When Goats Roamed the Lodge Room

There’s the interlocked square and compass, instantly recognizable to millions as a symbol of Masonry. There’s also the all-seeing eye, widely if inaccurately identifiable as a Masonic motif. But when it comes to Masonic iconography, whatever happened to the lodge goat?

That’s the subject of one of the lectures that will be presented at the 13th International Conference on Freemasonry, held March 22 at UCLA. This year’s theme, “Freemasonry in Popular Culture: 1700 to Yesterday,” includes lectures on the myriad ways that fraternal culture has broken the containment zone of the lodge room and entered the broader popular zeitgeist. In some cases, this exchange produced great works of art, like Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (the subject of a presentation from James Smith Allen of the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale). Other times, the results were rather more peculiar, as in the sudden popularity of “orientalism” in the wake of Shriners conventions—the subject of a talk by Jaclynne Kerner of SUNY New Paltz. Perhaps most curious of all were the goats.

While never formally a part of Freemasonry, in the late 19th century (the height of the anti-Masonic movement), images of goats were often associated with fraternal groups, showing up in political cartoons and paintings. William Moore, a professor of art history at Boston University and former director of the Grand Lodge of New York’s library and museum, explains that the goat was a not-so-veiled allusion to the secretive (and presumably bizarre) initiation rituals that outsiders imagined must be going on inside the lodge. By the turn of the century, the joke had been turned on its head, and many groups, from the Masons to the Odd Fellows to the Modern Woodmen of America, had adopted it as a tonguein- cheek mascot. “A number of lodges had pet goats they’d take on parades,” Moore says.

Sensing a niche in the market, fraternal supply companies began marketing mechanical goats. And in a bit of sociological reverse engineering, some fraternal groups, especially the more burlesque side orders, actually adopted them into their initiations. Moore points to the Mystic Order of Veiled Prophets of the Enchanted Realm, commonly known as the Grotto, as one of the pseudo-Masonic organizations that may have folded “riding the goat” into its ritual.

Today, those references are largely lost on us. But now and again, Moore says, someone will find an old stuffed goat in a dusty attic—a reminder of a time when the fraternity had a bit more of the frat house in it.