This Jungian Life

Piping through mountains and glens, the great god Pan carries the relentless procreative power of nature. He symbolizes the archaic level of psyche from which all wild instinct rises; feared during war as his panic could undo even the Titans and attacked in the Common Era as the image of the devil.  Half man and half goat, Pan’s untamed sexuality evoked rapture and impulsivity. As the god of shepherds, he ushered young men into puberty, introducing them to the spring rut in their flocks and their own bodies. In the first 30 years of the Christian era, Plutarch wrote that a sailor heard a divine proclamation, “The great god Pan is dead!” This foreshadowed the fate of natural sexuality as it encountered the ascetic demands of Christianity. The anthesis of Christ’s innocence and virtue, the lustful goat-foot-god, was recast as the prime cosmic offender. And so, Pan-ic was slowly redirected from fear-driven flocks racing from danger to the human conscience fleeing from the evils of the flesh. The triumph of ego