Rite of Pan

[Brendan]

My SO and I keep up an aperiodic Rite of Pan.
We did that the first time during the first MLA class.
And I must say I like goat cheese a lot better now!
So far, no Pan...
Although I can't speak for her, I notice an appreciable increase in my own primal lust.
And I may imagine it, but the Lust Index for people who see me everyday seems also to have mushroomed.
I imagined that the Lord Pan might appear as He did in Tom Robbins's book Jitterbug Perfume: as a discar... nate...
Well, no, actually, I don't want Him to appear all transparent and drained out for lack of worship, as He did during the body of that novel.
Maybe I had rather he spark up as he did at the beginning, in traditional form (horns, tail, furry legs, bevy of young maenads, unendurably delicious personal body odor)
I hadn't thought He might appear as Dionysus, a tall/dark/handsome ecstatic who causes plants and animals to suddenly flourish, and grape vines to inexplicably appear.
But nope; nerthing, not a darn thing.
At least we have a good time dancing and drinking!

[Brendan]

Some strange occurrences after i posted this:
On either the eighth or the ninth, my girlfriend and I walked home by a route we'd never taken before.
We began talking about our Rite, i.e., when next to do it, what preparations to make, etc.
Soon after we entered the path, and while still on the subject, we saw a large mask of Pan hung high up on a tree.
Not a "Green Man" mask, a lecherously-leering, bushy-bearded, ram-horned and grape-leafed Pan.
I remarked on the signifigance of this synchronicity, and we changed the subject to her study of magick.

That afternoon, after a long detour through the park, we lay down to nap and recover.
A woman shouted angrily and laughed from the building opposite.
We both remarked that it sounded as if she had entered the bedroom, and I thought to myself that some of her comments referred to facts only I know.
As I drifted off to sleep, I imagined I heard her say something about a Veve.
I received a frightening dream.
In it, an invoked deity rose up from our living room, growing to enormous size. from its groin sprouted an improbably large and lengthy penis; the body of which, composed of skeletally-decayed human corpses, had as its glans a deer-horned human skull. A voice inquired in awe, "The psychotic God of the forest?!"
My own sight and substance entered the skull, which peered lithely about.

I intended it to enter the apartment of the shouting woman, but instead the horned skull shot across town to my childhood home.
It entered my old bedroom, depositing me beside my sleeping girlfriend. The angry woman spoke through my own lips, and I jumped up out of bed.
I stumbled around, trying to turn on a red light to banish the manifestation, but to no avail.
Exasperatedly, I urged my girlfriend to get up and help me, but she replied that only five minutes had passed.
My feet tangled in each other. I stumbled, swayed, and fell.
My body seemed gigantic as I hit the carpet; it turned into the wooded area we had walked through, and a cloud of black beetles shot out of my ass.
An enormous form sank into the forest floor and heaved, struggling to rise from the dirt.
I awoke with a start and recounted the dream to my girlfriend.

On the morning of the eleventh, when i rose, I heard a hypnogogic voice telling me sternly: "A real tulpa, once your friend, has turned into your enemy."
That afternoon, I had a strange encounter with a man I do not know.
From inside the crowd of subway travellers, i heard a male voice call my name; it labelled me with an insult implying behavior I have certainly never committed.
A man sitting not ten feet distant then turned to look me in the eyes, his face a grotesque parody of my own, and made a sickly-lustful moue. He then immediately turned away.
With his wife and infant offspring directly beside him, and coupled with the aforesaid insulting shout from the crowd, his inexplicable expression struck me as monstrous.
I felt furious and made an extremely aggressive gesture, sufficient to imply violence, then an obscene sound. I soon found myself apologizing to the ladies in front of me for the latter; they had probably not observed the interaction between me and the other passenger, but they did hear the noise.
The man sitting next to me got up suddenly and stood halfway between us.
 
I exited at the nearest station, to remove myself from the situation.
Why did i think I heard someone calling out my name and insulting me?
Why did the guy look like my worst possible self?
Why did he offer a come-on, in such a lewd way, with his wife and child right there?

I figured I might as well walk home by the aforesaid path, since the Sun hurt my eyes; i also felt my skin burning from its heat.
Oddly, hours later, I had no sunburn; at this point, though, I definitely felt one.
While walking home, I felt a change coming over me.
I do not mean that I saw, with my eyes, horns growing from my forehead.
I do not mean that i could touch with my hands the wings growing from my back.
But I do mean that, right there on the sidewalk, i turned into a red-skinned, archetypal devil.

I grew horns, fangs, hooves, shaggy fur on the legs, and a tail if not long, then at least of mentionable length.
The wings extending from my back resembled those of bats.
My proprioceptive nevrves informed me that this change had occurred.
Instantly, the "wrath of Mohammed," i felt, fell on my head.

A shouting mullah appeared in mind's eye and chastised me for a hundred misdeeds.
I turned transparent to the intellect of passers-by, who also scolded me for my deviltry.
I walked in shame, all the way home, my hooves clumping heavily on the asphalt.
Yet i felt comfortably imposing, quite willing to accept fear in lieu of respect.
The possibility of some extraordinarily sensitive person perceiving the change bothered me a little, though.
As if in response to this agitation, an array of forms presented themselves as if on an invisible screen floating in front of my face.
I found that simply wishing my appearance to change scrolled through a menu of demonic and diabolic forms.
Eventually, I settled for a variation which allowed me to appear more human: my own face, surmounted by small, sharp horns; a set of ferociously sharp fangs; smaller, black bat's wings, and a flock of shadowy black bats that followed me as I walked.
The form responded to my usual GPR by promptly vanishing, along with all attendant ideation.

Last night, while watching a Wallace and Grommit with my girlfriend, I got that feeling again.
I felt guilty of the most atrocious acts, and at the same time naked to her surgically-incisive intuition. She accused me silently, with deadly accuracy.
A phantom conversation took place between an entity inhabiting me and an entity inhabiting her.
Only when I inwardly confessed to any and every act s/he accused me/us of did the the opposing entity abate in hir scrutiny.
We watched the rest of the movie in peace, and tidied up a bit afterward.
But again, I felt decidedly not myself: proprioceptively, I became very large, fat, and heavy.
I realized I had taken the form of a female acquaintance of ours, who, in a hushed tone, berated me for infidelity.
Facetiously, i informed her that we both worship the Devil; what sin could possibly exceed that?
As if by mental camera-phone, a reply came wherein the young woman called me "The Devil."
But what could she say? Panist revelry trumps Christian moralism. Her form vanished from inside mine.

The girlfriend and I roughhoused while doing dishes.
Again, a certain diabolic change took place in my person.
I felt that my eyes glowed golden like hot embers. Moreover, i could feel the light streaming out of them.
She apparently did not see this, nor had she heard any of the ghostly conversation. She turned from the sink as I backed out of the kitchen.
"I had a good time tonight, Satan," she stammered.
After so many weird occurances, I resignedly left the room and kept quiet about it.
I mentally began a GPR and readied for bed.

Well, what do you think about that?
Shall I say that Pan came to dinner?
I never invoked the Devil, but the Devil of the Tarot forms "the medieval blind for Pan," according to the comments in "The Book of Lies."