Faun

The light comes apart under the oaks, broken into coins that slide across the leaf litter, and somewhere in that flicker a shape moves that is almost a man. He steps on cloven hooves, soundless on the moss, and the goat-haunches behind him twitch a short tail. Two blunt horns push up through curling hair. He has been here since before the field at the wood’s edge was a field, since before anyone thought to count him among the gods or below them.

This is the faun, and he belongs to the seam where the ploughland gives way to the trees.

A faun wears a man down to the waist and a goat from there, though the older Romans were vaguer about it than the painters who came after them. The settled image, the one fixed by Renaissance brushes, gives him the hind legs of a goat, the small curved horns, the flick of a tail, and ears pulled to a point. The upper half stays human: a young man’s chest and arms, a face that can smile. He is slighter than the squat, horse-tailed satyr the Greeks knew, lighter on his feet, easier to mistake for something harmless.

Where he came from depends on who is telling it. The fauns are the many to a single great one, woodland spirits scattered through every grove as lesser shadows of Faunus, the old Italic god of forest and pasture worshipped in Latium long before Rome learned to speak Greek. As Pan in the Greek hills trailed a crowd of little Pans, so Faunus stood at the head of a whole population of fauns, each one a genius of its own patch of wild ground. They smelled of crushed thyme and goat and warm bark.

On an ordinary evening a faun keeps to the margins, drifting behind a flock as it climbs to high pasture, nudging a strayed lamb back toward the others, watching the shepherd from the dark between trunks. He does no harm. He simply attends, the way weather attends, and the herd grows fat under his loose, half-given care.

A faun in the wrong mood is another thing. The Romans believed these spirits could reach into a man alone in a far place and fill him, without warning, with a cold animal fear, the kind that empties the mind and turns the legs to water. A snapped branch. A sound with no source. A chill that has nothing to do with the season. The fauns gave that to travellers who wandered too deep, and the travellers ran.

There is a small, sharp story the Latin writers told, dropping in the name of Faunus where the Greeks had said satyr. A faun finds a man lost in the forest in the dead of winter and, taking pity, leads him home to his cave. The man lifts his cupped hands to his mouth and blows on them. The faun asks why. To warm my frozen fingers, the man says. Later the faun sets out a bowl of steaming food, and the man bends and blows on that too. The faun asks again. To cool it, says the man. The faun stops. He looks at this guest who can send heat and cold from the same mouth, and something in him recoils. He puts the man back out into the snow. He will not keep a roof over a creature that blows hot and cold.

That instinct is the whole of him. A faun is honest to the point of cruelty and reads a double tongue as a kind of filth.

The same woodland that hid him also spoke through him. Those who slept on the fleeces of sacrificed lambs in his sacred precincts were said to receive the future in dreams and in voices without bodies, the wild murmuring back answers no temple could give. The line between the chief god’s gift and the spirits that filled his groves was never drawn cleanly, and the country people did not trouble to draw it.

His powers are the powers of the place he is. He makes the flocks fertile and the orchards heavy. He moves without sound and knows the forest the way a man knows the inside of his own house. He can lead the desperate to shelter or scatter the careless with terror, and at the turning points of the year his kind were honoured with rustic offerings and dancing, the farmers thanking the woods for not turning on them.

His limits are the limits of the wild itself. He has no purchase on the tilled field, the walled town, the hearth with its iron and its order. He is bound to his own ground and dwindles where the trees come down. And for all his menace he is, at bottom, a simple creature, easily wounded by the sly and the smooth-spoken, more child than devil. Over the centuries he softened further, until the faun who began as a thing that could stop a man’s heart in a lonely wood became a figure of pipes and dancing, a gentler cousin to the satyr, half forgotten at the tree line.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a faun?

A faun is a rustic woodland spirit of Roman mythology, part man and part goat, tied to forests, fields, and flocks. Fauns are the many lesser nature spirits of the wild, subordinate to the god Faunus, and in later art they are shown with a human upper body and the horns, legs, and tail of a goat.

What is the difference between a faun and a satyr?

A faun is the Roman woodland spirit and a satyr is its Greek counterpart, and the two were blurred together over time. Fauns are pastoral, gentler, and goat-legged, while the original Greek satyrs were wilder, more lustful, and had horse-like ears and tails. Roman writers eventually used the two words almost interchangeably.

Are fauns good or evil?

Fauns are neither, but they are unreliable. They watch over shepherds and can guide a lost traveller to safety, yet they can also strike a lone wanderer in a wild place with sudden, mindless terror. A faun is honest to a fault and is quickly offended by human deceit.

Who is Faunus, and how is he related to fauns?

Faunus is the ancient Italic god of the forest, fields, and prophecy, and fauns are the many lesser spirits who take their name and nature from him. Just as the Greek god Pan was followed by a crowd of little Pans, Faunus stood at the head of a whole population of fauns scattered through the woods.

What powers do fauns have?

Fauns make flocks and orchards fertile, move silently through the forest, and can either guide or terrify the humans who enter their woods. In Faunus’s sacred groves, sleepers were also said to receive prophecies through dreams and disembodied voices. Their power is bound to the wild, however, and fades where the forest is cleared.

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Faunus, Pan, Satyr, Silenus, Satyrus, Aegipan, Priapus, Dionysus, Auloniad, Epimeliad, Hircocervus, Cernunnos, Leshy, Krampus