Anonymous Board Weighs How to Tell Pan From the Devil; Thread Soon Turns to Egyptian Gods and Cosmic Order

4CHAN /X/ — An anonymous poster on 4chan's /x/ paranormal board has raised a question of some practical delicacy: how one distinguishes Pan from the Devil. The two, the author observes, look rather similar, and "you really don't want to get these two mixed up." The post offers no method of telling them apart.

The thread, which had drawn 35 replies at the time of writing, declined to answer the question directly and went in search of larger matters. One respondent said he does not believe in the devil and holds that the gods who exist are each good in their own way. Another pointed the original poster toward the Egyptian pantheon, where, a third countered, there is no distinct evil god, darkness implying nothing about moral character.

This did not go unchallenged. Several posters nominated Set and Apep as candidates for badness, and one pasted a lengthy description of Set as a god of chaos, violence and murder. A reply noted that groups still worship Set, suggesting he cannot be all bad. Others observed that some Satanist groups read their figure differently from the Christian tradition, and that Set is defined as master of the shadow side of things rather than as the ultimate villain.

The debate then settled on the phrase "cosmic order." One poster argued that evil is the opposition of that order, whether by Satan in the Abrahamic view or by Apep in the Kemetic. Another asked whether defying a universe in which everything suffers and dies could be called evil. A further contributor held that a being bending the world to its will is itself following the cosmic order, since the realm exists partly so that souls may try being separate and self-interested.

The Aztec gods, who according to one poster called for mass human sacrifice, were also raised as a test case. A commenter scolded the room for shitposting rather than studying the paranormal. Another offered a view on the original question: anything other than Jesus, God and God's angels is either a devil or a human spirit, and the two are blatantly different. Pan was not mentioned again. No consensus was reached.