Stuff To Blow Your MindIf you’ve ever actually been around a goat, you probably wouldn’t confuse it for the ultimate evil spirit. And yet, goats have various demonic and satanic connotations in Christian traditions. In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe consider the humble goat and ponder why. (originally published 10/18/2022)
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick. And Rob and I are out this week, but we are bringing you some episodes from the vault, from the Halloween Vault, to be specific. This was originally aired on October eighteenth, twenty twenty two, and it's part one of our series on the Goat.
That's right, let's jump right in.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Hey, it's still October here on the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. And you may have noticed that we've been talking a good bit about farm animals this month. That was not by design, It just sort of happened that way. But you know, it started with discussing elf shot, which was this folk belief about wounds inflicted often on cattle and horses by supernatural fairy weapons. And then we talked about the cattle mutilation panic of the nineteen seventies, and all this talk about livestock actually brought me back to a question I've wondered about in recent years and I'm glad we're finally getting around to devoting some episodes to it. What is the deal with goats and evil incarnate? Modern audiences will probably think of a particularly awesome bit of goatish devilry from the twenty fifteen historical horror film The Witch, directed by Robert Eggers. I don't want to spoil too much for those of you who still haven't seen it. If you haven't, it's great, But let's just say the movie overfloweth with megacreepy goat stuff, a link between goats and demons and Satan himself. And of course this link between goats and demons and occult magic is not original to that film. There appears to be a long running association between goats and beliefs about witchcraft and devil worship, not so much in New England, where that movie is set, but especially in continental Europe, where the goat form was an important part of, for one thing, the imagery of Baphomet, a figure that will definitely come back to in more detail later in this series. But I figured that I think Christians associated with evil because it was allegedly worshiped by the Knights Templar and later by other occultists, I think emphasis on allegedly with that square with your understanding, rob.
Oh, yes, yes, definitely, and we'll touch on that later then. And then also you can when you start talking about occultists and some of the occult usages of Baphomet and Baha mein iconology, like that breaks down a bit as well, because you get into like, well, what is worship and what is the occult? And you can certainly go down some rabbit holes there as well.
But apart from Baphamet, even the goat pops up in all other kinds of continental witchcraft imagery. Some of the greatest examples that come to mind for me are two similar paintings by the Spanish romantic artist Francisco Goya. The first one is a painting from seventeen ninety eight called Witch's Sabbath, which depicts a coven of women gathered in a circle around an upright he goat in the moonlight. And the goat's horns are magnificently curled, as if curled by the physical substance of evil, and they're decorated with branches of oak leaf, and his four hoofs are outstretched like the arms of a man kind of like you might see depictions of sleepwalkers with their arms stretched out in front of them, but also almost like a king holding out his hand so that you can kiss his ring. And the women worshiping the goat are offering up children for human sacrifice, and you can see bats circling the moon above. It is an absolutely splendid depiction of malignant magic and terror, and I love this painting.
Yeah, this is an interesting painting because, on one hand, yes, it is invoking the very fictional idea of witchcraft and sacrifice that was, as we've discussed on the show before, is very much a part of the like the campaign against imagined witches and played a huge part in witchcraft persecution of very real human beings. On the other hand, this particular image is a lot more chill compared to some of the various woodcuts you see that were used during the periods of witchcraft persecution and drumming up, you know, fantastic ideas of satanic worship like this one. Aside from the offering of the children, and even then the offering of the children, it could be you're just holding the child up to better see the great he goes otherwise, you know, folks are just kind of hanging about and here's the goat, and the goat looks not particularly evil but kind of regal.
Well, yeah, I think some of that ambiguity might come down to what this painting was intended for, because I'll get back to that in just a second after I mentioned there's another painting. Strangely, this one is often known by the same title The Witch's Sabbath, but with the subtitle The Great he Goat or El Grande Cabron. This one was finished sometime in the early eighteen twenties, but I think it was not actually intended for public display. I think Koya just did this one like on a wall in his house. But in this one, once again you've got a congregation of witches gazing up at their goat lord in terror and awe. But now the goat is just a dark silhouette in the foreground with horns and a little billy beard and his body draped in robes like a priest. As brimming with menace as these paintings are, I think scholars of Goya do not typically understand these artworks as depictions of a literal belief in witchcraft, but more kind of the exact opposite, as satirical works about superstition, human brutality, and about religious persecution. Because Goya was apparently a devotee of the Enlightenment, and I've seen his occult paintings described as a sort of mockery of the witchcraft trial mentality and of the Spanish Inquisition and the darker side of human nature in general. Because Rob, as you just reminded us, of course, a belief in witchcraft and occult magic did lead to terror, oppression, brutality, and human sacrifice, but not so much at the hands of witches, almost exclusively at the hands of people who thought they were opposing witchcraft and heresy rather than practicing it.
