The Devil appears in the form of a goat. He comes with horns and cloven hooves, and once you introduce His Infernal Majesty, you might say you've got nowhere to run. But his association with goats is well-known. Try, for example, to imagine Lucifer in the form of a diabolical horse, or a coal-black chicken with burning red eyes. It just doesn't work, does it? A black dog just might do, but black dogs are like goats; they have their very own myth cycle. So the Devil is the first item on our list--the chupracabra's most distinguished relative.

For the next relative, we go back all the way to ancient Persia.

Two thousand years ago, the people of Persia believed in a monster called the mardkhora, or man-eater. It was a creature with a man's head, a porcupine's quills, the body of a lion and a scorpion tail, and we know this much about it because it was described by early scientists writing about the world they lived in: in Ctesias' Persica, and in Aristotle's Natural History. And that is the first fabulous beast in the goat-sucker's family tree.

From the Persian mardkhora comes the European legend of the manticore, which has three rows of teeth, the face of a man and the body of a lion. The manticore doesn't turn up much in pop culture anymore, but it used to be a big thing in heraldry, and you can fight manticores on some role-playing adventure games. That's the second fabulous beast, the son of the mardkhora.

The mardkhora's next offspring turns up in the mountains of southern Spain. It arrived there with Muslim invaders in the 711 AD. These Muslims came from Arabia and north Africa, but the culture they brought with them was centered on Damascus and Baghdad . . . and from Damascus and Baghdad, conquered Persian cities, the legend of the mardkhora went with the Muslim armies. It traveled in the minds of men, as all good folklore does. The Muslims remained in southern Spain until 1492, and when they were ejected, all their mosques were converted into churches. But they left things more insidious than religion behind them. They left their tall tales and urban legends, and among these was the mardkhora's offspring: the mantequero.

In the south of Spain at the beginning of the twentieth century, village people still believed in this particular fabulous beast. Sometimes they called it a mantequero, and sometimes a sacamantecas; it was a monster which looked like a man, but which lived in wild places and fed on human manteca or fat. A man-killer, in fact. When brought to bay, it made a shrill whinnying sound; except when it had fed upon some unfortunate victim and was glutted with fat, it appeared skinny and pitiful. It was far nastier than the European manticore, which never seems to have done much harm to anybody. Two languages perhaps collided here: maybe the arriving Muslims told the Spanish natives of a monster called a mardkhora, and the Spanish natives nodded wisely and realized that such a beast could only have fed on manteca.

Obviously, this was a sort of vampire. You could call it the mardkhora's child by way of Count Dracula. In fact, some Spanish peasants believed that they could be made young (or kept from aging) by stealing babies and either transfusing their blood into themselves, or (an older belief) hanging them on trees, scraping them till they bled and then drinking the blood. These too were called mantequeros, and they actually existed; there are records of them, since criminals do have their doings reported by the authorities where mythical monsters may never make it into any official statement. A gypsy family in 1910 was found living on the summit of the Sierra de Gador; they stole babies and drank their blood warm. Other cases were known. Even in the 1920s, in southern Spain there were curanderos (herbal healers) who trafficked in human blood, believing it was the only medicine which could cure every disease.

There: the Devil, three fabulous beasts, plus a series of murders.

Next, we have to go to Persia at the time of the Ignorance--which is the delightful Muslim name for the era before the Prophet. That land had its own religion, whose name was Zoroastrianism. After the Muslim conquest, Zoroastrianism was displaced. Some Zoroastrians fled north to Armenia, and became Christians; some fled to the western Himalayas, and helped create Tibetan Buddhism; some fled to India, and became the Parsees. Naturally, they took their folklore with them, and part of their folklore was the legend of the mardkhora.

From them comes the next twig on the goat-sucker's family tree.

And this is a living animal, the markhor goat. It's a mountain goat of Persia and India, with upstanding, twisted horns and a long trailing beard. It lives in the western Himalayas, right where Zoroastrian refugees settled . . . but its habitat is almost impossible to reach. It likes to graze on the tops of mountains, on precipitous slopes which drop abruptly to rocky cliffs. Having found a slope which it likes, it will graze there each day until the grass is exhausted and it can move on. The record pair of markhor horns measures 63 inches, and the horn type itself is variable: some markhor horns are heavily twisted but straight (like unicorn horns, or narwhale horns) but others can be found with which not only twist but spiral along their length. The animal itself was much-hunted by mad sportsmen during the last century, English army officers and peers with enough time to clamber all over the Himalayas in search of goat-heads for their trophy collections; there are a dozen different species of horned beasts in the Himalayas, antelope and goats and sheep. The hunter who had a few years and a good head for high altitude could bring home a trophy from each species and decorate his game-room wall with them.

