The Pipes of Pan

Dedicated to the Memory of Alan Lomax

by Geoffrey Clarfield (March 2010)

 January 2010

History does not repeat itself. We cannot return and we shall never return to ancient Rome. We will never witness a meeting of the Roman Senate. We shall never witness the gladiatorial games, we shall never meet an emperor and no matter how hard we try, we cannot get modern science out of our world view or the history of the twentieth century out of our consciousness, although given the state of University education these days, the latter may be possible within the next few decades. No, for all intents and purposes, the ancient world is dead to us.

I am in the Golan Heights, a group of hills and plateaus above the Sea of Galilee. The Golan is a territory of plains filled with oak trees and barren hillsides at the foot of Mount Hermon whose rivers and springs feed the Jordan River to the south. One of the springs feeds the pools of an ancient sanctuary where during Hellenistic and Roman times worshippers sacrificed to the God Pan.

Just above the cliffs is the white domed grave of a Druze holy man, El Khader, the green one, to whom a group of Druze has come to make a pilgrimage. No doubt they have prayed at the tomb, each supplicant asking for health, wealth or success as is often the case with the worship of Mediterranean saints whether their worshippers are Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Druze.

I can see them after their visit in the picnic area. The men wear old fashioned baggy Turkish pants bundled up at the ankle and sport white headdresses. The women wear black outfits, but unlike Muslims they do not veil their faces. Instead of the sacred burnt offerings that may here have once been offered to the God Pan, I can smell the roast meat of their bar b q wafting through the air and making me hungry.

The God Pan was associated with forests, water and the wild, all that is green and fertile and I wonder how it is that the Druze saint is called the green one. Is there a hint of continuity even in this late medieval transformation of the meaning of the site?

It is not surprising that a new religion (the secret religion of the Druze began sometime in the eleventh century) has chosen to make a sacred place, a few feet above the grotto that once served Pan, as in the Mediterranean so many churches and mosques have taken over the sacred space of earlier pagan religions.

In Roman Judea and the eastern Mediterranean the early Christians preached that the gods and spirits of the Roman and Greek pantheon were actually devils. They did as much as they could to dismantle or take over their places of worship, destroying what they took to be idols, the statues of the myriads of spirits that the religiously tolerant Romans worshipped throughout their multicultural empire.

Classicists can now tell us much about how the old Greek and Roman gods and spirits were worshipped. We know more about ancient Roman and Greek religion now than we did since the time of its decline during the Roman triumph of Christianity and the persecution of paganism, which began with the Emperor Constantine the Great. As so many Britons and Europeans lose interest in the Judeo Christian tradition, pagans are psychologically a tad closer to us once again, but I have yet to hear of New Age worshippers setting up a shrine to Zeus. Perhaps it is just a matter of time.

One thing these classical scholars have been unable to excavate for us is the music that was used during these old pagan ceremonies. Being largely of oral tradition it is lost to us. Only a few fragments of ancient Roman and Greek music have survived until today and none from the worship of Pan.

Today most ethnomusicologists will say it is far fetched, but some people say that the Pipes of Pan survive to this day, hidden in a mountain village in Northern Morocco. Throughout parts of rural Morocco, once a year after the major religious sacrifice that begins the Islamic New Year, Moroccan peasants and tribesmen act out a bizarre ritual with extensive musical accompaniment. It often takes days to complete, whereas the more formal sacrifice is over within a day.

Tellingly, no Muslim Arab scribe or historian has ever made mention of these ceremonies in any historical documents of the last few centuries and that are now providing historians of North Africa with growing amounts of primary sources to decipher. This signifies that these scholars did not see the masquerade as representative of the ideal, literate and predominantly urban Islam of the conquerors and later scholars. No doubt this cultural elite tolerated these customs of the peasants and tribesmen as surviving from the time of the great ignorance before the coming of Islam, what Islamic theologians call the Jahiliyya.

Common sense suggests that such a hypothesis could be true in and of itself, based on the fact that musics of oral tradition must, by their very nature, have a history. Most contemporary ethnomusicologists assume that if there are no written musical documents, then we must assume that there is no proven musical history and they dismiss any attempt to do so as speculative. Complementing this rather timid approach is their fear of being labeled colonialist or neo colonialist by their colleagues in the academy or the developing world.

As these intellectual essays were done when Europe had colonies in Asia and Africa, it is now dubbed colonial anthropology or ethnomusicology and in the academy these writings are declared to be inherently immoral. This is the acme of politically correct practice as most of these scholars are dead and not available to defend themselves at conferences.