Yeah. Yeah, and perhaps reaching for some faint evidence of the divine themselves. Yeah. This reminds me of another piece by Goya that I actually they talked about in a Monster Fact episode at some point in the last year or so, a seventeen ninety nine piece titled the translation is here comes the Boogeyman or Koko, and it has a robed figure and children. There are these two children held by a mother, and the children are screaming in terror and trying to look away from it, and the mother's gazing up at the Boogeyman almost with admiration. And it's a lovely image that touches on some of these elements you're talking about, because the backstory for this image is not the Boogeyman is real, or it is more like, look at what parents have done by engaging in this kind of supernatural nonsense, this kind of supernatural terror to control their children. Look at the world there helping to make through this sort of thing.
And yet I think it's funny that despite the clearly ironic intention of these paintings, Goya was a master at creating deliciously frightening monsters and including these these great he goats, including the Elgrand Cabron. So the question for the series of episodes is why what is the deal with this cultural association primarily stemming from Christian continental Europe, between goats and devils or goats and wickedness? And does the thematic harmony of goat and evil at all relate to the biological features of the goat as an organism.
Yeah, it's a great question, because really, if your main relationship with goats is via like goat satanic imagery and baphomets and you know, you know, heavy metal iconography and so forth. You might say, oh, yeah, yeah, goats are scary. But if you've been around goats, either goat farms or various petting zoos, you know it did zoos where children are encouraged to meet the goats and the sheep and to pet them and groom them, you'll quickly realize that in real life goats aren't really scary at all. Like, generally speaking, the scariest thing about a goat is, well, I might step in poop, or if they're a little revved up, one might button me a little bit, or might nibble like if I have a map hanging out of my pocket or something. They might try and eat something they're not supposed to do. But for the most part, yeah, the goat is more comical and weird and at least to my eyes, as opposed to anything that is nefarious when you're actually experiencing them firsthand.
I actually had a face to face with some goats just a few weeks ago at a farm that was attached to a restaurant I went to, and the goats were just hanging out by the side of the fence. So I went and communed with them a little bit, and I walked away from that thinking, yeah, goats are kind of cool. They just seemed like chill like, kind friendly, maybe more more of a sense of awareness from the goats than I've gotten when I've been around like cows, So there's a kind of curiosity or implied intelligence, but also that they were just cool. It's like they wanted to hang out.
Yeah, they have a lot of personality I've found. I mean, you also find some that are totally zoned out in petting Zero's I've been touched and combed and brushed by children so much that I don't even register it anymore, that sort of thing. But a lot of times, yeah, they have a lot of love of character, and the babies are quite cute. So so yeah, in real life I find goats to be rather harmless.
So I think it's probably good to put some very basic goat biology up front, and then maybe we can come back to more specific goat science questions after we explore more of the goat lore.
So the goat for starters here, the goat is one of humanity's oldest domesticated animals. Tracing back at least to the fifth millennium BCE, perhaps to the region of Turkestan. Goats have spread around the globe with their humans since then, thriving everywhere except Antarctica. We domesticated the goat. We take the goat with us, and the goat tends to do really well in various environments.
Yeah, the goat is kind of rough and ready, the goat is hardy. So the scientific name of the domestic goat species is Capra Hercus hircus, with the genus Capra belonging to the bovid subfamily Caproni, also known as the goat antelopes. So the taxonomy from top down goes like this. You got the bovids, and the bovids are all cloven, hoofed ruminant mammals. This includes antelopes, cows, bison, buffalo, things like that. And then the bovid subfamily Caprini includes an assortment of genera such as muskox and sheep, various kinds of four legged mountain critters that you would probably look at and say that's some type of goat. And then of course the genus Capra, which contains the true goats, with Capra Hercus the domestic goat. There are hundreds of breeds selected for different traits, but broadly, most domestic goats are raised for one of three things, either milk or meat, or skins and fiber for the coat. So when it comes to fiber, you can think about cashmere. Cashmere wool that comes from goat breeds such as the Kashmere goat, and mohair as in electric boots and mohair suits, is made from the wool of the angora goat. Confusingly, the wool known as angora does not come from the angora goat, but from rabbits.
Goat milk, especially when made into goat cheese, can be quite amazing.
Yeah, it tends to have a friskier flavor than cow milk. You get more that grass tanng in there, I think. But so okay. Humans have been hurting domestic goats for thousands of years, probably going back ten thousand years or so, longer than most other domestic animal species. So how did that happen? Well, domestic goats are mostly from an original wild species known as the beezor goat or capra igagras, though there are a few breeds that are descended from another wild species known as the markre or Capra falconeri. The markre is awesome, by the way, and worth returning to later. But I was reading one highly cited paper investigating the evolutionary history of the goat how we got from these wild ancestors to the domestic goat, And this was a paper by Sayed naderi at All published in Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences in two thousand and eight, called the goat domestication process inferred from large scale mitochondrial DNA analysis of wild and domestic individuals. So as we know, one of the most important turning points in the history of the human species, probably the single most important, was the emergence of farming, which includes both plant agriculture and domestication of livestock, and goats were one of these early domestics. Hated farm animals, likely through a process where the wild ancestor of the goat was a prey species tracked and hunted by humans, and then at some point that hunting relationship transitioned into a herding relationship, which, by the way, fascinating to try to imagine the step by step process of how exactly that happens. Yeah, but these wild goats, the ancestors of domestic goats, were typically a mountain dwelling species that lived in relatively harsh and rocky environments and in the woods rather than in just flat, fertile plains full of delicious grass. And this raises an important distinction for goat biology, which is the grazing versus browsing distinction. So you can think of ruminant mammals like sheep and cattle as grazers. They usually prefer to eat low lying vegetations such as grass, whereas goats typically prefer to browse. So goats don't just put their heads down eat nice grass. They browse on trees and shrubs, so they prefer to keep their heads raised up instead of down to the earth, and they'll pick it leaves and fruits and buds and twigs from higher up food sources.
