as transmitted, has been emended to yield an Illyrian name for Satyrs,
Deuadai.^49 It looks like a diminutive of the inherited word for ‘god’.
Augustine and others refer to hairy Gallic demons called Dusii, who would
take human form and seduce women. The name survives in Breton duz,
duzik.^50 Several figures of later Celtic folklore have goaty features: the Irish
bocánach, a demon of the battlefield; the Manx goayr heddagh, a ghostly goat;
the Scottish ùruisg, half man and half goat, and glaistig, half woman and half
goat, a malevolent seducer who haunted lonely pools.^51
Thelesˇi y of Russian folklore is a forest goblin who can change his size at
will. His head and body are covered with rough green hair; he has goat’s
horns, ears, and feet, and long, clawlike fingernails. Often he has only one
eye. He makes his presence known by whirlwind and storm, or by his loud
laughter and other strange noises. He tricks travellers in the forest into losing
their way or blundering into a bog. He is also a stealer of children.^52
Dancers and mischief-makersThere is a wider class of denizens of the wild who, without being dis-
tinguished by animal features, behave in similar ways to some who are.
Dancing is one pursuit often attributed to them. Another is playing pranks on
country-dwellers, stealing from them, damaging or befouling their property,
upsetting churns, deluding them.
The poet of the Hesiodic Catalogue, as mentioned above, associated the
mountain Nymphs and Satyrs with ‘the divine Kouretes, dancers who love to
sport’. The ‘sporting’ that they love (φιλοπαγμων) may just be the dance,
or there may be a hint of tomfoolery. Their name means simply ‘Young men’,
and corresponds to Kourai ‘Maids’, a name sometimes used of the Nymphs.
They faded out of the general Greek consciousness at an early date except in
Crete, where they were held to live in the wooded mountain glens and protect
livestock. Their rowdy dancing was on the one hand incorporated in the myth
of Zeus’ birth, on the other hand imitated in cult.^53
(^49) Krahe (1955–64), i. 82; Mayer (1957–9), i. 120. Note that neither Σα ́ τυρο nor Σειληνο ́
is a native Greek word. Krahe, Die Sprache 1 (1947), 37–42, argued that the former was of
Illyrian origin.
(^50) Augustin, De civitate Dei 15. 23, followed by Isid. Etym. 8. 103; Hincmar of Rheims, Patr.
Lat. lxxxii. 326; Grimm (1883–8), 481 n. 2. A thirteenth-century writer, Thomas of Chantimpré,
says that groves were consecrated to the Dusii by Prussians among other pagans: Mannhardt
(1936), 48.
(^51) J. MacKillop (as n. 37), 226 and under the above lemmata.
(^52) Mannhardt (1905), i. 138–43; Vánˇa (1992), 122 f.
(^53) M. L. West, JHS 85 (1965), 149–59, esp. 155.
294 7. Nymphs and Gnomes