Why the Oracles cease to give Answers
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
The Dead Pan; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)..
“What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?”
A Musical Instrument http://www.webterrace.com/browning/A%20Musical%20Instrument.htm, st. 1 (1860).
Context: What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.
“Some say the Gods are just a myth
but guess Who I've been dancing with…
The Great God Pan is alive!”
"The Return Of Pan"
Dream Harder (1993)
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday
Source: The Great God Pan (1894), Ch. VII : The Encounter in Soho
Context: I can fancy what you saw. Yes; it is horrible enough; but after all, it is an old story, an old mystery played in our day and in dim London streets instead of amidst the vineyards and the olive gardens. We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish, silly tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form. Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?
“Men build scales, but the gods blow upon the lighter pan.”
Volume 1: Nightside the Long Sun (1993), Ch. 1
Fiction, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–1996)
“Let me leap out of the frying-pan into the fire; or, out of God's blessing into the warm sun.”
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book III, Ch. 4.
“Oh dear Pan and all the other Gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside.”
279 – a prayer of Socrates, as portrayed in the dialogue.
Phaedrus
Context: Oh dear Pan and all the other Gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside. Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within. May I consider the wise man rich. As for gold, let me have as much as a moderate man could bear and carry with him.
