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, so we are bringing you an episode from the vault. This is part two in our series on the Goat and the devilish implications of the Goat. It was originally published on October twentieth, twenty twenty two.
Enjoy 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, and we're back with part two of our series on the Goat.
That's right, it's Halloween season and for some reason, all of our Halloween episodes so far have been livestock based. And this is part two of our look at the goat, a creature that in reality is, you know, pretty gentle. Nothing too weird about the goat for the most part.
Nothing the faari is, certainly, but within the larger traditions of mythology and folklore, various other connotations take over and kind of spin out of control until you have ultimately demonic goats, half goat, half human hybrids that may not have the best intentions at heart, and then also even a few cinematic incarnations, horror movie incarnations of the goat. We mentioned the Witch in the first episode, of course,
and Joe and I were trying to off Mike. We're trying to think of other spooky goats in films, or its even just spooky goat people in films, and there aren't maybe a ton of them, Like there are more way more killer cat movies and certainly killer dog movies than there are killer goat movies.
Well, it depends on if you include goat headed demons, then that massively expands the range. And as we were discussing, there is one Italian horror movie that has a really glorious goat costume that you only see for a couple of seconds. But it's in the Church.
Yeah, that's a nineteen eighty nine film. It's been a while since I've seen it, but it was produced by Dario Argento and a few others, and it's quite an interesting film, kind of a lower budget accult film that was perhaps partially inspired by the Name of the Rose, Like what if the Name of the Rose had one of the actors from the Name of the Rose but then also a demonic goat man roman.
About Oh okay, Yeah, and.
Of course The Devil Rides Out, which we discussed on Weird House Cinema earlier in the year that has a great goat man in it as well, but they're.
Not a wonderful, big old goat boy at a party.
Yeah, probably one of the better ones committed to the screen, but you don't see them a lot. I think I've mentioned before I think the first cinematic vision of like goat obsessed Cultists was the movie adaptation of Dragnet. This, I think a nineteen eighty seven film. Dan Ackroyd heavily
involved in that. I think Christopher Plumber is in it as well and plays one of the cultests, and so there's you know, there's scenes of some sort of a Hollywood black mass thing going on, and people wearing goat leggings and goat heads and so forth.
You're saying, that's the first one you remember seeing.
That's the first one I remember seeing as a kid, because you know, that was I think essentially supposed to be a family movie. You know, I remember there being plenty of elements in it there were maybe not so family friendly, but you know it was the eighties. Oh and Seth just poked in to mention. Of course, Pan's Labyrinth, Gimel Do Toro's film, which does have a fabulous Pan incarnation as well as well as some other just fabulous creatures.
Definitely not a family movie that one either. It's got some brutal violence and some very you know, real world themes, but also so fantastic mythological world.
Yeah, everybody remembers the monster with the eyes in its hands in that movie, even though Pans in the title. Yeah, it's not called Eyes in Palms Labyrinth.
For many of you. Though, when you think cinematic goat men, imagine for an entire generation of people. There's one particular portrayal you're going to think of, and that's going to be James McAvoy's two thousand and five portrayal of mister Tumnus in The Lion the Witch in the Wardrobe.
I never saw that adaptation.
Oh well, I have a feeling and go get around to it. It's a good one. It rewatched, it recently holds up pretty well. It's got some great creatures in it, and of course, in addition to James macavoy, we have a tremendous Tilda Swinton performance as the White Witch. So those two elements are alone are enough reason to check it out.
Does the movie have Turkish delight in it?
Oh, of course you can't not have Turkish delight in it. So I was thinking about mister Tumnus because we were talking about satyrs and fawns in the last episode, and I realized that this is an odd, pretty obvious modern fictional presentation of particularly a fawn in this situation. He's described as a fawn, of course, appears in C. S. Lewis's Narnia book The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
and various adaptations of that work. And despite all of the various connotations of the satyr and the fawn that Lewis was obviously quite aware of, mister Tumnus is a rather compassionate figure and not at all a nasty old he goat about. The worst thing you can say about him is that he's technically working for the White Witch.
