From Pan to the Devil: the 'demonization' and the removal of ancient European cults

di Marco Maculotti
cover: Arnold Böcklin, “Pan, the Syrinx-Blowing”, 1827

We have previously had the opportunity to see that, in the first centuries of our era and even during the medieval era, the cd. "Rural paganism" it kept its diffusion unchanged, especially in the areas further away from the large inhabited centers. St. Maximus noted that "in the fourth century (...) the first missionaries passed from city to city and rapidly spread the Gospel over a very large area, but they did not even touch the surrounding countryside", Then adding that" even in the fifth and sixth centuries, when most of them had long since been converted, in Gaul and Spain the Church, as shown by the repeated canons of the councils of the time, encountered great difficulty in suppressing the ancient rites with which peasants from time immemorial averted plagues e they increased the fertility of the flocks and fields"[AA Barb, cit. in Centini, p.101].

As a consequence of this mistrust of the survival of ancient cults and practices, the Church, in the Canons of the Councils and in the homilies of the bishops, clearly distanced itself from all those popular traditions that "trying to bring down the negative powers of the devil, in fact they ended up following his same path, resorting to apotropaic practices of clear pagan origin "[Centini, The beasts of the Devil, p.64]. So you can see how every pre-Christian cultic survival, as "pagan", was automatically branded as contrary to the dogmas of the Judeo-Christian tradition and, therefore, automatically considered "demonic", "satanic". This attitude of impatience gave way to the new wave of persecutions against ancient cults and practices; the work will later be carried out by the Inquisition, which will make a clean sweep of "heretics" and "witches" until the eighteenth century, when by now nothing will remain of the "pagan wisdom". What Christianity did, in essence, was eradicate the ancient European cults by accusing them of being "demonic cults": what it did, on the other hand, also on the opposite side of the ocean with the Amerindian populations.

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Pan, the Devil and the witches

The association between the god of vegetation, animals and uncontaminated nature and the Devil of the Christian tradition finds its origin in themedieval Christian interpretation of the figure of Pan, pastoral and rural god of a world without laws, of pure enjoyment and wildness. Number of shepherds and flocks, almost a sort of anthropomorphization of nature (in the same way as Cernunno, green man or of Wildermann), his name is derived from paon ("He who grazes"), but he was also defined as a "filthy with shiny coat", as a symbol of an uninhibited sexuality independent of any morality, reminiscent of archaic times, during which the human being lived immersed in this sort of "panic promiscuity".

All these functional characteristics, led in the Christian era to the identification of Pan with the Devil; Massimo Centini writes that, "Goat feet, horns, thick hair and tail are recurring attributes of the divine sylvan creature of Arcadia, who from 'filthy with shiny hair' has been transformed into Lord of the Underworld and eternal tempter of mankind" [The beasts of the Devil, pp. 70-1], in line with the dogmas of the new religion. On the other hand, according to the author [Ibidem, p.66] "the figure of the devil has never lost its atavistic aura of almost wild (animal) evil, which in fact relates it to a perverse universe, full of symbols that are often as ancient as man", of which rarely the origins are remembered.

These connections, in the final analysis, "determined a whole series of negative attitudes, which profoundly influenced the interpretative process carried out around the child creatures of wild nature and the forest, a process not enlightened by the new religion" [Ibidem, pp. 70-1]. This caused, over the centuries, a removal of certain symbolic elements from the European collective psyche with the result that, having no more way to decipher archetypal certain symbols and, consequently, to externalize certain qualities of being that were now seen in contrast with the official cult, eventually led to the replacement of ancient rites with perverse practices and - these for real -demonic. As Centini states [Ibidem, p.66]:

“It was there demonization to have dispersed the primitive bases from which the reason for being sylvan took shape, able to personify the link between Nature and Culture. The connection between the wild man and the universe of devils, mediated by a whole series of other evil creatures, still appears to a large extent conditioned by the consciousness of sin embodied in a figure no longer human and relegated, in appearance and behavior, to the rank of beast ".

The symbolic and ritual complex that once belonged to Pan, god of nature seen as a single organism (Bread= "All") *, thus becomes in medieval times the platform on which the terrifying one will dance Princeps huius mundi: the impulses panics of the European collective psyche, harnessed by religious and moral dogmas extraneous to their own culture, led to the construction of the sabbatical ritual during which the devil was worshiped, adversary of the god of the Old Testament. The same happened in Cernunno in Gaul and in the territories inhabited by populations of Celtic lineage: "the primitive model of the Lord of animals, which very often did not correspond to a precise physical aspect, was interpreted in a diabolical key, acquiring an anthropomorphic conformation, attributable to the stereotype of the devil / savage "[Centini, op.cit., p.73]. 

