The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (Vol. 2 of 2)Frazer, James George
ReligionComparative
The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (Vol. 2 of 2)
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
To begin with Dionysus. We have seen that he was represented sometimes as
a goat and sometimes as a bull. As a goat he can hardly be separated from
the minor divinities, the Pans, Satyrs, and Silenuses, all of whom are
closely associated with him and are represented more or less completely in
the form of goats. Thus, Pan was regularly represented in sculpture and
painting with the face and legs of a goat.(131) The Satyrs were depicted
with pointed goat-ears, and sometimes with sprouting horns and short
tails.(132) They were sometimes spoken of simply as goats;(133) and in the
drama their parts were played by men dressed in goat-skins.(134) Silenus
is represented in art clad in a goat-skin.(135) Further, the Fauns, the
Italian counterpart of the Greek Pans and Satyrs, are described as being
half goats, with goat-feet and goat-horns.(136) Again, all these minor
goat-formed divinities partake more or less clearly of the character of
woodland deities. Thus, Pan was called by the Arcadians the Lord of the
Wood.(137) The Silenuses associated with the tree-nymphs.(138) The Fauns
are expressly designated as woodland deities;(139) and their character as
such is still further brought out by their association, or even
identification, with Silvanus and the Silvanuses, who, as their name of
itself indicates, are spirits of the woods.(140) Lastly, the association
of the Satyrs with the Silenuses, Fauns, and Silvanuses,(141) proves that
the Satyrs also were woodland deities. These goat-formed spirits of the
woods have their counterparts in the folk-lore of Northern Europe. Thus,
the Russian wood-spirits, called _Ljeschie_ (from _ljes_, “wood,”) are
believed to appear partly in human shape, but with the horns, ears, and
legs of goats. The _Ljeschi_ can alter his stature at pleasure; when he
walks in the wood he is as tall as the trees; when he walks in the meadows
he is no higher than the grass. Some of the _Ljeschie_ are spirits of the
corn as well as of the wood; before harvest they are as tall as the
corn-stalks, but after it they shrink to the height of the stubble.(142)
This brings out—what we have remarked before—the close connection between
tree-spirits and corn-spirits, and shows how easily the former may melt
into the latter. Similarly the Fauns, though wood-spirits, were believed
to foster the growth of the crops.(143) We have already seen how often the
corn-spirit is represented in folk-custom as a goat.(144) On the whole,
then, as Mannhardt argues,(145) the Pans, Satyrs, and Fauns appear to
belong to a widely diffused class of wood-spirits conceived in goat-form.
The fondness of goats for straying in woods and nibbling the bark of
trees—to which it is well known that they are most destructive—is an
obvious and perhaps sufficient reason why wood-spirits should so often be
supposed to take the form of goats. The inconsistency of a god of
vegetation subsisting upon the vegetation which he personifies is not one
to strike the primitive mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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