The lust of the goat is the bounty of God

The lust of the goat is the bounty of God is a proverb from Blake’s Proverbs of Hell that Gibreel Farishta reads aloud to Alleluia Cone from her long-unopened copy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In the scene, its blunt celebration of sensual appetite becomes both a provocation between lovers and part of a more unsettled exchange about memory, death, and the leaking boundary between dreams and waking life.

Text and Source

The phrase appears among the markings Alleluia made in the book when she was younger: underlinings, marginal ticks, exclamations, and questions. Gibreel finds it while reading from the Proverbs of Hell, presenting the line with a wicked grin. The proverb is not introduced as his own belief; it is a passage he selects from a text that Alleluia had annotated and then left unopened.

The Reading Scene

Gibreel’s reading makes the proverb intimate and teasing. Alleluia blushes, and he follows it with another passage about the world being consumed in fire and the coming of that end through an improvement of sensual enjoyment. The juxtaposition links bodily pleasure with apocalyptic expectation, while Gibreel’s playful manner keeps the exchange from becoming a straightforward declaration of doctrine.

Memory and Apocalyptic Time

The book also holds a photograph of Alleluia’s sister, Elena Cone, whom Alleluia says is buried there and forgotten. Gibreel’s discovery makes the pages a repository not only of youthful desire but of a family loss associated with visions. He then points to Alleluia’s note in the flyleaf estimating the world’s creation at 4004 BC and the apocalypse in 1996, using the date to joke that time for sensual enjoyment remains. The proverb thus sits within a scene where erotic wit, remembered death, and the prospect of an ending occupy the same book and conversation.