Goat stories are dense with ambiguities.
This site though just stands for very simple ideas.
Ensnare time, return to Nature, and be in love with Goat Cheese.
Ferry rides evoke a mortuary procession every time. Not even when shoving the obol up the orifice of Caron, the voice of the sea still presides and lets the tale rise from the foam, against which shipwrecks and satellites tracking are just kids' tricks, trastulli for the dolphins. Erastài renounce each other wordlessly on the ship, and Epitherses saw what he reported to the historian Philippos, which Plutarch narrates in De defectu oraculorum, 17. Along the western shore of Greece the ferry directed to Italy drifted around the island of Paxi, spent the night there, and in the turmoil of wind all the passengers oddly awake distinguished a voice addressed to a random named Thamos. The voice raved about the Great Pan and asked Thamos to announce the god's death when they approach Palodes. Everyone was struck, so was Epitherses who passes on the story. Thamos was an Egyptian cybernetes (a pilot, that is), and unknown to all before the event. His bellow of declaration in Palodes blew the lid off and the commotion caught Roman Emperor's attention. At that time Tiberius was on throne, therefore the voyage must have taken place around 16-37AD. Someone wanted to see the historical figure of Christ in Pan, others the sunset of all the ancient mysteries that had preceded his, the axis «Arcadia-Eleusis-Crete» (Colli), which turned inane or were soon to be obstructed.
This reveals the nature of Pan, the undefinable and multishaped. Son of Hermes, mother unclear. He is the one who blossoms along the trees, spirit of the woods.
He is depicted as τραγοσκελήτης, goat hoofed, and αιγοκέρως, with the horns of a goat.
Αιπόλος, Plato says of him, goatherd. «I am not a prophet, I am a goatherd.» Pan invents the flute from reeds just like his father carved the lyre out of a turtleshell. He is ubiquitous, chases after several wood nymphs at the same time, infuses terror in the wanderers or profound joy. Cynics claim it was Pan who taught masturbation to the shepherds. If the Greek sages around Hermes' grandson fret to distill the Egyptian nous, to let it shine through the mask of their crafts, Pan is the nature rejoicing in itself immediate to the senses. There is no path to the spring, the path is a circle with the spring in the middle.
You can find this truth in the eyes of the goat still today. Purely Egyptian gaze. Plutarch narrates the episodes of Paxi as an instance of gods that can perish. Another god who died, as euphoric and promiscuous as Pan, is Dionysos, around whom the legends diverge dreadfully, whom we nevertheless call Trigonos, «born thrice».
First time he died when his mother Semele with him in womb was struck by a lightning, Zeus rescued the phoetus and stitched him in his thigh for gestation. This is indeed what they call the «Heat of a Brooding Bird» and accounts for two noels. The third birth is by the hands of Apollo who combined back together the remnants of his innards the Titans had torn into pieces.
You may wonder why only those who never abdicate their feral drive are the gods who die, also the only ones to be reborn. And the lyre keeps playing.
Pan is the goat, Dionysos is traditionally in the shape of a Cretan bull. The sacred animal is a recurring theme, the lineaments ceaselessly mutating, what these myths share though is the conjunction of the savage sediment in man and the force of the chant before it turns into techne. Before the healer's touch, they thrust the wound open (Χάστω). This transition is inevitable as soon as the first bonfire is lit, every time their seeds are sown in human soil. We have the shepherd poets of Arcadia inspired by Pan and the majesty of all Dionysian festivals during which the rustic choral songs tuned for the rites of the earth turned into the refined art of tragedy.
Another figure akin to embodying this course of events is the cantor Orpheus, another forest stroller, known to bewitch all the beasts within reach by the sound of his lyre. He introduced men to the initiation rites and taught them to refrain from murders.
Eventually a gang of raging females reduced him to shreds, in the same way Dionysos was by the Titans, but Orpheus grew to love his mortality. After his death his song still guides men through the path to the underworld.
They are parched, and he shows them the spring.
In the Orphic Gold Tablets of Thurii, panic nature resurfaces.
Some translates ἒριφος as kid or agnello (Colli, La sapienza greca, 1977, Adelphi pg.179; English translation by scholar Torjussen), but it means goat kid. Colli points out that Erífios could be one of the names of Dionysos (Apollod. ap. Stephan. Byz are mentioned), his figure being the culmination of the initiate's path of transformation. Eukles was identified as Hades and Eubuleus as Dionysos. It does not take long to realise all the mysteries of initiation constitute disparate versions of the same belief. Demeter discloses the secrets of the earth, her daughter receives the being disoriented beneath it, Orpheus sings how to reach her, and Dionysos embodies the acme of this process of transmutation. Story never changes, while all its characters are never equal to themselves. The mortal arrives out of breath and has to return to the waters. This converges in the «mirror of Dionysos», where the opposites fuse: the eternity is the gaze of all potentialities. A little goat plunged in milk.
If this image brings solace to the man facing death, robed in the rite of its anticipation and stupor of having the soul purged, it oddly echoes the act of gestation and of anything that created has the property of transforming the creator.
Kleopatra the alchemist wrote pages that lacerate.
A deluge of favellas to address the same thirst. Δίξηι δ'εἰμ'αῦος is the prayer the initiate to the Orphic rite of transition recites (Golden Tablet at Farsalo). The dead seeks the spring and is instructed not to partake in the first stream near the cypress. They will find the fresh waters in the marsh of Mnemosyne further on. The prayer imposes no words of humility, but the grace of the gesture. In both the instances, in the Orphic passage from transience to timeless bliss and in the joyful union of the opposites of Kleopatra's metaphor, the strife conducted by the body for the knowledge induces a state of purity. Intuition is liberated and can guide the unfolding of the action with no intrusion of petty motives (any λὸγισμος). Ever seen goat kids hopping? In the forest reaching their mother for the milk? What remains unknown is what allows this change of state, what leads the initiate to the sight of the god, after which everything becomes known, a permanent memory. They will abandon their shell in the way of Hermes' turtle, be suckled and all of them are aware of the plot from end to end.
