Dan Clore
2005-02-02 13:46:31 UTC
panic, panique, adj. & n. [< Gr panikós < Pan, the name of
the deity; also panikón, panic terror.] Of or pertaining to
the god Pan; specifically, in such expressions as panic
terror, panic horror, panic fear, etc., of or pertaining to
the sudden attack of groundless terror once attributed to
the god Pan; the attack of groundless terror itself, or a
similar attack of intense terror.
Ran Coll our Dog, and Talbot with the Band,
And Malkin, with her Distaff in her Hand:
Ran Cow and Calf, and Family of Hogs,
In Panique Horror of pursuing Dogs;
With many a deadly Grunt and doleful Squeak
Poor Swine, as if their pretty Hearts would break.
John Dryden, "The Cock and the Fox; or, The Tale of the
Nun's Priest"
Amid the pagans, armed with scimitars, and dressed in
caftans, the fiends are painted as assisting them,
pourtrayed in all the modern horrors of the cloven-foot, or,
as the Germans term it, horse's foot, bat-wings,
saucer-eyes, locks like serpents, and tail like a dragon.
These attributes, it may be cursorily noticed, themselves
intimate the connexion of modern demonology with the
mythology of the ancients. The cloven foot is the attribute
of Pan, to whose talents for inspiring terror we owe the
word panic -- the snaky tresses are borrowed from the shield
of Minerva, and the dragon train alone seems to be connected
with the scriptural history.
Sir Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft,
Addressed to J.G. Lockheart, Esq.
No pen can describe the awful scene of confusion and death
which now took place. Swayed by no panic fear, but
influenced by terrors of dreadful reality, the people
exerted all their force to escape from that spot; and thus
the struggling—crushing—pushing—crowding—fighting -- and all
the oscillations of a multitude set in motion by the direst
alarms, were succeeded by the most fatal results.
G.W.M. Reynolds, Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf: A Romance
For death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are
fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon
another, the child too often makes its entrance from the
mother's corpse. It is no wonder, with so traitourous a
scheme of things, if the wise people who created for us the
idea of Pan thought that of all fears the fear of him was
the most terrible, since it embraces all. And still we
preserve the phrase: a panic terror. To reckon dangers too
curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat that runs
through all the winning music of the world, to hold back the
hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from life
because of death: this it is to be afraid of Pan.
Robert Louis Stevenson, "Pan's Pipes"
They were working for panic terror?
Arthur Machen, The Terror
"If we can make a ghost of this fear of yours -- well,
ghosts can be laid. If we make a fever of it, fever can be
cured. But while this remains merely panic fear and a
smouldering rage, what can we do about it?"
H.G. Wells, The Croquet Player
He spoke of the Latin god, Pan, with great affection, and
declared himself to be in union and understanding with that
divinity.
"But in Pan lurks a peril against which you must guard,"
warned the dragon. "There is a panic terror, a fear and
dread of him, that may awake at any moment to ruin life; and
there is a panic trust, equally destructive -- that blind,
cowardly repose in his shadow which tends to rob us of
self-command and self-expression. Both these extremes
stultify existence, and other gods than Pan are also
responsible for them."
Eden Phillpotts, The Lavender Dragon
I knew what was wrong with me. I was suffering from panic --
a physical affection produced by natural causes, explicable,
though as yet not fully explained. Two friends of mine had
once been afflicted with it; one in a lonely glen in the
Jotunheim, so that he ran for ten miles over stony hills
till he found a sæter and human companionship: the other in
a Bavarian forest, where both he and his guide tore for
hours through the thicket till they dropped like logs beside
a highroad.
