Consider the Goat

So I was doing a little research to find out why goat eyes look so bizarre. Because they do. Have you seen them? No mammal has eyes like that. I mean, I like goats in principle, but those eyes are weird.

And as I was scanning the little abstracts google gives you for each search result, right near the top of the list I find something like "...I decided to use goat's eyes in my portrait of Baphomet..." And I think it's some role playing game geek site, but I look down to discover the url was, alas, the Church Of The Devil (and no, I don't mean Microsoft).

What did the poor goat do to be associated with Evil, anyway? You see it everywhere in representations of incarnate evil. Goat eyes, goat legs, goat horns. I don't know of any biblical accounts, apocryphal or otherwise, where a goat led someone to their doom or ate their children or anything. Snakes, we have a story. Pigs even. I don't know.

Maybe I'm just not sufficiently educated on the origins of metaphors for evil, but I think that some monastery somewhere was having trouble with goats in their garden and one of the local serfs heard a monk say "Aye, th' visage of th' Dewill is pertly that of yon foul goats!"

And you know how those serfs are. They told their neighbors, and their neighbors told neighbors, and soon enough, the hapless goat became the recognized physical avatar of The Evil One.

Now I'm not saying goats aren't evil. They still could be. I mean, you have to be a little evil to mess with a monk's garden. I'm just saying you shouldn't automatically judge a guy if looks like a goat. Or if he happens to be wearing goat leggings and a horn hat. Maybe it's a comfort thing. It doesn't necessarily mean that he's evil.