Baphomet

The 19th century image of a Sabbatic Goat, created by Eliphas Lévi. The arms bear the Latin words SOLVE (dissolve) and COAGULA (congeal).

Baphomet is an imagined pagan deity, (i.e., a product of Christian folklore concerning pagans) revived in the 19th century as a figure of Satanism. It first appeared in a late 12th-century Provençal poem as a corruption of "Muhammad"^[1], but later it appeared as a term for a pagan idol in trial transcripts of the Inquisition of the Knights Templar in the early 14th century. However, in the 19th century the name came into popular English-speaking consciousness with the publication of various works of pseudo-history that tried to link the Knights Templar with conspiracy theories elaborating on their suppression. The name Baphomet then became associated with a "Sabbatic Goat" image drawn by Eliphas Lévi.

History

The name Baphomet first appears around 1195 in the Occitan poem "Senhors, per los nostres peccatz" by the troubadour Gavaudan.^[2] Around 1250 in a poem bewailing the defeat of the Seventh Crusade, Austorc d'Aorlhac refers to "Bafomet". De Bafomet is also the title of one of four surviving chapters of an Occitan translation of Ramon Llull's earliest known work, the Libre de la doctrina pueril.^[3]

When the medieval order of the Knights Templar was suppressed by King Philip IV of France, on October 13, 1307, Philip had many French Templars simultaneously arrested, and then tortured into confessions. The name Baphomet comes up in several of these confessions, in reference to an idol of some type that the Templars were alleged to have worshipped. The description of the object changed from confession to confession. Some Templars denied any knowledge of it. Others, under torture, described it as being either a severed head, a cat, or a head with three faces.^[4]

Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856) associated a series of carved or engraved figures found on a number of supposed 13th century Templar artifacts (such as cups, bowls and coffers) with the Baphometic idol.

Over 100 different charges had been leveled against the Templars. Most of them were clearly false, as they were the same charges that were leveled against many of King Philip's enemies. For example, he had earlier kidnapped Pope Boniface VIII and charged him with near identical offenses of heresy, spitting and urinating on the cross, and sodomy. However, the claims of an idol named Baphomet were unique to the Inquisition of the Templars.^[5][6] As Karen Ralls, author of Knights Templar Encyclopedia argues that this is significant: "There is no mention of Baphomet either in the Templar Rule or in other medieval period Templar documents".^[7]

Centuries later, the name Baphomet appeared in the essay by the Viennese Orientalist Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, Mysterium Baphometis revelatum^[8] as The Mystery of Baphomet Revealed,^[9] which presented an elaborate pseudohistory constructed to discredit the Freemasons by linking them with "Templar masons". He argued, using as archaeological evidence "Baphomets" faked by earlier scholars and literary evidence such as the Grail romances, that the Templars were Gnostics and the 'Templars' head' was a Gnostic idol called Baphomet. In the 19th century some European museums acquired such pseudo-Egyptian objects, which were catalogued as "Baphomets" and credulously thought to have been idols of the Templars.^[10]

Some modern scholars such as Peter Partner and Malcolm Barber agree that the name of Baphomet was an Old French corruption of the name Muhammad, with the interpretation being that some of the Templars, through their long military occupation of the Outremer, had begun incorporating Islamic ideas into their belief system, and that this was seen and documented by the Inquisitors as heresy.^[11] Peter Partner's 1987 book The Knights Templar and their Myth says, "In the trial of the Templars one of their main charges was their supposed worship of a heathen idol-head known as a 'Baphomet' ('Baphomet' = Mahomet)." Partner's book also provides a quote from a poem written in a Provençal dialect by a troubadour who is thought to have been a Templar. The poem is in reference to some battles in 1265 that were not going well for the Crusaders: "And daily they impose new defeats on us: for God, who used to watch on our behalf, is now asleep, and Bafometz puts forth his power to support the Sultan."^[12]

Eliphas Levi

Promotional poster for Léo Taxil, Les Mystères de la franc-maçonnerie dévoilés (1886), adapts Lévi's invention

In the 19th century, the name of Baphomet became associated with the occult. In 1854, Eliphas Levi published Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie ("Dogmas and Rituals of High Magic"), in which he 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 (illustration, top). This image has become the best-known representation of Baphomet.