* AF d'Olivet writes that "the Universe considered as a living whole, composed of intelligence, soul and body, was called Bread o Phanes"From the Orphics [D'Olivet, The golden verses of Pythagoras, p.164].

Secondo George Galli, we cannot speak of the ancient European cults as mere superstitions or indicate them with the reductive denomination of “witchcraft”. In this archaic substratum, which lived up to the Middle Ages, he saw [Mysterious West, p.170] an "expanding movement, of a real alternative culture translating into behaviors, with ancient roots (the Matristic civilizations, the Bacchantes, the Gnostics), re-emerging in specific conditions (the crisis of the Church, the resumption of magical-astrological beliefs) ". This movement was fought "because it had cultural and social roots, because without defeating it [...] the" modern age "could not have been such, with its own values". Galli adds that "The devil is the Dionysus of witches", the sabbaths are an update of the meetings of the maenads and "the same relationships with animals are connected to a tradition that has the antecedent in Pasiphae and its Cretan myth, as an echo of a period in which the promiscuity of the human being in the nature was normally lived "[Ibidem, p.173].

From the episode of the "death of Pan" reported by Plutarch, according to the interpretation of james hillman [Essay on Pan, p.58], we can draw this lesson: his symbolic death is equivalent to one psychic repression. "THEhe nature ceased to speak to us—or we were no longer able to hear it. Pan's person the mediator, like an ether that invisibly enveloped all things natural of personal significance, of luster, was gone". Hillman later specifies what he means by "removal" [Ibidem, p.59]:

“When the human loses his personal connection with nature personified and instinct personified, the image of Pan and the image of the Devil mix. Pan never died (...) he was removed. Therefore (…) Pan still lives, and not only in the literary imagination. He lives in the repressed that returns, in the psychopathologies of instinct that come forward (...) first of all in the nightmare and in the erotic, demonic and panic qualities associated with it ".

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Il Wildermann

From what has been said it follows that the figure of the Christian devil overlapped, in addition to that of Pan and Cernunno, also that of the Wildermann, a character from the folklore of the Germanic-speaking populations, also called in Italy, "Salvanello", "wild man" or "man of the woods", which is considered connected to traditional models such as satyrs, silenes and fauns of ancient Mediterranean mythologies and sa'iri ("Ruffled") of the Old Testament tradition, the so-called "country devils" [Biedermann, p. 568]. 

Historical chronicles document the cult of the "Wild" by putting it in close relationship with the "witch sabbath". In 1233, in fact, Pope Gregory IX promulgated a bull in which he stated that "in sabbatical meetings Satan normally presented himself as a man covered in hair with characteristics attributable to the Wildermann German "[Centini, op.cit., p.71]. Similarly, in an inquisitorial trial of 1615 in Coredo, in Val di Non, the "witch" Maria Polizan in her description of the sabbath indicated Satan as the "Salvanello", "a stereotype of the savage who in the legendary tradition of Trentino presents aspects similar to the elf "[Centini, op. cit. pp. 71-2]. Similar to the Dionysian gatherings of the Bacchantes or to those in which the Goddess of a thousand names was invoked (Diana, Hecate, Herodias, Herodiana, Hera, Frau Venus, etc), the witchcraft tragedies took place in the woods late at night, during four tempora: we therefore find all those practices which in ancient times had to act as an effective counterpart to a series of agrarian-rural beliefs [cf. The Friulian benandanti and the ancient European fertility cults], demonized from the Church on the one hand for a utilitarian calculation, on the other for an inexcusable ignorance.

For modern psychoanalysis the archetype of the Wild Man, as well as that panic, symbolizes the emergence of the primitive, lower, dark part of the human being: the unconscious in its regressive and dangerous aspect that Jung called "Shadow". As the Wildermann, Pan also lives in untouched nature (Arcadia), in a locality - as Hillman writes [on. cit., p.50] - "both physical and psychic", to the point that "the 'dark caves' where he could be encountered (...) were dilated by the Neoplatonists to indicate the material recesses in which the impulse resides, the dark holes of the psyche from which desire and delirium arise". Further on, he goes on to specify [on. cit., p.52]: "Defining instinct as an innate triggering mechanism, or speaking of it as a chthonic spirit, an urgency of nature, expresses in obscure psychological concepts those obscure experiences that once would have been referred to Pan". Only in this sense can its archetypal connection be understood, identified and irremediably deformed by the Judeo-Christian priestly elite with the psycho-collective consequences we have mentioned.

