There are moments in the woods when language falls behind. When the body knows something before the mind does. Fear sharpens. Breath changes. The senses feel alert in a way that isn’t quite comfortable. The world no longer behaves like a neutral backdrop. It feels responsive, watchful and alive.
These states don’t arise easily in constant noise. They require a certain quiet that’s not just external, but internal. When attention isn’t constantly pulled elsewhere, when the body is a little more exposed, a little less buffered.
Modern life is designed to interrupt this. Screens, schedules, comfort, and constant mediation keep the body from lingering in that threshold state for long. That insulation has value, but it also changes what kinds of experiences are likely to arise at all. Certain ways of sensing the world require certain conditions. They don’t appear on demand.
Long before experiences like this were analysed or explained, people tried to speak about them. They reached for stories, symbols, and figures that could hold instinct, unease, exhilaration, and aliveness all at once. One of those names was Pan.
In ancient Greece, Pan was imagined as a god of wild places. Part human, part animal, living in woods, hills, and caves. He embodied sensations people recognised in untamed landscapes: sudden fear, joy without reason, sexual energy, the feeling of being watched, the sense that the land itself was alert. Pan was not a moral figure or a teacher. He didn’t offer instruction or salvation. Instead, he gave form to experiences that were physical, instinctive, and difficult to explain.
Across cultures, this presence appears under different names and images. In Britain, it takes multiple forms, in earlier horned figures, such as Cernunnos and later in the Green Man. These are not copies of Pan, but related expressions of the same underlying intuition of wildness and vitality embedded in the land.
When Christianity spread across Europe, figures like Pan became problematic. Not because they were evil, but because they represented everything that resisted control: instinct, desire, wilderness, the body, the land itself. Horns, hooves, and animal features were gradually repurposed into the image of the Devil. Pan did not become the Devil but rather, the Devil was shaped using Pan imagery. And yet this presence was never fully erased.
Green Men still appear in churches tucked into corners, hidden in roof bosses, or staring directly down from arches. Their presence has been interpreted in many ways: as warnings, as remnants, or as bridges between belief systems during times of transition. Whatever the intention, their persistence suggests something important. That the image of a living, watching world could not simply be removed. It was absorbed. Reframed. And quietly, it endured.
In my own life, Pan has never felt like a belief so much as a recognition. When I began to understand more clearly how his image had been reshaped into the figure of the Devil, it struck me as a deep injustice. I had grown up with a genuine belief in Christ as a teacher, and I still hold that the moral vision at the heart of Christianity, compassion, responsibility, care for others is of course a good way to live. But I have always been uneasy with the way light and dark are separated, rather than understood together.
What drew me to Pan was that he refused that separation. Learning how he had been demonised made me want to reclaim him not as a softened or sentimental figure, but as something whole. I begun to seek him and to draw him and eventually tattooed his likeness across my core. This wasn’t an act of rebellion against Christianity so much as a refusal to accept that wildness must automatically be equated with evil. I wanted to hold morality and instinct together, rather than choosing one at the expense of the other.
More recently in my creative practice I have spent less time on illustration and more time crafting and creating with a particular draw towards painting on animal hide. Rather than decorations I am wanting to create relics. They are not a new direction so much as a deepening of a line I’ve been following for years, having tanned my first hide some years ago in France (see previous blog) and they sit at the heart of my studio, The Red Tent and through which I explore making as ceremony, and material as something alive rather than inert.
The imagery that appears in these hangings is not incidental. I work with a range of forms and references. Ancient cave art, stone, fragments of place, the sacred feminine, and ancestral marks gathered through time and attention. Some of the hangings also show Pan; others do not. But the same underlying questions run through all of them. Questions about life, death, responsibility, and relationship with the more-than-human world. Pan is not the only figure present, but he is one I know I will return to.
These hangings are made on skin; on the body of another being and that carries weight. The impulse came initially from encountering Native American artwork made on buffalo hide, treated as an act of respect and acknowledgement for a life that had been taken. To eat an animal, to survive because of it, and then to live daily in the presence of its skin is not comfortable. It carries gratitude, but also pain. It insists on responsibility.
The first wall hanging I made was at the conclusion of my Primitive Year, using a skin I had prepared myself and decorated with bones from animals I had eaten during the course. Much of this work has been shaped through my time and training with Woodland Ways, where skills are taught not just as techniques, but as ways of paying attention to land, material, and responsibility. That first piece made something immediately clear to me: this was a form I wanted to continue working with.
Each piece is fully biodegradable, made entirely from natural materials gathered and prepared from the Derbyshire landscape: gall ink I’ve made myself, earth pigments like ochre, sinew, hide glue. Nothing is synthetic. Nothing is permanent in a way that denies return. These objects could go back into the land they came from without harm.
The act of making them is itself devotional. Painting onto skin, using materials drawn directly from place, feels like an honest form of worship. Not idealised or romanticised, but grounded in matter, labour, and care.
Because of all this, I’ve also come to question positions that insist there is nothing beyond our understanding. No depth, no interiority, no aliveness to the world at all. That kind of certainty feels as shaped by history and environment as any religion. It often grows out of a justified rejection of institutional faith, combined with lives lived far from the conditions that once made the world feel responsive rather than inert.
I’m not interested in replacing one dogma with another. Belief is not required. But I do think something is lost when rejection is not followed by re-rooting. When there is no way back into relationship with land, time, vulnerability, and consequence, spirituality is either abandoned entirely or replaced with something weightless. Something merely symbolic without cost, comforting without any responsibility.
Here, in Derbyshire, it feels different. This is a landscape that has never been fully smoothed out. Stone circles sit beside farms and footpaths. Churches rise near prehistoric sites. Woodland, gritstone edges, quarries, and open moor interrupt modern life rather than disappearing beneath it. Time layers instead of replacing itself. The quiet comes more easily, and with it, a sense of presence.
I know this difference because I’ve felt it in my own life. When I spent extended time immersed in wild places, travelling, living with fewer comforts, fewer certainties, my own spirituality finally had space to grow. This was not because I found answers, but because I found conditions where listening was possible.
This intuition has a name in philosophy too: panpsychism.
Panpsychism proposes that consciousness is not something that suddenly appears in complex brains, but a fundamental feature of reality. Thinkers such as Philip Goff and Galen Strawson argue that awareness may be as basic as mass or charge, present, in some form, throughout all matter. Rocks, trees, water, animals: not conscious in the human sense, but not devoid of inner life either.
For some, this sounds radical. For others, it feels like remembering something long known.
As a child, I loved the line from Pocahontas: “but I know every rock and tree and creature has a life, has a spirit, has a name.” I didn’t know the word panpsychism then. I just knew it felt true.
This understanding weaves through all of my work: bushcraft, creating, tattooing and ceremony not as metaphor, but as practice. These are my ways of remaining in relationship with a world that is alive.
Pan does not need permission. He does not rely on belief, revival, or defence. He is not something that can be destroyed, only repressed and whatever is repressed has a habit of returning.
As long as there is a living world, there will be names for the experience of being inside it. As long as there are bodies, instincts, fear, desire, and joy, something like Pan will re-emerge, in religion, in philosophy, in art, in the quiet recognition that the world is not inert.
We are not separate from that wildness. We are made of it. Some of us forget how to feel it, or never find the conditions that allow it space but forgetting does not undo what is there.
Pan is not benevolent. He is not gentle. He is not interested in being liked.
He simply is.
And he always will be.