Goat

The honor of the goat is that it has a rite of of sin bearer named for it, not to speak of Esau who was to be a wild donkey man, or Balaam's ass. There is a dignity to these beings that have natures which we know and about whom whole species of thought occur. Consider Balaam here, and goat here, also a species of Thought Goat, and if you like, Thought Ass, a species of writing, called ThoughtGoatten, part of the greater bestiary in which we occur. Thought Beasts as well. Pegasus would be included among these except it is mythological, a charge sometimes applied to Balaam. Whether this commentary, fiction or poem is real is more or less the same to me.

   Michael Broyles makes the telling observation that "much of the story [of Pilgrim's Progress] is set in America...it was the metaphorical terrain the believer had to traverse...," which he says to differentiate the gentler Puritan composer William Billings (The New England Psalm Singer, 1770. Also see Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music, 25). A great deal more than this has been said of those first  centuries. Uncontaminated nature means uncontaminated by mind not land fills. The Puritans transferred sin from themselves to the forest to drive it out, except their goat was the tree.  The sin bearer was the forest. It had to be mowed lest sins come back. A scapegoat is no good unless lost.  Anyway, trees hid predators. The tree became the goat and was cut. The forest then could not hide the terror of the dark.  This thinking unfurled all American botanical and biological extinction.

Puritans thought "the world," would contaminate. It was  toxic austere soil New England garrisoned  against the natural. New England only welcomed the Pennsylvania genius of inviting nature indoors two centuries too late.  By 1850 transcendentalism had them all wishing  for the pond. Early New England believed that savage men, wild men and their own sins  at the clearing's edge were only kept at bay by cutting back the growth. Defoliate the  forest, clear cut, exterminate. This prevented sin and made a profit. Against the evil in themselves they built a dominion for their superior race. In the new puritan age today, a "spiritual imagination... impotent, sterile, or dead... an era of violence, chaos, destruction, madness, and slaughter (Thomas Merton, Seeking Paradise, 85).

Raze and Exterminate also lay down with Romulus and Remus at the Puritan door. Questions of these sucklings by the Pennsylvania Dutch, who survived the murderous Roman ancestor-adversaries in Holland and Switzerland, are opposite. They domesticated the natural, invited it indoors, befriended it in their natures and painted it, sculpted it and threw it on the forge. Pennsylvania didn’t make any Scarlet Letter, or Cask of Amontillado, it decorated barns and chests. Decorated chests may be expanded in the real or in the parable of the inner decoration, both good, the dower chest and the entire Way Into the Flowering Heart, and evil, the many-vagaried Orc.

Sources:

1. The Tree Became A Goat - People in the Wilderness 

2. Apologizing for Art in the Americanization of the Pennsylvania Dutch