Table of Contents
Historian Ronald Hutton, at Gresham College, traces how modern paganism’s favored male image came into being. Horned gods existed in ancient Europe, he argues, but they were not the central figures. Jupiter stood closer to a patron of rulers. Pan was a rustic joke kept in place by Olympian laughter, until writers enlarged him because his name echoed the Greek word for all. The real promotion came as England left the fields. Around 1810 most people still farmed. Around 1910 most lived in towns. Pan became an idle summer where nobody labored, a comfort against industry and against a dry science. The Wind in the Willows treats a meeting with him as a real vision, and later fiction and verse, including desire between men, carried him on. Once writers cast accused witches as surviving pagans, Margaret Murray dropped the Greek name and called him an ancient British horned god. Hutton’s sequence is plain. Poets dreamed that god. A kind of history said the dream had happened. Belief on a large scale came only after that.
Key points
- Ancient horned gods, in Hutton’s argument, were real but not the dominant male deities of pagan Europe.
- Pan stayed a comic country god until romantic culture, facing industrial England, made him lost nature itself.
- Literature from the Willows chapter through Dunsany, Fortune, and erotic verse widened that image.
- By 1900 the same figure had also become a patron of sexuality between men.
- Murray, he argues, renamed the Greek Pan as a universal horned god of the witches once classical education faded.
- The result is a modern belief built in sequence by poets, then by a kind of history, then by a new religion.
Short quotes
in 1810 80% of the population still lived in the countryside and were employed in occupations related to agriculture
Ronald Hutton, Hutton on the horned god
His turning point is an England that was still mostly rural and agricultural. Watch at 3:00
a comic grotesque Little Country God kept under control by the laughter
Ronald Hutton, Hutton on the horned god
Classical Pan, he says, was a joke the greater gods kept in his place. Watch at 5:29
Pan's Countryside was one in which nobody ever worked
Ronald Hutton, Hutton on the horned god
The romantic countryside attached to Pan has no laborers in it. Watch at 8:32
by 1900 the horned and horny God had also become the patron of gay sexuality
Ronald Hutton, Hutton on the horned god
He dates a further role, as patron of gay sexuality, to about 1900. Watch at 27:34
Murray told the world that pan had only been one aspect of the universal horned deity
Ronald Hutton, Hutton on the horned god
Murray, in his account, folded the Greek Pan into a wider horned god. Watch at 38:24
a minor Pagan deity from a backwood at the far end of Europe
Ronald Hutton, Hutton on the horned god
The lecture’s subject begins as a minor god from a remote part of Europe. Watch at 43:17
Video by Gresham College. Watch on YouTube.