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Robin Goodfellow e Robin Hood

A character of English folklore who in medieval times rose to a new representation of the archetypal principle panic fu Robin Hood, probable variant of the Saxon name Rof Breoht Woden (“Woden's shining force” —that is, Odin's), equivalent to Puck, companion in the ancient rural cults of the goddess of Love, called by the ancient English "Bride of May" due to its association with the cult of the hawthorn (may-tree, "May tree"). He was also called euphemistically Robin Goodfellow ("Robin the Good Devil"). It should be noted that in France the term robin mean "ram" but also "devil" [Graves, The White Goddess, pp. 455]; both readings, therefore, bring us back to the mythical complex peculiar to Pan, god-goat which in the Christian era took on demonic connotations. Add to this that in Cornwall robin stood for "do it". Our hypothesis is fully confirmed by an illustration in a seventeenth-century pamphlet, in which Robin "is depicted as an itiphallic god of witches, with horns of a young ram, legs of a ram, a witch's broom over her left shoulder and a lighted candle in her right hand "[Ibidem].

It is curious here to note how, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the events of the historical Robin Hood, the famous outlaw of Sherwood Forest, were associated with masquerades of Calendimaggio: according to popular folklore, when the party drew to a close, Robin "moved against his rival Bran or Saturn, who had been Lord of Misrule, "Lord of Bad Government", in the celebrations of Yule "[Ibidem, pp. 155-6] —that is to say, in the rituals of the end of the year, connected to the "solstice crisis". From this we understand how Robin actually covered, in these popular masquerades, which later resulted in Carnival (*krn), the function of "King of the Waning Year", where Bran / Saturn obviously plays the role of "King of the Waning Year". Robert Graves adds, about the Yule celebrations, that they continued in medieval times behind the veil of Christmas play, the Christmas play, the main episodes of which were "the beheading and restitution to life of the Christmas King, or Fool Christmas" [Ibidem, pp. 457-8] —peculiarity that links it above all to the Roman Saturnalia [cf. Cosmic cycles and time regeneration: immolation rites of the 'King of the Old Year'].

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Beltane: Ostara and the sacrifice of the "Calendimaggio goat"

Still with regard to the Calendimaggio rituals, we know that these ceremonies were addressed to a goddess variously named (Hölde in the Germanic area, Rea in Crete, Ostara in the Saxon area), to whom a goat was sacrificed. According to the English scholar, Puck**, “the Calendimaggio goat, as is evident from the English witches ceremonies and from the Swedish Maggiolata Bükkerwise, he mated with the Goddess, was sacrificed and resurrected ”***. Or: the Priestess publicly joined the annual king [the "King of the Old Year", nda] dressed in goatskin, who was killed and resurrected in the figure of his successor [the "King of the New Year", nda], or instead a goat was sacrificed and his reign was extended "[Ibidem, p.464]. The celebration of Calendimaggio (formerly defined Beltane) anticipated in the cosmic-liturgical calendar of the European populations of Celtic lineage Lamas, feast of the first harvest [cf. The festival of Lughnasadh / Lammas and the Celtic god Lugh].

** For an in-depth analysis of the figure of Puck (and Robin Goodfellow) through the centuries, cf. Allen W. Wright, Puck Through the Ages. The History of a Hobgoblin.

*** It is at least curious and worthy of mention the correspondence between the sacrifice of the "Goat of Calendimaggio" in the pagan liturgical calendar and likewise of the "Lamb of God", immolated on a cross and destined to be resurrected to new life, in the Christian one. . It should also be added that the current name of Easter in the Anglo-Saxon countries, Easter, derives from the name of the goddess Ostara, the "bride of May" of Beltane, to which the goat-king was sacrificed after one Hieros Gameos (lit. "sacred marriage"; representation of the sacred union between the virile principle and the feminine principle).

According to Graves, "This fertility rite is the basis of the intellectualized" Little Mysteries "of Eleusis, which were celebrated in February and represented the wedding of the Dionysus-goat with the goddess Tione, the" possessed queen ", and her subsequent death and resurrection" [Ibidem]. And, in this regard, what Centini writes is interesting [on. cit., pp. 117-8], namely that: “The image of the goat-devil, protagonist of the blasphemous sabbatical ceremonies, can be understood as the demonized survival of those hybrid, sylvan divinities, adored by pagans and celebrated in the woods; but at the same time it must also be considered as the reminiscence of the sacrifices of this animal, which were widely practiced in ancient times ". Ceremonies of this kind appear undoubtedly connected to ancient rites of fertility and the regeneration of nature, which in archaic times were connected with the worship of the "goat-god," Pan, and similar deities of the wild nature such as the Wildermann, green man, et similia, which in medieval times often resulted arbitrarily in the cauldron of the cd. "Witchcraft sabbath".

