The soldiers were shaken and moved by the sight of the strange hominid, lying there with bared teeth and desolate eyes, and felt compelled to give him a burial. They placed him under a cairn of stones and left him there amid the frozen wastes, perhaps the last true Wild Man - descendant of our Neanderthal ancestors - ever seen alive.

Panic Attack

The Pamirs were one of the few remaining place where a prehistoric leftover – if such the ‘wild man’ was – might survive. As the population expands, the surface area of the globe stays constant. More and more people occupy less and less space. People have to opt for filing-block skyscrapers or a dome at the bottom of the ocean. Formerly an epithet radiating a charge of fear, ‘wild’ now obtained a pleasurable dimension, a frisson denoting open forest or lakeland where one could relax and interact with the benign and varied forms of nature. If wild beasts were present – bears, wolves and mountains lions – so much the better. It spiced the appeal of the district - after all, they were the aboriginal inhabitants with proper rights to graze and wander. Yes, animals had rights, too: to live and thrive unhunted, unmolested, unskinned.

If culling proved necessary, it was to be by instant and humane methods. Wilderness - in theory at least - was a precious area, no longer to be overcome and tamed pioneer-fashion, but to be fenced around, preserved and labelled National Park or Nature Reserve. The latter were areas in which industrial man could aerate his soul just as Jean Jacques Rousseau had delighted in the diamond snows and air-baths of the high alps. Land was no longer a commodity. Gone were the days when a peasant might have a whole field of his own to work and the notion of body-space became a legislative issue. This steady ‘filling up’ and possession of the world’s space entailed the passing of more and more laws. More people implied less freedom. Such factors, allied to the pressure of keeping down a job and maintaining a family, sent men and women looking for new ways of relaxing or letting go of their inhibitions. There were bars, dance halls and discotheques, but there were few modern ceremonies that allowed young people to lose restraint or go dangerously mad. Those looking for equivalents find an outlet in substance abuse: “I got stoned” or “smashed out of my skull” or “blew my mind”.

In such a frustrated context, Pan made his presence known through the common if unwelcome phenomenon of the ‘panic attack’. Usually attributed to stress, overwork and sundry mental problems, sufferers found it “difficult to cope”. Everything seemed to “get them down”. A crowded street, a busy waiting room, a wooded lane - all produced fits of terror and shaking. Why? What was leaking into their systems and causing this? Arguably it was the same ‘all’ at work as thousands of years ago, inducing fear and alarm, yet qualitatively different from the primordial terror. The latter was induced by the prowling unknown - by the hostile wilderness beyond the campfire - while the modern panic attack seemed to be caused by an excess of knowledge and obligation. To sufferers, it seemed as if the bedrock facts of their daily lives - all the laws, mortgages, emotional upsets, filial obligations – were dissolving and congealing into a single mass - formless, threatening and pitiless. In other words, Pan was penetrating the centrally heated skins of the 20^th century and demonstrating that knowing too much can be as frightening and chaotic as knowing too little.

Borley Rectory

The ‘Pan’ experience impinges on one. It is not a thing one pursues. The very act of concentration or ‘intentionality’ tends to cancel it out. But once an experience has been categorised, there is a natural gravitation towards analysing its contents. From such an impulse arises the educative process that transforms yesterday’s terrors into tomorrow’s pleasures. Where formerly a ghost had been a thing one fled from shrieking, by the 1920s it had become something to pursue as ardently as a beautiful woman. While the literati were sporting among the inky glades and parchment meadows, intent on trapping the elusive goat-god, an eminent psychic researcher, Harry Price, was cataloguing the phantoms reputed to reside in Britain’s most haunted house: Borley Rectory.

