The Goat in Mythology: From Cave Art to the Devil's Horns

Written by David Caldwell · 5 March 2026

A cultural history of the most contradictory animal in the human imagination

I. The Oldest Inhabitant

In archaeological opinion, the heyday of the goat in Britain was during the New Stone Age, some five thousand years ago, when the he-goat was valued for his skin, his partner for her milk, and their offspring for the pot. That is the pragmatic beginning. But the goat was never content to remain merely useful. Long before he became the Devil's familiar, the Witches' Sabbath mascot, or the occultist's emblem, he had already accumulated a bewildering quantity of symbolic luggage - sacred, profane, divine, monstrous, comedic, and tragic - spanning almost every civilisation that ever kept a flock.

Writing in the Sporting Gazette in 1883, one observer lamented the animal's disappearance from the English hills with an elegiac sweep that captures something real about what was being lost: "He has left such quaint footmarks in the world as time will not soon erase, an impress in language and letters which not all the substituted canned meats of Chicago can ever equal." The footmarks he referred to ran all the way back to ancient Egypt, through Jewish scripture, Norse myth, Greek tragedy, and medieval demonology, before arriving - somewhat dishevelled and thoroughly misrepresented - at the modern Satanic panic.

To follow those footmarks is to discover that the goat's strange career in human symbolism was never really about the goat at all. It was about the boundaries we draw between the sacred and the profane, the civilised and the wild, the human and the animal - and the peculiar anxiety we feel whenever those boundaries look uncertain.

II. The Sacred Goat of Egypt

The earliest and most intellectually contested chapter in the goat's mythological history begins at Mendes, an ancient cult-centre in the eastern Nile Delta. Here, a deity associated with the ram or goat - Banebdjedet, "the Ba of the Lord of Djedet" - was venerated with considerable ceremony. Greek travellers, most influentially Herodotus, encountered this cult and translated it through their own categories, connecting the sacred animal at Mendes with their woodland deity Pan, who was himself goat-footed and goat-horned. The result was a richly garbled account that became one of the most durable - and most distorted - threads in the entire goat-mythology tradition.

A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, reviewed in the Weekly Chronicle in 1852, noted plainly that "the goat at Mendes" was one of the local cult animals of Egypt, a specific nome deity among many, sitting alongside the wolf worshipped at Lycopolis and the lion at Leontopolis. The worship of animals, the dictionary observed, was widely misunderstood by Greek observers: "Our verdicts to the Coptic temples are Greeks who, being ignorant of the language, misunderstood much that they heard, and being preoccupied by their own ritual or philosophy, misinterpreted much that they saw."

That mistranslation would prove extraordinarily productive. The Egyptian goat-cult, filtered through Greek sensationalism, eventually became "the Goat of Mendes" - a phrase that later passed through Christian demonology, medieval witchcraft accusations, and Victorian occultism before arriving, by the nineteenth century, as a shorthand for the Devil himself.

A lecture reported in the Irish Christian Advocate in 1887, discussing the Second Commandment, illustrates this rhetorical recycling perfectly. The author lists the animal cults encountered by the Israelites in Egypt - Apis the bull, the cat, the hawk, the crocodile - before reaching: "They had witnessed the worship of the sacred goat of Mendes, the ram of Ammon." The purpose is entirely pedagogical. Egypt is being deployed as a catalogue of idolatry, and "the goat of Mendes" functions as a ready example of exactly the kind of visible, animal-shaped worship the commandment was designed to forbid. By this stage, Mendes had long since ceased to be a place. It had become a symbol.

Equally revealing is a Victorian account of "Egyptian Mysteries" published in the Leith Burghs Pilot in 1888, which drops "the image of Mendes with the refulgent star upon his head" into a lurid inventory of pyramid subterranean chambers, secret initiations, and hidden tables inscribed with antediluvian knowledge. This is the goat translated into pure gothic atmosphere: no longer an actual cult animal, but an emblem of esoteric Egypt as the imagined birthplace of all hidden wisdom.

III. The Scapegoat and the Wilderness

While the goat was being mythologised in Egypt, it was acquiring an entirely different and enormously influential symbolic role in Hebrew scripture. On the Day of Atonement - Yom Kippur - the High Priest of Israel presented two goats at the door of the Tabernacle and cast lots upon them. The first goat, designated for Jehovah, was sacrificed and its blood sprinkled on the sacred shrine. The second, designated for Azazel, received a very different fate. The priest laid both hands upon its head, confessed over it all the sins of the people, and sent it away into the wilderness - "into a land not inhabited."