Now, the name of the markhor goat is said to come from two Persian words compounded; it means "snake-eater". So the man-eater has become the snake-eater, and the name of snake-eater comes accompanied by a considerable body of folklore--for when a markhor happens across a poisonous snake, supposedly it not only eats it, but it eats it with relish. Thus one Haughton, author of Sport and Folklore in the Himalayas, mentions three separate stories of natives watching markhor trampling and devouring snakes. One Colonel Cobb (once political agent in Gilgit, entrusted with negotiating an international postal service across the Himalayas between India and Sinkiang) recorded further markhor folklore:

"When a markhor encounters a snake he kills it by stamping upon its head, and then devours it. The poison of the snake causes a cyst to grow in the stomach known as the zahr morah stone. This stone when applied to a snake bite wound absorbs the poison from the blood stream and the cure of the patient is rapid.

"I have had first hand experience of this.

"I obtained one such stone from a Gujar shepherd in Dir which came fresh from a markhor which he had been commissioned to shoot for me. When I enquired if he had found the stone he took it from his cap and sold it me for twenty rupees.

"Some time afterwards I was at a dinner party in Peshawar in a house where I was staying. A servant came in to say that a golden retriever puppy of mine in a shed in the stable had been bitten by a snake. With my friend, Colonel Sir Hissam-ud-Din, a well known shikari, I went to investigate. We found the puppy in great pain. I went to my room and brought a razor and the snake stone from my stud box. After shaving the neck we saw the two fang marks. Making a small nick between them I clapped on the stone and held it in place.

"The stone stuck to the wound and soon began to draw it with a slight bubbling. In half an hour the puppy whose eye had been glassy was relieved from the pain of the poison and soon recovered from the effects of the bite.

"In the dust of the floor we could see the trail of the snake leading to a hole in the wall."

From the legend of the markhor and the snake comes the legend of the bezoar stone, or perhaps it is the other way around. Bezoar-stones were a sure cure for snake-venom and poison. They were obtained from the stomachs of various animals, mostly goats, and they used to be a regular item of trade from India and Persia to Europe, as recounted by one Doctor Fryer in an account written circa 1672-1681.

Fryer lived and worked for several years in Bombay, and left a detailed record of the gem trade which passed through the English Bombay warehouses. Bezoar was counted as a precious stone . . . along with musk (the scent-glands of male deer, from which perfume was made, and which were shipped stored in cod to keep them fresh), tortoise-shell, and elephant's teeth which were graded in three kinds: muyn, muyda, and sera, or greatest teeth without flaws, great teeth with flaws, and least or most flawed. Ambergris too was traded in; to make trial of this, the trader was told to chew a little, and if it was grey in color, fragrant to chew, and in texture rather like bee's-wax, then it was of the best quality.

Fryer describes bezoar carefully. Bezoar-stones, he said, were originally obtained in Persia, found in the bellies of the Persian mountain-goats. The stones rose from some item in the diet of these goats. Bezoars were called by the Persians pazahar, ie pa "against" and zahar "poison", and certain districts were known for breeding good bezoar-stones; the stones could appear in the stomachs of domestic animals as well as wild ones--in sheep and goats, cattle and apes. The locals in good bezoar areas could tell which animals had bezoar-stones; the gait of the afflicted animals was the clue. The bezoars gotten from apes, they said, were the most valuable of all.

True bezoar, Fryer writes, will show purple if rubbed with lime. It may be pared in layers like pearl, until a straw-like substance is discovered in its heart; fake bezoars lack this straw-like matter. There are several other ways to test the stone. One rubs it hard on a stone of chalk; if it leaves an olive-stain, it is real bezoar. Or touch it to a red-hot iron, and if it fries like resin or wax, it is a counterfeit. Put it into clear water; if small white bubbles rise, the stone is true, and if none it is doubtful. Or rub it on wood-ashes held in the palm of the hand; a real bezoar will leave a faint green color behind. And a true bezoar which is soaked in water should not shrink or change color; a fake stone will.

