Let's Talk About Pan

Note the panpipe or pan flute around the neck of this new Peter Pan?

I'd like to commence a conversation involving the considered conclusions of Forteans and synchromystics. Specifically, I wonder how we all are feeling about the new Pan film? The movie is placing itself to the forefront with the use of the subtle marketing of the old Greek god of the wild, rustic music, and companion of the nymphs, Pan.

In the world of new movies, Pan is an forecoming synchrocinematic effort, directed by Joe Wright and written by Jason Fuchs. It stars Hugh Jackman, Garrett Hedlund, Rooney Mara, Amanda Seyfried, and Levi Miller as the title character. As an anonymous writer put it, Pan is "an invented origin story for Peter Pan and Captain Hook."

Pan is scheduled for release in the USA on October 9, 2015, and in the United Kingdom on October 16, 2015. I'm assuming worldwide distribution will follow.

I asked the author of The Rebirth of Pan and Weird America, Jim Brandon, to share some thoughts about the forthcoming Pan film:

Looks a bit misleading to me, since it's really about Peter Pan, of which there have been around ten versions, starting with Walt Disney’s in 1953, according to Netflix. Of course some are spinoffs like Hook (1991, with Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams) and Finding Neverland (2004, with Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet).
The best treatment of the mythological character that I’m aware of would be the Spanish-made Pan’s Labyrinth (2006, with unknown players but good special effects). 

Craig Heimbichner, the co-author of Ritual America, forwards his reaction to Pan:

To the cognoscenti, Pan is not a benign or benevolent member of the Hellenic pantheon--Wiccans to the contrary--but a dark figure and a betrayer. The encoding of Pan symbols in the Group Mind fits the general pattern of the ignorant, seemingly playful, self-destructive behavior of the human race as the Kali Yuga winds down. 

Adam Parfrey, the lead coauthor of of Ritual America, notes that he once wrote about the modern-day manifestation of "Pan" in what I feel is today a classic article, "Pederastic Park?".

Also, he mentions an extension of his "Pan" sense of such cinema by Jimbo X in "Steven Spielberg: The King of Child Exploitation Cinema?"

As far as is known, Steven Spielberg is unattached to this version of the story.

Insights from others are shared by Matthew Bell:

According to the one of the 20th century's leading experts on ancient Rome, R. E. A. Palmer: "In Rome Pan, an old Greek god ..., was thought of as a deity of good health."
(Robert Everett Allen Palmer II, "Northern Campus Martius" [Studies of the northern Campus Martius in Ancient Rome], Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 80, no. 4, 1990, p. 36)

Here is the famous "Pan is dead," as cited in Hamlet's Mill: "Everyone has once read, for it comes up many times in literature, of that pilot in the reign of Tiberius, who, as he was sailing along in the Aegean on a quiet evening, heard a loud voice announcing that 'Great Pan was dead.' ...On the one hand, it announced the end of paganism: Pan with his pipes, the demon of still sun-drenched noon, the pagan god of glade and pasture and the rural idyll, had yielded to the supernatural. On the other hand the myth has been understood as telling of the death of Christ in the 19th year of Tiberius: the Son of God who was everything from Alpha to Omega was identified with Pan = 'All.'"
(Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time, paperback ed., 4th printing, Jaffrey, N.H.: David R. Godine Publisher, 1998, p. 275.)

There is a Socratic angle that is personally interesting to me. In his dialog Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates report that he could not remember his own past remarks on "love" (see also the Symposium): "...I can't remember at all because I was completely possessed by the gods..." (Socrates, Phaedrus, 263d; John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson, eds., Plato: Complete Works, Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publ., 1997, p. 540.)

Which "gods"? "Then I perceive that the Nymphs of Achelous and Pan the son of Hermes, who inspired me, were far better rhetoricians than Lysias the son of Cephalus." (Socrates,Phaedrus, 263d; B. Jowett, ed., Dialogues of Plato: Translated Into English With Analysis and Introductions, 3rd ed., vol. 1, New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1892, p. 472.)

Don't forget James Shelby Downard's "All that is hidden will be made manifest."

"All" in Greek is of course pan. Therefore, we may say: "Pan that

is hidden will be made manifest." ~ Matthew Bell.

In the realm of stream of consciousness linking of one thought to another, where Pan and Peter Pan turn up in the middle, Wayne J. Bush's Tricked by the Light blog captured an array of good illustrations and associations for the 2013 illustrated "Tricksters & the Trickster God."

What are your thoughts?