In correspondence with the most accomplished American academic expert on Moroccan music he wrote me saying that he would not get involved in this topic as it was too hot to handle. Unlike him I have none of these qualms. I was trained in ethnomusicology at the graduate level. I have done ethnomusicological fieldwork in Morocco and other developing countries. So, I would like to invite the reader on a historical, anthropological and intellectual a journey of exploration to see if we can indeed find the Pipes of Pan in the hills of North Africa. But first we need to make a bit of a detour as I would like to tell you how I got there.

In 1965 when I was twelve years old I saw the Rolling Stones perform live at a hockey arena in Toronto. I was twelve seats away from the stage and I could almost see the chords that guitarist Brian Jones and Keith Richards used to belt out their unique mixture of Black American rhythm and blues and Anglo Saxon rock and roll.

 

Brian Jones played a white semi acoustic Gretch guitar with gold fittings. Somehow, that gold and white guitar looked like the kind of treasure that you would find in a Viking burial or in the Hall of the Mountain King. There was something entirely pagan about the whole affair. It was as close to Pan as I could get as a young teenager.

These good old films captured your imagination from the first scene and kept your adrenaline at a fever pitch for a full hour and a half. I left the concert saying to myself that Brian Jones had produced this affect with guitars and drums, not tanks and guns. It was my first taste of sympathy for the devil and let us not forget that the early Christians believed that Pan was the devil or at least, a devil and in those days so many moralists believed that rock and roll was the work of the devil.

More than ten years later I went to live in Morocco. I had spent my teenage years playing every form of folk and pop music that North America could produce-Delta Blues, Ragtime, Jugband, Blue Grass, Child ballads, Rhythm and Blues and Rock and Roll. But the music of the Americas did not quench my thirst for melodic and rhythmic diversity. As an undergraduate I studied world music (in those days it was an esoteric subject called comparative musicology).

 

The cook, an elderly woman named Zubeida prepared a feast each afternoon, taking us on a culinary tour of traditional Moroccan cuisine, feeding us with various kinds of meat cooked in olive oil mixed with fruits like prunes or apricots, eaten with fresh round Berber bread brought from the bakery down the alley and topped off with sweet green mint tea served in silver pots with ornate filigree.

I spent my time going back and forth between two overlapping worlds: that of expatriates abroad (and who in the seventies continued to provide the material that Paul Bowles used to fashion his novels about expatriates in Morocco and Africa who, consistently lose their way in life) and that of local Moroccan musicians.

We do not know if Jones is implying that perhaps this was how and why the Pipes of Pan survive, subliminally passed down from one generation to another for two thousand years, but let us give him the benefit of the doubt.

So Brian with an a, passes us over to the authority of Brion the painter with an o, his friend who has seen the festival of Pan and heard his pipers. Let us find out what he has discovered.

Here are quotes from his evocation, meant no doubt to persuade the reader by their fragmentary nature that we are second hand witnesses to something ancient and mysterious, and that only the superhip friends of Brian Jones have so far had the privilege to witness.

As I look at the record jacket the front is covered with a color photo portrait of a Jajoukan musician blowing on his double reed pipe, what the Moroccans call Ghaita and what Western musicologists call the shawm. [It is a single album with a double jacket.]

Barely noticeable, in a photo of a young man playing an upright violin, we see on the back wall a framed portrait of Brian Jones, who died in a mysterious swimming pool accident (the intervention of Pan?), common to so many rock stars and it is identical to the one on the liner notes of the previous album.

After having read it we find out that the Moroccan painter Hamri, whose pictures grace the front cover of the earlier album, told it to the author. This is the gist of the story that he tells us.

One day Boujeloud and Homulka disappeared. Attar took his flocks and searched for them. He killed his last four goats and made himself a costume from the skins. He put it on and went back to his village pretending to be Boujeloud. The villagers played for him and danced with him. From then on, he returned to the forest cave to live and no longer lived in the village. Before his death he passed down the tradition to one of the men of the village who passed it down until today.

 

 

For those unfamiliar with comparative mythology the half man, half goat would remind anyone with the vestiges of a classical education of the God Pan. And indeed it is hard to suggest that this is not the case.

 

So who exactly are the Master Musicians of Jajouka?

Let us return to the liner notes. Once again Brion Gysin is on hand to tell us the recent history of the Master Musicians. (By the way nowhere does anyone tell us why they are called the Master Musicians. It would seem that it is a bit of semantic drift. Our pop ethnographers tell us that Boujeloud is “the master of the skins” so why not call the musicians “masters” as well? Let us also not forget that the writers come from the West where technical mastery of a musical instrument is still a high cultural value. For those who play guitar, please remember the refrain from the sixties, “Clapton is God”).

