This passage describes the death of the God of Ecstasy in order to facilitate the birth of Christianity in Ancient Rome.
‘In what as been called ‘one of the most haunting passages in Western literature,’ the Greek historian Plutarch tells the story of how passengers on a Greek merchant ship, sometime during the reign of Tiberius (14-37BCE), heard a loud cry coming from the island of Paxos. The voice instructed the ship’s pilot to call out, when he sailed past Palodes, ’ The Great God Pan is dead.’ As soon as he did so, the passengers heard, floating back to them from across the water, ‘a great cry of lamentation, not of one person, but of many.’
‘Pan, the horned god who overlapped Dionysus as a deity of dance and ecstatic states, had to die to make room for the stately and sober Jesus. Only centuries later did Plutarch’s readers fully attend to the answering voices of lamentation and begin to grasp what was lost with the rise of monotheism. In a world without Dionysus / Pan / Bacchus / Sabazios, nature would be dead, joy would be postponed to an afterlife, and the forests would no longer ring with the sounds of pipes and flutes.’ Pg 57
Dancing in the Street: A History of Collective Joy, Babara Ehrenreich
No comments:
Post a Comment