Bird Gods in Ancient Euro 



pe 



allowed to depart into exile. Here we seem 

 to have a human sacrifice to a bird god analo- 

 gous to Pan (Phaon) for whose sake Sappho 

 herself was said to have taken the fatal leap. 



Pan is indeed a mysterious and little-under- 

 stood deity. Were we to take only what the 

 Greeks have vouchsafed 

 to say of him, we would 

 not learn much. But 

 with the clew of bird 

 traits and bird origins in 

 our hand, we can find Pan 

 under many disguises. 

 The Greeks degraded him ; or perhaps it were 

 truer to say that they exalted other gods, their 

 own special gods, above him. Thus in the 

 career of Apollo we find fragments of the 

 career of Pan ; because, as we have seen, 

 Apollo ousted Pan and absorbed many of his 

 attributes, such as mastery in song, divination, 

 bowmanship, eloquence — even Pan's hard 

 luck in love. 



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