The body was our first language.

Before representation, before naming, before identity, the body existed as a fact.

My interest in how bodies communicate meaning began early, during my education at an art school, where the human figure was never treated as a neutral form. Anatomy was not merely structure; it was tension, intention, vulnerability. A torso could imply power or fragility. A posture could indicate discipline, desire, or fear. Later, this fascination deepened through translated critical texts in Bulgarian periodical publications—most notably the work of Igor Semyonovich Kon, whose writings challenged the idea of the male body as a natural given. Kon viewed masculinity as a cultural construct rather than a biological imperative, contending that male physicality is influenced, governed, and interpreted by social norms rather than mere instinct. As he observed, masculinity is not inherited; it is constructed, rehearsed, and constantly tested. (Kon, 2003)

This perspective becomes particularly revealing when viewed through the lens of antiquity—not the polished antiquity of marble statues and ideal proportions, but one marked by struggle, exposure, and risk. Among the ancient Greek athletic practices, pankration stands apart. A hybrid of wrestling and striking, it was a combat discipline with minimal rules and maximal physical demand. Classical sources describe it not as a spectacle, but as an agon—a contest in which the stakes were endurance, submission, and survival. (Vernant, 1983) In pankration, the body was stripped of symbolic excess. There was no pose to maintain, no image to preserve. Only reaction remained.

It is here that Pan (Πάν) enters—not as a decorative mythological figure, but as an archetype of rupture. Pan represents sudden fear, unanticipated panic, and the dissolution of control. Neither fully human nor animal, Pan occupies thresholds: between civilisation and wilderness, reason and impulse, and form and collapse. As Jean-Pierre Vernant reminds us, Greek culture did not deny chaos; it lived in constant negotiation with it. Order existed precisely because its dissolution was always possible. (Vernant, 1983) Pan is the embodiment of that potential.

This article is not an exercise in mythological analysis, nor a historical account of an ancient sport. Instead, it uses pankration as a conceptual framework and Pan as a philosophical pressure point to ask a contemporary question: what remains of identity when the image fails? In a culture where bodies are endlessly visualised, curated, and disciplined—through fitness regimes, wellness ideologies, and digital representation—the ancient combat arena exposes an uncomfortable truth. Beneath identity as narrative and art as form, there persists a body that does not seek meaning but endurance.

PANKRATION AND THE REFUSAL OF THE IMAGE

In classical art, the body is resolved.

In pankration, it is interrupted.

Ancient Greek sculpture presents the male body as balanced: proportioned, composed, and seemingly self-contained. Even in moments of tension, the sculpted figure appears to be in control, arrested in an idealised instant of potential rather than collapse. This visual language has profoundly shaped Western ideas of bodily perfection, reinforcing the belief that form is both attainable and stable. The lived experience of the ancient body—exposed, trained, fatigued, and wounded—was in stark contrast to its marble counterpart.

Pankration occupies this dissonance. As a combat practice, it rejects the logic of representation. In a chokehold, there is no ideal posture, and there is no heroic symmetry during the moment of submission. The body folds, contorts, and fails. In this sense, pankration does not merely depict the body; it actively resists being considered an image. The fighter’s concern is not how the body appears, but whether it endures. Visibility becomes secondary to survival.

This refusal of the image is crucial. Art historian Richard Neer has argued that classical form functions as a stabilising device—a way of containing the volatility of the human body within intelligible limits. (Neer, 2010) Pankration, by contrast, exposes what form seeks to conceal: imbalance, panic, and vulnerability. The combat arena becomes a space where the body exceeds aesthetic legibility. It cannot be read; it can only be experienced.

Such moments reveal a deeper truth about identity. When the body is pushed to its limits, the symbolic frameworks that normally define the self—status, reputation, even name—lose their authority. What remains is a corporeal presence stripped of narrative. Michel Foucault’s analysis of the disciplined body helps illuminate this condition. While ancient athletics were embedded within systems of training and regulation, pankration marks a threshold where discipline collapses into exposure. (Foucault, 1977) The body, no longer governed by representation, becomes a site of raw immediacy.

Pan’s presence is felt precisely here. Pan's presence is felt not as a figure watching from the margins, but as a force within the body itself. Panic is not fear imagined; it is fear enacted. It arrives when the body no longer obeys conscious intention, when breath shortens, muscles tighten, and reason recedes. In pankration, panic is not failure—it is revelation. It reveals the distance between the body's image and the body's lived experience.

