Domain: The wild, forests, fields, herds, fertility, prophecy Symbol: Horns, goat-legs, the woodland, the pipe Greek Equivalent: Pan
Overview
Faunus is the old Roman god of the untamed countryside — the forests and pastures, the herds that graze them, and the fertility that keeps both flock and field alive. He is a rustic power, half-wild, sometimes pictured with horns and the legs of a goat, and he belongs to the woods more than to any city temple. Farmers and shepherds knew him as a friend to the herd and a guardian of grazing land, but also as a presence that could unsettle a lonely traveller who wandered too far into the trees.
His nature drew him early into the orbit of the Greek Pan, and the two were largely identified, so that Faunus took on Pan's goat-form and his association with panic and wild music. Yet Faunus kept a distinctly Roman office the Greek god never had: he was a prophetic voice of the woodland. Sleepers who lay down in his sacred groves received oracles in their dreams, and his warnings were said to sound out from the trees themselves — a disembodied voice in the forest, the fauni voces.
The Prophetic Voice
Where other gods spoke through priests and formal oracles, Faunus spoke through the land. Roman writers record his voice issuing from the depths of a wood to warn of coming disaster, and his oracles came to those who slept on the fleece of a sacrificed sheep in his grove. This gift of woodland prophecy made him more than a mere shepherd's god: he was the countryside made articulate, the wild returning an answer to those who listened.
The Lupercalia
The wild, fertile character of Faunus is bound up with the Lupercalia, the archaic February festival celebrated at the Lupercal cave below the Palatine. There the Luperci, young men clad in the skins of sacrificed goats, ran through the streets striking bystanders — especially women — with strips of hide to confer fertility. Under his cult-title Faunus Lupercus he presides over this rite of purification and increase, the god of the fecund wild loosed for a day into the heart of the city.
Related
- Pan — his Greek counterpart, the goat-god of the wild
- Mythology
- Roman Mythology Index