Levi's depiction is similar to that of the Devil in early tarot cards, but it may also have been partly inspired by grotesque carvings on the Templar churches of Lanleff in Brittany and St. Merri in Paris, which depict squatting bearded men with bat wings, female breasts, horns and the shaggy hindquarters of a beast.^[13]

Le Diable, from the early eighteenth century Tarot of Marseilles by Jean Dodal.

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:

"The goat on the frontispiece carries the sign of the pentagram on the forehead, with one point at the top, a symbol of light, his two hands forming the sign of hermetism, the one pointing up to the white moon of Chesed, the other pointing down to the black one of Geburah. This sign expresses the perfect harmony of mercy with justice. His one arm is female, the other male like the ones of the androgyn of Khunrath, the attributes of which we had to unite with those of our goat because he is one and the same symbol. The flame of intelligence shining between his horns is the magic light of the universal balance, the image of the soul elevated above matter, as the flame, whilst being tied to matter, shines above it. The beast's head expresses the horror of the sinner, whose materially acting, solely responsible part has to bear the punishment exclusively; because the soul is insensitive according to its nature and can only suffer when it materializes. The rod standing instead of genitals symbolizes eternal life, the body covered with scales the water, the semi-circle above it the atmosphere, the feathers following above the volatile. Humanity is represented by the two breasts and the androgyn arms of this sphinx of the occult sciences."

Levi called his image "The Goat of Mendes", presumably following Herodotus' account^[14] that the god of Mendes — the Greek name for Djedet, Egypt — was depicted with a goat's face and legs. Herodotus relates how all male goats were held in great reverence by the Mendesians, and how in his time a woman publicly copulated with a goat.^[15] However the deity that was venerated at Egyptian Mendes was actually a ram deity Banebdjed (literally Ba of the lord of djed, and titled "the Lord of Mendes"), who was the soul of Osiris. Levi combined the images of the Tarot of Marseilles Devil card and refigured the ram Banebdjed as a he-goat, further imagined by him as "copulator in Anep and inseminator in the district of Mendes".

Egyptian connections aside, Lévi's depiction, for all its modern fame, does not match the historical descriptions from the Templar trials, although it is akin to some grotesques found on Templar churches, or, more specifically, to Viollet-le-Duc's vivid gargoyles that were added to Notre Dame de Paris about the same time as Lévi's illustration.

Levi's now-familiar image of a "Sabbatic Goat" shows parallels with works by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, who more than once painted a "Witch's Sabbath"; in the version ca 1821-23, El gran cabrón ^[16] now at the Prado, a group of seated women offer their dead infant children to a seated goat.

Aleister Crowley

The Baphomet of Lévi was to become an important figure within the cosmology of Thelema, the mystical system established by Aleister Crowley in the early twentieth century. Baphomet features in the Creed of the Gnostic Catholic Church recited by the congregation in The Gnostic Mass, in the sentence: "And I believe in the Serpent and the Lion, Mystery of Mystery, in His name BAPHOMET."^[17]

In Magick (Book 4), Crowley asserted that Baphomet was a divine androgyne and "the hieroglyph of arcane perfection":

For Crowley, Baphomet is further a representative of the spiritual nature of the spermatozoa while also being symbolic of the "magical child" produced as a result of sex magic. As such, Baphomet represents the Union of Opposites, especially as mystically personified in Chaos and Babalon combined and biologically manifested with the sperm and egg united in the zygote.

As a demon

Lévi's Baphomet image employed in the later 19th century to suggest Baphomet worship by Freemasons

Baphomet, as Lévi's illustration suggests, has occasionally been portrayed as a synonym of Satan or a demon, a member of the hierarchy of Hell. Baphomet appears in that guise as a character in James Blish's The Day After Judgment. Christian evangelist Jack Chick claims that Baphomet is a demon worshipped by Freemasons, a claim that apparently originated with the Taxil hoax.^[19]. Léo Taxil's elaborate hoax employed a version of Lévi's Baphomet on the cover of Les Mystères de la franc-maçonnerie dévoilés, his lurid paperback "exposé" of Freemasonry, which in 1897 he revealed as a hoax satirizing ultra-Catholic anti-Masonic propaganda. The downward-pointing pentagram on its forehead is enlarged upon by Lévi in his illustration of a goat's head arranged within such a pentagram, which he contrasts with the microcosmic man arranged within a similar but upright pentagram.^[20]

Lévi's Baphomet is clearly the source as well of the later Tarot image of the Devil, in the Rider-Waite design. The symbol of the goat in the downward-pointed pentagram was adopted as the official symbol — called the Sigil of Baphomet — of the Church of Satan, and continues to be used among Satanists.

