Pan and the Nightmare

by James Hillman

This brilliant book brings Pan back to life by following C.G. Jung’s famous saying that the gods have become our diseases. Chapters on nightmare panic, masturbation, rape and nympholepsy, instinct and synchronicity, and Pan’s female lovers ― Echo, Syrinx, Selene, and the Muses ― show the goat-god at work and play in the dark drives and creative passions of our lives. (Includes a full translation of EPHIALTES, Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher’s masterful nineteenth-century mythological-pathological treatise on Pan and the demons of the night).

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Mythology, Religion

159 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1972

About the author

James Hillman (1926-2011) was an American psychologist. He served in the US Navy Hospital Corps from 1944 to 1946, after which he attended the Sorbonne in Paris, studying English Literature, and Trinity College, Dublin, graduating with a degree in mental and moral science in 1950.

In 1959, he received his PhD from the University of Zurich, as well as his analyst's diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute and founded a movement toward archetypal psychology, was then appointed as Director of Studies at the institute, a position he held until 1969.

In 1970, Hillman became editor of Spring Publications, a publishing company devoted to advancing Archetypal Psychology as well as publishing books on mythology, philosophy and art. His magnum opus, Re-visioning Psychology, was written in 1975 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Hillman then helped co-found the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture in 1978.

Retired into private practice, writing and traveling to lecture, until his death at his home in Connecticut on October 27, 2011 from bone cancer.

Reviews

[Berna Labourdette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un ensayo estupendo de mitología griega, con énfasis en Pan, Fauno, las bacantes y cómo se fue conformando la imagen del diablo católico con la mezcla de distintos atributos de los dioses griegos dedicados a los bosques. Es especialmente interesante el capítulo dedicado al propósito de las pesadillas (con mucha información etimológica) y el análisis que hace del pánico en ovejas y en humanos (de manera colectiva e individual). 

[Morgan Blackledge · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Hillman’s extended meditation on panic, pandemonium, pandemic, and psychic terror.

This is BY FAR Hillman’s most INTENSE and DISTURBING text (that I am currently aware of).

It’s Metal as FUCK.

And I FUCKING LIVE.

However.

It’s not for EVERYONE.

Certainly not for the FAINT of HEART.

Hillman goes EXTREMELY HARD IN THE PAINT on some EXTREMELY SENSITIVE SUBJECTS.

And he does NOT do it in a SENSITIVE WAY.

He’s INTENTIONALLY PROVOCATIVE.

At BEST.

And he’s a FUCKING ASSHOLE on average.

So be forewarned.

IT WILL TRIGGER YOU.

I call that a GOOD THING.

But I respect people who feel GUARDED.

Given that.

If you’re ANYTHING like ME

He will also ACTIVATE your SOUL.

And ALTER your MIND.

And I have to say this is also one of his more SOUL ACTIVATING MIND ALTERING texts.

I certainly haven’t SEEN the WORLD or FELT my SOUL quite the same way since reading it.

And I’m CERTAINLY not seeing PSYCHOLOGY or the CREATIVE ACT or the SOUL or the SHADOW the same way. I’m ALTERED. And for the BETTER.

Can’t heap enough praise on to this or any of Hillmans other works. He’s a GENIUS. I’m COMPLETELY inspired by him. Hillman has altered my MIND and the COURSE of my LIFE.

And I FUCKING LIVE.

5/5 ⭐️

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have not but more than looked at the companion volume here, but Hillman's monograph on the derivation of the goat-god in Hellenistic thought, An Essay On Pan, originally published in the late sixties, is a crucial work of Blakean psychology.

[Rodrigo Tello · Rating 4 out of 5]

Más allá de que se puede criticar que Hillman ve a Pan hasta en la sopa, es un ensayo muy en la línea de autores como Patrick Harpur, me gustó bastante, sobre todo la primera parte escrita por Hillman donde se mete con el delirio jungiano

[Javier Maldonado · Rating 3 out of 5]

Como psicólogo no soy precisamente un fan del psicoanálisis, sin embargo, este ensayo sobre el Dios Griego Pan ha sido una tremenda lectura.

[rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hillman's half of this is as amazing as I expected. Roscher's "Ephialtes" is second— I read 1/2 of and called it quits; he really isn't focused on Pan, but for anyone interested in greek antiquity/views on nightmares, it would be of interest.
Hillman is talking rape, masturbation and nature 'in here' in an 80 page essay of Jungian archetypes that had my highlighter running over every (digital) page; his way of connecting things is much smoother than Roscher's "Ephialtes" and plumbs much deeper. Next to Anima Mundi: The Soul of the Worldd this is the best thing I've read from him.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compilation of 2 essays about the ancient Greek god Pan's role in the surrounding culture's worldview, the folklore surrounding nightmares and how those two topics relate to each other. The first is by James Hillman, a student of C. G. Jung who broke his the master to create his own system of occultism/psychology that was even more weird and mystical; the second by a German classicist named Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher, who was something of a hero to Hillman. Roscher's essay is easier to read but at the same time his writing style is nowhere on Hillman's literary level. In contrast to Jung's writing style, which I often find rather clumsy, I enjoy reading Hillman for the elegant prose and wordplay alone even when I don't understand his theories well enough to say whether I agree or disagree with them!

In any case there is a lot of interesting information to be found within these 2 essays. The bulk of the new revelations to me concern how dream interpretation has evolved as a discipline from ancient Greece to the modern West, changing with the metaphysics underpinning a society's consensus reality. Hillman points out here that understanding the role which Pan played in the art, literature, religion and society of ancient Greece in turn requires the modern Westerner to code-switch to a completely different conception of reality than we grew up in. A worldview that is pantheistic, acausal and monistic instead of anthropocentric, causal and dualistic. Ergo: Pan is not the god of nature, he IS nature; Pan is not associated with goats, he IS a goat. To put it bluntly: What Hillman instructs his readers in here is not how to think about Pan but how to live with Pan. Hillman dwells on the fact that unlike other Greek gods, Pan was officially pronounced dead at some point - specifically during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius. From thereon, the worldview of the ancient Romans started shifting in the direction that led to the modern Western worldview. For better and for the worse.

More information in ”Pan and the Nightmare” that is new to me includes that of Pan having invented masturbation and rape according to the ancient Greeks. Or for that matter the in-depth descriptions of Pan's relations to the nymphs and nereids of the waters, and how these were essential to his character and ancient Greek cosmology. This means that quite a few of the ancient Greek religious practices involving Pan which Hillman describes in here, I recognise as forerunners to modern day sex magick, a subject I only know as much about as I do because I have become cyber-penpals with an American occultist named Stephanie Quick who frequently writes about the subject on her blog:
https://stephaniequick.home.blog/

Guess what, Quick's blog includes a couple esoteric analyses of J. M. Barrie's ”Peter Pan”, where she connects Barrie's character to his ancient namesake and his fairy companion Tinkerbell to older manifestations of the divine feminine:
https://stephaniequick.home.blog/2020...

and
https://stephaniequick.home.blog/2019...

As far as Roscher's essay in here goes? Well, he brings to light even more information which I did not know until now either. In particular, Roscher finds it noteworthy that most European folklore surrounding nightmares from antiquity to modernity involves numinous entities assaulting the dreamer. Beginning with Ephialtes and Pnigalion in ancient Greece, demons who resemble unflattering caricatures of Pan! Closer to my backyard Roscher drops the bombshell that in mediaeval Scandinavia, Germany and Britain elves and fae were both identified with incubi, succubi and other nightmare-causing demons yet also regarded as entities you could make pacts with for mutual benefit as long as you had the necessary know-how. This is something I noticed since earlier this year, I dreamt about an encounter in a British graveyard with entities who could have been elves or fae but also a secret society of human mystics – they did not make this clear, but the dream had a lasting effect on me.