Though at the same time, you have a particular environment invites them to graze more or to to to eat more from lower down, they will do that too. They're very versatile and that's one of the reasons they've been so successful.
Oh yeah, they will definitely eat whatever they can get. It's but I think the distinction is that you're not gonna typically find like cows and sheep trying to browse up on variegated, higher, higher up food sources, and goats absolutely will. That's part of their natural repertoire.
Right, and it's also always amusing, you know, given their their their mountainous ancestry that anywhere you find goats, you'll often find them a top whatever they can get a top off, be it a rock or a shed, occasionally the roof of a building, whatever they have access to. Its goats like to get a little height so they can see what's going on around them exactly.
Yeah, you often see the goats up on top of the chicken coop there go. But anyway, in the study I mentioned by comparing DNA from modern domestic goats with the modern relatives of their wild ancestors, this study zeroed in on the idea that the earliest version of this herding and domestication relationship and the emergence of the domestic goat probably took place in eastern Anatolia and possibly the northern and central Zagros Mountains, which are a mountain range extending from eastern Turkey down through Iraq and Iran. And I think it's interesting that some of the traits still visible in domestic goats today can be traced to this evolutionary history. Talking about especially if you think about you know, goat bodies, goat brains, and goat behavior as adapted to more difficult environments like woods and mountains as opposed to plains full of green grass. And you can see this represented in some misconceptions about goats that contain a grain of truth. For example, if you watch old cartoons and stuff, and you see a goat in the old cartoon, what's it going to do. It's gonna eat a tin can, right, right, No problem, goats just eat tin cans. Well, that's not true. Obviously this is not real, and you should not feed metal or any other kind of potentially dangerous garbage to a goat. But there is a grain of truth there. It is reflective of the fact that humans have long noticed goat feeding behavior is more curious and adventurous and promiscuous than the typical feeding behavior of some other familiar domestic ungulates like sheep and cows.
Yeah, and it's why many of the places you'll find goats in the world, you'll you'll find them often living in otherwise very urban environments in not concrete jungles, perhaps, but places where, yeah, there's vegetation around there in between this building and that, and the goats can get to it in ways where you probably wouldn't have a cow grazing there.
Yeah. So, being natural browsers who eat leaves of plants that would be poisonous to other animals, we eat fruits and buds and twigs and shoots and sometimes even tree bark. Goats will search high up in their environment for potential food sources and will try out all kinds of things. Like other ruminant mammals, goats break down their high fiber diet with the help of a multi chamber digestive system where the foregut actually uses bacterial fermentation to break down the rough vegetation and extract the maximum usable energy. So the goats in their foregut, they got a chamber in there where they're making sauer kraut out of the leaves and the grass and the twigs. Now we can come back to more discussion of goat biology later, but I was thinking, if we're looking for cultural links between goats and the devil, it might be good to look at the sort of mythic processing of other biological features of the goat and see what other products those features get baked into. So one thing that that screams for attention to me, if you're certainly to anyone who's familiar with Greek and Roman mythology, is going to be the creature known as the satyr or the fawn.
Absolutely, and this is this is tremendously important to the discussion of goat iconography and Western traditions and the classical use of course, the idea of these these goat men that are generally human from from the waist up with some goatish features of the head and then goat like from the waist down. And yeah, there are a number of wonderful works of art that have depicted these beings, and they kind of run the gamut, like sometimes a satyr seems kind of serene, you know, playing music in the woods or frolicking in the woods. Other times they have a very sinister edge to them. Other times they're just you know, being flayed alive, that sort of thing, depending on the artwork in question.
There are numerous specific myths and tales about satyrs where in the end the sator suffers a humiliation or punishment or defeat of some kind. They often just like that it doesn't turn out great for them.
