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Goat Slapping
THE ANCIENT ART OF
GOAT SLAPPING (a story)
(no goats harmed in the making of
this ritual)
The art of the
slapping goat
that came from the 12th century is believed to be the misunderstood
slapping art of
goating.
However, at the turn of the 13th century the Munageen culture, of the
far east, clearly defined why the proverbial
goat is slapped and by whom. But how it later came to be
adopted and changed by the English and later Europeans and even
later by Americans remains questionable.
The Munageen realized that if a goat
were slapped over and over again by a group or tribe member, then
the goat would represent the
hellish life of the tribe. It would also represent those
unwilling to participate and the proverbial road they would be
willing to travel. The redder the goat, the darker the road they were
unwilling to travel.
In a series of thousands of slaps over a thousand day period the
entire tribe would focus on this one goat. There is nothing to
credit the theory that the Munageen
ravaged the goat itself, but it is
known that many tonics were drunk. For these 1000 days, good times
were had and fires burned as the tribe would stay together in a
sacred arena.
When the anthropologist Sir Fredrick Bartholomew Blackwell III of
Norfolk Ireland encountered this action on his journeys, he knew he
needed to bring them home. He later found that the
goat could be replaced with a person
dressed as a goat.
Dressing himself as the first "goat" in
the first ritual of the modern man, he found the experience so
enlightening that he promoted the slapping in lectures, shows, and later in his well
known best-seller and award winning: "Goat
Slapping, The Art, The Mayhem and the
Love of Life."
Blackwell, once a poor anthropologist interested in rituals, became
one the most famous authors and statesmen as
"Goats" began to be slapped across the English Channel into
new territories.
It was from there, that
goat slapping became what it is
today.
In 2008, this
ancient art rebirthed at Burning Man as the Bumblepuss Tribe
gathered together and raised an effigy of a goat designed from a bag
of wine and some fake fur (Bumbles are not cruel to animals so no
real goat would ever be used). One-by-one each
member of the tribe would slap it and drink the wine.
Each time the members remembered to slap it again for luck.
Although the original meaning of this ritual has
been completely lost, Bumblepuss has brought it back to life because it is
udderly ridiculous.
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