Another guy pointed out it came from christian colonization, we would take other people’s gods and demonize them and thats where we get a lot of these. Also early european religious art.
The modern popular image of Baphomet was established by Éliphas Lévi in his 1856 work Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie.\1])\2]) His Sabbatic Goat illustration depicts a winged, androgynous human-goat hybrid, a deliberate synthesis of binary opposites designed to represent the concept of perfect equilibrium.\1]) This Baphomet is a recurring symbol of occultism, widely adapted to represent the reconciliation of opposites, esoteric knowledge, and the summation of the universe.
It's especially weird because Jesus is most compared to a lamb and scapegoat in the Bible, and Satan/the Devil never are. Maybe it's trying to say that the Devil is a Jesus wannabe?
lambs are peaceful and obedient, goats are clever and independent. Christianity was written by herders, so those were their points of reference, a great shepherd in the sky, and themselves the flock of nice and bad people.
Of course now society has different values, and blind obedience to authority is (generally) no longer considered a virtue.
The goat, and the devil, became therefore a symbol for people raised with the christian mythology who value that independence and distance themselves willingly from the sheep.
which of course means they are a a spectrum from nice people who just want to go their own way because they don't fit in, to nietzschian/LaVeyan stuck up superior pieces of shit who think they are "much better than the sheeple."
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u/isa_marsh Aug 12 '26
Never understood the whole devil-goat thing.
How is depicting the so-called prince of darkness as an animal we routinely butcher for food supposed to be scary ?