One of the other books I've brought with me is Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon. It's an excellent history of the revival of Pagan witchcraft in England. Besides covering the roles of the usual suspects -- occultists like Aleister Crowley, anthropologists like Margaret Murray, and the founder of modern Wicca, Gerald Gardner -- Hutton makes the point that the literary environment of the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth centuries, especially the work of the British Romantic poets, played a significant role.
One of the themes of the Romantic movement was an admiration for classical Greco-Roman mythology. This admiration might have roots in the attempt by artists in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance to resolve their Christianity with the classical Pagan roots of their civilizations. This is evident in the Divine Comedy, where Dante's guide through Hell is the great Roman poet Virgil. It's also in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, where the "Knight's Tale" is a story of Theseus of Athens that involves the Greco-Roman pantheon as active characters. Works like this made it acceptable to at least mention the old gods.
Then the "Enlightenment" of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries did much to weaken the hold of Christianity on the western mind. It emphasized "Reason" -- or a least, a version of "Reason" -- over old religious dogmas, and saw the triumph of patriarchal monotheism over more natural religions as a regrettable thing.
The end of the Enlightenment period, and the beginning of the Romantic, is generally regarded to be around the late Eighteenth or earth Nineteenth Centuries. In the bloody upheaval of the French and American Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars, and with the Industrial Revolution wrecking havoc on established social structures, it become clear to many that "Reason" -- at least in the form proposed -- was not enough. So the some of the British Romantics -- especially the "second generation" -- followed the thread of their intellectual heritage back, to a point before both Christianity and Reason, to the ancient Greco-Roman pantheon.
By the 1820s, Keats and Shelly were invoking the Goddess through images from Greek mythology. (The idea of a single Goddess, as opposed to the multiplicity of goddesses found in ancient pantheons, is mostly a Romantic creation, at least in contemporary Western civilization.) However, they looked at this mythology in a post-Enlightenment context.
Thus, Shelly could write a treatise titled The Necessity of Atheism, explicitly targeted against the idea of a god outside of the universe -- but could also invoke the Goddess in his poetry and raise an altar to the Great God Pan.
Indeed, it was thanks to these Romantics that Pan became a Great God rather than a bit player. Apollo had long been seen as the patron of poets, in the original Greco-Roman tradition and in its Renaissance revival. But his restraint and moderation didn't fit well with Romantic ideals, with their rebellion against the coldness and hyper-rationality of the Enlightenment.
By the 1890s the satyr had trumped the sun god, as William Hazlitt gladly declared that English poetry "has more of Pan than of Apollo". Not bad for a little rural god who was considered comic at best, grotesque at worst, by the ancient Greeks.
The Romantics made Pan an incarnation of the natural world, until by the end of the nineteenth century Maurice Hewlett had him say, "I am Pan and the Earth is mine", and in Kenneth Grahame's 1908 The Wind in The Willows Pan appears as an awe-inspiring demi-god who protects the animal children of the forest.
It is not a coincidence that it was during this same period that the image of Satan took on the goat-horned and goat-legged appearance we know today. Prior to this, the devil was portrayed with the horns of a bull and the wings of a bat or dragon, or had dog- or snake-like attributes. This re-imaging of Satan was almost certainly a reaction -- conscious or unconscious -- against the resurgence of Pan.
The Romantics influenced generations of followers, including a little-known poet named Algernon Charles Swinburne. In 1866 Swinburne (who was also at the time a big fan of Walt Whitman) published his anti-authoritarian, Shelly-imitating collection Poems and Ballads -- work that was later admired and quoted by Alistair Crowley and Gerald Gardner.
About two decades later, another admirer of Shelly and Keats enters the story. David Hewavitarne, more widely known by his dharma name Anagarika Dharmapala, was a Sinhalese who played a key role in the Buddhist revival. But it took an outside force to help set him on his way. It wasn't just his native Buddhism that inspired him, nor the work of the romantics. It took the Theosophists to help connect him to Buddhism, and to bring him to the attention of the world.