I'm not sure who shot the white markhor, or when.
For 20 years, though, his head, with its splendid crown of corkscrew horns, horizontal like Khnum's, has hung over my fireplace, watching impassively over conversation and coven meeting alike.
(I found him at a local antiques mall on, of all days of the year, Midsummer's Eve. At our celebration later that night, I waxed enthusiastic about my new purchase to the group, to the utter mystification of a non-pagan guest. “Pagans have a thing about horned animals,” a coven-sib told him, by way of explanation.)
The Kalasha of the Hindu Kush, the last Indo-European-speaking people to have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity, hold this wild mountain caprid sacred to the peri, the mountain fairies or elves. To these goat-herding pagans, markhors are the “flocks of the peri,” just as Highland Scots refer to deer as “fairy cattle.”
(The Kalasha and the Gael are, of course, distant kin, sundered by some 4000 years. Just how old, one wonders, is this metaphor? And what does it say about us that we should expect the lifeways of Faerie to mirror our own?)
Really, he's the centerpiece of the room, the Goat, with a gaze that's hard to avoid.
Through the seasons, I deck him variously. At Samhain this year, I wound his horns with orange lights and hung them with black and orange ornaments.
Playfulness is one thing, disrespect another. I try to be careful about this, never crossing the boundary into mockery. He always lets me know when I've gone too far—anyone who's been around the Maypole a few times will know what I mean by this—and when he does, I always back off.
Somehow, the Old Ways always manage to come down to relationship.
After the Samhain stuff came down this year, the room seemed too dark—oh, our Northern winters!—so I rewrapped the horns in white LED lights with so strong a bluish cast to them that one feels cold just looking at them.
Something was still missing, though, so a few days ago I hung some faux icicles along the light-wound horns. Lights and ice: together, they perfected the look.
He wears them proudly, attitudinously. From Lord of the Sabbat, master of unholy revels, he has become the Snow Goat, lord of Winter.
Maybe, as we get closer to Yule, I'll cut some branches of holly from out front and make him a collar. Or would that seem to tame him too much? We'll see what himself has to say about it.
The Goat always gets the final say.