He's technically prepared to poison one of the children and then deliver her to the White Witch, but then he quickly betrays the White Witch to help the children of Earth. So while he's not really portrayed for the most part as a sexual being. Still, James McAvoy's two thousand and five portrayal has perhaps a little bit of unintended allure
to it. I think it's one of those situations where, even if you try and strip those elements away from the visual satyr or fawn, if you then recreate the fawn, especially using an actual person, an actual actor, you cannot help but evoke some of its symbolic essence. Lewis, by the way, also wrote a poem titled The Satyr, which also seems to dwell on the creature's more sublime qualities.
This is one that he wrote much earlier as an adolescent atheist, is pointed out by Joe R. Christopher in a twenty sixteen paper title C. S. Lewis's Two Satyrs, referring to this poem and then to mister Tumnus, I thought, I thought I might read just a little of this poem. You can find the whole thing at allpoetry dot com.
But it begins like this, when the flowery hands of spring forth their woodland riches, fling through the meadows, through the valleys, goes the satyr, caroling from the mountain and the moor forest green and ocean shore, all the fairy kin he rallies making music ever more, See the shaggy pelf doth grow on his twisted shanks below, and his dreadful feet are cloven, though his brow be white as snow. And it goes on from there's a fun little little poem. Now.
Christopher's Ride Up is I think a pretty interesting analysis, as long as you're in for sort of at times a psycho sexual interpretation of a Narnia book, which I realized it is not everyone's cup of tea, but still I think it's quite interesting. And he points out that while mister Tumnus is largely desatorized defaanntinized, if you will, there are still hints of the basic nature he is
overcoming and being civilized, and so forth. Mentions of times when quote and this is from the line the Witch and the wardrobe quote, the woods were green and old salinas on his fat donkey would to visit them, and sometimes Bacchus himself, and then the streams would run with wine instead of water, and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end jollification. Yeah, so,
Christopher ultimately writes in this paper quote. If one compares Lewis's two satyrs, one finds that both are about the split in the male human. Partly he is led by reason, by wisdom and high thoughts, by family, moors and philia, and partially he is driven by sexual or bestial or devilish and or traitorous impulses. The satyr attracts fairy maidens
by his unhappiness. Perhaps he is unhappy because women flee from him, but more likely, has suggested before, he is unhappy because he has self divided himself about his relationship to women. The fawn mister Tumnus shows that a man can control his impulses, his animal or devilish side, and treat a woman well.
Huh, Well, I don't know quite what to make that, because I haven't read this since I was a kid.
Yeah, I listened to the audiobook version of it in recent years, so it's a little fresher on my mind as well. But I'd love to hear it from everyone out there, because I know we have a lot of There are a lot of people out there who either grew up on these books or these movies and maybe thought one way about them at one point in their life and thought another way much later. But mister Tumnus
is still there, standing essentially naked in the snow. I think he's wearing a scarf in the movie version, but otherwise looks very naked except for the goat for.
Okay, Well, in the previous episode, we were talking about the question of why the cultural association, especially stemming from Christian continental Europe, between goats and devils or between goats and wickedness. Where does this association come from, especially given that it's not universal. Of course, it's not like every culture thinks goats are evil? So what are the origin points? And I think we can POSSI find some points of inspiration for this mental link link between goats and demons.
In the Biblical tradition itself, going all the way back to the Torah. One of the most prominent appearances of goats in the Hebrew Bible is the prescription for the Day of Atonement or Yam Kapor. Yam Kapur is the holiest day of the year in Judaism. It is a day dedicated to the ritual cleansing of sin and the ritual is described in the Book of Leviticus, chapter sixteen
as a prelude. The Lord is talking to Moses, and the Lord tells Moses that erin the High Priest, he can't just come into the presence of the Ark of the Covenant at any time, or God may appear in a cloud upon the cover of the Ark and kill him. And this is coming after God has already struck out from the Ark and killed people who did the wrong
thing with it, who maybe brought strange fire before it. Instead, at an appointed to the high priest, will bathe his body in water and will put on special holy vestments, and then he can enter into the presence of the Lord, of the presence of the Ark to give offerings. And then regarding the day of atonement, we're told the following. This is from the NRSV, beginning chapter sixteen, verse five.
