Panparadox – Vexior 218
Ixaxaar – 2009

This is a book of gnostic Satanic black chaos magic about the Greek god Pan and his counterparts, Loki, Grimalkin and Lucifer. It was a pretty enjoyable read.

I often mix up the details of the ancient Greek myths (the Greeks did too in fairness), and I wasn’t familiar with a lot of the mythological information on Pan in this book. That being said, most of it did sound like the kind of stories about Greek gods that I’ve read before. I wasn’t bothered comparing the stories in this book to the ones told by Ovid and his mates. Vexior, the author of this book, may well have twisted a few strands of information here to suit his own ideas, but realistically, that’s how myths work. Doing so does nothing but pump new life into Pan and his mythology.

This book contains some very cool art.

I breezed through this book in one day. It doesn’t get bogged down with Qabalistic nonsense, and there’s only a bit of magical instruction at the end. Most of it is mythology/philosophy. The philosophy stuff gets fairly obtuse though. Pan is a god of contradictions. He is everything while also being nothing. Therefore everything is nothing, and nothing is everything. Yeah, yeah. I’ve come across this idea in lots of other books. I get it, but whenever I read this kind of thing, I find it hard to take anything else in that book seriously.

Panparadox has awesome pictures, and it would look real cool on a bookshelf. Also, maybe I’m wrong, but I think there’s a couple of jokes in this text. This makes sense really – Pan’s Nordic counterpart Loki is a trickster god, but I wasn’t expecting jokes (however small) from an Ixaxaar book.

Pan is one of the coolest gods from the Greek pantheon. (Isn’t he the one who taught humans how to masturbate?) Reading this made me want to reread Machen’s The Great God Pan. I’d love to own a copy of Panparadox, but like most Ixaxaar books, it’s rare and rather expensive.