This is the origin of the scapegoat, and it is worth pausing over the ritual logic, because several of the articles gathered here circle around it with genuine intellectual intensity.

A piece in the Barrow News in 1920 gives the bare bones of the ceremony plainly: one goat sacrificed, one goat bearing the community's guilt sent away to escape. But more searching explorations appear elsewhere. G.W.E. Russell, writing in the Daily News in 1915, noted that popular understanding of the scapegoat had fastened overwhelmingly on the "expulsion into the wilderness" element - the Holman Hunt painting - while largely ignoring the accompanying sacrifice. Modern Biblical scholars of the time, he mentioned, were already suggesting that the scapegoat was not merely released but thrown from a crag above a rocky chasm near Jerusalem. The comfortable image of an animal wandering free was perhaps, all along, a softened version of something far harsher.

Russell also observed something philosophically important about the institution: the scapegoat is structurally impossible to apply to oneself. To be a scapegoat is precisely not to have committed the sins you carry. The essence of the ceremony is that an innocent creature bears the guilt of others. This transferred quality - punishment and expulsion falling on the unoffending - gave the concept its staying power as a social metaphor, one that Russell traced from Savonarola to Lord Frederick Cavendish to the "Constitutional Scapegoat" of British parliamentary politics.

A Yom Kippur article in the Ripon Observer in 1907 went further still, tracing the ritual's possible Egyptian origins and noting the scholarly debate over whether Azazel was a demon, a rocky mountain, or a satyr-like wilderness spirit. The article offers one of the clearest period summaries of how sacrifice, guilt-transfer, and eventual spiritualisation worked in this tradition. Crucially, the ceremony "probably had an Egyptian origin," though the slaying of the sacrificial goat was "more characteristic of the Jewish ritual." Across centuries, the symbolic aspect came to predominate: by the Babylonian captivity, Yom Kippur had become primarily a day of prayer and repentance, and the goat imagery had been largely interiorised.

The Jewish Echo in 1936 drew the parallel with unmistakable urgency to its contemporary moment: the Jewish people, it wrote, were being made the "Goat for Azazel" by the nations, sent like the scapegoat "into the wilderness of hate, degradation and endless torture and suffering." The ancient ritual, stripped of its sacrificial context, had become a metaphor for the most lethal form of collective blame in human history.

IV. The Greek Goat: Pan, Tragedy, and the God of Panic

If the Hebrew tradition made the goat an emblem of guilt and expulsion, the Greek tradition made it something altogether more ambiguous - and rather more exuberant.

The most important Greek goat-figure is Pan, the woodland deity of flocks, portrayed with the hindquarters, horns, and ears of a goat. Pan's name gave us panic - the Wolverhampton Express and Star explained in 1950 that the word derived from Pan's habit of inflicting sudden, unreasoning terror on travellers lost in the forests, a terror so overwhelming it bypassed all rational faculties. The association between the goat-god and irrational fear is older than Christianity and entirely pre-diabolical: Pan was not evil, merely unpredictable, a force of wild nature that existed beyond human control.

The goat was also sacred to Dionysus/Bacchus, the god of wine, fertility, and the theatrical arts. Its connection to theatre goes to the very heart of Western literary culture. The Sporting Gazette of 1883 explained the derivation of "tragedy" from the Greek tragos (goat) and ode (song): the "goat's song" was either the prize in the dramatic competitions, the name given because performers wore goat-skins to impersonate satyrs, or because a goat was sacrificed at the recital to Bacchus. The piece's observation that tragedy takes its name from the goat is no mere etymological curiosity - it suggests that at the very origin of the highest literary form the Greeks achieved, there was a sacrificial animal standing just offstage.

The Shields Daily News in 1936 reported on the survival of Dionysian rites in Bulgaria's "Kukieri" ceremonies, where a young man wore a goat skin, scattered grain in the fields, was symbolically thrown to the ground and beaten, and feasted with his companions in the village square. The article noted that this clearly derived from the ancient Dionysian rites in which the nature god who dies and rises again each year was ritually impersonated - the killing of a man having been replaced by symbolic action since at least the fourth century BC. Goat-footed Pan was still being performed in the Balkans two and a half millennia after Athens.

