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Updated: October 13, 2025
The fondness of goats for straying in woods and nibbling the bark of trees, to which indeed 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.
"Were these wood-spirits unreasonable," asks Niafer, "in saying that the countenance and the body you have given me are ugly?" "My dear," replied Manuel, "it was their saying that which made me try to avoid the conflict, because it does not look well, not even in dealing with demons, to injure the insane." "Manuel, and can it be you who are considering appearances?"
The guests of Rheinsberg should once more enjoy the careless gayety of a happy day, before they returned to the winter saloons, on whose threshold Etiquette awaited them, with her forced smile, her robes of ceremony and her orders and titles. The ladies and gentlemen had been transformed, therefore, into gods and goddesses, nymphs, and hamadryads, fauns, satyrs, and wood-spirits.
Similarly the Fauns, though wood-spirits, were believed to foster the growth of the crops. We have already seen how often the corn-spirit is represented in folk-custom as a goat. On the whole, then, as Mannhardt argues, the Pans, Satyrs, and Fauns perhaps belong to a widely diffused class of wood-spirits conceived in goat-form.
Some people spoke of gipsies, some of deep holes or pools in the woods; others did not say much, but they thought of the wood-spirits and fairies and shook their heads. Hugo had many a time played with pretty baby Elsa; her father and the forester were friends, and she had spent the day sometimes in the forestry on the Küppel.
"So you do care to know?" the soft voice said, that could make the nerves of even an indifferent hearer thrill and quiver strangely. After once listening to it, it was very easy to believe the weird stories of Norse sorceresses, and German wood-spirits and pixies, luring men to death with their fatally musical tones.
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