There are two new things here. First we now find out that the musicians of Jajouka are not just the hidden sons of Pan, living in their village in a Moroccan equivalent of Brigadoon but, they have also doubled as Royal musicians, piping the Sultan to and from the mosque and playing him bed time tunes. (Remember the Sultan usually had a number of women to choose from each night, so the music may have been an early try at Viagra).

From the Moroccan point of view these layers of musical occasion and distinct repertoires merely add up to a whole lot of Baraka attending these musicians in the eyes of their fellow villagers.

The musicians therefore have maintained their solidarity and power on three levels. The first is their associations with Sultans (who in Morocco are the closest thing to Divine Kingship still existing in the modern world) and who have a most powerful national and pan Islamic Baraka. The second is their drawing on the power from their local saint, who has local Baraka and the third once again, is their mythic association with the story of Boujeloud who is associated with ancient, immemorial Baraka.

Contrary to the academic skeptics it would seem that although our pop ethnographers have a lot more data to complicate the matter, the thesis that Boujeloud is Pan (or some major Pre Islamic Mediterranean spirit) is still quite strong.

So perhaps we should ask ourselves who was Pan and what do we know about him and to what degree he resembles Boujeloud? That will be easier once we define the major difference between the myth and ritual of ancient Paganism and that of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

 

First we must ask ourselves what is the essential nature of Greek and Roman Ritual and Myth. A contemporary encyclopedia article defines Roman mythology as a:

 

The ancient mind was different. Suffice it to say that in those days when we all wore togas it was simply expected of one to go to the sacrifices and believe in the Gods secondarily. The concept of an exclusive theology with a hierarchy of Gods with fixed attributes and a clear theology was a later, Judeo Christian addition, a kind of cleaning up of the ancient Mediterranean world of belief and ritual using Greek logic to make sense of the sacred.

The entire Golden Bough appears to be an argument that says that underneath or beside the urban theology of the great religions, especially in the Mediterranean, the ancient myths and rituals of the Greeks and Romans survived in the beliefs and practices of peasants and tribal peoples up until the early 20^th century.

As the ancients seemed to be somewhat promiscuous with regards to the object and variety of their sexual practices, we can also conclude that they were ritually and mythically promiscuous as well. Yet they did make some basic classificatory distinctions as to kinds of spirits. There was some order to their legions of spirits. Here is a quote from one encyclopedia:

Going back to our encyclopedia we find that:

Another scholar adds:

Let us go back to the encyclopedia once more. It says:

Another scholar adds that they were also:

Finally we are reminded that:

So if we take Brion Gysin and his friend Hamri at their word, we can show a fair and coherent symbolic correspondence between the festival that worshipped Pan in pre Islamic times and the carnival-like ritual which follows the great Islamic sacrifice each year in rural Morocco and which completely inverts its meaning and content. The great British classicist Robin Lane Fox in his book from Pagan to Christian has shown clearly that pagan religion was focused on fertility, sexuality and the celebration of the body as reflected in similar escapades of the Gods. Judaism, Christianity and later Islam moved against this libidinal theme in Greco Roman religion.

 

Let us give a Freudian twist to all of this and suggest that the anti libidinal nature of Jewish Christian and Muslim ritual and its linear theology, tried but never quite wiped out the pagan, libidinous and cyclical nature of pagan Mediterranean religion. All of these pre Islamic themes emerge in the Boujeloud masquerade.

So we can suggest the mild hypothesis that the festival of Boujeloud is similar in type, and probably a garbled lineal descendant of a ritual that worshipped Pan, but denigrated to a kind of afterthought of a great Islamic sacrifice. As Pan and Boujeloud are clearly mythologically types of the archetypical great trickster, it is not surprising that one of the members of the greatest group of modern musical tricksters, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones had this intuition before he died in his swimming pool which in a weird way resembles the pool that I saw in the grotto of Pan in the Golan.

 

One scholar who believed that in order to understand how ancient music sounded suggested that we must ask a different question. He argued that we must not ask about specific melodies and rhythms but that we must look at the entire song style of a culture, and in some cases groups of cultures that form what historians call civilizations like that of China and the Far East.

 

But like many men of genius this was not enough. In the nineteen sixties Lomax put together a multidisciplinary team of scientists, social scientists, musicologists, anthropologists and statisticians in order to classify the different kinds of music of the world according to a grid of 37 categories, to link these styles of music to ethnic groups in geographic areas and to speculate on their historical origins though controlled comparison. He called this system Cantometrics, the measure of song.

 

 

Geoffrey Clarfield is an Anthropologist at large.


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