The goat holds the sharpest place in the vocabulary of sacrifice. Leviticus 16 sets out two goats for the Day of Atonement: one offered to God, and one on whose head the sins of Israel are laid and which is driven into the wilderness for Azazel, the origin of the English word scapegoat, coined by Tyndale to render the passage. Greek tradition gives Pan and the satyrs their goat legs, figures of untamed nature and appetite, and the goat Amalthea suckles the infant Zeus, her horn becoming the cornucopia. The goat as a devil-figure is late and largely modern: the endlessly reproduced horned Baphomet is Eliphas Levi's drawing of 1856, not an ancient image.
The constellation Capricornus, the sea-goat, has its own separate myth: fleeing the monster Typhon, the god Pan, or in some tellings his son Aegipan, dived into the Nile and transformed only halfway, leaving him with a goat's foreparts and a fish's tail, and Zeus set the strange hybrid form among the stars in gratitude for the god's aid against Typhon. The image, goat above and fish below, is genuinely ancient, appearing on Babylonian boundary stones centuries before the Greek story was attached to it, evidence the sea-goat itself predates the myth used to explain it.