John Buchan, "Skule Skerry"
I reckon among ghosts the nameless and disembodied hauntings
of particular stretches of road, clearings in forests, bare
hill-tops. I have twice met with powerful examples of this
phenomenon. The first occasion was on a North Welsh ridge
crowded with an ancient earthwork; the second was in the
Balearics on a lonely coast road, near a village where a
temple of Diana had once stood. On each occasion it was dusk
with a waxing moon, and I felt that sudden inexplicable
dread that makes the hair of one's scalp rise like the fur
of an angry cat and one's legs run with no sense of effort,
as if they were skating. Previously I had thought that when
Shakespeare wrote about the haunted ship in The Tempest:
. . . not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad and played
Some trick of desperation. . . . Ferdnand
With hair upstaring -- then like reeds, not hair --
Cried "Hell is empty and all the devils are here!"
he was writing poetical nonsense. Since then, I know that he
was giving a not exaggerated account of a disagreeable
physical fact. The Greeks had a word for this sort of dread
-- "panic" -- meaning the fear that suddenly struck them in
the woods or on the hills when the God Pan was loose. In
Ferdinand's case it was not Pan, of course, but St. Elmo;
and the only way I can account for my two hauntings is that
both places had once been the scene of horrific rites, and
that the rocks and stones still periodically sweated out
that horror.
Robert Graves, Seven Days in New Crete (aka Watch the North
Wind Rise) (ellipses in original)
There they stood -- that enigmatic row, intent, studying us
beneath their god or altar or machine of cones and disks
within their cylinder walled with light -- and at that
moment there crystallized within my consciousness the
sublimation of all the strangenesses of all that had gone
before, smothering throat and heart; a panic loneliness as
though I had wandered into an alien world -- a world as
unfamiliar to humanity, as unfamiliar with it as our own
would seem to a thinking, mobile, crystal adrift among men.
A. Merritt, The Metal Monster
In a moment when no one was looking I reached out and seized
the too familiar sheets, crushing them in my hand without
daring to look at their penmanship. I ought to be sorry now
that a kind of panic fear made me burn them that night with
averted eyes.
H.P. Lovecraft & Adolphe de Castro, "The Electric Executioner"
Once more the mound was a thing of panic fright, and only
the excitement of the Great War served to restore it to the
farther background of Binger folklore.
H.P. Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop, "The Mound"
Then I heard a rustle among the food packages brought in
yesterday, and that dæmoniac fly crawled out before my eyes.
I grabbed something flat and made passes at the thing
despite my panic fear, but with no more effect than usual.
H.P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald, "Winged Death"
And at that instant the head of Vacharn, in its rolling,
bound against Uldulla's feet; and the head, snarling
ferociously, caught the hem of his robe with its teeth and
hung there as he sprang back in panic fright.
Clark Ashton Smith, "Necromancy in Naat"
"Quiet!" he commanded, then hurried on: "In the old days
when such things were, my friend, Pan, the god of Nature,
was very real to the people. They believed, firmly, that
whoso saw Pan after nightfall, that one died instantly.
Therefore, when a person is seized with a blind, unreasoning
fear, even to this day, we say he has a panic."
Seabury Quinn, "The Great God Pan"
I ran from Jason, who clung inexorably to the fabric of my
mind, pouring the black blind panic of his fear into my
soul. Such fear as we have no name for today!
It was terror that only primitive peoples know, assailed by
the vastness of the unknown. A fear like an ecstasy that
used to fall upon men in the old days when Pan himself
peered out at them, horned and grinning, through the trees.
Panic they called it, because they knew that horned head by
name.
Henry Kuttner, The Mask of Circe
And he told me of Pan, goat-footed, moving through the
woodland with laughter running before him and panic behind,
the same panic terror which my language and the
Shaughnessy's get from his name. Pânico, we Brazilians call it.
C.L. Moore, "Dæmon"
Then the leader -- a tall man in a white fur cap—shouted
suddenly in a voice of panic terror. "No use to fire! No use
-- don't you see? These aren't real wolves . . ."
C.L. Moore, "Werewoman" (ellipsis in original)
Someday the hill might be bulldozed down, when greed had
grown even greater than it is today and awe of primeval
nature even less, but now it could still awaken panic terror.
Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
the deity; also panikón, panic terror.] Of or pertaining to
the god Pan; specifically, in such expressions as panic
terror, panic horror, panic fear, etc., of or pertaining to
the sudden attack of groundless terror once attributed to
the god Pan; the attack of groundless terror itself, or a
similar attack of intense terror.
Ran Coll our Dog, and Talbot with the Band,
And Malkin, with her Distaff in her Hand:
Ran Cow and Calf, and Family of Hogs,
In Panique Horror of pursuing Dogs;
With many a deadly Grunt and doleful Squeak
Poor Swine, as if their pretty Hearts would break.
John Dryden, "The Cock and the Fox; or, The Tale of the
Nun's Priest"
Amid the pagans, armed with scimitars, and dressed in
caftans, the fiends are painted as assisting them,
pourtrayed in all the modern horrors of the cloven-foot, or,
as the Germans term it, horse's foot, bat-wings,
saucer-eyes, locks like serpents, and tail like a dragon.
These attributes, it may be cursorily noticed, themselves
intimate the connexion of modern demonology with the
mythology of the ancients. The cloven foot is the attribute
of Pan, to whose talents for inspiring terror we owe the
word panic -- the snaky tresses are borrowed from the shield
of Minerva, and the dragon train alone seems to be connected
with the scriptural history.
Sir Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft,
Addressed to J.G. Lockheart, Esq.
No pen can describe the awful scene of confusion and death
which now took place. Swayed by no panic fear, but
influenced by terrors of dreadful reality, the people
exerted all their force to escape from that spot; and thus
the struggling—crushing—pushing—crowding—fighting -- and all
the oscillations of a multitude set in motion by the direst
alarms, were succeeded by the most fatal results.
G.W.M. Reynolds, Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf: A Romance
For death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are
fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon
another, the child too often makes its entrance from the
mother's corpse. It is no wonder, with so traitourous a
scheme of things, if the wise people who created for us the
idea of Pan thought that of all fears the fear of him was
the most terrible, since it embraces all. And still we
preserve the phrase: a panic terror. To reckon dangers too
curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat that runs
through all the winning music of the world, to hold back the
hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from life
because of death: this it is to be afraid of Pan.
Robert Louis Stevenson, "Pan's Pipes"
They were working for panic terror?
Arthur Machen, The Terror
"If we can make a ghost of this fear of yours -- well,
ghosts can be laid. If we make a fever of it, fever can be
cured. But while this remains merely panic fear and a
smouldering rage, what can we do about it?"
H.G. Wells, The Croquet Player
He spoke of the Latin god, Pan, with great affection, and
declared himself to be in union and understanding with that
divinity.
"But in Pan lurks a peril against which you must guard,"
warned the dragon. "There is a panic terror, a fear and
dread of him, that may awake at any moment to ruin life; and
there is a panic trust, equally destructive -- that blind,
cowardly repose in his shadow which tends to rob us of
self-command and self-expression. Both these extremes
stultify existence, and other gods than Pan are also
responsible for them."
Eden Phillpotts, The Lavender Dragon
I knew what was wrong with me. I was suffering from panic --
a physical affection produced by natural causes, explicable,
though as yet not fully explained. Two friends of mine had
once been afflicted with it; one in a lonely glen in the
Jotunheim, so that he ran for ten miles over stony hills
till he found a sæter and human companionship: the other in
a Bavarian forest, where both he and his guide tore for
hours through the thicket till they dropped like logs beside
a highroad.
