Quartz 5

Pan Guardian of Nature

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tagsdeity
aliasesPan, Deity-Pan

3 min read

Pan Guardian of Nature

“A flower is a flower, whether it grows in the thick of the forest or in a tended garden. Some will say a flower that grows where flowers do not is worth all the more - though I see the beauty in every flower, no matter where it grows.”

  • words attributed to Pan

Pan is the wild god of nature, beasts, passion, and untamed magic - a complex deity who is sometimes trickster, sometimes protector. Alone among the Olympians he is fey-born: a being of the Feywyld who proved himself worthy of divinity and, granted a single wish, shaped the centaurs and satyrs from it. He counts both peoples as his own.

Divine Domain

Pan governs the living wild - forest and beast, growth and decay, the freedom of wild places and the wild magic that runs through them. He is said to feel the land as his own body: where a forest is desecrated, the faithful who pray to him report feeling his grief and rage at the wound.

Symbol

The syrinx, the reed pan-flute, whose soft, unearthly melody is said to accompany his presence.

Worshippers & Cults

Pan is the patron of the centaurs and satyrs and of those who live close to the wild. In the Holy Theocracy of Olympus he is counted among the Olympians, and his worshippers - centaurs and satyrs foremost - are held sacred rather than Twisted; his clergy are among those empowered to grant the permits for animal communication and hunting in centaur lands.

Most numerous among his faithful are the forest tribes, such as the Rediviva, who serve him through battle in defence of nature.

Theology

Pan does not lead his faithful by a hard hand, “neither to punishment nor to reward” - each worshipper’s path is held to be their own to walk. He teaches that a soul is judged only at the end of its days, in the world to come, where both its sins and its heroism are weighed; the hour of that reckoning, he says, is known to none but the Fates - not even to him. From this comes a forgiving creed: an honest mistake made in his service is human, where to sin knowingly in a god’s name is a crime, and intention is what truly matters.

Uniquely among the gods, Pan has never had a champion. One common theory holds that his faithful tend to “fixate on the trees and miss the forest,” and so seldom grasp the whole of his essence; another, that the wild god simply needs no instrument.

Manifestation

On the rarest occasions Pan has appeared in person to his most devoted - as he is said to have appeared to Peltaria, an ancient chieftain of the Rediviva. He takes the form of a great satyr some three metres tall, with green-tinged fur and beard, large and impressive horns, a syrinx in hand, and eyes that hold every colour at once; his presence is described as a heavy, calming weight, like a warm blanket.

Appendix

See Also

Deities

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