He shall take from the congregation of the Israelites two male goats for a purification offering, and one ram for a burnt offering. Eron shall offer the bull as a purification offering for himself, and shall make atonement for himself and for his house. He shall take the two goats and set them before the Lord at the entrance of the tent of meeting, and Erin shall cast lots on the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the
other lot for Azazel. Eron shall present the goat on which the lot fell for the Lord and offer it as a purification offering. But the goat on which the lot fell for as Azel shall be presented alive before the Lord to make atonement over it, that it may be sent away into the wilderness to as Azel. And in the tradition of the Second Temple, as described in the Mishnah, this ritual is understood to mean that one goat is sacrificed to the Lord for purification, and the
other goat becomes a scapegoat. That word scapegoat in the English language, I believe comes from the William Tyndale translation of the Bible. William Tyndale, by the way, executed for heresy, even though he gave us most of the English translation that would end up in the King James Bible.
Oh wow.
But so that English word scapegoat. There is an attempt to translate the concept of the goat for Asizel from the day of atonement. So this is a goat that is ritually designated as a vessel for the sins of the Jewish people, and then, after being the sins of the people are placed upon it, it is driven out into the wilderness, perhaps to fall off a cliff and die. So what does it mean to say that the scapegoat
was for as Azel. Well, Rabbis and scholars have interpreted this phrase in a number of different ways over the ages. So one interpretation is that as Azel is the name of the place to which the goat was sent, specifically maybe a rocky, desolate mountaintop or a land of impassable cliffs. So there are different linguistic interpretations. But other commentaries have held that as Azel was a proper name, the name of a supernatural entity or power, And obviously this interpretation
is more relevant to what we're talking about today. In this reading, as Azel is some kind of demon or fallen angel, a spirit of defilement and wickedness haunting the desert, and the goat on which the high priest places the sins of the people is sent out for him. And so despite the fact that in this ritual actually both the Lord and this demonic figure each get one goat, the scapegoat, the goat that carries the sins of the people away to meet a filthy devil in the wasteland.
I think might be the more salient image. Kind of in the same way that even in most early Christian literature that gets into the idea of the afterlife, descriptions of hell tend to be more vivid than descriptions of heaven, just because of I don't know certain features of human psychology.
Yeah, I guess a lot of these traditions in which hell is described too, those description very descriptions of hell are kind of the oftentimes one of the only available avenues into which into which you can pour your dark imagination. Yeah, if you want, If you want to create paint devils and demons and grotesque hybrids, there are certain improved areas of interest, generally religious sorts in later on and Western traditions. You know, the mythological realm in paint whatever you want,
as long as you're depicting one of these stories. It's important to a given culture.
Right, Yeah, you could use the dark imagination for allegedly at least the purpose of discouraging sin, saying look what will happen to you? Though it's interesting, you could argue that that's the same principle on which exploitation movies are made. It's like, well, we have important subject matter to talk about here. This is a film educating people about the dangers of using marijuana. Never mind that it's also just an excuse to show a bunch of debauchery and party scenes and stuff.
You know. The other thing about this scapegoat scenario, and I was thinking it kind of matches up with some stuff I was thinking about recently because I started using a new meditation practice that I was taught called it's a bitch, rather simple. It's just called leaves them a stream, where you take a particular thought and you sort of externalize yourself from that thought. You realize that you're thinking
that thought, and you imagine yourself at a stream. You imagine yourself taking that thought, placing it on the leaf, and letting it float down the stream away from you. And that's all there is to it, you know. It's just it's a very simple exercise of removing yourself from a thought and then sending that thought away, you know, not trying to avoid thinking that thought or avoid feeling that feeling, but acknowledging it and then letting it go, and I was as I was after using it and
finding it rather helpful. The last couple of weeks, I was thinking, well, I wonder how much of this is present in various religious practices throughout history. The idea, the simple concept of like acknowledging something and then sending it away. It seems like it may line up in some ways with this sort of practice as well.
Yeah, I can totally see that, though. Again, I think it's interesting the specifics of the imagery here, which is that the goat is being sent away for as a zel for this demon in the desert. And you could obviously see how this standard tradition of yam Kapur could later give rise to a mental association between goats and the creatures of hell, because the goat is being sent out to meet this devil.
Yeah, what does he do with these goats? Does he? Do they just hang out with him? Do they morph into strange goat creatures? Does he eat them? Either way, it would make you maybe think twice about seeing a feral goat in the wild, which is something to think about. I mean, even though these are domesticated species, you'll end up with feral goats out there, and I can imagine there might be something kind of haunting about a feral
domestic species that you encounter. It's kind of like a ghost town or a haunted house.