For contemporary viewers, this refusal of the image resonates powerfully. Today's visual culture demands consistency, optimisation, and legibility. Bodies are curated through training, filtered through screens, and disciplined into recognisable forms of identity. Yet practices that foreground exhaustion, impact, and risk—whether in combat sports or performance art—continue to attract fascination precisely because they fracture this visual order. They expose the body where it resists becoming a symbol.

Pankration reminds us that the body precedes its representation. Before it becomes art, before it signifies identity, the body persists as a material condition—unruly, responsive, and finite. This piece is not a nostalgic return to antiquity but a confrontation with something unresolved in the present: the fear that beneath our carefully constructed images lies a body that cannot be fully controlled.

Fig. 1. The Boxer at Rest (also known as The Terme Boxer), Hellenistic Greek bronze, c. 1st century BCE.

Fig. 2. Attic red-figure krater attributed to the Euphronios Painter, c. 550–500 BCE.

Fig. 3. Wrestlers (Uffizi Wrestlers), Roman marble sculpture, 1st century BCE.

Fig. 4. Eadweard Muybridge, Wrestling / Athletic Motion Studies, from Animal Locomotion, 1880s

Fig. 5. Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1953.

Fig. 6. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Studies for the Battle of Cascina: Male Nude, Seen from the Rear (verso), c. 1504.

PAN, PANIC, AND THE BODY BEYOND CONTROL

Panic is not imagined.

It is felt.

The Greek word panikon deima describes a sudden, contagious fear—an eruption that bypasses reason and takes hold of the body before thought can intervene. This is the fear attributed to Pan: not a distant terror, but an embodied shock. Unlike the controlled anxieties of civic life, panic dissolves structure. It interrupts language, posture, and intention. The body reacts before the mind understands.

In ancient thought, this loss of control was not accidental. Pan belonged to the margins of the polis—to mountains, forests, and borderlands, where the assurances of civilisation weakened. His hybrid form destabilised the logic of classification: neither god nor beast, neither culture nor nature. As classicist Philippe Borgeaud notes, Pan represents a divine figure who resists integration into the ordered pantheon precisely because he embodies excess and unpredictability. (Borgeaud, 1988) His presence signals the breakdown of measure.

Pankration stages this breakdown within the body itself. The fighter enters the contest trained, disciplined, and prepared, yet panic remains unavoidable. Breath is restricted, balance collapses, and pain overwhelms orientation. In these moments, the body ceases to be an instrument of the self and becomes its limit. Identity, normally sustained through coherence and control, fractures under pressure. What emerges is not heroism, but exposure.

This exposure reveals a deeper anxiety embedded in Western culture: the fear of the body’s autonomy. From Plato onwards, philosophers expressed unease at the body's resistance to rational command, treating it as a source of disorder that requires regulation. (Plato, 2005) Pan personifies this anxiety. He is not violent by nature; he is destabilising. He appears when the body refuses to remain silent, when instinct interrupts intention.

In contemporary contexts, panic is often pathologised—treated as a malfunction rather than a signal. Nevertheless, as cultural theorist Brian Massumi suggests, effect precedes cognition. The body feels before it understands. (Massumi, 2002) Panic exposes this sequence brutally. It reveals that control is always provisional, that identity is sustained only as long as the body cooperates.

This is why Pan remains unsettling. He does not attack; he interrupts. He does not destroy form; he reveals its fragility. In pankration, panic is not an external threat but an internal event—a moment when the self confronts its limits. The body becomes unfamiliar territory, no longer aligned with the narratives imposed upon it.

To encounter Pan, then, is not to encounter mythology but to experience a rupture in certainty. It is to recognise that beneath identity as performance and art as composition lies a body capable of disobedience. Panic marks the point at which the illusion of mastery falters, and something older, less articulate, but profoundly real, emerges in its place.

Fig. 7. Hendrick van Balen the Elder, in collaboration with Jan Brueghel the Elder, Pan Pursuing Syrinx, c. 1615. Oil on copper. Fig. 8. Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520–1523. Oil on canvas. National Gallery, London. Fig. 9. Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781. Oil on canvas, 180 × 250 cm. Fig. 10. Egon Schiele, Nude Self-Portrait, 1916. Watercolour and pencil on paper. Fig. 11. Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953. Oil on canvas, 153 × 118 cm. Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines.