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Metaphysics of the Mask

We continue this study with an in-depth analysis of the precise meaning of mask in tradition and folklore. This excursus it will be useful for us to better understand the last topic we will discuss, namely the "masquerades" that were held throughout Europe on the occasion of the Kalends of January, a period in which it was believed that the spirits of the dead would return to earth. We will be based on a monograph written on the subject by Alexander Pizzorno and entitled On The Mask.

First of all, it must be said that the mask and death are closely connected: the original model of the mask would have been the human skull or the skull of an animal [Pizzorno, p.27]. For some traditions (e.g. the Dogon one) the mask appeared when the first ancestor, having wanted to know the secret language, was punished by the gods with death. The appearance of the mask is therefore contemporary with that of human mortality: the mask would, in this sense, "restore order to the disorder caused by death" [Ibidem, p.29]. In this way, he who wears a mask during a ritual dies as an individual and detaches himself from his person (= mask) daily to impersonate an a-temporal being, fixed in the mask that represents him: it can therefore be said that "the mask begins where the person" [Ibidem, p.35], or the mask that each individual wears in his daily life. The person who hides behind the mask "tries to graft his own action on the body of his daily history, interrupts his personal identity, removes every action he takes from the responsibility of before and after" [Ibidem, p.49].

Furthermore, within a ceremonial situation in which all the participants in the rite are masked, the masks serve to suppress the personal conscience to realize the identity of conscience of all the people present [Ibidem, p.43]. The possibility of this mystical participation in a ultra-consciousness, to a egregor—We would say in Gnostic terms—, it is in close connection with the aspect of a-temporality and eternity that the mask conveys: "in the incessant passage and rhythm of what is permanence, duration, identity, what, resisting time, represents time in its aspect of eternity, can establish participation "[Ibidem, p.48]. It is, therefore, a collective identification with a being who is invincible because it is immutable. It is about "To escape the pressing time of the situation in order to place oneself - and act from there - in the mythical time where the beings that the masks represent operate; to ensure a dominant and intangible presence. The viewer is terrified of the power of being represented; but above all from the monstrous relationship between it and the man who carries it "[Ibidem, p.56].

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Larva, Masca, striae

On the other hand, the connection between mask and frightening beings (demons, spirits, dead, witches) is confirmed by tradition, to the point that it is claimed that originally the masks "depict beings from the underworld who reappear on earth at the beginning of the annual cycle" [Toschi, Folklore, p.33]. In Latin, larva it meant both "ghost" and "mask"; the other term used to indicate the mask, person, probably of Etruscan derivation, still in full Latinity it served to designate the souls of the dead, in perfect coherence with the Latin belief that the dead survived as masks [Pizzorno, on. cit., pp. 32-3]. The current Italian name derives from masca, which originally had the meaning of "Dead, witch or evil spirit". Toschi wrote that [cit. in Centini, on. cit., p.109] "in the Lombard, masca it means first of all an ignoble spirit, which, similar to strigae Roman, devoured men alive, but it seems that originally masca it meant a dead man, wrapped in a net to hinder his return to earth, a custom that is found among some primitive populations. Frequent is the use of masca, again to indicate witch, in medieval Latin and also in the centuries closest to ours ". Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Gervasius of Tilbury wrote: "Physicists say that the lamias, commonly called mesh or in the Gallic language striae, they are nocturnal visions that disturb the souls of the sleepers and cause oppression "[Ibidem] [cf. The phenomenon of sleep paralysis: folkloric interpretations and recent hypotheses].

However, it is believed that the real one demonization of the disguise was accentuated only starting from the origins of Christianity, when the mask was "directly connected to the devil and his ability to constantly change in his attempts to mislead men" [Ibidem, p.100]. However, in the Middle Ages, within the folkloric sphere, the mask became the emblem of the reinvigoration of paganism within the popular traditions which, from the point of view of the Church - as we have seen - were an "authentic receptacle of the devil" [Ibidem]. Among the most famous masks of the Italian Carnival, that of Harlequin is the most interesting here: he initially "was certainly a devil, indeed the head of a horde of devils: his very name Hallequin derived from Hell= "Hell» "[Toschi, on. cit., p.33]. Arlecchino was therefore, originally, a 'double' of Saturn / Cernunno, the cervine horned god who rules the 'Underworld'; and it is no coincidence that many scholars trace an etymological (but nevertheless functional) connection with Erlik Khan, very ancient god of the 'underworld' and of the dead in Turkish-Mongolian and Siberian shamanism, also like Cernunno (and Kronos in the Orphic Hymns, as well as the Indo-Iranian Yama / Yima) traditionally depicted with a stag antler [ cf. Divinity of the Underworld, the Afterlife and the Mysteries].

