Reply To: The Triumph of the Moon by Ronald Hutton

[DowrgiParticipant]

Interestingly, I believe that Pan was the only deity of Graeco-Roman tradition whose death was ‘announced’. According to Plutarch in De Defectu Oraculorum (On the Failure of Oracles), an Egyptian sailor named Thamus, while sailing near Paxos, heard a mysterious voice instructing him to proclaim: ‘The great god Pan is dead!’ Upon so doing, at Palodes, a chorus of unseen mourners erupted from the shore. Some have interpreted this as symbolic of the decline of paganism, and some early Christian writers even linked it to the birth of Christ. Yet other scholars have suggested that the sailor may have actually misheard a lament for the dying god Adonis – mistaking it for a divine message. Curious all the same.

Bennathow,
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