What does this description prove? Not the source of the bezoar supply--whether it was Persian goatherds out for a little extra profit, or hunters somewhere catching apes and cutting open their stomachs--for Fryer never traveled beyond the coasts of Persia. But certainly he handled something which came from Persia and was considered valuable. He tells us just what this substance looked like, and what properties it had . . . whatever it was! But the association with goat myths is obvious. Markhor goats ate snakes, so they must be immune to poison; bezoar stones were found in the bellies of goats, so they must be a cure for poison.

There: a species of Indian goat. And an item in trade from India.

Now we have to return to the twentieth century, and consider goat-suckers themselves.

There are no less than three kinds of goat-sucker out there. There's the goat-sucker which terrorizes rural communities in South America, by sucking the blood out of small animals, and leaping upon young girls and biting them; its chief characteristic is a mouth with lots of teeth. It is widely talked about in the supermarket papers, and gets its own exclusive websites and television documentaries.

There's a goat-sucker which is living and real; like the mardkhora, it lives in Persia, near Baghdad in fact. It is the varanus lizard, a living species. It has the appearance of a Rhinegold dragon, being about three feet long with the body and tail of a lizard, a flattish head, a thin forked tongue and a loud hiss. The local name for it was buz majjeh, or 'goat-sucker'. Freya Stark, who lived in Iraq in the 1920's, writes of traveling near Baghdad, in a derelict local taxi; in the desert, she writes, there were dozens of huge and clumsy lizards whom her taxi-driver enjoyed running over. When she tried to discourage him, he said the lizards crept up on flocks of sheep from behind, and sucked the udders of the ewes without their noticing. Nor was this a joke played on Freya, because British students collecting field specimens in Iraq in the nineteen-sixties described the very same lizard and heard the very same story.

There's a goat-sucker bird in the Americas, whose existence was recorded by no less than Claude Levi-Strauss himself. It's the night-jar, which (according to an Arawak myth) sprang from brains scattered from a smashed-open head; when the goat-sucker bird breaks wind (according to an Arapaho myth) a rolling rock breaks open in a symbolic manner, like a head being smashed; no surprise, for this particular goat-sucker is a symbol of oral avidity, and thus capable of behavior the very opposite of anal retention . . . according to Levi-Strauss, who sees everything in Freudian terms!

How does the goat-sucker, which rampages through Puerto Rico and points west (as anyone who watches the Learning Channel knows) have anything to do with man-eating monsters and snake-eating goats? Well, myths are funny things; they keep going round and round and whenever they turn up in a new locale, their form is likely to be completely different. For instance, look at the way that the idea of a man-eating monster becomes the idea of a snake-eating goat, and from the snake-eating goat springs the thought that in the goat's stomach might be found a remedy for snakebite.

The idea of the manticore, the idea of the mantequero, the idea of the markhor goat--all spring from the idea of the mardkhora. The idea went from Persia to Arabia via the Muslims, and from Arabia into Spain, and passed into the folklore of that country. It went from Persia into Europe via the Greeks, and passed into the mythology of the Middle Ages. It went from Persia into India via the Parsees, and passed into the folklore of that land.

The idea of the goat-sucker is now in Iraqi folklore; it is in American Indian folklore; it is in modern American mythology. I think it went from Persia to Arabia via the Muslims, and from Arabia to southern Spain. The island of Puerto Rica was settled by immigrants from southern Spain. The Iraqi legend of the monster that crept up on goats and sucked their milk, appeared in new clothes in the New World; it may have collided with the idea of the mantequero, the monster which sprang on travelers and sucked their blood or fat; it may have collided with the idea of the goat-sucker bird. Or perhaps the goat-sucker bird is descended from the goat-sucker lizard; who knows?

Levi-Strauss collected his myths in the 1960's. In the 1960's, in Iraq, honest peasants were still killing the goat-suckers that attacked their flocks. In Puerto Rico, the first goat-suckers were sighted in 1995. Since then, goat-suckers had been seen in Florida; even now, they may be creeping along the east coast, preparing to attack New England and ransack Mexico.

Who know where they'll turn up next?

Sources:

Gerald Brenan, South From Granada (for the legends of southern Spain).

Major-General J. G. Elliott, Field Sports in India 1800-1947 (for the legend of the markhor goat).

Fryer, Fryer's India and Persia, reprinted by the Hakluyt Society (for the legend of the bezoar stone).

Claude Levi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners (for the legend of the night-jar).

Anthony Smith, Blind White Fish in Persia (for Iraqi myths in the 1960's).

Freya Stark, Baghdad Sketches (for Iraqi myths in the 1920's).

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