He may have had a bushy beard and keen sight.[4][3] He was also closely affiliated with goats or bucks: Pan has goat's legs while goats are said to pull the car of Pūshān (the animal was also sacrificed to him on occasion).[3][5]
History
The deity was first proposed due to association between the Greek god
Pan and the Vedic god
Pūshān first identified in 1924 by German linguist
Hermann Collitz.[6][7]
The minor discrepancies between the two deities could be explained by the possibility that many of Pan's original attributes were transferred over to his father
Hermes,[8][5] the two of which were likely originally the same deity.[9][10]
According to West, the reflex may be at least of
Graeco-Aryan origin: "Pūshān and Pan agree well enough in name and nature—especially when Hermes is seen as a
hypostasis of Pan—to make it a reasonable conclusion that they are parallel reflexes of a prototypical god of ways and byways, a guide on the journey, a protector of flocks, a watcher of who and what goes where, one who can scamper up any slope with the ease of a goat."[11]
Pan and Hermes
The cult of
Hermes was established in Greece in remote regions, likely making him originally a god of nature, farmers, and shepherds. It is also possible that since the beginning he has been a deity with
shamanic attributes linked to
divination,
reconciliation,
magic,
sacrifices, and
initiation and contact with other planes of existence, a role of mediator between the worlds of the visible and invisible.[12] According to a theory that has received considerable scholarly acceptance, Hermes originated as a form of the god
Pan, who has been identified as a reflex of the
Proto-Indo-European pastoral god *Péh₂usōn,[7][9][original research?] in his aspect as the god of
boundary markers. Later, the epithet supplanted the original name itself and Hermes took over the roles as god of messengers, travelers, and boundaries, which had originally belonged to Pan, while Pan himself continued to be venerated by his original name in his more rustic aspect as the god of the wild in the relatively isolated mountainous region of
Arcadia. In later myths, after the cult of Pan was reintroduced to Attica, Pan was said to be Hermes' son.[9][10]
Gamkrelidze, Thomas V.;
Ivanov, Vjaceslav V. (1995). Winter, Werner (ed.). Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans: A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-Language and a Proto-Culture. Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 80. Berlin: M. De Gruyter.
Jackson, Peter (2002). "Light from Distant Asterisks. Towards a Description of the Indo-European Religious Heritage". Numen. 49 (1): 61–102.
doi:
10.1163/15685270252772777.
JSTOR3270472.
Jakobson, Roman (1985). "Linguistic Evidence in Comparative Mythology". In Stephen Rudy (ed.).
Roman Jakobson: Selected Writings. Vol. VII: Contributions to Comparative Mythology: Studies in Linguistics and Philology, 1972–1982. Walter de Gruyter.
ISBN9783110855463.
Littleton, C. Scott (1982). "From swords in the earth to the sword in the stone: A possible reflection of an Alano-Sarmatian rite of passage in the Arthurian tradition". In Polomé, Edgar C. (ed.).
Homage to Georges Dumézil. Journal of Indo-European Studies, Institute for the Study of Man. pp. 53–68.
ISBN9780941694285.
Tirta, Mark (2004). Petrit Bezhani (ed.). Mitologjia ndër shqiptarë (in Albanian). Tirana: Mësonjëtorja.
ISBN99927-938-9-9.
Treimer, Karl (1971). "Zur Rückerschliessung der illyrischen Götterwelt und ihre Bedeutung für die südslawische Philologie". In Henrik Barić (ed.).
Arhiv za Arbanasku starinu, jezik i etnologiju. Vol. I. R. Trofenik. pp. 27–33.