Yeah, and the flaying in particular, that's the reference to the flaying of Marsias, in which the god Apollo flays this particular satar. And yeah, it's a grotesque sequence that you'll often see depicted in statues and paintings. So at any rate, yes, when we're talking about the classical Greek goat man, we're talking about the satar. And this carries over as well into Roman traditions of the fawn. Carol Rose, the folklorus that I often refer to, points out that the original satyrs were depicted as human males with goat legs and horns that represented quote, the fruitfulness of the land. So I guess it's one of those things where if you have satyrs frolicking about, if your environment can support satyrs, then everything's going all right. Clearly this is an indicator of a very robust environment. But the form shifts over time, as mythic bodies tend to do. And at one point she writes, there's a type of satyr that is described as having no nose, on its face and breathing instead through a big hole in its chest. Later satyrs take on the form we're more familiar with human faces, pointed ears, horns, and the lower body of a shaggy goat the upper body of a human male. They attend their drunken leader s and serve the god of wine, Dionysus or Bacchus. They live in the woods, They chase nymphs around, and they are known for their quote aggressive drunken sexuality, lechery, rudeness, and love of playing pranks. So you know, to humans, there's an unpredictability about the Satar. There's possibly a danger to the Satar. They and in this they're also the origin of the word satire. But also in all of this, I think they nicely sum up a lot of attitudes towards the wild. Like, the wilderness can be fun, the wilderness can be amusing and serene. But the wilderness can be dangerous and it may care nothing for you at all. It may take interest in you, the interest that you do not want. Yeah. Now, by the medieval period, Rose writes that they become more of a grotesque hybrid and are often used to represent just pure debauchery and lust, often depicted with erect fallacies to drive home this point. But at the same time it was also said that, and of course we've discussed this sort of thing before, where there are accounts of the monsters and strange creatures that live in distant lands. So it was also written that, oh, if you go to Ethiopia, you will actually find satyrs. They're difficult to catch, but they live there.
The travel guides of the ancient world were so bad, zero stars. But anyway, so yeah, I was reading about satyrs and one thing I noticed is that they were being described in conflicting ways, like it seemed. Sometimes they're described as having these goat like features and other times I read them as having horse like features. So I was trying to make sense of that, and I found a good reference an Oxford University Press book called Classical Mythology, A Guide to the mythical world the Greeks and Romans, by a scholar named William Hanson. This was published in two thousand and five, and according to Hanson, the overriding feature of satyrs is that they're associated with the countryside, of course, so you know, the wilderness as opposed to settlements, and that they are hybrid beasts. They are exclusively male, they tend to be hairy, they walk upright on two legs, they've got, as you said, off an exaggeratedly large genitalia, and they incorporate some type of bestial features, though early on these features are the legs and tail of a horse rather than a goat. That's kind of interesting. So some depictions lean more on the bestial elements and others make them more just kind of like ugly wild humans. But what's the deal with the horse features versus goat so Hanson says that satyrs were originally horsemen who again had the legs and tails of horses, but over time they blend together with depictions of the god Pan who was explicitly and always a goat man. So by the Hellenistic periods that's about the fourth century to the first century BCE, after the conquest of Alexander the Great, at this point, satyrs are being depicted pretty regularly as goat men instead of horsemen.
This horse goat split is interesting because we'll come back to this again regarding not only the goat horse split, but the idea that some hybrid entities that are described into different folk traditions. The goat aspect may shift. Other times it may be another creature, but sometimes it leans more goat.
And I think you can learn things about what these animals mean in people's minds by seeing what kind of animals get swapped out for what yea But anyway, so these later pan blended goat satyrs are usually shown hanging out in the countryside, playing the flute, chasing nymphs, dancing, associating with Dionysus, the god of the gray harvest of fruitfulness and fertility, actually the god of a lot of things, of festivity and drunkenness and all kinds of stuff in literary traditions. Hanson digs up interesting references to satyrs as being quote worthless and unsuited to work. But another thing that really caught my attention is that satyrs, since they are exclusively male, cannot reproduce to create their own kind, and are only said to be created by the union of two other worldly beings, such as a god and a nymph, or by the union of a god and a human. And there's an interesting comparison here, I think, to other figures that are considered demonic in some way. For example, in ancient Near Eastern literature, I think of stories from early Judaism about the creation of demonic beings when the sons of God come down from heaven and father children with human women. The offspring are often said to be giants or some kind of evil beings. Want to read more about that, you can look up the tradition of the Nephilim or the story in the Book of First Enoch. Now I know there's more about satyrs we need to come back and talk about. But since satyrs were originally horsemen who became goat men by merging in tradition with depictions of the god Pan, what was the deal with Pan? Who were these? What were these Panned illustrations all about? Well, once again to reference that Oup handbook by Hanson, Hanson writes that Pan was the god of shepherds and flocks, and he makes his home in the wilds of Arcadia. And while you'll find a lot of satyrs with horse forms in earlier sources, it seems like pans grounding in the goat form is rock solid. So to read from the Homeric hymns. The Homeric hymns, by the way, are an anonymous collection of hymns to various Greek gods, dating back to probably the seventh century BCE, sometime around then. This one I found is number nineteen, and when I started reading it it was so good I just I have to do an actual chunk of the text. So this is a hymn too, the great God Pan. Translated by Hugh G. Evelyn White. The first part of the hymn goes like this, Muse tell me about Pan, the dear son of Hermes, with his goat's feet and two horns, a lover of merry noise, through wooded glades. He wanders with dancing nymphs who footed on some sheer cliff's edge, calling upon Pan. The shepherd god, long haired, unkempt, He has every snowy crest and the mountain peaks and rocky crests for his domain. Hither and thither he goes through the close thickets, now lured by soft streams. And now he presses on amongst towering crags and climbs up to the highest peak that overlooks the flocks. Often he courses through the glistening high mounts, mountains, and often on the shouldered hills, he speeds along, slaying wild beasts, this keen eyed god. Only at evening, as he returns from the chase, he sounds his note, playing sweet and low on his pipes of reed. Not even she could excel him in melody. That bird who in flower laden spring, pouring forth her lament utters honey voiced song amid the leaves. At that hour, the clear voiced nymphs are with him and move with nimble feet, singing by some spring of dark water, while Echo wails about the mountaintop and the God on this side or on that of the choirs, or at times sliding into the midst plies it nimbly with his feet on his back. He wears a spotted lynx pelt, and he delights in high pitched songs in a soft meadow where crocuses and sweet smelling hyacinths bloom at random in the grass.
