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Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Black Ram: The Single Beast Behind the Sacrifice, the Heresy, and the Purge, and What the Cast-Out Can Still Do

The Black Ram: The Single Beast Behind the Sacrifice, the Heresy, and the Purge, and What the Cast-Out Can Still Do

Paperback

Religion General Mythology & FolkloreCriminology

ISBN13: 9798185287187
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 2 2026
Pages: 202
Weight: 0.53
Height: 0.46 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

In the last minutes of Robert Eggers's The Witch, a girl walks into a barn to meet the Devil in the shape of a black goat. That image is five thousand years old.

When a community cannot face the truth about itself, it manufactures an outside and puts its fear there. It wants a face for that fear, a body to carry off what the group will not own, and again and again, across the centuries, the body it reaches for is a horned black animal. The figure begins as a god on the Nile and a sacred victim in the cult of the dead. It darkens into the goat driven into the desert with a people's guilt on its back, then into the Devil, the heretic, the witch, the neighbor a village burns to explain a dead child or a failed harvest. The same shape surfaces now in the moral panic, the show trial, and the manufactured enemy a nation invents so it never has to look at itself.

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Boles, David

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Religion General