Strangely enough, the regions said to have been traversed by Dionysus, Osiris, or Bacchus were, at different times, passed through by the posterity of Ham, and in many of them they took up their residence. In his journeyings the chief attendants of Osiris, or Bacchus, were Pan, Anabis, Macedo, the Muses, the Satyrs, and Bacchic women were all in his retinue. The people of India claim him as their own, and maintain that he was born at Nusa in their country. Arrian speaks of the Nuseans as being the attendants of Dionysus. In all traditions Dionysus appears as the representative of some power of Nature.
The first who reduced Mythology to a kind of system were, in all probability, the Egyptians. Egypt was ever the land of graven images, and under the veil of Allegory and Mythology the priests concealed religion from the eyes of the vulgar. In the beginning, brute animals and certain vegetables were represented as the visible symbols of the deities to which they were consecrated. Hence Jupiter Ammon was represented under the figure of a Ram; Apis under a Cow; Osiris of a Bull; Mercury or Thol of an Ibis; Diana or Babastis of a Cat; and Pan of a Goat. From these sources are derived the fabulous transformation of the gods celebrated in Egyptian Mythology, and afterwards imported into Greece and Italy to serve as the subjects of the Grecian and Roman Pantomimes.
Pantomime as we now know the term, means, not only the Art of acting in dumb show, but also that of a spectacle or Christmas entertainment. (I may add in parenthesis, that in the early part of the last century--the nineteenth--the dictionaries only refer to Pantomime as meaning the former of the above two definitions, and not the latter.)
Pan, regarded as the symbol of the universe, was also the god of flocks, pastures, and shepherds in classic Mythology, and the guardian of bees, hunting and fishing in his Kingdom of Arcadia. His form, like the Satyrs, both supposed to have been the offsprings of Mercury, was that of a man combined with a goat, having horns and feet like the latter animal.
_Mimos_ (Gr.), as I have stated in the beginning, means an "imitator," or a "mimic," and from which word we have the derivation of the words "mimicry," "mimetic," and the like.