On a final note: As someone with an interest in ufology from an esoteric viewpoint, who hopes to one day know enough about traditional Western occultism to make heads and tails of Erwin Neutzsky-Wulff and Kenneth Grant's musings on the subject, I find it startling that in some of the nightmare accounts which Roscher compiles appear satyr-like demons who have similar builds and facial features as the Greys who currently besiege UFO abductees. (short stature, big heads and small frail bodies, grey skin, opaque black eyes etc)

I would recommend ”Pan and the Nightmare” to anyone with an interest in pre-Christian Greco-Roman religion and its relevance to modern Western occultism, folklore surrounding nightmares or how dream analysis has evolved throughout Europe's history... as long as they aren't allergic to Hillman's mutant Jungian psychology. Which frankly ended up closer to Alejandro Jodorowsky and G. I. Gurdjieff than either Freud or Jung most of the time anyway!

[Rjyan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The beginning of James Hillman's half of this book contains once of his most eloquent arguments for a modern reevaluation (and application) of polytheism. After that, it becomes an investigation and analysis into the relationship suggested by the title, centered around a book written in 1900 by German classicist Wilhelm Roscher. Hillman applies the archetypal psychology to Roscher's insights, and teases from them the assumptions that delineate telling boundaries. Boundaries... in the shape of Pan, himself, alive and forever animated by/animating our Pannish inclinations, kaplow! Hillman is great to hang with when he's taking a go at a single Classic god. You get to see the god happening now and ever.

Roscher's book is dry to the end. There are several numbered lists; man's dad was an economist, I don't know if that has something to do with it.

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first half is Hillman with some questionable analysis of Pan, haunting the nastier corners of our collective grey-matters. He assumes the reader is already familiar with his personal Jungian heresy, which only really gets in the way of enjoying the read when he talks about Pan as rapist. If he would just clearly denounce rape and then mumble something about how to handle rape fantasies in a therapeutic setting it would have helped, and I think he is kind of beating around that bush, but it comes across all kinds of wrong, at least for me. Some of his points at the beginning, about "Hellenism versus Hebrewism" (cf Matthew Arnold) and the importance of the ancient, classical myths as foundations in our (meaning I guess "western") culture were interesting but also old-fashioned, I think. We can move on from thinking monotheism is so homogenous, as if its denial of other supernatural forms and forces is total, as if its patriarchy is total... and we definitely need to recognize that more and more orishas and other non-western figures have meanwhile moved in with Pan and the nymphs... aaaannnnd I think we definitely need to talk about how the idea of the "forest" has changed in our ecocidal age.

The second half, a translation of some even older, even more geeked-out greybeard mansplainer, gets off to a slow start with a review of the science of nightmares in the 19th Century. How anyone survived the 19th Century with any kind of imagination intact is a tale of great heroic struggle. But Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher, we are told, actually got a lot of his encyclopedic knowledge about Greek Mythology into a multivolume encyclopedia but died with a few letters to go. When he sets out to discuss Pan and other "erotic nightmare demons" we are finally in the territory that interests me. Unfortunately, it's even older and drier than the first half and connections to contemporary nightmares and libidos even weaker.

Two intellectuals, one nearly completely divorced from the consensus in his field and the other likely exercising some neurospicy superpowers, write about a fascinating subject, but you'll learn more about Pan by reading 2006 interviews with Guillermo del Toro.

[Hagar · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Pan's hour was always noon. At this moment he would appear in the blaze and shimmer of midday, startling man and animal into blind terror. This seems to have little to do with the nightmare. Perhaps we need to regard high noon, the zenith of the day, as the highest point of natural strength, which constellates both the life force and its opposite, the necessary fall from this height. It is the uncanny moment when I and my shadow are one. Noon like midnight is a moment of transition and, like midnight, daybreak and sunset, a radix of primordial orientation for what might be called the symbolic clock. These are the moments when time stands still, when the orderly procession of moments disrupts. So must certain things be accomplished before the cock's crow at dawn, or the stroke of midnight, or before night falls. At these moments time is broken through by something extraordinary, something beyond the usual order. The "Mittagsfrauen" appear, or ghosts at midnight - compare Nietzsche's vision of the eternal at noon in his Thus Spake Zarathustra. This is the moment when only the moment itself matters, where the moment is severed from before and after, a law unto itself, a quality, altogether a constellation of the forces in the air, without continuity and therefore without connection to "...the waste sad time/ Stretching before and after" (T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" V)."

