Great Goat

The Great Goat presents as a tall, lean, slender man whose head is concealed beneath the head of a large goat, its dark fur and orange eyes forming his face to onlookers. The horned mask evokes the Baphomet imagery long tied to witchcraft and occult worship. Once transformed into a pseudo-apostle, his frame warps into something far more monstrous.

Little of the man behind the mask is known beyond his silence and his appetites. He took pleasure in bedding members of his cult, particularly newcomers, whose initiation required them to kiss his heart and phallus, the latter appearing as a living serpent's head under the sway of hallucinogenic drugs. After his transformation, whatever thought he had left narrowed to a single obsession: forcing Casca into union and claiming her as family.

He first appears presiding over one of his cult's orgies as Nina brings Joachim to be inducted, a rite the newcomer flees once he realizes the ritual soup is made from human flesh. When Casca is later mistaken for a witch and delivered to the pagans, the Great Goat is meant to take her as part of making her one of his own. Chaos erupts instead: the surviving Joachim has led the Holy Iron Chain Knights to them, and Casca's Brand of Sacrifice summons vengeful spirits that possess the cannibal worshippers.

Trying to flee, the Great Goat catches his mask's horns in a crack in the cave wall and is pierced by the stinger of the Egg of the Perfect World, siring him into a pseudo-apostle. He returns to the slaughter, butchering his own followers and many knights before setting his sights on Casca once more, caressing her with his tongue as he declares his intent. Guts arrives in time to shear off the creature's arm and its serpentine phallus in one swing of the Dragon Slayer. The Great Goat pursues the fleeing group, proving swift and deadly with hooves and horns, at one point landing a stomp that only Godot's armor lets Guts survive. Guts finally maims his face and eye with one of Rickert's bombs, then takes his head off with a single blow, the corpse reverting to its human shape.