The Banffshire Advertiser of 1935, writing about Killorglin's Puck Fair, offered the further observation that "Puck" was originally an evil demon who came, in time, to be regarded as a good fairy - and that fairies in popular superstition are linked to the Devil and "pay tribute to Hell." This is a nice example of the semantic drift that runs through the entire goat-mythology tradition: a deity or spirit begins as an ambivalent nature force, gets demonised by a rival religious system, survives in folklore as something half-tame and half-sinister, and eventually becomes either whimsical (Puck, the fairy prankster) or ominous (the he-goat presiding over Killorglin, "King Puck").

V. The Norse Goat: Thor's Strange Companions

The goat appears with fascinating specificity in Norse mythology, and here the associations are overwhelmingly positive - even celebratory. Thor's chariot was drawn by two he-goats named Tanngrisnir ("teeth-barer") and Tanngnjóstr ("teeth-grinder"). Their hooves, the Coventry Evening Telegraph of 1963 noted, sparked lightning from the clouds as the chariot thundered across the sky.

But more remarkable than the chariot-goats was the she-goat Heiðrún, who fed on the leaves of the great world-tree Yggdrasil and produced not milk but mead in such quantities that she could satisfy the heroes of Valhalla. Anna Maria Andrews, writing that 1963 survey piece with evident delight, named her "Delight" and described mead flowing by the vatful for the thirstiest souls in the Norse afterlife.

More remarkable still is the resurrection story attached to Thor's chariot goats. At a peasant's house one evening, Thor slaughtered the goats, skinned them, and feasted on the flesh - but kept the bones intact. In the morning he restored them to life with his hammer, Mjölnir. The farmer's son, however, had broken a leg-bone to suck out the marrow, and one goat thereafter limped. This detail, noted by the Dundee Evening Telegraph in 1895, was given a striking theological interpretation: when the world became Christian and the Teutonic gods became demons, Thor's limping goat was said to have "suggested the cloven feet and the limp of the devil." The mythology of one religious tradition literally anatomised itself into the demonology of the next.

VI. The Medieval Devil's Goat

The fusion of Pan, the goat of Mendes, the scapegoat, and various other strands into the recognisable figure of the horned, cloven-hoofed Devil is one of the most complex processes in the history of Western religious iconography. Several articles in this collection circle the question at different angles.

The Chester Courant of 1816 printed an extended piece on the popular imagery of the Devil that is unusually candid about the goat's role. Citing the learned Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors, it explained that the ground of the belief in the Devil's cloven hoof "might be his frequent appearing in the shape of a Goat" - an appearance that also accounted for his horns and tail. This was, the piece noted, the opinion of the ancient Christians concerning the Apparition of Panites, Fauns, and Satyrs; and Holy Scripture itself was pressed into service: the original Hebrew word for "devils" in certain passages was seghuirim, meaning "rough and hairy goats," because "in that shape the Devil most often appeared."

The Sporting Gazette of 1883 put it plainly: the goat's unreliability, its destructiveness, its fondness for forbidden and seemingly worthless provender, its habits of gate-crashing and fence-smashing, made it "the type of man's perversity." The goat eats the bark of young trees and kills them; in old superstition, its breath was thought to be poisonous. "He was wanton, baleful, full of whim," the piece observed. "The sheep and the lamb, on the other hand, pourtrayed innocence and simplicity." The contrast of sheep and goat - coded as saved and damned respectively in Matthew 25 - is built on centuries of pastoral observation filtered through theological allegory.

The Runcorn Examiner in 1920 summarised the tradition with blunt economy: "Somewhere, the legend exists that the goat was created by the devil." In ancient times he was sacrificed to Bacchus; in modern times, "presented on the dining table," he was given "the name of one of the most docile animals known" - a culinary euphemism that preserved, in genteel form, the long tradition of treating him as an embarrassment.

The Witches' Sabbath added another layer entirely. The Devil was said to appear at the Sabbath in the form of a he-goat, and the Banffshire Advertiser noted this in its Puck Fair piece with reference to old traditions. This was not merely folk superstition: it was a formal theological claim prosecuted by witch-finders throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Saturday Review of 1915, in its piece on Sax Rohmer's history of sorcery, noted that witch-finding was usually "due to man's perpetual desire to find a scapegoat when his affairs do not go smoothly" - a wry observation that links the demonological goat back to the Levitical one: the creature onto which we heap our guilt and send away.

