Why are goats often interpreted as a Masonic symbol?
One of the most frequent ways of drawing a Freemason by religious people, in statues and illustrations, etc., is as a being that looks half human and half animal, more specifically, a goat. Many times it is Baphomet, a figure that did not always have to do with the Masonic, among several others.
Why are goats related to the Masonic?
The thing is that religious people want to compare Freemasons with demons.
Unlike what is believed, the Bible stories do not provide too many references to the character we know as “Devil” or “Satan”, but rather he was culturally constructed throughout history by the organized institution that is the Church.
One of the representations that we consider “satanic” is that of the character Baphomet, who although he has a human body, his head is assimilated to that of a goat, so the idea remained that in the Masonic there is a worship of the goats.
The Goat Baphomet is a character from the mythical stories of Ancient Babylon and other representations of characters present in pagan beliefs that the Church tried to exterminate or convert to Christianity were added to him, such as, for example, the Greek god Pan, which represents the wild and whose appearance is similar to that of a goat.
When Christianity began to spread throughout Europe, other iconic elements of the beliefs of peoples outside Christianity were added to the satanic symbology. In this way, the faithful of the Church saw in the native peoples a manifestation of evil and, therefore, worthy of being crushed, tortured, and destroyed. Thus it was that both the characters of Baphomet and Pan became closely linked to the Masonic in the collective imagination of Western cultures, since for religious people the Masonic is diabolical.
**The few details that link the creature to a biblical origin include the description of the “Day of Judgment” within the “Gospel of Matthew” in the Bible.