Oh yeah, absolutely. And I also want to be clear that the overall format of the scapegoat ritual is not unique to Jewish tree addition, the scapegoat rituals of various kinds are used in a number of ancient cultures, in
many instances not involving goats. For example, ancient Greece, I think, especially like Athens and Ionia, would sometimes banish human scapegoats to appease the gods and avoid some kind of bad fate, such as in the festival of Thargelia, which was a festival of Apollo, where it's said that often a sort of a couple like a man and a woman who were despised in some way, or who were considered physically ugly, or for some reason were not wanted by the people
would be selected and then they would be paraded around the town and they would be whipped with branches, like branches of trees or pieces of vegetation that I think was supposed to symbolize a kind of transference of guilt or impurity of some kind from the people onto the couple, and then they would be banished outside of the city, exiled, presumably to die outside in the wilderness.
Well, we're not we're not advising anyone try that out. What that doesn't just doesn't sound helpful to anybody.
No, I think, thar Gaelia we can safely put to rest. Yeah, okay, I've got another biblical association between goats and sin or evil or impurity. This one comes from the New Testament. This comes from Christian traditions. Some people will probably be familiar with the story of the sheep and the goats
in the New Testament. One passage to zero in on here is in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter twenty five, And for context, this is part of the so called Olivet Discourse, which is a discourse in which Jesus is giving a bunch of teachings that are full of apocalyptic statements about what is going to happen when the Son of Man comes. And these appear in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, Mark, Luke, and Matthew. And they've got
different kinds of predictions. You know, there might be like earthquakes and disasters, and the destruction of the temple and so forth. But one of the things described happening when the Son of Man comes in glory, begins in Matthew chapter five, verse thirty one, and to quote from the NRSV, it reads, when the Son of Man comes in glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit
on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left.
I definitely remember growing up hearing this in church, and I mean on one level, it's like, okay, he's separating people and good from bad. But I never really understood like the sheep goat to do aspect of this. I'm kind of like, well, a sheep and a goat. I mean, I've been around both of them at petting zoos, and it's not like one is grosser than the other anything, or that one sweeter than the other. They're both domesticated
farm animals, and just one. The goat has a lot more personality than the sheep.
In my opinion, I remember being confused too. It's actually one of a number of comparisons or parables or stories in the New Testament that kind of don't make sense if you're not familiar with like an ancient agricultural context. Like tons of these stories are about agriculture, and like, I don't know what reaping and sewing are and stuff when I'm a little kid. I'm not a farmer, so I like, I don't know what to think about this stuff.
But a lot of it ends up just being picked up anyway, and people are like, yeah, you want to be a sheep or a goat? Of course you want to be a sheep. And you might go, yeah, of course I want to be a sheep. But then again you might ask, well, is there a third option? Is farm animal? I could be in this scenario?
Well, as best I can tell, I think it is just a point of the point is really about the separation. But to explain the rest of the story, So the sheep go on the right hand, and the Son of Man will bless them, and they're going to ask why are we being blessed?
What did we do?
And Jesus goes on for the to give these famous statements. He says, quote for I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothing. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me. And then they're going to
ask when did we do any of that? And then the Son of Man will say to them, truly, I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me. And then we get the same answer inverted for the goats at the left hand. Why are they at his left because they didn't do any
of that stuff for him? And they protest, well, they never denied him food or drink or comfort, and quote then he will answer them, truly, I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, did not do it to me. And then it says, and these will go away into eternal punishment,
but the righteous into eternal life. So in this story, the sheep are representing the righteous, who will inherit the Kingdom of God, and the goats are representing the unrighteous who must depart into destruction to be annihilated when the Son of Man comes in power. So I was thinking, why goats here? I didn't find an answer to this that I found super authoritatively convincing. I read one evangelical
theological blog post that had an interesting idea. I don't know how valid this was, but at least it suggested that when you're maintaining mixed herds of goats and sheep, which I do think was actually common in the Levant at this time, goats reproduce faster than sheep, so herdsmen would have to regularly cull young male goats to maintain
the correct balance of their flocks. And if they didn't regularly cull the young male goats, the goats would reproduce faster and they would take over there would be too many of them in the flock.
