Syrinx the Nymph

Pan, Πάν, the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, rustic music and impromptus, and companion of the nymphs, was a very handsome god. Until there came the day when his appetites for fair wood nymphs, the protective creatures of nature, would get him in trouble with the Goddess Artemis. He was a horny egotistical tyrant who pursued the wood nymphs continuously and annoyingly.

His ego and libido came to be his undoing on the day that he would not take no for an answer. Artemis, tired of his constant horrid behavior and the complaints of her lovely wood nymphs, transformed Pan into a terrible creature. He now had hindquarters, legs and horns of a goat, in the same manner as a faun or satyr. With his homeland in rustic Arcadia, he was also recognized as the god of fields, groves, wooded glens, and often affiliated with sex; Pan is connected to fertility and the season of spring.

Pan was particularly enamored by Syrinx, Σύριγξ, the Arcadian nymph and follower of Artemis, who was known for her chastity, and like Artemis Syrinx had vowed to remain chaste.

One day Pan caught up with Syrinx and almost had his way with her as she was returning from the hunt. To escape from his advances, she ran away and didn't stop to hear his compliments. He pursued until she came to her sisters in the river Ladon, and at her own request, like the lovely caterpillar to the butterfly, was metamorphosed, and immediately became changed into a reed, and they hid her among the other reeds by the riverbank.

Pan arrived by the river, and being a god, immediately discerned that something was not right. In anger, he bellowed and roared and began to punish the other wood nymphs by turning them into fishes, frogs and horrible water creatures, until they finally confessed that Syrinx had been made into a reed. They had no idea which reed she was, they told him.

He angered the Goddess Artemis, who watched over the nymphs, she then tried to turn him into a goat, but only succeeded halfway as he fought back. That is how he is now remembered today as half goat, half man/god. Some say that whenever he enters water, his lower half becomes like a fish.

The god, still infatuated, took some of the reeds, because he could not identify which reed Syrinx had become, and began to fashion his panpipes.

When the air blew through the reeds, it produced a plaintive and sad melody. He cut seven pieces here, and nine pieces there, joined them side by side in gradually decreasing lengths, and formed the musical instrument, bearing the name of his beloved Syrinx. Henceforth, Pan was seldom seen without it.

It is said that the music which pan makes with his panpipe is so beautiful that dying flowers and anything that ails, upon hearing the sweet music will immediately return to life. Syrinx too, can be seen by her sisters standing behind Pan as he plays. He cannot see her, only the music allows her to appear as herself as it is so hauntingly addictive.

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A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT. (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

I.

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.

II.

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,

From the deep cool bed of the river:

The limpid water turbidly ran,

And the broken lilies a-dying lay,

And the dragon-fly had fled away,

Ere he brought it out of the river.

III.

High on the shore sate the great god Pan,

While turbidly flowed the river;

And hacked and hewed as a great god can,

With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,

Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed

To prove it fresh from the river.

IV.

He cut it short, did the great god Pan,

(How tall it stood in the river!)

Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,

Steadily from the outside ring,

And notched the poor dry empty thing

In holes, as he sate by the river.

V.

'This is the way,' laughed the great god Pan,

Laughed while he sate by the river,)

'The only way, since gods began

To make sweet music, they could succeed.'

Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,

He blew in power by the river.

VI.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!

Piercing sweet by the river!

Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!

The sun on the hill forgot to die,

And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly

Came back to dream on the river.

VII.

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,

To laugh as he sits by the river,

Making a poet out of a man:

The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,—

For the reed which grows nevermore again

As a reed with the reeds in the river

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