When Gods Return as Symptoms: The Great God Pan, Disenchantment, and the Psyche-Nature Split

As Jung observed, the old gods did not disappear under modern scientific scrutiny. They were exiled, only to reappear as pathology and a culture increasingly estranged from the world it inhabits. The ecological crisis is the outer symptom of an inner split. This talk reads the Roman-era "death of the Great God Pan" as a diagnostic myth of modern disenchantment: the split between an archaic psyche embedded in an ensouled nature and a modern psyche that "straightens things up" through logic. The work, then, is to recover the mythic psyche as a guide toward a renewed relation to nature.