M Okay, well, that seems to match up with some of what we were talking about in the last episode about the sex life of the goat.
But I would say the question of what is the underlying agricultural reasoning about the goats and the sheep here? That may be true but I don't know. I'm still interested in this. I feel like there's got to be a good answer out there I just haven't found yet.
Yeah, yeah, this is certainly if we have any people with herding experience or vaster herding ag knowledge right in and let us know, was a good reason to separate the goats from the sheep. Now, at this point, I thought we might get into some other examples of folklore of the goat and the he goat, and perhaps some more religious traditions and mythological traditions of the goat. Some of these are going to match up and be more in line with some of the demonic goat ideas that
we've discussed thus far. Some are going to go in an entirely different direction. We're going to get a little bit into divine goats at times. One example that came up in my research this is from an eighteenth century folk lores by the name of John Brand. Brand wrote, quote, there is a popular superstition relative to goats. They are supposed never to be seen for twenty four hours together, and that once in that space they pay a visit to the devil in order to have their beards combed.
This is common both in England and Scotland.
What I don't think I even understand what that's claiming?
What is it?
How did you understand the never scene? For twenty four hours together?
This I took to be about this sort of the nature of the goat, Like the goat is gonna get around, it's gonna explore, it's gonna climb a little bit, it's going to poke around and see what's available to eat. And therefore I'm imagining a herdsman might maybe have a little more of a time keeping track of the goats and it be like, well, I think one's missing, and then you find them and they're like, okay, now we
have all the goats. I wonder where that goat went. Well, it's probably just the other side of the hill or was poking around under something. But what if it was visiting the devil? And what would a goat? I feel like there's kind of a This is one of those folk beliefs that maybe has a little tongue in cheek, you know, like why would a goat actually go to the devil? What do they have that the devil can offer them? Well, their beards need combed every now and then.
I get that nice sheen. So I don't know I found it. I found it more amusing than illuminating.
It's like when the dog just gets back from the groomers. It's the goat just comes back, but he's been with the devil. He looks luxurious.
Yeah, I guess it's something about a domesticated species that it has a little bit of a it still has some of that adventurous spirit to it. You know, we often have supernatural ideas about what it does and where it goes, and what its intentions are, such as with the cat. The cat is going to want to go off and do its own things. Where does the cat go?
What is it up to? That sort of thing. Now, an interesting paper I was looking at is a paper titled A Note on Goats Defoe on Crusoe's Devil from nineteen ninety eight, and this is by Aaron Santisso this of course is referring to Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Dafoe. Robinson Crusoe not a work that I think I've ever read, but i've certainly, I think seen various film or even cartoon adaptations of it over the years. Maybe I read it in school, but it's been a very long time.
I think when I was a kid, I had a children's abridged and ad adapted version of it, which is weird to think about.
I think that may have been how I encountered it as well, But this is still an interesting paper to read. I didn't know there were I did not remember there being any goats in it, but that seems to be the case. The author here writes that by the eighteenth century, old goat and goat foot were popular euphemisms for Satan, and the devil was said to take the form of a goat, and the image of Satan was often depicted as that of a robed, goat headed man. That kind
of became the staple image. But apparently Yeah, to explain the title of the work, there is a bit in Robinson Crusoe where he encounters goats, and at the same time, Daniel Dfoe wrote an entire book on the perceived presence of Satan in global affairs, The Political History of the Devil from seventeen twenty six.
Funny with that title, that could be either a really interesting book of historical scholarship, or that could be a wild conspiracy tract.
Yeah, it's another work I've not read and I only have just a brief summaries understanding of it, but at any rate, I thought it was worth mentioning real quick a couple of goat man type creatures that seem related in some cases to the satyrs and the Fawnds that pop up in the encyclopedias of Carol Rose. There's the Bachman. This is a goat man of German folklore, used as a nursery bogey to keep kids away from the forest. So near the forest and the Bachman might get you.
And of course, in imagining a Germanic goat man, we of course can't help but think of the Crampis creatures as well.
Oh yeah, I was gonna I was gonna bring up Crampus, but also as a brief refresher on the idea of a nursery bogee. This was an idea we explored in our series on Jinny Green Teeth from a few octobers back, which is a famous nursery bogey. I think the concept of a nursery bogie is a monster that is specifically designed to warn children away from some type of dangerous behavior.
