Landscape of Panic
We tend to think of nature as being essentially benign and long since tamed by man,but its gods and spirits can still inspire fear. Patrick Harpur recounts some everyday tales of daylight terror. ...
A friend of mine once pointed out to me the place in the New Forest where “the last person to die of panic ” had been found; the corpse crouched against a tree, its teeth bared in a rictus of fear. This had happened in about the 1920s, he thought; but it sounds, despite its rural setting, very like what we now call an urban legend. I wonder how many other woods or wild places are credited with a death by panic –the idea that someone, out in Nature, can be suddenly overwhelmed by a seemingly causeless irrational terror. It is a state named after the Greek god Pan because it is he who personifies the wilderness, inhabiting caves, dells, grottoes and woods; he who, with a terrible shout, causes the wayfarer to flee uncontrollably.
The sudden onset of panic is not only found in myth and legend, however. On a sunny summer ’s afternoon in 1953, my father and uncle were sea fishing off some rocks near Waterville in Co Kerry. Both were young veterans of the Second World War; my dad had been decorated more than once for bravery. At one point, my uncle told me, his line had snagged on something underwater. As he tried to tug it free, he had the distinct feeling that something was holding it. A kind of horror began to creep over him, as if the something were intelligent and terrible. He glanced over at my father who, deathly pale, was already watching him. As one, they threw down their rods and ran “for their lives,” not stopping until they were back at their hotel.
Common sense tells us that, in Ireland,the cause of panic might lie closer to home than Pan.The Tuatha de Danann , also known as the Sidhe, the fairies, or, more in hope than expectation, the ‘Good People’, are as likely to harm as help us, dealing us a blow or ‘stroke’, abducting our children, blighting crops if we offend them. And we can, famously, offend them simply by trespassing on one of their haunts, whether a fairy ‘fort ’or rath, or one of the ‘threshold zones ’they favour, such as fords, bridges or sea shores. They do not want too much to be known about them, according to the poet WB Yeats; and folklorist Katharine Briggs notes that they are dangerous if they see you before you see them. Incidentally, while twilight is traditionally the liminal time preferred by the fairies for their appearance, Pan ’s hour is noon. If incidents of panic do not literally occur at this time, they do take place in the heat of the day.
My supervisor at Cambridge, the Yeats scholar Tom Henn, had an experience similar to my father ’s which he describes in his autobiography ive Arches. As a teenager, in 1915, he was fishing a tributary of the Shannon near Paradise –his family ’s estate in Co Galway – when, as he writes,“an overpowering fear attacked me, utterly cold in quality, and terrible because of its irrationality in that sunlit, lonely place. I remember that I dashed out of the water, up and out of the hollow and ran and ran, sweat-sodden, till after a mile or so I came within sight of a cottage.There was nothing following me.”
According to her autobiography Time out of Mind, the medium and author Joan Grant – her two books about ancient Egypt, Winged Pharaoh and The Eyes of Horus, were received psychically – was staying with her husband Leslie at a shooting lodge, near Grantown-on-Spey in Scotland, in August 1928. One day they' went to Rothiemurchus. intending to climb towards the Cairngorms. However, it was a beautiful September day, too hot for serious hiking, and so they settled for a gentle walk. Nothing could have been farther from my mind than spooks," wrote Joan, "when suddenly I was seized with such tenor that I turned and in panic fled back along the path. Leslie ran after me, imploring me to tell him what was wrong. I could only spare breath enough to tell him to run faster, faster. Something - utterly malign, four-legged and yet obscenely human, invisible and yet solid enough for me to hear the pounding of its hooves, was trying to reach me. If it did I should die, for I was far too frightened to know how to defend myself. I had run about half a mile when I burst through an invisible barrier behind which I was safe."
Some years later, the local doctor told Joan that two hikers had been found dead at the exact location of her terror. Both men were under 30; the weather had been fine; they had spent a good night under the shelter stone on the highest ridge (they had written to that effect in the book that was kept up there), "They were found within a hundred yards of each other sprawled face downward, as though they had fallen headlong when in flight." The doctor performed a postmortem on them both. "Never in my life have I seen healthier corpses" he said. "Not a thing wrong with either of the poor chaps except that their hearts stopped. I put 'heart failure' on the chit, but it is my considered opinion that they died of fright."
To be seized by panic depends in part on who you are, it seems, since Joan's husband was oblivious to the centaur-like pursuer. Yet the encounter also attaches to a particular place if the case of the dead hikers is anything to go by. On the other hand, Tom Henn subsequently went fishing several times at the place of his panic and experienced nothing like it again. Like all anomalous events, panic is partly to do with us and partly not, partly from within us and partly without.
