Goat’s cheese is an acquired taste. When I first tried it, it reminded me of
nothing so much as rugby-scrum sweat. A
frightened goat smells just the way goat’s cheese tastes. Jame Gumb, the serial killer of The Silence of the Lambs when in
murdering mode has “that peculiar goat-like odour”.
Of
the cheeses that look as if they might do for you, a grey or green-tinged
cylinder of goat’s cheese must be right up there with the winners. And take the case of Benn Gunn in Treasure Island. There he is, his cave full of salted
goat. What he hankers after is a piece
of toasted cheese. By that he means
something like cheddar: either he’s
never thought of making goat’s cheese, or he’s sick of the taste of it.
Significantly,
Gunn says that in his three years of being marooned he’s had, “Not a bite of Christian
diet.” I’m sure my reservations about
goat’s cheese – I now love it, incidentally – went beyond the look of it and
had something to do with childhood impressions about goats in The New
Testament.
In the Parable of the Sheep and Goats, after all, the
goats are the wrongdoers. If we link
this parable to the related one of the wheat and the tares, then sheep are to
goats as wheat is to weeds. In Christ’s
explanation of the parable, the weeds are sewn by the Devil.
This
is not the only association of goats and the demonic. Medieval art gave goats’ legs and horns to demons. The goat’s cloven hoof was the mark of the
Devil himself.
But now for some positive things about goats. Goat’s-milk soap is wonderfully
fragrant. Goats are adaptable, surviving
in poor pasture unsuitable for pampered cows: a characteristic they share with
sheep. When you see sheep and goats
grazing together in the same field, at a distance it is vary hard to tell them
apart. That presumably, is part of the
point of the parable: things may look the same to the human eye, but the
difference is discernible to the vision of God.
If
you compare goats and sheep up close, to me everything seems in favour of
goats. Where sheep tend to have vacant
expressions, goats have shy, humorous
intelligent faces. A sheep’s baa has
none of the lyrical plaintiveness of a goat’s bleat. And goats can move fast, with an agility
beyond anything a sheep can muster.
It is
not true, either, as I once half-believed, that The Bible is anti-goat as
such. The Bible has nothing to say about
what demons look like, but when it uses analogies, the references are to a
serpent or a dragon, or to something posing as “an angel of light”. When
medieval art depicted goat-footed devils, it was not being biblical; it was
simply demonizing the fauns and satyrs of classical mythology.
For the Greeks themselves, satyrs had no such negative
connotations: the goat/human mixture was a compliment to the goat’s sexual
prowess. There were satyr plays, for entertainment. Truly monstrous Greek
mythological creatures, like the Hydra or the Chimaera, tend to be hybrids of
different animals. With the exception of
the Minotaur, human/animal hybrids tend to be more favourable: the satyr and
centaur concepts arising from the goats and horses for which the Greeks felt
affection. If the centaurs are sometimes
lustful and treacherous, so are the gods and humans. The satyrs are mischievous more than evil, and
the centaurs have wisdom. Pan, the
archetypal goat foot, invents the reed-pipe instrument named after him; Chiron
the centaur is the tutor of Jason and Achilles.
Goats have even been seen as the opposite of
evil. In the old Norwegian fairy tale,
Billy Goat Gruff senior is the hero who defeats the wicked troll. The two younger goats save themselves by
their quick-wittedness. Whoever thought
up the story had clearly perceived the individuality and intelligence of
goats.
In
the Psalms, goats are shown in
positive contexts. In Psalm 104, a celebration of the natural
world, “The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats.” The goats are God’s creatures. In Psalm
114, “The mountains skipped like rams: and the little hills like young
sheep.” Here, no pejorative comparison
is made between sheep and goats: if
anything the goats have pride of place.
In the temple scene in Mark, Christ focuses not on the rich, but on the poor widow who in
donating two mites has given more than
any. It is a characteristic of
Christianity that the unlikely are singled out for praise, and this holds good
for animals no less than for humans.. In Revelation,
Christ is the Lion from the tribe of Judah, and the warrior on a white
charger; but at the heart of the throne of God, “with the marks of slaughter on
it”, is a lamb. Christ rides into
Jerusalem on a donkey, or a young colt.
And the goat is not forgotten either. It is the hair of goats that is to be used to
make the curtains of the Tabernacle, in the layer beyond The Holy of Holies.
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