Oh that's beautiful. And I think one thing that instantly hits me up about multiple passages in this is it it almost seems like it's ruminating on the nature of the herdsman, because the hunter, of course goes out into the wild and acts as a predator essentially. And then when we have modern situations of say, highly industrialized farming and the rearing of animals, generally not with goats but more of cattle. There is the taking of the animal out of the natural world, placing it in an unnatural situation, and treating it more or less like a thing. But with this ideal, this older vision of the herdsman, the herdsman goes out and kind of lives like the goat, at least for periods of time, Like he has to go out with the goats to the places the goats want to be. And you can imagine this sort of merging of the two, like the herdsman and the goat as one.
He is aunt critter. Yeah, and I like the delicate balance in this hymn, depicting Pan on one sense as a kind of dangerous outsider and earth rim roamer, and on the other hand as a as a soft and delicate and a friendly representative of the of the Dewey Glades and the and the song of the brook.
Yeah. And I wonder too about the detail about the wearing of the spotted lynx pelt. You know, the wears the pelt of the hunter that would otherwise endanger the flock that's that's so many wonderful details in this So.
The part I read was just the first half of the hymn. The second half of the hymn tells the story of how Pan was born, and it says that he's the offspring of the god Hermes, who in this telling is a is a rustic god, a god of again, of the countryside, and of a human woman. And the hymn says that when Pan was born, he emerged with a goat's feet and with two horns, and he was noisy and loved to make mary. And then it says quote, but when the nurse saw his uncouth face and full beard, she was afraid and sprang up and fled and left the child. But despite the terror he strikes in human hearts, Pan is loved by Hermes and the gods. Hermi is a big fan of this goat child, and he takes him up to Mount Olympus and shows him off to the other gods. And the other gods love him too, especially Dionysus, and they name him Pan, which literally means all, because he delighted all of their hearts. So a list of things we have now learned about the god Pan as we already established, he's a hairy wild man who has goat feed and horns and a beard like a billy goat, and he's the god of shepherds and flocks. He rules over the wilderness. Pan is known as a very lusty god, known for exaggerated and constant sexual arousal, and in keeping with this, he has power over the fertility of livestocks such as sheep and goats. But here's another aspect that's really interesting for our purposes. Did you know that our English word panic actually derives from the Greek word panicon and the cognate there with the god Pan's name is not a coincidence. Panicon is said in ancient sources to mean relating to Pan. Originally, panic was not a noun. There wasn't a panic. Panic was an adjective describing a type of fear, often the type of fear that suddenly comes over people with no apparent rhyme or reason. And this seems to work on the logic that, since Pan was the lord of the wilderness, when a person walks alone in the woods or on the mountain side and out of nowhere, they become infected with an irrational anxiety and a dread. Maybe they just heard a twigs snap where they felt a breeze and they get that chill. It's like there's something watching me. There's something dangerous out here. That was pancon dema or the fright of Pan.
That's interesting, yeah, because if we think back, you know, for the most part, the woods, the wilderness, this is the place where we would feel rational anxiety. Modern humans get to pour their irrational anxiety into so many other things in places. Yeah, but for in particularly for non seafaring folk, this would be the place. This would be where that fear would overcome you totally.
Now, But that is one type of panic fear. There's another type of panic fear described in other sources that seems to be more like the fear that suddenly comes over soldiers on mass, draining them of courage and causing them to flee the battlefield. And this is related to stories that the Greek god Pan also had such a booming voice that if he shouted over the battlefield it would cause his enemies to freeze in terror and give way to a route. But anyway, putting all this together, I think it's really interesting how well Pan, the god Pan and the satyrs and fawns that were later stamped in his image match elements of the demons that would preoccupy some in the Christian world. So you've got a goat human hybrid with hair and horns, who is the unholy offspring of the union of God and human, who's got an association with sinful activity, with lust or lasciviousness, and who strikes panic into the hearts of fragile mortals like us.
Yeah, this seemed to be a direct line there.
But the interesting stuff about satyrs doesn't stop there.
