I was down town in the park one evening. It had been a beautiful summer day and the evening was no different. I was sitting on a bench, watching the purple skies after sunset. The sky was mostly clear, but there were some clouds hovering right above the horizon. As the sun was already beyond the horizon, the reddish, orange light of the sunset still shone on those clouds and they in turn reflected the unusually coloured light back to the ground. Everything was being bathed in a beautiful but somehow sickly looking reddish tint.
All of a sudden I’ve heard a whoosh behind me. Turning away, I couldn’t see anything. I’ve decided it must’ve been my imagination and turned back to marvel at the curiously coloured landscape. Then I thought, I had seen something. It was something running. Running so impossibly fast, I could barely make out at first what it could possibly be. Suddenly it stopped. I was flabbergasted. It was a Baphomet. You know, the creature that occultist and Satanists mistake for some supernatural being. As I would come to find out, it is anything but a natural creature, a cryptid, as some call other creatures of its kind.
Very slowly, the cryptid approached me. It had the head and legs of a goat and the torso of a human with feathered wings. Its human torso was also baffling. It had female breasts, but male reproductive parts, which I could clearly see, the creature being completely naked. I was terrified at the sight of such an anomaly. A creature no natural process of Darwinian evolution could produce. I felt a mixture of terror and immense curiosity, that prevented me from running away. The monstrosity knelt before me an said in a surprisingly high pitched, yet unnatural sounding voice: “Please forgive me, master. I beg of you, don’t hurt me.”
“Master?!” was the only thing I was able to mutter.
“Please spare me. Though I know, I’m not allowed to walk among the Blessed, I grew tired of the Cursed. I had to witness again the wonderful thing the Blessed Children of God are allowed to enjoy.”
“What?”
He (or she?) began to sing in a beautiful soprano voice: “ I, the lowliest creature of God, blessed with the gift of Reason, yet cursed with the body of a beast, the Image of God by Mind, yet the image of the ruminant goat by body, repent of my sins…”
“Stop,” I shouted, “who are you? What do you want from me?”
The other people in the park turned all towards me at my shouting. They made such a curious face, as if I was the mad one. As if they couldn’t see the monstrosity before me.
“You can see me, master, can’t you?”
“Yeah … I … Can …” I barely managed to get those few words out.
“Well, then you must be our master, though you look completely different. You are the one who brought us the Gospel and taught us to stop murdering the Children of God. You are the one who taught us to respect all life in God’s creation. We’ve been waiting for you to come back for a thousand years.”
“I’m … not … the guy … you’re looking … for!” I barely managed to say, while hyperventilating.
“No? Are you Christian at least?”
” Yeah … Kind of …”
“Good, meet me next year, this time. You can read us from the Holy Gospel.”
While it’s true what I’ve said to the Baphomet, I did indeed grow up Lutheran, I didn’t go to church in at least three or four years. I guess you could describe me as a lapsed Lutheran. After the encounter I’ve read up on my religious tradition. From what I’ve gathered, the Baphomets seem to have joined some weird quasi Christian cult, which kind of concerns me. On the other hand, I guess it’s a good thing they respect human live more, as the words of the Baphomet I’ve encountered suggested. It’s been almost a year since then. I am soon to meet the same Baphomet i the same park. What would you do in my stead?