An Encounter with the Great God Pan Among the Stars
- Holly Rhiannon
- Jul 11
- 3 min read
A reader submission, shared with permission
A note from the editor:
Since we published The Poltergeist of Côte Saint-Luc, I keep coming back to the same thought: you never know what the people around you have lived through. The stranger in line ahead of you, your coworker, the person you pass on the street every day without a second glance. Today's story comes to us from a contributor who goes by JB, along with a beautiful piece of art depicting what he saw. I'm honoured people trust Stygian enough to share things like this with us.
Holly Rhiannon
Founder, Stygian Media
The Story
On February 6th, 2011, in the Province of Québec, JB had a six-hour near-death experience following surgery. What he describes from those hours is a state of communion with the Great God Pan in his highest cosmic form, appearing as though he were made of every star and galaxy in the universe.
While JB was still in this state, something was happening on the other side of it that he wouldn't learn about until later. His mother, visiting him at the hospital right after his surgery while he lay comatose, heard her sister's voice clearly in the room with them. The voice repeated the same words over and over: "I'm so sorry, I was so selfish, I'm so sorry." JB's aunt had died by suicide five years earlier. His mother was deeply shaken by the experience, so much so that she remained disturbed by it even a year later.
JB never told his mother what he had seen on his own side of that threshold. Pan looked at him, he says, with a knowing smile, and JB fell into the god's endlessly spiralling ram's horns, woven from the fabric of the cosmos itself. He found himself descending a staircase, not built so much as formed, its steps made of what looked like onyx, floating above nothing at all.
After walking down those steps for some time, JB came upon his aunt. She sat listless on the stairs and told him, "I'm more lost than ever, this is the Abyss, I'm more lost than ever." Without thinking, he took her hand and told her, "You're not lost anymore, I've found you." Life returned to her eyes. The next thing JB remembers is waking up in the hospital, days later.
About a month after he was released, JB was at his local public library when he noticed a tall, young woman looking at him and smiling. Something about her felt familiar, though he couldn't place her at first. Then it struck him: she was his aunt, appearing as she had in his childhood, in her twenties. He turned around for a moment, and when he looked back, she was gone. He hasn't seen her since.
JB describes what happened to him as an unintentional echo of Orpheus's journey into the underworld to rescue the soul of someone he loved. He has come to see the whole experience as the beginning of a devotion that now shapes his days, from waking to sleep, to the mysteries of Pan.
Below is the artwork JB created depicting what he witnessed during his experience.
Interested in sharing your own story or writing for The Stygian Blog? We welcome submissions on any aspect of horror, from fiction and filmmaking to art, theory, and commentary on the darker corners of imagination. If you have an idea or a piece you’d like to share, email us at minion@stygiansociety.com.
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