VII. The Occult Goat: Baphomet and the Goat of Mendes Reconstituted

The nineteenth century performed an extraordinary act of occult reconstruction. What had been scattered through folk tradition, demonological treatises, and anti-heretical accusations was gathered up, redrawn, and given a new philosophical dignity by the French occultist Éliphas Lévi, whose Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854-56) crystallised the image of Baphomet - the Sabbatic Goat, "the Goat of Mendes" - as an esoteric symbol of balanced opposites.

The Saturday Review's 1887 review of Albert Edward Waite's digest of Lévi's writings captures the ambivalence with which serious commentators received this project. They acknowledged that Lévi gave "a very lucid account of the tools and implements commonly used in ceremonial magic, and seems to be prodigiously well informed upon the proceedings at the Magician's Sabbath, and the worship of the Goat of Mendes." The worship of Baphomet, the piece noted, was one of the fearsome accusations that had brought about the dissolution of the Knights Templars in the fourteenth century - adding, with significant scepticism, that it was "as well founded as that other accusation that the Templars were in the habit of sitting upon the Cross, as a token of their contempt for it."

By 1915 the pentagram's goat symbolism was being explained in mainstream literary reviews. The Saturday Review's piece on Sax Rohmer's Romance of Sorcery explained it succinctly: for white magic, the pentagram was traced with a single horn pointing upward, symbolising the head of man with the other four points as his limbs. "Reversed, it became very evil indeed. In black magic there were two horns in the ascendant as the mark of the accursed goat of Mendes, and the hapless head of man consequently hung downwards in suggestion of general disorder and folly."

This inversion logic is the key to the occult goat's symbolic power. The goat of Mendes, as reconstituted by Lévi, was not simply evil but inverted - a symbol of the world turned upside-down, of the transgression of sacred order, of matter taking precedence over spirit. The A.E. Waite review is scathing about the metaphysical coherence of all this, noting that Lévi "contradicts himself as frequently as if he were a Radical politician." But intellectual coherence was never the point. The symbol was already doing its cultural work.

VIII. The Brocken Goat: Black Magic as Theatre

By the interwar years, the goat had completed its journey from sacred animal to mass-media prop. The Belfast Telegraph of January 1932 reported on plans to perform a medieval "black magic ceremony" on the summit of the Brocken mountain in the Harz - the famous Walpurgis Night location that Goethe had immortalised in Faust. The ceremony, organised by Harry Price of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research in South Kensington, required a he-goat, a virgin, a professor, and an ointment made from bat's blood, church-bell scrapings, and honey.

The object, solemnly stated, was to transform the goat into "a youth of surpassing beauty."

The Daily Express followed up in June 1932 with the news that fog had prevented the January attempt, and that a new date had been set for the summer. The maiden had been found: Miss Urta Gordon, twenty-one years old, half-Scottish by birth, described as "beautiful." Scientists had obtained "a goat without blemish." Everything was in readiness.

The rite is almost certainly a theatrical stunt rather than a genuine occult attempt, organised by Price, who was a skilled publicist as much as a researcher. But its theatrical elements are precisely what makes it instructive. The goat → Adonis transformation encodes a very old symbolic logic: the goat as raw animality, lust, wilderness, the pagan residue, and Adonis as enchanted male beauty, the perfected human form. To transform one into the other is to perform, in ritual terms, the entire cultural history of what the goat represents - nature that can be mastered, wildness that can be refined, the animal that can be made divine.

Every ingredient in the ceremony is borrowed from Christian sacred space and inverted: the church bell scrapings, the Latin incantations, the virgin's purity as a magical ingredient, the ritual circle. This is the occult logic identified by the Saturday Review critics and attributed to Lévi: transgression as transformation, the sacred profaned in order to produce a new kind of sacred.

IX. The Civic Goat: Killorglin and King Puck

Not all goat symbolism ran through this darkening channel. At Killorglin in County Kerry, a very different tradition had been keeping a goat on a throne for centuries. The Kerryman of 1996 traced the various legends of Puck Fair - a three-day August festival in which a he-goat is crowned King of the Fair and elevated on a platform above the town.

The most widely circulated legend connects the goat to Oliver Cromwell: a herd of goats grazing in the hills was routed by Roundhead raiders, and the male goat ran towards Killorglin, his arrival warning the townspeople of approaching danger. In his honour, the people instituted a festival. The Belfast News-Letter of 1968 gave a shorter version of the same legend: the goats warned the townspeople in time to flee.

