Panic

   , PANDEMONIUM, PAN

   In the Greek religion, Pan, a god of forests and fields, of flocks and shepherds, came from disputed parentage. He is represented with the torso of a man and the legs, horns, and ears of a goat. Because he dwelt in the woodlands, any weird sound or eerie sigh emanating at night from the mountains or valleys was attributed to him. Pan was a mischievous creature and loved to dart out of underbrush and shout at people just to startle them. A panic is caused by overpowering fear. In its theatrical sense, however, panic has an opposite connotation—to amuse to the point that the audience is hysterical with laughter.

   Sex and music were Pan's chief interests. He was often portrayed playing his panpipes or dancing with nymphs. He set his lustful eye one day on a nymph named Syrinx. But she fled from him to preserve her chastity and was transformed into a bed of reeds. Pan cut the reeds into unequal lengths and fashioned from them his syrinx or panpipe. Pan continued his amorous, lustful pursuits with other nymphs. Although his courtship of Syrinx proved fruitless, the anglicized name of his lovely nymph continues to this day, but in the form of a very ordinary device—a syringe (a Syrinx is the vocal organ of birds). John Milton coined the word pandemonium in Paradise Lost in 1667. Milton wanted a word to represent a tumultuous disorder. It is used today to describe any wild, unrestrained uproar or any boisterous assembly. Where there is panic there is bound to be pandemonium.