Carcosa Bound

The ‘Judas goat’ is an idea at once so clear, perverse and system-oriented, only an environmental conservationist could come up with it.

In the country where I live, goats are regarded as a pest, and wild populations are hunted to control numbers, but also for recreation and food.

Wild goats are also delicious and nourishing – and eating is a perhaps overlooked way of learning from a creature that has known only freedom, and no fences.

So, as we seek exotic tastes, we ourselves may seek to make our lives and souls delicious and memorable, for the muses to feast upon. The spiritual experience of being eaten or consumed is primal and recurring, through many traditions and practices.

I digress.

The Judas goat: the process

A captured goat is fitted with a radio tracker.

It is dropped by helicopter in areas where other goats are known to be.

Goats are social animals – they cannot help but to find a herd to run with.

When they do, the hunters return, kill all but the Judas, then take it to find another group.

A Carcosan fable, by way of the Aesopica

Carcosa Bound is certainly not place for moralising – but these are strange days, and only getting stranger. If there is anything curative or instructive in this, it run something like:

We must be always on the lookout for the Judas Goat in our interactions, systems, ecologies – whether our own behaviours, our communities, our wider communion of souls.

We seek to run with those like us – but not all are conscious of who they bring with them.