My son has been learning about the Greek and Roman mythologies in school recently, and he seems to have really taken a shine to it.
He’s loving reading about all the gods, the traditions, religious festivals, and all the beautiful art that has come into being even in the millennia since these gods were no longer worshipped.
As I was helping him with a piece of work the other day, though, we came to a short essay question discussing the differences between a faun and a satyr.
I’ll be honest, I had only heard of a faun before that day.
So, I decided to look into it.
Faun vs satyr—what’s the difference?
They are very similar, but the terms can also mean a variety of things. A faun is pretty much always a half-man, half-goat creature. A satyr can also have the features of a goat, but was originally a half-man, half-horse. Satyrs are more often deities, demiurges, or half-deities.
So, unfortunately, the answer isn’t as simple as you might want it to be.
The truth is that the depictions of both of these creatures changed a lot over the course of time, and both came ultimately to represent something different than how we picture them now.
Let’s look into this further.
What is a faun?
A faun is certainly the simpler mythological creature to define.
It seems to have maintained a consistent form for centuries across Greek and Roman people.
A faun, simply put, is a half-man, half-goat creature, which more often than not is also depicted with goat’s ears and horns.
Sometimes, a faun only has the lower half of a goat.
They were believed to inspire fear in traveling men and were also capable of guiding and helping humans.
Indeed, the depiction of fauns that has cemented them in our cultural consciousness, to a large extent, is still C.S. Lewis’s Mr Tumnus.
They were seen as guiding spirits.
Fauns were mainly a creation of Roman myth and were popular in the Roman world after the power of the Greek cities had waned.
Realistically, this is the number one difference between the two things: fauns were the Roman version of an extant Greek myth—satyrs.
So, what is a satyr?
What is a satyr?
The simplest way to define a satyr is as the original Greek root of the popularized Roman mythological creature we still know today.
That is not to say that the satyr doesn’t exist in our cultural consciousness in its own right.
Of course it does.
A satyr, originally, could have been a couple of things.
Our earliest depictions of satyrs essentially show them as hairy, stocky, ugly little men—like Dwarves of later mythologies.
They could also be woodwoses, with the ears and tails of horses.
They did also often don a more faun-like appearance, with goat features.
In general, satyrs were considered to be more associated with women.
They loved women, and generally stayed away from men.
Whereas fauns were considered whimsical or foolish, satyrs were essentially nature spirits with deep knowledge.
Let’s clear up a few more misconceptions.
Is a faun a female satyr?
No, it isn’t—although, the thing to remember is that these mythologies have been used, abused, changed, warped, and there are many fictional universes extant today that feature this rule.
That is to say, in those fictional worlds, a faun is indeed a female satyr.
Some texts call female fauns maenads.
However, this is more to do with the fact of their association with the god Bacchus and Dionysus.
Both of these gods were associated with nature, and their followers too were often grouped by sex—so you would have cabals of priestesses with no priests.
Fauns were associated with both of these gods, and a maenad was the term for a female follower of one of these cults.
What is a female satyr called?
So, again, just to give this a caveat—there is no official, exhaustive compendium of mythological terms, used by the Greeks or the Romans.
They most likely did not have specific names for a female satyr.
They would simply call it a satyr.
That said, in modern fiction, often the term satyress is used.
Such is often common practice for the female version of a mythological creature—ogress, giantess, etc.
So, for the most part, you can just call it a satyr.
A satyress if you want to feel really fancy.
Was Dionysus a satyr?
Dionysus himself was not a satyr in mythology, but he was very closely associated with satyrs.
Dionysus was closely associated with nature, with beasts, even with uncouth men and revelry—all of which were common features of both satyrs and fauns.
However, Dionysus was depicted as entirely, or mostly, human.
While depictions vary, the image that has come down to us is of a human figure—a god after whose image the human was created.
Mythological creatures often had such associations, but Dionysus was purely a god.
It’s all a bit murky and unclear, then.
It’s not surprising that this is the case, given the way the Romans twisted and altered Greek mythology to fit their own needs.
Much of what constituted Greek folklore and mythology, while ultimately becoming Roman mythology, was not passed down in a completely intact form.
Even today, our picture of the whole mythos is far from complete.
There are vast gaps in our knowledge.
I hope, though, that I have illustrated the main differences.