Goat

The goat holds the sharpest place in the vocabulary of sacrifice. Leviticus 16 sets out two goats for the Day of Atonement: one offered to God, and one on whose head the sins of Israel are laid and which is driven into the wilderness for Azazel, the origin of the English word scapegoat, coined by Tyndale to render the passage. Greek tradition gives Pan and the satyrs their goat legs, figures of untamed nature and appetite, and the goat Amalthea suckles the infant Zeus, her horn becoming the cornucopia. The goat as a devil-figure is late and largely modern: the endlessly reproduced horned Baphomet is Eliphas Levi's drawing of 1856, not an ancient image.

The constellation Capricornus, the sea-goat, has its own separate myth: fleeing the monster Typhon, the god Pan, or in some tellings his son Aegipan, dived into the Nile and transformed only halfway, leaving him with a goat's foreparts and a fish's tail, and Zeus set the strange hybrid form among the stars in gratitude for the god's aid against Typhon. The image, goat above and fish below, is genuinely ancient, appearing on Babylonian boundary stones centuries before the Greek story was attached to it, evidence the sea-goat itself predates the myth used to explain it.

The eighth sign of the Chinese zodiac is the Goat, the same word covers goat and sheep, and it is variously rendered either way in English. As a birth-sign it is read for gentleness, sensitivity, artistry and a preference for peace and domestic comfort, the mildest and most retiring of the twelve in most popular accounts. It is associated with the early afternoon hours and, in the elemental scheme, with earth. The sign's reputation is so peaceable that some modern Chinese folk belief has treated a Goat year as inauspicious for births, an anxiety with no old textual basis that demographers have nonetheless been able to detect in the birth statistics.

The ambiguity between sheep and goat in the sign's name feeds directly into a well-known auspicious phrase, sanyang kaitai, three rams open prosperity, in which yang, the word for the animal, puns on a separate word yang meaning positive or growing energy in yin-yang cosmology; the phrase and its accompanying image of three sheep or rams are a standard New Year decoration regardless of which Chinese zodiac year is being marked, an example of the sign's imagery circulating independently of the twelve-year cycle itself. The sign's own name reveals a real taxonomic blur: yang covers both sheep, genus Ovis, and goats, genus Capra, two related but distinct genera whose hybrids, sometimes called geep, are rare and usually non-viable, underscoring that the single Chinese word papers over an actual biological difference the zodiac itself does not distinguish.