The Devil in the Rider-Waite tarot deck

Alternative etymologies

While modern scholars such as Peter Partner, Dr. Malcolm Barber, and the Oxford English Dictionary, state that the origin of the name Baphomet was a probable French version of "Mahomet" (i.e., "Muhammad").^[11][12] alternative etymologies have also been proposed:

• Emile Littré (1801–1881) in Dictionnaire de la langue francaise asserted that the word was cabalistically formed by writing backward tem. o. h. p. ab an abbreviation of templi omnium hominum pacis abbas, 'abbot' or 'father of the temple of peace of all men.' His source is the "Abbé Constant", which is to say, Alphonse-Louis Constant, the real name of Eliphas Lévi.

• Arkon Daraul proposed that "Baphomet" may derive from the Arabic word أبو فهمة Abu fihama(t), meaning "The Father of Understanding".^[21] "Arkon Daraul" is widely thought to be a pseudonym of Idries Shah.

• Dr Hugh J. Schonfield,^[22] one of the scholars who worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls, argued in his book The Essene Odyssey that the word "Baphomet" was created with knowledge of the Atbash substitution cipher, which substitutes the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet for the last, the second for the second last, and so on. "Baphomet" rendered in Hebrew is בפומת; interpreted using Atbash, it becomes שופיא, which can be interpreted as the Greek word "Sophia", or wisdom. This theory is an important part of the plot of The Da Vinci Code. Professor Schonfield's theory however cannot be independently corroborated.

• Montague Summers (1880–1948), a self-proclaimed Catholic priest who wrote The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926) and The Geography of Witchcraft (1927), claimed that "Baphomet" was formed from the Greek words baphe and metis to mean "Baptism of Wisdom", alternatively "To Absorb Knowledge".

• Aleister Crowley proposed that Baphomet was derived from "Father Mithras". In his Confessions he describes the circumstances that led to this etymology:

I had taken the name Baphomet as my motto in the O.T.O. For six years and more I had tried to discover the proper way to spell this name. I knew that it must have eight letters, and also that the numerical and literal correspondences must be such as to express the meaning of the name in such a ways as to confirm what scholarship had found out about it, and also to clear up those problems which archaeologists had so far failed to solve. ...One theory of the name is that it represents the words Beta alpha phi eta mu eta tau epsilon omicron sigma, the baptism of wisdom; another, that it is a corruption of a title meaning "Father Mithras". Needless to say, the suffix R supported the latter theory. I added up the word as spelt by the Wizard. It totalled 729. This number had never appeared in my Cabbalistic working and therefore meant nothing to me. It however justified itself as being the cube of nine. The word chi eta phi alpha sigma, the mystic title given by Christ to Peter as the cornerstone of the Church, has this same value. So far, the Wizard had shown great qualities! He had cleared up the etymological problem and shown why the Templars should have given the name Baphomet to their so-called idol. Baphomet was Father Mithras, the cubical stone which was the corner of the Temple.

^[23]

Notes

References

• Barber, Malcolm (1994), The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple, Cambridge 
• Crowley, Aleister (1974), The Equinox of the Gods, New York, NY: Gordon Press, http://www.hermetic.com/crowley/eoftg/index.html 
• Crowley, Aleister (1944). The Book of Thoth; A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians, being the Equinox, Volume III, No. V. London: Ordo Templi Orientis. 
• Crowley, Aleister (1996-12). The Law is for All: The Authorized Popular Commentary of Liber Al Vel Legis sub figura CCXX, The Book of the Law. Louis Wilkinson (ed.). Thelema Media. ISBN 0972658386. 
• Crowley, Aleister; Mary. Desti, Leila. Waddell (2004). Magick: Liber ABA, Book 4, Parts I-IV. Hymenaeus. Beta (ed.). York Beach, Maine.: Samuel Weiser. ISBN 0877289190 9780877289197. 
• Martin, Sean (2005), The Knights Templar: The History & Myths of the Legendary Military Order. ISBN 1-56025-645-1.
• Read, Piers Paul (1999), The Templars. Da Capo Press, ISBN 0-306-81071-9.
• Franz Spunda. Baphomet: Der geheime Gott der Templer : ein alchimistischer Roman. ISBN 3-8655-2073-1

External links

• Myth of the Baphomet
• Historical and modern images of Baphomet
• Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum in PDF
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (Eleventh ed.). Cambridge University Press.