Plutarch reported that a mysterious cry rang through late antiquity: "Great Pan is dead!" Pan's death signifies the death of Nature as an animate power, the withdrawal of the gods and daimons. But gods cannot die: thus Pan may well have moved north to head, in the form of Wotan, the Wild Hunt [see FT136] which from time to time swept like a destructive wind over the European countryside, maiming or deranging anyone in its path. He took cover behind the horned and hoofed Devil of the Christians. He haunted the literary imagination - in English poetry he outnumbers his nearest Greek rivals (Helen, Orpheus and Persephone by nearly two to one. Above all, he lived on in our nightmares, as Ephialtes - "he who jumps up" and then presses down on us so that we can neither move nor speak. Indeed. since our modem mythologies of religion and science have outlawed Pan, the creative voice of Nature has fallen silent and he is forced to appear inwardly, in the caves and grottoes of the psyche, as an overwhelming instinctual force.
Yet was Pan perhaps present in the following tale from crop circle lore? In May 1990 Gary and Vivienne Tomlinson were out walking near the village of Hambledon. They paused to watch the wind blowing over a cornfield. Vivienne, a 36-year-old housewife from Guildford, had always been fascinated by the sight and sound of wind and "can lose herself watching it". Suddenly the wind changed. It seemed to blow from two directions at once, gathering strength, its whistling growing louder, "almost like a high-pitched pan-pipe sound. Then we felt a wind pushing us from the side and from above," Vivienne reported. "It was forcing down on our heads so that we could hardly stay upright, yet my husband's hair was standing on end. It was incredible... The noise was tremendous. We looked for a helicopter above us but there was nothing. Gary still shivers at the memory' and how his hair stood on end." Is this an account of Pan's primaeval, paralyzing, hair-raising 'shout'?
The wind continued to swirl around them, and they saw the corn being pushed down, forming a circle. "The corn swirled and then gently laid down. There was no feel of wind now or sound. It felt strange watching these ever-faster gathering gathering whirlwinds. They just seemed to increase; they were enveloping us quickly. I panicked, grabbed my husband's hand and pulled him out of the circle." Her instincts were sound; whoever steps into a fairy ring or joins a fairy revel is liable to be trapped.
As the personification of Nature, Pan is ambiguous. He is the protector of herdsmen and shepherds; fishermen and hunters. His benign face persuades those of us with a Romantic view that Nature is a smiling realm of peace and healing. But his dark, frightening side connects us with our own deepest instincts of fear and flight. This may not be a bad thing. If we are out for a gentle stroll in the country and, suddenly, 'we find that the world we thought was passive and dead is alive, animate and watchful, of course our first reaction is panic. It is we who are then passive, paralysed, as the world begins to move. No wonder we run as soon as we can.
But this may be only the way we are whenever we break away from civilisation, out of our safe habitat and into the wilderness. Pan helps us to stay in touch with instinct, to break out of the defensiveness that can lead to paranoia, to prevent the protective city wall from becoming a prison. Pan introduces a bit of necessary wildness into our lives; he gives body to our airy-fairy spirituality; he injects the nymphs of sweetness and Iight with a bit of hoof and goat-stink. That Pan can be good for the is evidenced by Apuleius' tale of Eros and Psyche in which Pan saves Psyche - the soul - from suicide after Eros has abandoned her.
Nevertheless, the perils of an encounter with Pan should not be underestimated. In Memory Hold-the-Door, John Buchan - the former governor general of Canada and author of such adventure stories as The Thirty-Nine Steps - recounts how in 1910 he set out to climb a small peak called the Alpspitze in the Bavarian Wettersteingebirge above Partenkirchen. Accompanied by a young forester named Sebastian, he reached the top at about nine in the morning (having left at 2 am). They breakfasted in a mountain inn before beginning the six-mile walk back down to the valley. "It was a brilliant summer day with a promise of great heat. But our road lay through pleasant shady pine woods and flowery meadows" wrote Buchan. "I noticed that my companion had fallen silent, and, glancing at him, was amazed to see that his face was dead-white, that sweat stood in beads on his forehead, and that his eyes were staring ahead as if he was in an agony of fear, as if terror were all around him so that he dared not look one way rather than another. Suddenly he began to run, and I ran too, some power not myself constraining me. Terror had seized me also, but I did not know what I dreaded; it was like the epidemic of giggling which overcomes children who have no wish to laugh. We ran - we ran like demented bacchanals, tearing down the glades, leaping rocks. bursting through thickets, colliding with trees, sometimes colliding with each other, and all the time we never uttered a sound. At last we fetched up beside the much-frequented valley highway, where we lay for a time utterly exhausted. For the rest of the road home we did not speak: we did not even dare to look at each other".
What, wonders Buchan, was it all about? "I suppose it was Panic," he surmises. "Sebastian had seen the goat-foot god or something of the kind - he was forest-born, and Bavarian peasants are very near primeval things - and he had made me feel his terror." It is a terror, salutary or fatal, which we are always open to whenever we stray off the beaten track; a horror we are liable to hook whenever we sink a line into the depths.
