The honors of every kind which antiquity paid to goats would be very astonishing, if anything could astonish those who have grown a little familiar with the world, ancient and modern. The Egyptians and the Jews often designated the kings and the chiefs of the people by the word “goat.” We find in Zachariah:

“Mine anger was kindled against the shepherds, and I punished the goats; for the Lord of Hosts hath visited his flock, the house of Judah, and hath made them as his goodly horse in the battle.”

“Remove out of the midst of Babylon,” says Jeremiah to the chiefs of the people; “go forth out of the land of the Chald?ans, and be as the he-goats before the flocks.”

Isaiah, in chapters x. and xiv., uses the term “goat,” which has been translated “prince.” The Egyptians went much farther than calling their kings goats; they consecrated a goat in Mendes, and it is even said that they adored him. The truth very likely was, that the people took an emblem for a divinity, as is but too often the case.

It is not likely that the Egyptian sho?n or shotim, i. e., priests, immolated goats and worshipped them at the same time. We know that they had their goat Hazazel, which they adorned and crowned with flowers, and threw down headlong, as an expiation for the people; and that the Jews took from them, not only this ceremony, but even the very name of Hazazel, as they adopted many other rites from Egypt.

But goats received another, and yet more singular honor. It is beyond a doubt that in Egypt many women set the same example with goats, as Pasiphae did with her bull.

The Jews but too faithfully imitated these abominations. Jeroboam instituted priests for the service of his calves and his goats.

The worship of the goat was established in Egypt, and in the lands of a part of Palestine. Enchantments were believed to be operated by means of goats, and other monsters, which were always represented with a goat’s head.

Magic, sorcery, soon passed from the East into the West, and extended itself throughout the earth. The sort of sorcery that came from the Jews was called Sabbatum by the Romans, who thus confounded their sacred day with their secret abominations. Thence it was, that in the neighboring nations, to be a sorcerer and to go to the sabbath, meant the same thing.

Wretched village women, deceived by knaves, and still more by the weakness of their own imaginations, believed that after pronouncing the word “abraxa,” and rubbing themselves with an ointment mixed ............