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Kalends of January: le Brain and the "Visitor's cult complex"

And with this we return to the discourse previously developed, dealing with the period of "Winter crisis" and the return, at this time of year, of the spirits of the dead to the world of the living. Mircea Eliade connects mythical complexes of this guise to the "Visitor's cult complex", which includes, in the European area, the beliefs about arrival, in the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany [cf. The archaic substratum of the end of year celebrations: the traditional significance of the 12 days between Christmas and the Epiphany], of the god Odin (later desecrated in Santa Claus or S. Nicola) and of the goddess Hölde (later desecrated in the figure of the Befana) with them following la Wilde Heer (furious army, exercitus feralis) and the procession of the souls of the dead (dianaticus) [cf. Cernunno, Odin, Dionysus and other deities of the 'Winter Sun'].

Speaking of the agricultural festivals at the beginning of the year, Cesario of Arles in the sixth century he wrote addressing the members of the French rural communities: "When the feast of the Kalends of January arrives you stupidly rejoice, you become drunk, you go wild in erotic songs and obscene games (...) If you do not want to participate in their collective sin, do not allow them to come in procession, in front of your house, disguised as deer, witches, any beast"[Centini, op.cit., pp. 100-1]. It will be remembered that the deer, especially due to the annual moulting of its antlers, is symbolically connected to the death and regeneration of nature. Licentious dances with doe or old masks were also effectively performed in the German or English countryside during the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany. [Tilak, Orione, pp. 162-3], which we know to be the days of the "solstice crisis", during which it was believed possible the return of the spirits of the dead among the living. To these examples we must add that of Reg of Eastern Europe, youth brotherhoods that in the twelve days wandered in the villages referring to the wishes of the dead, wearing costumes and masks that refer to the human skeleton [Centini, on. cit., p.76] and therefore, ultimately, to the dead and the cd. «Visitor complex» [cf. Metamorphosis and ritual battles in the myth and folklore of the Eurasian populations].

As for Italy, it was Jung who attested to the existence of an ancient pagan festival called New Year Brain o Cervulus, celebrated at the Kalends of January, during which the strenae (consisting of twigs of a propitious plant that detached from a grove on the Via Sacra, consecrated to a goddess of Sabine origin, Strenia, a bringer of luck and prosperity) and masquerading as animals or old women, dancing to the melody of those who the Church considered "sacrilegious singers". Marija Gimbutas speculates that these manifestations are attributable to archaic rites in honor of a female divinity, a «Lady of the Animals» from the appearance of doe or doe, from which Diana would have derived. Moreover, Pausanias attests that Artemis, in the Despoina temple, in Arcadia, wore cervine skin [Radin, Jung, Kerényi, The divine rascal, p.180].

Similar rites are also attested in Crete and Cyprus, but they were not the prerogative of the Indo-European cultures alone: ​​Eliade testifies to the existence of similar ceremonies also among the Sumerians, the Egyptians and the ancient Japanese. In the Land of the Rising Sun, “just like among the Germans and other Indo-European peoples, the last night of the year is marked by the appearance of funeral animals (horses, etc.) of the chthonic-funerary gods and goddesses; at this point the masked processions of the secret societies of men take place, the dead visit the living and initiations are celebrated " [Eliade, The myth of the eternal return, p.96]. We are therefore faced with a widespread belief in antiquity: its propagation throughout the Eurasian and Mediterranean area leads us to hypothesize the existence of a common cosmic-liturgical calendar, with related myths and rites, in prehistoric times. More enigmatic is the testimony that comes to us from the Far East, which could perhaps be explained by virtue of the very ancient migrations of the Ainu stock that occurred in the XII-XI millennium BC. They came from Siberia and practiced an animist type cult: this obviously brings water to our mill, as we have already amply demonstrated the existence, in prehistory, of a pan-Eurasian shamanism that emerges from the most archaic substratum of European traditions up to the distant eastern steppes of Siberia and Mongolia.

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