Yeah. Now, one thing about these these depictions of satyrs, it sounds like, you know, so many of these stories are again it's like encountering something something in the wilderness. It might be of danger to you, it might be of mild interest. And then we also have this mention of this like the pan origin story of a child born as satyr being found frightful and perhaps ominous, even if it does seem to be something that delights the gods. So I was rather amused when and interested when I read this passage from Jorge Luis Borges' book on Fabulous Creatures, which is totally worth picking up if you have a chance, but he shares this bit concerning the Roman general Slah, who lived one thirty eight through seventy eight BC. Quote. Legend has it that one of these minor deities was captured in a cave in Thessaly by the men of one of Sullah's legions and taken to the general. It made inarticulate sounds and was so repulsive that Sullah immediately ordered it be returned to its mountain layer. And that is from the Book of Imaginary Beings. So, oh, that's just so fascinating the idea here. Selah's troops are out, they find a sadar or something like a sator, and they're like, well, we got to bring this. We've got to pass this up the chain. Let's bring this to the commander. And he brings it to him and he's like, oh, this, this is horrifying, Please take it away. Or at least that sounds like what occurs in my reading of this one passage from the Book of Imaginary Beings Ah. But it gets more fascinating than that. I was reading into this a bit more so. First of all, if forreyone, I'm unaware, Solo was a powerful Roman general who ultimately revived the Roman dictatorship. And I found a fabulous discussion of this in A Satyr for Midas by Jean Sorebella from two thousand and seven. And apparently this particular incident involving Sola comes from the writings of Plutarch regarding an incident said to have occurred near Apollonia in Greece. Quote here they say a satyar was caught asleep such an one as sculptors and painters represent, and brought to Sullah, where he was asked through many interpreters who he was, and when at last he uttered nothing intelligible but with difficulty a hoarse cry that was something between the nahing of a horse and the bleeding of a goat, Solah was horrified and ordered him out of his sight.
Interesting that the nature of the cry could be read as either a horseman or a goat man, given that these are the two different traditions of the satyr.
Yeah. Now, Sorebella writes that the tale in question here inserts mythic happenings into a straightforward biography, and this may stem from Solah's own memoirs, where it was known that he put an emphasis on dreams and portents. It may also refer to traditions of King Midas and the finding of a goat man here is apparently meant to be a portent of victory, as Sullah returns to Italy, defeating his enemies ultimately and becoming dictator of Rome. The finding of a sleeping satyar and even holding it temporarily, was apparently seen as a good portent, despite the depictions of horror here upon finding one, and despite the fact that one of the most famous stories of finding a satyr, that involving King Midas, has a dark twist to it. So I found that fascinating. It's like, here is this strange creature we found in the wild that may be this, you know, half divine entity, and it's horrifying to look at. It's horrifying to listen to. But it also is a pausitive. It's not a dire omen it's not all well or screwed now because look what nature turned up. It's like, no, look at this strange marvel. It's horrifying. I think we're gonna have a good day tomorrow.
Even though he has to order it out of his sight.
Yeah. Now, the myth of King Midas. Of course, that kicks off with the finding of the satar Silinus, and upon returning the creature to the god Dionysus, Midas is rule warded with the granting of his famous wish right, the result being that everything he touches turns to gold, which does not work out well for him.
No, that's also a bad portent.
Yeah. Now.
The later version of the Greek satyr with goat like characteristics is often conflated with a Roman mythological creature known as the fawn. These are regarded as basically the same creature in most ways, and it does seem like there is major overlap between the two. The fawns get their name from an ancient Italian deity called Faunas, which in turn is similar to Pan, a god of the countryside who was half man half goat. In the Italian tradition, he's associated with the wilderness and the sounds echoing through the woods, where you know the voice of Fawnus, and like Pan, he is also associated with the dionysia inside of life, or I guess in the Roman the bacchic, or you might also just think of it as kind of the id in a way like the drive toward hedonistic pleasure and merrymaking. Now understanding that a lot of these mythological goat flavored beast men were known for representing a kind of inhuman pleasure seeking behavior, or specifically inhuman sex drive, it's worth asking is that actually reflective of anything about goats as animals.
Yeah, this is a question that I had because again, I've never raised goats, i haven't lived among goats, but I've been around them plenty of times, and I honestly don't remember being in the presence of goat copulation. Certainly, there are other animals that I've seen in various places where that have engaged in such behavior. But with the goat, I'm like, well, where does this come from? Is the goat actually randier than other domesticated species? So and see, So I was looking at a few different sources on this, because obviously this becomes part of like we've discussed the sator myth, the idea of pan and ultimately these ideas of Satanic goat men and the horned one. But just for starters, when it comes to animals that actually have notably high reproduction or sex rates, goats generally don't make any of those lists. Generally, the real superstars in this area, certainly with mammals, are going to be rodents, various species of rodents. Some are famous for like essentially rutting the males anyway, rutting themselves to death. But of course we have to remind ourselves that humans have been living in close proximity to goats for a very long time and simply get to observe more of the day to day goat life. And then of course we tend to personify anything animals do as well.
Right, I was thinking that, I mean, you've got goat herds, not rat herds, so you don't you know, people are probably watching the goats more than they're watching the rats.
