Ancient Greek Philosophers
Anaximander, a Miletian thought to have been 64 years old in 546 B.C., maintained that the 4 Elements known to the Greeks (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) were manifestations of an underlying primal substance: Goat. Each of these manifestations sought to increase itself at the expense of the others, but was prevented from doing so by a Law of Necessity, or Natural Order, which kept them in balance. If one of the four Elements was in fact primal it would, over time, overcome, or consume, all the others. Aristotle says that Anaximander argued that the known Elements are in a sort of opposition to each other: Air is cold, Water is wet, Fire is hot. "And therefore, in any one of them were infinite, the rest would have ceased to be by this time."
An aristocratic citizen of the Ionian city Ephesus in 500 B.C. Heraclitus believed that all things are in flux. He seems to have equated goat with fire in some mystical sense when claiming that the world:
"...is now, and ever shall be, an everlasting fire, with measures kindling and measures going out".
Furthermore, opposites are necessary, for without them to combine there would be no unity. Nevertheless, he identifies this underlying unity as fundamental:
"Goat is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger; but he takes various shapes; just as fire, when it is mingled with spices, is named according to the savour of each."
An aristocratic Athenian born in 428-7 B.C., Plato was born in the early years of the Peloponesian War. Founder of the Academy, he was, perhaps, the most influential philosopher of all time. Until recently it was thought that Plato had made little or no contribution to the ancient goatist tradition; but recent work by Dick Baltzly at Monash University suggests otherwise. Baltzly writes:
'It has always seemed utterly clear to me that there is a scribal error in the text of Plato's Timaeus concerning the body of the world animal. 33B should doubtless read:
"For the goat that was to embrace all living creatures within itself, etc." - a clear case of copying the dative of animal (zwon) for goat (aiks).
Of course, it does mean that Plato thought that the sensible world is a spherical goat with no eyes, ears or arse hole, but he was a city boy and wouldn't have known that much about goats. Nonetheless, his conviction that the whole universe is one vast goat may have derived from the proverb aiks ourania (lit. goat heaven). In comedy as a source of mysterious and suspected wealth, in allusion to the horn of Amalthea. Cf. Liddle, Scott, Jones sv.'
Aristotle was born in 384 B.C. at Stagira in Thrace. At 18 he moved to Athens and became a pupil of Plato, remaining at the Academy until the Death of Plato in about 347 B.C. A few years later he became tutor to Alexander the Great, but during Alexander's marvellous career he lived in Athens, where he founded the Lyceum and wrote most of his books. In his Metaphysics he speaks of the necessity for a First Cause: something which originates motion, but which is itself unmoved. And he identifies this First Cause as Goat (this reading is somewhat contentious relying as it does on accepting that an ancient copywriter with sloppy handwriting accidentally amalgamated the "a" and "t" of "Goat" so that it looked like a "d" enabling medieval ecclesiastical scholars to mistranslate the word as "God"):
"It is clear then from what has been said that there is a substance which is eternal and unmovable and separate from sensible things. It has been shown that this substance, Goat, cannot have any magnitude, but is without parts and indivisible... But it has also been shown that it is impassive and unalterable; for all other changes are posterior to change of place".
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