COMBAT, RITUAL, AND THE CONTEMPORARY BODY

Before it was entertainment, combat was ritual.

Before it was ritual, it was necessity.

In antiquity, athletic contests were embedded within religious and civic frameworks. Pankration, despite its violence, was not a form of spectacle designed for consumption but a structured confrontation with physical limits. It functioned as a rite of passage—a test through which the body was publicly exposed and privately transformed. Victory mattered, but endurance mattered more. The contest did not merely produce winners; it produced altered bodies.

Ritual, as anthropologist Victor Turner reminds us, is defined by liminality—a threshold state in which participants are temporarily removed from social order. (Turner, 1969) In pankration, this liminal condition is enacted through bodily risk. The fighter enters a space where normal hierarchies are suspended, where identity is no longer guaranteed by name or status but negotiated through physical persistence. The body becomes both subject and object of transformation.

This ritual dimension resonates strongly with contemporary performance practices. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, artists have repeatedly turned to the body as a site of endurance, vulnerability, and confrontation. These works resist passive spectatorship. They demand attention not through beauty, but through duration, risk, and exposure. Like pankration, they place the body in situations where control is provisional and meaning emerges through sustained physical presence rather than representation.

Crucially, such destabilise the boundaries the boundary between art and lived experience. Art historian Amelia Jones argues that body-centred performance collapses the distance between viewer and subject, forcing an encounter with the material reality of another body. (Jones, 1998) This collapse mirrors the logic of combat: the impossibility of aesthetic detachment. One cannot observe a body under strain without acknowledging its mortality.

In contemporary culture, combat has re-emerged in sanitised and commodified forms—regulated sports, televised events, and branded disciplines. These formats promise authenticity while carefully managing risk, offering controlled access to violence without its full consequences. Yet the appeal of these practices lies precisely in their residual unpredictability. They flirt with the possibility that something might go wrong, that the body might exceed its script.

Here, Pan returns—not as chaos unleashed, but as chaos contained. The ritual persists, but its edges are softened. Training regimens, safety protocols, and visual narratives frame the body as robust, optimised, and heroic. The rupture moment is suppressed: panic, disorientation, and the body's refusal to act as expected.

Nevertheless, these moments cannot be fully erased. They surface in exhaustion, injury, and silence. They mark the limits of ritualistic control and remind us that the body remains an unstable participant in its own representation. Combat—whether ancient or contemporary—continues to function as a threshold where identity is tested, not affirmed. (Poliakoff, 1987)

In this sense, ritual does not resolve panic; it negotiates with it. It provides a structure within which the body may approach its vulnerability without collapsing entirely. Pankration and contemporary performance share this fragile balance. Both acknowledge that the body cannot be fully mastered—only temporarily held in form.

References

Kon, I. S., The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private, New York: Harrington Park Press, 2003.

Poliakoff, M. B., Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Vernant, J.-P., Myth and Thought among the Greeks, London: Routledge, 1983.

Neer, R. T., The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin Books, 1977.

Poliakoff, M. B., Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Borgeaud, P., The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Plato, Phaedrus, trans. C. J. Rowe, London: Penguin Classics, 2005.

Massumi, B., Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Turner, V., The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969.

Jones, A., Body Art/Performing the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

Poliakoff, M. B., Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Images credit

Fig. 1. The Boxer at Rest (also known as The Terme Boxer), Hellenistic Greek bronze, c. 1st century BCE. Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome.

Fig. 2. Attic red-figure krater attributed to the Euphronios Painter, c. 550–500 BCE. Found in Cerveteri. Museo Nazionale Archeologico Cerite, inv. L.2006.10.

Fig. 3. Wrestlers (Uffizi Wrestlers), Roman marble sculpture, 1st century BCE. Copy after a lost Greek bronze original of the 3rd century BCE. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

Fig. 4. Eadweard Muybridge, Wrestling / Athletic Motion Studies, from Animal Locomotion, 1880s (photographed c. 1872–1885).

Fig. 5. Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1953. Oil on canvas.

Fig. 6. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Studies for the Battle of Cascina: Male Nude, Seen from the Rear (verso), c. 1504. Black chalk on paper.