Price has been criticised for preferring the limelight of newspaper publicity to the small, patient glow empirical research, but it was through Borley Rectory that he gained the reputation of being Britain’s premier ghost-hunter. Since its erection in 1863, various ghostly visitations had disturbed the incumbents: apparitions, poltergeist activity, spontaneous ‘spirit’ writing and planchette communication. Eerie stories emerged of kidnap and intrigue, of an affair between a monk and a nun ending with a rape and a murder. The families who lived in the Rectory had troubled histories, too, which seemed to entwine with the bizarre phenomena. Price itemised the latter as “raps, taps and knockings; displacement of objects, clicks and cracks; sounds as of a door closing; knocks, bumps, thuds, jumping or stamping; dragging noise; wailing sounds; rustling or scrabbling noises; metallic sounds; crashing, as of crockery falling; wall-pencillings; appearance of objects; luminous phenomenon; odours, pleasant and unpleasant; sensation of coldness; tactual phenomena; sensation of a presence; and a fulfilled prediction.”

The climax came on 27 March 1938 with a planchette message from an entity called Sunex Amures who announced he was going to burn down the Rectory that night – a event delayed eleven until 27 February 1939. Such dramatic incidents makeThe Most Haunted House in Britain (1940) a minor occult classic. The level-headed, ostensible practicality of Price endows him with a Buchanesque authority. Here indeed we have a doughty explorer of the spiritual borderlands who employs scientific apparatus to trap the unwary ghost. “In case the reader may wish to know,” he writes, “what a psychic investigator takes with him when engaged on an important case, I will enumerate some of the items: a pair of soft felt overshoes for creeping, unheard, about the house in order that neither human beings nor paranormal ‘entities’ shall be disturbed when producing ‘phenomena’; steel measuring tape for measuring chambers of hidey-holes; steel screw-eyes, lead post-office seals, sealing tool, strong cord or tape, and adhesive surgical tape, for sealing doors, windows or cupboards; a set of tools, with wire nails, nails, etc; hank of electric flex, small electric bells and switches (for secret electrical contacts)...”

The list proceeds remorselessly, like a mad handyman’s bottomless toolbox. Additionally there is a “flask of brandy” for reviving investigators who fall faint from fear or injury. Borley’s spirits had the unpleasant habit of tossing things around pell-mell – violently enough at times for Price to have added a miner’s safety helmet to his list of gadgetry.

Or was it the sprits? According to Charles Sutton (1950), Price used to walk behind investigators at Borley, casually shattering windows and attributing the delinquency to poltergeists. During a guided tour, he insisted the suspicious Mr Sutton walk ahead, but when the latter heard the sound of breaking glass, instead of pursuing the noise, he turned on Price and asked him to empty out his pockets: “He refused to to do so, so I plunged my hands into both his coat pockets and found that they contained a number of pebbles and stones of various sizes.”

The Borley story stands as a clever, complex narrative, and the Rectory as an unpleasant, creepy place. But aside from Price’s window-smashing expertise, a good deal of the phenomena appears unrelated or linked only by messages from the planchette, raising the suspicion that Price might have employed the latter as a literary device to bind otherwise disconnected events.

After Borley, Price’s most famous antic took place at the centenary of the death of Goethe in 1932. The year before he had announced that he would prove the fallacy of transcendental magic by performing a demon-invoking ritual – or act of ‘black magic’ - on top of the Brocken in Germany. Several Germans involved in the Goethe celebrations thought Price’s experiment to be in the Faustian tradition - accordingly he was invited to slot in the programme. Price agreed. After gathering the requisite accessories - bats’ blood, scraping of church bells, soot and honey - he waited for Walpurgis Night to break on the highest peak in the Harz Mountains. There he found the organisers of the festival had drawn for him a magic circle, accurately designed in mosaic, near the Granite Altar. Unfortunately the moon could not be seen for mist – but nothing could be done about that .

Attending Price was the genial rationalist and radio personality, Professor Joad; a spotless white-robed maiden; a goat whom, it was hoped, the spell would transform into a youth of surpassing beauty; 42 photographers; 73 pressmen and a hefty movie camera. Price recited the medieval incantation clearly but the goat remained goat - as he had indeed predicted it would - but this unfortunate adventure resulted in him being dubbed the Goat Man; aptly enough, for Pan also is the Cosmic Joker, who visits mockery on the portentous and serious-minded.

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