Just kidding: a history of goats

NATURE COLUMN: Bill Cawley

AS IT IS Halloween I thought I would produce something on a supernatural theme.

Why, I wonder, is the goat – one of our oldest domesticated animals – associated with the Devil?

Part of the reason, among others, may well be its ability to mimic the human voice.

Harry Pearson’s book on North Country fairs, Racing Pigs and Giant Marrows, relates an incident in the Yorkshire Dales of an encounter with a goat that seemed to want to get into a conversation with him. I originally dismissed the story as fanciful, but Youtube has many examples of goats appearing to mimic human sounds.

An interesting animal, it is extremely curious and intelligent.

It is also very coordinated and widely known for the ability to climb and hold its balance even in the most precarious of places.

This makes goats the only ruminant able to climb trees. Due to their agility and inquisitiveness, they are notorious for escaping captivity and for their unruly behaviour – in contrast with obedient sheep. The Gospels distinguishes the loyalty of the sheep with the disobedience of the goat. Then of course there is the tradition of the scapegoat in the Old Testament which has the sins of humanity laid upon it.

Another reason might be the animal’s appearance

The goat has horns, as do many of the deities of religions in opposition to the early Christians. The Roman god Pan, the deity of the wilds and mountains, had horns, as did the Celtic god Cernunnos.

This god was the deity of the underworld, the forest and of fertility. It is usually portrayed as a stag – perhaps a folk memory of this ancient divinity continues in Staffordshire with the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance held every September?

In the Middle Ages the Knights Templar were founded to provide security for pilgrims visiting the sites in the Holy Land during the times of the Crusades.

They became powerful and rich and were accused by their enemies of worshipping the devil in the form of a goat figure, Baphomet .

It seems that many of the knights had gone native and were adopting Islamic practices and “Baphomet” was a mistranslation of Mahomet or Mohammed.

The order was quickly and bloodily crushed. Baphomet ,however, unlike the Knight stemplar, appears to be undergoing something of a renaissance.

An eight-foot tall statue of Baphomet represented as a goatheaded, bearded and winged hermaphrodite, at whose feet two children gaze adoringly up has been created by the Church of Satan and was recently in the news.

The “Church” – a front organisation that works to promote the separation of church and state in the US – was unveiled in front of a government building in Arkansas at a rally outside the seat of government in protest at a 10 Commandments monument already installed in the grounds of the State Capitol in Little Rock.