Yeah, and we actually mentioned nursery bogies in the last episode talking about Goya. Goya, Yeah, talking about Goya, and one bit about the you know, watch out for the Boogeyman. It was both a kind of a takedown of parents engaging and supernatural ideas to scare obedience into their children and at the same time like preparing them for adulthood
full of supernatural beliefs. Another creature that Rose mentions is the buckanock, which is described She describes as quote a vast, menacing goat, and it's said to terrify travelers on lonely Irish roads at night, which I think is interesting and makes me think of the experience even today of encountering either a feral goat or a wandering goat on the
roadside and seeing it illuminated in your headlights. Obviously wouldn't be the same situation on lonely Irish roads in olden times, but still, perhaps if you had some sort of a lantern and your lantern light caught the eyes of the goat just right, might be a bit creepy.
Now, sticking to the British Isles for a minute, I came across an interesting goat related creature known as the Gleistig or the Green Maiden, a malevolent fairy from Scottish Gaelic mythology. According to the Oxford Reference Encyclopedia, this monster sometimes appears as a beautiful woman, but other times as a half woman, half goat, and she seduces a male victim, brings him, lures him to her hideaway near a secluded pool, and then when they are alone, she slashes his throat
and drinks all his blood. And I thought this was interesting because it echoes the idea of goat says sort of a sexual danger in some way, except usually it's like the idea of a lusty he goat that is that kind of mythological threat. Here, instead it is an evil fairy woman who seduces male victims. Interesting though it's also noted that in other variations, the Glistig is not dangerous and is a helpful creature who protects children and the elderly.
That's an interesting one. Yeah, I hadn't heard of that one. Now. In Norse tradition, we have a pair of giant goats that are rather famous. They are Tang Grishner and Tang Groschner. They are two giant goats that pull the chariot of Thor across the skies. In Norse mythology. I may have butchered their names a little bit, but those are translated as tooth gnasher and tooth grinder, and these are depicted in the latest Thor movie as well as screaming goats.
Screaming like the goats from the internet video.
Yeah, just screaming the whole time. It's pretty amusing. There's some amusing stuff in that film. Now, another creature I came across is the yale or centacore. This is a mythical beast found in European mythology and and ultimately European heraldry, described by plenty of the Elder. Depictions vary from goat like to more of an more like an antelope, and the descriptions have been linked to varying creatures from distant lands. So this is where we kind of get into We
mentioned this in the last episode. When you're dealing with either mythological creatures, folkloric creatures, or accounts of action creatures in distant lands, the translation of them may take on different forms. It might end up being a little more goat like, it might be more horse like, and there are examples where it might take on the forms of other animals. It reminds me too of Europeans going out into the world and discovering new fruits and thinking, oh,
what kind of apple is this? Oh, we will call it the pine apple, Like what kind of strange goat is this? We will interpret this idea of a new creature by using the goat as a base point. Now, another creature that I read about is the latter rog. This is a white, golden horned goat in the traditions of Slovenia. And the basic idea here is that this is a fabulous I mean it's not only is it a big goat, almost like a ram like creature, it also has horns that are gold, presumably real gold. So
of course hunters want it. Hunters go out, they chase it around. But this is a smart creature. This is a savvy creature, and it may well lead you over a ravine where you fall to your death. The creature is also known as or as translated to just being called gold horn, and it also seems to be the mascot of a Slovenian beer. So if anyone out there is a fan of international beers or if you have any drinkers of this particular beer, I would love to hear your thoughts on it. I looked it up on
Beer Advocate. It has a score of seventy three there, which I guess that's okay. It says okay right here, seventy three okay, must be an okay beer.
Rob, I have had this beer?
What oh do tell I? Well?
I drank this when I was in Slovenia. Yeah, so in Slovenia. I don't know if it's still this way, but when I was there, it seemed to me there were basically two types of beer. There was Union, which is spelled like the English word union, and there was Lashko. And I recall thinking that it seemed like the bars were divided by which beer they sold. I don't know if that's really true, but it seemed that way to me.
So you'd have like an Union bar and a Loshko bar, and it's like, do you want to go to the place that has lashco or do you want to go to the other place. And for whatever reason, I ended up on the Lashko side, So I was drinking those I think I only had a couple of onions.