The Banffshire Advertiser of 1935 suggested older origins, linking the goat to pre-Christian pagan rites in which he was a favourite sacrifice and a symbol of fertility, connecting the fair to Druid ceremonies and to the Witches' Sabbath tradition in which the Devil appeared as a he-goat. The Kerryman added that the fair has been linked to "pre-Christian celebrations of a fruitful harvest" and that the male goat - Puck - "was a pagan symbol of fertility, like the pagan god Pan."

What is striking about Killorglin is that the goat's symbolic ambiguity has here been domesticated and celebrated rather than demonised. The same animal that carried the Witches' Sabbath associations in Protestant Europe was being crowned and toasted in Catholic Kerry. The Kerryman noted that the fair was "worth an estimated £1m to the local economy" by 1996, drawing sixty thousand visitors. King Puck had survived every attempt to make him purely diabolical and emerged, tinsel crown and all, as one of Ireland's most cherished pieces of cultural heritage.

X. The Modern Goat: Mendes in Suburbia

The 1975 resignation of the mayor-elect of St Ives, Huntingdonshire, offers a precise terminus point for this history's arc. Peter Frazer, a forty-three-year-old bank official, had belonged for four months to something called the Mendean Institute - named, both the Shropshire Star and the Wolverhampton Express and Star explained, "after the goat of Mendes, the traditional name for the Devil." The institute had a symbol: a pair of goat's horns and the cross. When this came to light three days before his mayor-making ceremony, a special council meeting was convened and he resigned.

The story is almost perfectly comic in its proportions. The "Mendean Institute" sounds like something invented by a committee trying to seem esoteric; the symbol (goat's horns + cross) manages to combine two thousand years of symbolic conflict in the most telegraphic possible form; and the institution itself sounds, from Frazer's own description, to have been largely harmless - "Most of the meetings started with a Bible reading," he said.

But the civic machinery moved swiftly and without irony. The "goat of Mendes" - that phrase which had started life as a somewhat garbled account of an Egyptian ram cult in the sixth century BC - had enough charge left in it, twenty-six centuries later, to end a man's moment of civic honour in an English market town.

XI. What the Goat Carries

The goat's symbolic career is not a straight line from sacred animal to Devil's familiar. It is more like a series of overlapping projections, each culture casting its own anxieties and aspirations onto the same creature.

The Egyptians had a real cult animal at Mendes, whatever the Greeks made of it. The Israelites had a precise ritual logic: one goat killed for the Lord, one carrying the community's guilt into the wilderness - a ceremony that encoded a profoundly sophisticated theology of guilt, expiation, and the necessary limits of communal sacrifice. The Greeks had Pan and the satyr and the theatrical prize and the name of tragedy itself. The Norse had Thor's goat that could be killed and resurrected, its limping leg becoming, in the Christian reinterpretation, the origin of the Devil's deformity. The medieval Church had a convenient symbolic shorthand for everything untameable, perverse, and sexually threatening. The Victorian occultists had Lévi's Baphomet, the inversion symbol, the goat of Mendes reconstituted as philosophical transgression. The twentieth century had tabloid stunts on mountain tops, Black Magic ceremonies arranged by psychical researchers, and a civic scandal in a Huntingdonshire market town.

Through all of it the goat remains obstinately itself - browsing on bark and blackthorn, gate-crashing fences, defying confinement, spending one hour each day, as the shepherds of Provence still half-believe, "down there" getting its beard combed.

As the Sporting Gazette put it in 1883, in a lament for a disappearing England that reads better as a meditation on the whole tradition: "He has not time. How should he? In place of fellow-feeling we have got political economy, that dismal science which makes utility the chief end of man, and makes the test of all things, 'how much per cent?' Well, what is sentiment against dividend? And so we lose our goat."



The goat was never just an animal. He was the thing that could not be entirely domesticated, the creature on the boundary between the tame and the wild, the sacrificed and the liberated, the sacred and the diabolical. We have been projecting our deepest fears and strangest hopes onto him for at least as long as we have been writing anything down - and probably, given the cave paintings, a good deal longer than that.

Sources drawn from newspaper archives 1816-1996, including the Chester Courant, Sporting Gazette, Saturday Review, Dundee Evening Telegraph, Belfast Telegraph, Coventry Evening Telegraph, Jewish Echo, Daily News (London), Ripon Observer, Barrow News, Runcorn Examiner, Banffshire Advertiser, Shropshire Star, Wolverhampton Express and Star, and Kerryman, among others.