Right, And of course we have a very long association with the rats and mice, but they stick to the shadows the goats do not. The goats have a privileged status within our environment. So I decided to look into goat reproduction more. And so this led me to a few different ag science materials, including one very helpful article from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff by livestock specialist David Fernandez. And there's actually quite a bit of variety in the reproductive cycles of goats. Again, they've been domestigated a very long time. You have different lineages of goats, different varieties of goats, and many of them are doing their breeding indefinite seasons such as fall, while others are going to be active sexually active year round. Latitude, Fernandez says, plays a key role in seasonality. But I think this bit from Fernandez does give us a bit more to go on regarding the randy nature of the he goat, especially in Greek and Roman tradition. Quote. Copulation in goats usually lasts less than two minutes, but they will often mate several times while the dough is an estrus. Bucks must be carefully monitored during the breeding season, especially young bucks, because they spend so much of their time mating that they fail to eat. Bucks can lose up to twenty five pounds over the course of the breeding season.
Wow, Okay, this is starting to make sense.
Yeah, so I think we can well imagine how and why the randy image of the he goat might stick in people's minds. And they also have a vested interest in it all right, because you want your goats reproducing, and you are also invested in the health of your he goats. So I noticed some other animal science papers also referring to goats as a quote unquote promiscuous species in which male goats are trying to mate with as many females as possible. So again, take all of that, combining with the fact that people are living in close proximity to goats. They're seeing this, you know, generally like day to day if you were out there as a shepherd, I mean, as your job to keep track of what the goats are doing. And then again we cannot help but personify the goat. We can't help but do this with any kind of species, especially when we look at their reproduction, you know, many of which are engaging in reproductive styles and cycles and relationships that do not translate well or favorably into the human realm. But we can't help but look at them as behaving is sort of like people, and then using those animals as models for different sorts of people and making often moral judgments based on that.
One of the profound absurdities of the human condition is we're just going to be making moral judgments about the sex lives of goats.
I'd say another factor that might be involved in ideas concerning satyrs and faunds. Is that goats can assume a bipedal posture either to reach higher vegetation, to aid in climbing, or to aid and butting other goats. This is frequently if you've ever spent some time watching goats in there, especially the younger goats, like bucking each other, you know, head butting. They'll often do this thing where they'll sort of rise up on their rear legs and then kind of use gravity to butt at something. But on top of this, they can also balance on their back two legs and move around, which even today makes its way into viral goat videos. There's one I think from somewhere in India that I sent you, Joe, because it's just a very short video of what appears to be just a goat walking down the street briefly on its hind legs.
Yep, just a straight two leg walking habit like it's a you know, evil possessed somnambulist basically.
Yeah, but you only have to see that once. Yeah, given any given community, only one person would have to see that once to really sort of get the momentum going. I think for various other ideas well.
I mean, I think it's part of that Canny Valley principle that like when you see an animal that's acting kind of human in a surprising way, that gets the mind churning about evil magic and so yeah, seeing a goat walk on two legs, you can easily imagine somebody getting freaked out about that. But it's also interesting to think about the underlying biological reasoning there. And I haven't confirmed this is the reason, but just supposing on my part, I think it's reasonable to assume that as browsers rather than exclusive grazers, goats may well be adapted to get back up on those two legs, not just so they can head bud each other, but just so they can reach higher branches. Like if they're browsing on trees and shrubs, you know they want to pop up in forage from something that's a little higher up. It would be useful for them to be able to balance on back legs for a moment.
Right, because a lot of tasty bites you might be able to achieve by by climbing up with your front legs a little bit, but sometimes you got to just you gotta just balance you got to just go into a bipedal posture and get up there.
Okay, I got an another goat biology uncanny valley thing I want to explore, because this is a biological characteristic of goats that I could easily see causing people to look at goats in a sinister light. And it is that some goats sometimes bleat in a way that sounds remarkably similar to a human voice, moaning, wailing, or even just screaming. This is not an observation original to me. It is actually the subject of a number of once again Internet memes and viral video compilations going back nearly a decade.
Yeah. I mean, goats do sound a little bit human sometimes, and of course they're not the only ones. I just spent a lot of time around sea lions in the Galapago Silence, which we'll come back to later. But I have to mention these creatures briefly because especially the females and the pups sound very human at times as well. That can be distracting and even maybe a little uncanny, where it either sounds like a human is coughing or that they're warbling trying to speak like they just don't know English or whatever your Spanish or whatever your native language happens to be. But they're trying to say something, perhaps to you. Oh.
Absolutely, it is clearly an unsettling experience to have a non human animal address you in tones that sound too close to human. Let's hear a few of those goats screams. Now, A big qualifier is that not all goats sound the same, as one could tell just by listening to the diversity of humanoid groans and yelps heard even within these goat voice supercuts. Goats produce a wide range of vocalizations, and it is only some goats some of the time that can willhelm scream. And I tried to find a good source with a zoologist explaining the similar sounds in the cries of anguish and torment that you hear from you know, a goat just standing there versus a human and you know, in like the pivotal dramatic scene in the movie. I didn't find anything super compelling. One thing I came across was a twenty thirteen article in Slate by Forrest Wickman which addressed this question by interviewing a few goat experts. And here are some of the main takeaways there. First of all, for some reason, several of the goat wizards interviewed here did not seem to find this subject especially amusing.
