The primary attitude of man to the numina seems clearly to be one of fear, which survives prominently in the "impish" character of certain of the spirits of the countryside, such as Faunus and Inuus, and is always seen in the underlying conception of religio, a sense of awe in the presence of a superhuman power.
Thus we hear of temples dedicated to Juventas=Hebe (191 B.C.), Diana=Artemis (179 B.C.), Mars=Ares (138 B.C.), and find even such unexpected identifications as that of the Bona Dea - a cult title of the ancient Fauna, the female counterpart of the countryside numen Faunus - with a Greek goddess of women, Damia.
In Hesiod (Theogony, 1013) he is the son of Odysseus and Circe, and ruler of the Tyrsenians; in Virgil, the son of Faunus and the nymph Marica, a national genealogy being substituted for the Hesiodic, which probably originated from a Greek source.
Faunus also revealed the secrets of the future by strange sounds from the woods, or by visions communicated to those who slept within his precincts in the skin of sacrificed lambs; he was then called Fatuus, and with him was associated his wife or daughter Fatua.
In poetical tradition Faunus is an old king of Latium, the son of Picus (Mars) and father of Latinus, the teacher of agriculture and cattle-breeding, and the introducer of the religious system of the country, honoured after death as a tutelary divinity.