From myth to music, the Goatman lives on

Otago Daily Times

5 days ago

Young people in Lyttelton are forever forming bands.
One such is a three-man outfit called Beware the Goatman, who are about to launch an album and are planning some publicity for it.
I know all this because one of the members of Beware the Goatman sent me an email. It was well spelt, well punctuated and intriguing. He wanted to know whether, as a long-term resident of Lyttelton, I had any good stories about the Goatman.
"What Goatman?" I replied.
"The Goatman of Lyttelton."
"I'm all ears," I said, whereupon the young man told me about a character that haunted the upper streets of Lyttelton seeking out children to terrify. Why, I wondered, had I not heard of this before?
Later that day I went into the newsagent's where I found Paul the newsagent behind his counter and a middle-aged woman studying the greeting cards. If anyone has his finger on the pulse of Lyttelton it is Paul the newsagent.
"Tell me about the Goatman," I said.
"What Goatman?" said Paul.
I was about to share the little information I had when the woman looked up from the greeting cards.
"I'll tell you about the Goatman," she said.
Some 30 years ago, when she was about 10, her best friend claimed to have been grabbed by the Goatman on Harman's Rd, but she'd struggled and managed to escape. The Goatman had been an adult male in a mask made from an actual goat's head. The woman spoke with conviction.
I have since asked a dozen or more people. Generally the women were more forthcoming than the men, but no two versions of the Goatman story were the same. In essence, it seems that the idea of a Goatman, if not an actual Goatman, has been scaring the children of Lyttelton for decades.
His dwelling varies, from an actual address on St David's St to the Anglican cemetery. His nature varies from an actual old man in a mask to a hairy horror monster. He knocks on windows and he hunts girls.
By doing so he sends this small town, which has existed as Lyttelton for less than two centuries and as Ohinehou for fewer than five, spiralling back down time's tunnel to the dawn of human history. Goatmen go back.
Ancient Greece had a Goatman. This was Pan, the pagan god of the wild and of flocks and, interestingly, of music. Pan had the legs, loins and horns of a goat. (And it seems that the name Pan derives from an even earlier god, identified in the proto-Indo-European language from which all Western languages evolved.)
Rome had a Goatman, too, the satyr, built on the same lines as Pan. From him we get satyriasis, the disease — if that is the right word — of excessive and unbridled lust.
But the supreme Goatman, the apotheosis of Goatmen, has to be the Christian Satan, invariably depicted with a goat's horns, eyes, skull, back legs and cloven hooves.
So it's no surprise that goats fare poorly in the Bible. Matthew tells us that on the day of judgement the son of man (and there's an expression I've never understood) will come to separate the sheep from the goats, putting the sheep on his right side and the goats on his left.
He will then welcome the docile and innocuous sheep into the kingdom of heaven, but he will fling the wilful goats into the pits of everlasting hell, which all seems a bit tough. What have goats done to deserve this?
Well it seems they have been unruly. Goats are hard to restrain and contain. Unlike sheep, they do not follow each other and they are great escapers. They are also compulsive omnivores with a taste for laundry.
But above all they love sex. The bucks go at it with a shameless vigour, fighting for mating rites, dowsing themselves in their own urine and leaping aboard whenever the opportunity presents itself. And they grin while doing so.
And that is the point of Goatmen. They are unrestrained and they delight in their unrestraint. Pan grinned, the satyr grinned, the devil famously grins. They enjoy their sins.
Goats represent our animal spirits, the side of our nature that the great religions seek to repress. But it won't be repressed. Regardless of disapproval the anarchic joyous id insists on bubbling up.
Whether in distant Arcadia or darkest Lyttelton, the Goatman lives. And it's the Goatman that makes the young form bands.
— Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.