[Menia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Το παρόν βιβλίο είναι ένα από τα βιβλία που ανακαλύπτεις τυχαία σε ένα ξεχασμένο ράφι βιβλιοπωλείου (ίσως και να ήταν η τελευταία κόπια), και τελικά όχι μόνο το αγοράζεις, αλλά σε εκπλήσσει ευχάριστα! Με λατρεμένο θέμα την παγκόσμια μυθολογία, ο Χιλμαν προσπαθεί να παρουσιάσει με αρκετά πολύπλοκο, ψυχαναλυτικό και κάποιες φορές κουραστικό τρόπο, τη θεραπευτική και λυτρωτική λειτουργία των μύθων. Στο πρώτο μέρος ασχολείται με τη βιολογική έκφανση του αρχαίου θεού Πάνα , όπως αυτή παρουσιάζεται σε φαινόμενα διαταραγμένης ανθρωπινης ψυχολογίας (πανικός, εφιάλτης, λαγνεία, διαστροφή να κ.λπ.). Στο δεύτερο μέρος γίνεται μια ενδελεχής πραγμάτευση και παράθεση όλων των μυθικών κακόβουλων πνευμάτων που σχετίζονται με τους εφιάλτες ( Μόρα, Κοβαλοι, Φαυνοι) από μέρους του Γερμανού κλασικού φιλολόγου Roscher, ο οποίος προσπαθεί να ερμηνεύσει ορθολογικά τις αρχαίες δεισιδαιμονίες (όσο είναι αυτό δυνατόν, καθώς οι πραγματείες είναι γραμμένες στις αρχές σχεδόν του προηγούμενου αιώνα). Θα ήθελα στο επίμετρο να υπάρχουν οι μεταγενέστερες προσθήκες και σχόλια του Roscher, καθότι αφαιρέθηκαν. Η μετάφραση, προσωπικά, με ικανοποίησε απόλυτα! 4 αστέρια, λοιπόν!

[Sign of the Wolf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trochę trudne do ocenienia, bo książka składa się właściwie z długiego eseju Hillmana i tłumaczenia eseju o Panie i demonach snu epoki hellenistycznej Wilhelma Roschera. O ile oba teksty łączy temat przewodni, to różnią się całkowicie podejściem do tematu. Tekst Hillmana, ucznia Junga, może być dość wymagający dla osoby raczej zielonej w psychologii archetypowej Junga (np dla mnie), jakkolwiek niektóre tezy Hillmana mi siedzą. Tekst Roschera podszedł mi trochę bardziej - jest to przede wszystkim przegląd demonologii koszmaru w tekstach antycznych i jeśli ktoś chciałby mieć ten temat w pigułce, to chyba Roscher streszcza go w miarę przejrzyście. Niemniej jakkolwiek jest to ciekawy tekst z filologicznej perspektywy, to wiedza autora na temat zaburzeń psychicznych (jak to przystało na koniec XIX w) jest dość nędzna, co psuje trochę experience, szczególnie jeśli ktoś nie ma za dużej świadomości tego tematu. Generalnie całość poleciłbym głównie ze względu na to tłumaczenie, tekst Hillmana to raczej rzecz dla diehard fanbase'u Junga

[Camilo Puello · Rating 3 out of 5]

Buen libro, pero a veces coloca tantas referencias sin conexión con anteriores parrafos que hace que debamos volver a leer secciones anteriores

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved Hillman's essay, but the second one is kind of a slog and eventually I realized I had no interest in forcing my way to the end of it.

[Jfish938 · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK, not Hillman at his best.

[Paul Théberge]

Very profound full of truth!! "The Gods have become our diseases." so true. I believe now...myths are so important!!thanks mister Hillman