Is it Baphomet or Totes McGoats? Looks the same, What's the Difference?

Totes McGoats, Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster's stand in for Satan, does a good job for a guy convicted of heroin dealing. Here's Baphomet, spawn of Satan. Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster thinks he's an appropriate role model for children!

Late in the 19th century, the name of Baphomet became associated with the occult when Eliphas Levi published "Dogmas and Rituals of High Magic" in Paris, France.

In the black book, Levi included an image he had drawn himself which he described as Baphomet and "The Sabbatic Goat", showing a winged humanoid goat with a pair of breasts and a torch on its head between its horns.

This image has become the best-known representation of Baphomet. Lévi considered the Baphomet to be a depiction of the absolute in symbolic form and explicated in detail his symbolism in the drawing that served as the frontispiece.

Dyster’s Totes McGoats is little different. A horned goat head perched atop a flabby, male, Niagara Falls body, belonging to accused heroin dealer who also happens to be a city employee.

While Baphomet was designed by Levi as the personification of supernatural evil, Totes McGoats was meant by Dyster to be child friendly, a loveable mascot tasked with helping the little ones to understand his ill-advised and tremendously costly recycling plan.

Lévi's depiction of Baphomet is similar to that of the Devilin early Tarot cards. Lévi, working with correspondences different from those later used by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, "equated the Devil Tarot key with Mercury,,." giving "his figure Mercury's caduceus, rising like a phallus from his groin.”

About Totes McGoats groin we have little clue. What we do know is that the city worker tipped by Dyster to portray the kid friendly character is a man who was arrested on charges he sold heroin to an undercover operative of the Niagara Falls City Police Department on two occasions in 2013, and ended up copping a plea deal and winding up in a drug diversion program.

He’s exactly the kind of guy Dyster would choose to lead a youth program, and the fact that his costume resembles archaic depictions of Satan may be entirely coincidental.

“We confront here that phantom of all terrors, the dragon of the all theogenies, the Ahriman of the Persians, the Typhon of the Egyptians, the Python of the Greeks, the old serpent of the Hebrews, the fantastic monster, the nightmare, the Croquemitaine, the gargoyle, the great beast of the Middle Ages, and—worse than all these—Baphomet, that bearded idol of the alchemist, the obscene deity of Mendes, the goat of the Sabbath,” Levi wrote.

Now Dyster has embraced the image willingly. And employed a heroin dealer to portray him.

Halloween approaches fast. And Dyster has obliged the darkness.

A horned god for a godless regime.

In case you couldn't pin it down, Totes’ name comes from a scene in I Love You, Man where a flustered Paul Rudd attempted to casually make a slang phrase from the word “totally” and failed abjectly.

The movie is generally thought of as a “chick flick,” which is what we assume Dyster watches.

Who can judge?