You didn't have enough to fall into a ravine. That's the no. No.
To be fair, I know I drank Lashko. I don't know if I if it was the Zlatterog variety. I think it probably was because it looks like that's one of their flagship beers, but I can't be positive it was. I mean, because it looks like there's also like just you know, Lashco light and stuff like that, but I think I had this one. I definitely had plenty of Loashko.
Awesome. Well that's that's fabulous question answered. But then then, of course, if anyone out there has more experience with this beer right in, let us know.
Yeah, I would appreciate it. Slovenian listeners. To clarify my memories, are there actually Lashco bars and Union bars or is that just an all mixed step in my head. Another thing about drinking in Slovenia was I remember everywhere I went people would show up with wine in unlabeled jugs. They just have these glass jugs of you had red wine and you had white wine. And it wasn't like, oh yeah it's this vineyard, this vintage is just a jug of wine. I don't know where it's from.
Yeah, in Trout. One of the many things that's great about traveling is of course finding out what if there is a local drinking tradition, what is it? And if there is a local beer or a national beer, what is that. Not being a beer enthusiast, they all tend to kind of taste the same to me, but there's something that's kind of kind of fun about traveling to a place and then having the national beer of that particular country.
I also remember in Slovenia very fruity type of liqueur called sleeveovitz that I think the innkeeper where I stayed would like give us in the morning.
That's how you start your dead.
Okay, I got another goat god type figure. So in pre Christian Basque mythology of the Basque people, there was a deity known as Mari Mari that was sort of a queen of the gods, a supreme female deity in the Basque pantheon, and she would be depicted as like a you know, flying around and through the air in a chariot, but also sometimes as riding on a ram well. According to the Rutledge Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses, devils
and Demons by Manfred Lurker two thousand and five. One of the representatives for the physical forms representing the power of the God or the goddess Mari is this figure called acker Belts, which means black billy goat. He looks exactly how he sounds. He is a billy goat with a black coat, and this goat spirit is thought to be a protector of people's flocks, of their livestock. Lurker writes quote people who want their animals to do well
turned to him for help. In earlier times, a black billy goat was kept in the farmsteading to protect the herd from plague and sickness. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he was venerated as a god by witches and wizards. Sacrifices were made to him, and dance formed part of the ritual in his honor. So locker Belts is cool.
Acker Belts, we like it seems. This is another example of a goat, a spiritual goat creature that is not a demonic at all from what I can tell, except maybe viewed you know, through like a hostile Christian lens on the Basque mythology. But within the basque mythology, it seems like, yeah, this is just a this is a good thing that protects your flocks.
Yeah, I mean flock. The flocks are life. Yeah, this is this is something that it really has has also been a part of all these episodes we've looked at this Halloween season regarding domesticated animals. It's like these are the lifeblood of the people who raise them, and so threats to those those animals, be they real threats or perceived threats, or supernatural interpretations of threats. You know, it's it's it's serious business. Life and death depends upon it.
And this would be by no means the only mythological or spiritual goat form that is beneficent in nature, that is sacred or good or holy, or considered so by the people who believe in it. Not all of the goat based mythical creatures are are malevolent wild things that want to want to destroy you.
Yeah, this brings us to the sacred goats of China, and China we have it in Chinese traditions. We have at least one really special goat in the form of the zishi, which you might think of as a kind of unicorn. I think this is word is often translated as unicorn. Of course, if we've discussed on the show previously in our episodes about unicorns, even in Western traditions,
there's a lot of drift regarding the unicorns. Sometimes the unicorn is more goat like, sometimes it's more horse like, and it's often used and later in Christian traditions as kind of an incarnation of Jesus. So many of these traditions the unicorn is both goat like and christ like, which is in start contrast to these demonic ideas concerning
the goat. So that's something that's worth keeping in mind as we go forward, is that you don't even have to remove yourself from Christian traditions in the West to find some examples of holy goats. Now with the Xishi here, it's essentially like a dark, shaggy goat or perhaps an ox. Again, we see this kind of drift occur with any of these creatures, like does it have the body of a goat?
Does it have the body of an ox? I looked at various images of statues and depictions, and some of them I included a picture here of one for you, Joe that I think looks very goat like, clearly has goat like legs, even if its head is more fantastic. But then there's another one that looks very much kind of like a bulldog or like a cat, So it has a totally different morphology going on, at least to
my non expert eye. But these are noble, divine creatures, so again, in that sense, they are more like the Western idea of the unicorn.