John Buchan, "Skule Skerry"
I reckon among ghosts the nameless and disembodied hauntings
of particular stretches of road, clearings in forests, bare
hill-tops. I have twice met with powerful examples of this
phenomenon. The first occasion was on a North Welsh ridge
crowded with an ancient earthwork; the second was in the
Balearics on a lonely coast road, near a village where a
temple of Diana had once stood. On each occasion it was dusk
with a waxing moon, and I felt that sudden inexplicable
dread that makes the hair of one's scalp rise like the fur
of an angry cat and one's legs run with no sense of effort,
as if they were skating. Previously I had thought that when
Shakespeare wrote about the haunted ship in The Tempest:
. . . not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad and played
Some trick of desperation. . . . Ferdnand
With hair upstaring -- then like reeds, not hair --
Cried "Hell is empty and all the devils are here!"
he was writing poetical nonsense. Since then, I know that he
was giving a not exaggerated account of a disagreeable
physical fact. The Greeks had a word for this sort of dread
-- "panic" -- meaning the fear that suddenly struck them in
the woods or on the hills when the God Pan was loose. In
Ferdinand's case it was not Pan, of course, but St. Elmo;
and the only way I can account for my two hauntings is that
both places had once been the scene of horrific rites, and
that the rocks and stones still periodically sweated out
that horror.
Robert Graves, Seven Days in New Crete (aka Watch the North
Wind Rise) (ellipses in original)
There they stood -- that enigmatic row, intent, studying us
beneath their god or altar or machine of cones and disks
within their cylinder walled with light -- and at that
moment there crystallized within my consciousness the
sublimation of all the strangenesses of all that had gone
before, smothering throat and heart; a panic loneliness as
though I had wandered into an alien world -- a world as
unfamiliar to humanity, as unfamiliar with it as our own
would seem to a thinking, mobile, crystal adrift among men.
A. Merritt, The Metal Monster
In a moment when no one was looking I reached out and seized
the too familiar sheets, crushing them in my hand without
daring to look at their penmanship. I ought to be sorry now
that a kind of panic fear made me burn them that night with
averted eyes.
H.P. Lovecraft & Adolphe de Castro, "The Electric Executioner"
Once more the mound was a thing of panic fright, and only
the excitement of the Great War served to restore it to the
farther background of Binger folklore.
H.P. Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop, "The Mound"
Then I heard a rustle among the food packages brought in
yesterday, and that dæmoniac fly crawled out before my eyes.
I grabbed something flat and made passes at the thing
despite my panic fear, but with no more effect than usual.
H.P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald, "Winged Death"
And at that instant the head of Vacharn, in its rolling,
bound against Uldulla's feet; and the head, snarling
ferociously, caught the hem of his robe with its teeth and
hung there as he sprang back in panic fright.
Clark Ashton Smith, "Necromancy in Naat"
"Quiet!" he commanded, then hurried on: "In the old days
when such things were, my friend, Pan, the god of Nature,
was very real to the people. They believed, firmly, that
whoso saw Pan after nightfall, that one died instantly.
Therefore, when a person is seized with a blind, unreasoning
fear, even to this day, we say he has a panic."
Seabury Quinn, "The Great God Pan"
I ran from Jason, who clung inexorably to the fabric of my
mind, pouring the black blind panic of his fear into my
soul. Such fear as we have no name for today!
It was terror that only primitive peoples know, assailed by
the vastness of the unknown. A fear like an ecstasy that
used to fall upon men in the old days when Pan himself
peered out at them, horned and grinning, through the trees.
Panic they called it, because they knew that horned head by
name.
Henry Kuttner, The Mask of Circe
And he told me of Pan, goat-footed, moving through the
woodland with laughter running before him and panic behind,
the same panic terror which my language and the
Shaughnessy's get from his name. Pânico, we Brazilians call it.
C.L. Moore, "Dæmon"
Then the leader -- a tall man in a white fur cap—shouted
suddenly in a voice of panic terror. "No use to fire! No use
-- don't you see? These aren't real wolves . . ."
C.L. Moore, "Werewoman" (ellipsis in original)
Someday the hill might be bulldozed down, when greed had
grown even greater than it is today and awe of primeval
nature even less, but now it could still awaken panic terror.
Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"