Dave’s Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #76: “A Satyr Once”

I write a lot about mythology, especially doing myths and revisionist fairy tales. When I saw a call for submissions about satyrs, it immediately got the creative currents flowing in my mind and soon the idea for a story unfolded. The creative impulses arose from various sources:  one would be the character of Mr. Tumnus is C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Tumnus was not a satyr, he was a faun, which is a little bit different, but the same sort of creature; from a section of Sir Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene; and from an old English madrigal I liked, written by a poet from the Elizabethan era, called “A Satyr Once” (I took the title from that song). I’m always curious about what elements work together to create stories. A lot came from the era of Elizabeth and Shakespeare, when people knew their mythology better and were intrigued by it.

Satyrs were mythical creatures who were half-goat and half-human; goat from the waist down, human from the waist up. This physiognomy was highly symbolic. The goat was a symbol of lust, so the satyrs were driven by lust and desire and dangerous for women to be around. In the scene I referenced in The Fairie Queene, the female character of the first Canto, Una, suddenly finds herself surrounded by satyrs. She despairs, thinking her fate will be to fall victim to their insatiable sexual desire. But she is so holy, pure, and good that the satyrs do not assault her; they deem her a goddess and bow down to worship her. Spenser’s allegory uses this incident to illustrate the power of goodness and the magic of chastity (Una is a virgin). To me, it suggested the idea that a satyrs were not simply lust-driven, lecherous creatures. Maybe they had another side to them.

Lorena

Varinius is a satyr who has lived in England since Roman times. He faces the problem, though, that Chaucer noted:  the Christian church continually sanctifies lands and has driven all the elves, fairies, and spirit being away—including satyrs. As sanctuaries grow rarer and rarer, Varinius goes to the less-populated northern reaches only to be spotted and pursued to by a group of hunters. The idea for this phase of the story came from a poem by Seventeenth-Century writer Andrew Marvell, “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn”: The wanton troopers riding by / Have shot my fawn, and it will die. Varinius runs from the hunters and dives into a pond where he is rescued by a nymph named Lorena who is the local deity of the pond. The two of them live together happily until local craftsmen pollute the pond with industrial waste, which poisons and kills Lorena.



Ionia

He buries her near a tree belonging to hamadryad named Ionia. They eventually become lovers.The entire story is told as flashback. As he tell the tales, Varinius is doing what satyrs do. He is whoring, drinking, and fornicating. Ionia has taught him to successfully live in human society and how to transform his appearance so he can feign being old, dying, and then reappear as his son and heir. He and Ionia continue their relationship have a child (a girl, since hamadryads only bear female children).

He adapts to human society—and the role of an English Lord who is a law to himself and who is expected to live a life of vice and dissipation, suits him very well. The satyr ran away but ran to a secure location where he live on and on, practicing his life of lechery, drinking, and orgiastic partying.

 "A Satyr Once" is available. See the link here. 

If you enjoy stories involving ancient myth, drinking, and lechery, you will find it all here.

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