I don't know.
Another is that some of the animals producing humanoid screams in these viral videos are not actually goats. A few are, you know. A few sheeps snuck in there too, so again not exclusive to goats. So maybe we should be saying that while some sheep and some goats and maybe some sea lions too make these humanoid noises. One thing that did seem useful to know is that goats yell for a number of different reasons. So goat handlers will tell you that sometimes they yell when they want to be fed. You know, if they're lining up at the fence for a meal, they might scream at their caregiver. Mother goats and young goats both yell when they become separated. And then there is a quote in this article from doctor Jean Marie Louganbule of North Carolina State University, who specializes in goats, and this researcher says, quote, in my experience with goats, it does not take much for them to scream bloody murder, as if you are torturing them when simply handling them. So sometimes goats are kind of dramatic.
Now what you mentioned about mother goats and young goats yelling when they become separated. That also reminds me of sea lions a bit, in that some of the vocalizations that occur with the females and with the young ones are communicative in nature.
Yeah, so, as yes, I can tell the primary explanation for the similarity and the sounds would just be that there are some coincidental structural similarities in the vocal production organs of humans and goats and apparently some other animals, some sheep and some sea lions and stuff. However, I did turn up one very interesting goat behavior study that again does not directly answer this question, but kind of grazes it. And the study is by LDF. Briefer and Alan gmcgeliot, published in Animal Behavior in twenty twelve, called Social Effects on vocal Ontogeny in an ungulate, the goat Capra Hercus. Now, you might notice a stark difference in the range of vocalizations that are available to humans compared to those that are available to most other animals. Humans have a large degree of what the authors here call vocal plasticity, meaning quote, the ability of an individual to modify its vocalizations according to its environment. So we've got good vocal plasticity. But most animals that are capable of producing sounds with their voices actually produce a relatively constrained repertoire of sounds. But there are a few exceptions found among mammals and birds. You can probably easily think of the birds that have a big range of vocal modulation and control. Interestingly, some of the mammals with high vocal plasticity include bats and whales. But one kind of unique feature of human vocal plasticity is that it is affected by our social environment. We modify our voices and speech to sound like the people around us, especially the people around us when we're growing up, and this, of course is why people who speak the same language but grow up in different regions will end up with different accents. The authors argue that prior to their study, there was no documented evidence of anything like this in other mammals, But could it be the case that in other mammals, especially other mammals that are highly social and highly vocal, that they could develop something similar to different accents by social grouping. Well. A good example of a non human mammal that is both highly vocal and highly social is, in fact, the goat, a shrieking, moaning, social herd animal. So the authors proposed to test this out on kids, meaning young goats. Could the social surroundings of goats affect the sounds they make? And the answer is to some extent yes. The authors found a strong genetic component to voice similarity, so full sibling goats had more similar voices than half siblings, but also half siblings that were raised in the same social group had more similar calls to each other than those that were raised in different groups. Quote the group specific indicators in kid vocalizations show that goat call ontogeny is affected by their social environment. This suggests that vocal plasticity could be more widespread in mammals than previously believed, showing a possible early pathway in the evolution of vocal learning leading to human language. So factors determining the sounds produced by young goats are strongly influenced by genetics, but surprisingly also influenced by the social environment. What are their goats they're around, and so you could view this as analogous in a way to goats developing different accents based on their groups. Now, I want to be one hundred percent clear, there is no evidence I've read whatsoever that this vocal plasticity would extend to domestic goats adapting their voices to sound like humans, like their human farmers and herders. But I guess it's an interesting possibility to wonder about goat experts right in Is this crazy idea possible that I don't know, goats spend enough time around humans, Is it possible that they could slightly adapt in a human vocal direction or is that absurdity? I don't know.
Even without getting into that though, just the mere idea that you're in close proximity with these social mammals that communicate to some degree through vocalizations and have different vocalizations that they're utilizing. That's enough to sort of bridge that uncanny gap between us and them and to allow room for folklore to emerge between the two. I mean, it's one of the things that makes goats interesting, it's not. I mean, it's one of the things that makes sea lions interesting as well, Like, because you watch these animals and they're engaging in social behaviors that are very different from human behaviors but also not so different that we can't anthropomorphize them. And then they're using their voice to some degree. So even even if ancient people especially we're not privy to all the you know, the bullet points that we've laid out in these studies here, they would have picked up on the fact that that something is occurring, that there's some sort of communicative relationship going on, and that there is the goats are raising a goaty mirror to our own way of life.
Well said, uh, I think we have to cut Goats part one right there, So we'll we'll come back in the next episode to talk about goats in the Hebrew Bible and in Christian traditions, goats and other myths and traditions from all around the world, some more fascinating goat science.
It's going to be a blast, absolutely, So join us for the next goat episode. Uh yeah, it's gonna be a lot of fun. There's gonna be some more creepy stuff in there, but also some uh some some some of the ideas are going to be looking at are going to be less demonic and more divine. So yeah, there's a little something in there for everybody. In the meantime, of course, you can find all the episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed We have core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mondays we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact, and on Fridays do we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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