The goat and the sabbath: an image from miniatures to Goya
From the scapegoat of Leviticus to the vauderie of Arras, from Baldung Grien and Dürer to Goya's paintings: how the goat became the face of the sabbath.
When we think of the witches' sabbath, the image that almost always surfaces is that of a great black goat at the centre of a circle of nocturnal figures. This representation did not arise overnight: it is the result of a long layering of biblical symbols, classical legacies, demonological treatises and works of art. Following the history of the goat lets us observe how an iconography can almost single-handedly build the very idea of a rite never documented in reality.
Biblical and classical roots
In Leviticus the rite of atonement involves two goats: one is sacrificed and the other is assigned to Azazel and sent away into the wilderness, laden with the sins of the people. From this comes the expression «scapegoat». In the Gospel of Matthew, moreover, the final judge separates the sheep, placed on his right, from the goats, placed on his left, strengthening the association between the animal and condemnation.
The Greek world had provided another model: Pan, god of the woods with goat's horns and legs, and the satyrs of the Dionysian retinue, figures linked to instinct, sexuality and wild nature. When Christian art had to give the devil a face, the horns, hooves and hair of these pagan deities offered a ready repertoire, easily recognised by the faithful.
The goat in fifteenth-century treatises
During the fifteenth century, as the concept of the sabbath took shape, accusations against alleged heretics and sorcerers began to describe the worship of a goat. In the Arras trials of 1459 and 1460, linked to the so-called vauderie, the defendants were accused of meeting at night to pay homage to the devil in animal form.
The treatise against the vauderie attributed to the theologian Johannes Tinctoris has come down to us in a manuscript with a famous miniature, now in the National Library of France, showing men and women kneeling before a goat and others flying on brooms and sticks. It is one of the first complete images of the sabbath, and the goat already occupies the central place in it.
From sixteenth-century prints to Goya
In the sixteenth century the image spread thanks to printing. Around 1500 Albrecht Dürer engraved a witch riding backwards on a goat, and in 1510 Hans Baldung Grien produced a woodcut of witches gathered around a smoking vessel, with figures carried through the air by a goat. In 1608 the Compendium maleficarum of Francesco Maria Guazzo, printed in Milan, accompanied its text with woodcuts in which the goat-shaped devil presides over the gatherings.
The artistic peak comes with Goya. The painting known as El aquelarre, of 1797-1798, kept at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid, shows a great goat surrounded by women offering it children; the Basque term akelarre probably means «meadow of the he-goat». More than twenty years later, among the Black Paintings of his house, Goya returned to the theme with a sombre scene, now in the Prado, dominated by a goat seen from behind.
In the nineteenth century Éliphas Lévi drew the Baphomet, a winged goat-like figure destined for enormous success in modern occultism. Yet the goat of the sabbath remains above all a creation of art and of learned treatises: an image born to give visible form to religious fears, which ended up looking like the testimony of a real rite, while the documents show above all the weight of accusations and extorted confessions.