"PÂN, PÂN, show me thy blood,
And I will give thee good white wine!"
As he uttered the charm, the juvenile pontiff spat on poor Thammuz, till a torrent of blood, or what seemed such, "ran purple" over the urchin's fingers.
Paul-Ernest Jablonski's numerous readers need not be told that the said beetle is an Egyptian emblem of the everlasting and universal soul, and that its temple is the equinoctial circle, the upper hemisphere.[1]
As a solar emblem, it offers an instructive object of inquiry to the judicious gleaners of the old world's fascinating nursery traditions. Sicilian Diodorus tells us that the earth's lover, Attis (or Adonis), after his resuscitation, acquired the divine title of PAPAN.[2] To hazard the inoffensive query, why one of our commonest great beetles is still allowed to figure under so distinguished a name, will therefore reflect no discredit upon a cautious student of nearly threescore years. The very Welsh talked, in William Baxter's time, of "Heaven, as bugarth PAPAN," the sun's ox-stall or resting-place; and here you likewise find his beetle-majesty, in a Low-Norman collection of insular rhymes:—
"Sus l'bord piâsottaient, côte-à-côte,
Les équerbots et leas PAPANS,
Et ratte et rat laissaient leux crotte
Sus les vieilles casses et même dedans."[3]
By the help of Horapollo, Chiflet's gnostic gems, and other repertories of the same class, one might, peradventure, make a tolerable case in favour of the mythological identity of the legend of Ladybird—that is, the sun-chafer, or barn-bie, the fire-fly, "whose house is burnt, and whose bairns are ten," of course the first ten days of the Egyptian year[4]—with the mystical stories of the said black or dark blue lords of radiance, Pân and Papân.