Another case of men preemptively knowing the plot is at the theater. What animates the agon between tragedians is a matter of koaks, the angle at which the blade slains the beast meant for the sacrifice. This saves the earth. While spectators rewind the scene in their head, Dionysos' maenads twist themselves out of themselves in a furious dance. They are both the fillies grazing out to pasture and the huntresses devouring the prey raw. Creatures of pure instinct, their body is merely the vessel to surpass it. Dionysos in the shape of a bull or multiheaded serpent, or as a lion to embrace them. Dionysos is thirsty too. Wants to suck the blood of the male goat just slain.
Again we notice the invocation to Crete as Dionysos' native soil, the killing essential to the unearthing of novel existence, the parade of caprine dancers (satyrs) in tune with the flute, nature that nourishes nature with no mediation, the numberless masks of the god (Bromio), fluids quencing spirit. What is proper in the bacchic chorus is words as percussions. Words do not serve descriptions, they set the stage for the holy purifications (ὁσίοις καθαρμοῖσιν) so that the ivy-crowned god can weave a new wreath. I would intend the word μαντική, «prophesising», not as foreseeing the future, but as the ability to transform it. This is what a rabid woman seeks when writhing in the Bacchic dance, this the art of the tragedian singing the chant of the male goat, and the story looping over itself of the Immense Zagreus who perpetually changes names.
Not ascertained by the scholars, but taken here to heart. Goat is the symbol of irreprehensible vitality. This is the flute of Pan and his swaying around the trees of any wood in diguise for wind. Goat is also the one whose blood seals the promise of the sacrifice. A long tradition behind this, also found in the Torah, Leviticus, 16. During Yom Kippur two goats are chosen, one is slaughtered to honour YHWH, the other one is destined to Azazel. This latter has to take upon itself all people's sins and has to be cast out of town, far into the wilderness or beyond, off a near cliff.
As it is often the case for the ancients, the simplicity of the ceremony reveals a profound understanding of nature. This ritual of atonement accounts for the fact that killing is never an act of suppression. You cannot annihilate evil while impregnating the hands with its blood. Moreover, if sin is a disease of the soul, you would rather not feast on the animal incarnating it. Straight out, the easiest way to get rid of an evil is to push it away. Millennia later we look at the sun and we say we suck its negentropy, implying that the amount of waste can only be relocated somewhere else in the exchange with the external environment, not eliminated. Once the landfill of sin is settled (generally beyond the city walls, out of the town perimeter, or the planet atmosphere), suffices to pick up the goat that will take out the trash. The goat becomes that trash and its expulsion atones for all men's filth.
Similar rites centered on the scapegoat are to be found among the Hittites and Kassites («the scapegoat is Ninamashazagga, spirit of herds»), and in Greece under the tradition of pharmakoi (human victims taken as symbols). The problem of evil has never ceased to fill men's mouths («What navel-snipper wiped and washed you as you squirmed about, you crack-brained creature?»). However, a peculiar novel stance emerges with the birth of the tragedy (Phrynichus, end of VI century BC), and as the implication of all the mysteries of the underworld (Am Duat, Orphism, Eleusi). Evil can be simulated, staged, rehearsed in the head. The art (techne) of theater takes over to bring back the conflict from the past and anticipate the one of the future. At the end of the representation both the actor and the spectator are purified, in spite of the act of cruelty that remains hidden from the skené: imagination is the only catalyst. In the ritual the initiate prepares himself to the path to go through after death. They die before death in order to return to life. The animal becomes superfluous and is replaced by a myriad of symbols, for all characters reflect the torments of what is irreconcilable in nature upon their skin. This process of simulation is certainly the outcome of a refined set of arts, each establishing a thick compendium of instructions, made possible only by a passionate observation of the dynamics of nature, which are then internalised and executed organically. Nature allows for outbursts and devastation, causes friction, yet she is the only one that heals herself. If what is up reflects what is down, and all differences in her operations are of gradation, artists and priests are the guardians of this scale, those carrying through the transition in all things from what is within men's reach to what eludes them, and vice versa. This way evil is not expelled but matter to be transformed.
All these keycaps pressed frenetically to convey what the Egyptian gaze of the goat tells with no words.
My fascination with the goats began around fourty three light years away from here, when Capella the brightest star of the constellation of the Charioteer kept me company one summer. This was before I found myself in Crete, in the caves of Mount Ida, where the Goat Amalthea suckled Zeus, raised secretely from his father Cronos, and where Epimenides and Pythagoras are said to have met for the first time. According to the myth, Capella is the goat wound up in the sky once Zeus grew up, cracked her corn from which all could flow, cornucopia, and wore her skin to win over the Titans. Goat's skin is called aegis, and Zeus is called Aegiokhos.
Epimenides slept in a cave for fifty seven damn years after which he could see the past and future as one.In his Cretica he re-evokes the upbringing of Zeus. Amalthea is said sacred to Zeus.
And the shield of the aegis is sacred to Athena. With the eyes of the Gorgon on it.
Goat stories are dense with ambiguities.
This site though just stands for very simple ideas.
Ensnare time, return to Nature, and be in love with Goat Cheese.