A closer look
If you keep all your club meetings completely secret, people will inevitably assume you are hanging out with farm animals. In the 19th century, anti-Masonic propagandists desperately wanted to portray the fraternal order as Satanic, so they fabricated the wildly popular myth that Masons ritually rode a magical goat named Baphomet. The Masons eventually just leaned into the joke, sometimes buying literal taxidermy goats for their lodges just to mess with the incredibly gullible general public.