I'm going to say, at least for these two pictures you attached for me, these are good boys. Yeah, yeah, these are good boys. Who deserves a good scratch now.
In the Chinese city of Guangzhou there is also the legend of the Five Goats. So this is a founding myth regarding the five immortals riding to the spot of the city's founding and bringing the knowledge of rice cultivation there. And when the immortals leave, according to the myth, they left their goats behind, and these goats became the stones of the Dallas Temple of the five immortals there and there is also in the city in Guangzhou there's a
splendid statue of the five goats atop a hill. In this expansive garden in the city which I have visited, and I actually marched to the top of this hill and got to see the statue of the goats. There included a picture here for you, Joe. This is not my picture that you were looking at. There are a lot of images of the goat's statues online, but it's quite quite splendid. And again at the top of this
hill in this enormous park. Beautiful now as a widely domesticated species, we of course find goats in Indian traditions as well. In Hinduism, a goat is the vehicle of both the fire god Agne and sometimes the vehicle of the solar deity Pushan. The Daksha has the head of a goat following his insult of Shiva and subsequent execution by the order of Shiva. But then Shiva shows mercy and allows Daksha to return to life with the head
of the first living being he meets. Upon his return to life, that animal turns out to be a goat.
So he didn't originally have a goat head, he gets one, Okay, I see, yeah.
Yeah, he had a more I guess, a human head, a humanoid ad but then he lost that head because he earned himself a beheading. But then the God shows mercy and says, all right, you can have your life back. You can have your head back, but it has to be the first head of the head of the first animal you see in the world.
Is this is so he gets to go about with a goat head? Is this interpreted as a kind of curse or humiliation in the story or not so much.
I'm not so sure about that, because you're getting into, I guess a deeper quest question of how the goat perceived in India and in Hindu culture. I was reading about this particular tale in Nonditha Krishna's Sacred Animals of India, and according to this author, the tale is often used to justify goat sacrifices, as Daksha was essentially the sacrifice of Shiva, you know, albeit with a pre goat head,
and it's you know, execution and sacrifice. Trying to draw parallels there, goats are also a sacrifice to the mother goddess, according to Krishna here and sometimes to Kali as well.
Man there is so much goat lore you could have an entire Wikipedia style goat database just for goat backstory, goat lore, goat mythology.
Internet, goat database. Yeah, yeah, I can see that working. I mean, there's just a lot of it, and I think it comes down to know what we've been discussing here. It's just it has been such a part of human traditions for so long. We've spent plenty of time watching goats, comparing ourselves to goats, comparing our ways to the ways of goats, and then out of that all these various
fanciful ideas emerge. Those ideas then breed with each other and we are left with all these interesting traditions of the divine, the demonic, and everything in between.
Okay, I think we have to call it for this episode, just for time, but we've got more goat stuff to talk about.
That's right. We'll be coming back in the next episode with discussions of Egyptian traditions. We'll get into occultism a little bit, goat intelligence, wars on goats. There's a lot more to talk about, but certainly in the meantime, feel free to write into us, particularly if you have experience with any of the background in any of the traditions that we've discussed here and would like to share more
about them. If you have personal experience with goats, if you have lived any part of your life among the goats, you probably have insight to share and we would love to hear from you. You can catch up on all our episodes and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed on Tuesdays and Thursdays we have our core episodes. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact. On Mondays we do listener mail, and on Fridays we
do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film like The Devil Rides Out. So if you want some more discussion of goat people, I think that may be the only goat film we've watched. Perhaps your memories better than mine, and you can remember another goat that's popped up.
That's the only one come to mind, But I don't know. Our back catalog is starting to get kind of long, So we're finally reaching the point where I am forgetting which movies we've covered.
Yeah, I think this week's film will be the ninetieth film that we have looked at on Weird House Cinema.
It's been a wild ride so far. Yeah, but we have miles to go before we sleep.
A wild goat ride to nowhere.
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, to shed some to shed some light on goats, to share personal experience about goats, if you are a goat herder yourself, or if you just want to get in touch and say hi, any of that's fair game. You can always write us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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