Baphomet is a deity which the Knights Templar were accused of worshipping that subsequently became incorporated into various occult and Western esoteric traditions. The name Baphomet appeared in trial transcripts for the Inquisition of the Knights Templar starting in 1307.[1] It first came into popular English usage in the 19th century during debate and speculation on the reasons for the suppression of the Templar order.[1] Baphomet is a symbol of balance in various occult and mystical traditions, the origin of which some occultists have attempted to link with the Gnostics and Templars,[2] although occasionally purported to be a deity or a demon. Since 1856 the name Baphomet has been associated with the "Sabbatic Goat" image drawn by Éliphas Lévi, composed of binary elements representing the "symbolization of the equilibrium of opposites": half-human and half-animal, male and female, and good and evil. Lévi's intention was to symbolize his concept of balance, with Baphomet representing the goal of perfect social order.
See main article: History of the Knights Templar and Trials of the Knights Templar.
The name Baphomet appeared in July 1098 in a letter about the siege of Antioch by the French Crusader Anselm of Ribemont:
Raymond of Aguilers, a chronicler of the First Crusade, reports that the troubadours used the term Bafomet for Muhammad, and Bafumaria for a mosque.[3] The name Bafometz later appeared around 1195 in the Provençal poems Occitan (post 1500);: Senhors, per los nostres peccatz by the troubadour Gavaudan.[4] Around 1250, a Provençal poem by Austorc d'Aorlhac bewailing the defeat of the Seventh Crusade again uses the name Bafomet for Muhammad.[5] Occitan (post 1500);: De Bafomet is also the title of one of four surviving chapters of an Occitan translation of Ramon Llull's earliest known work, the Catalan; Valencian: Libre de la doctrina pueril.[6]
Baphomet was allegedly worshipped as a deity by the medieval order of the Knights Templar. King Philip IV of France had many French Templars simultaneously arrested, and then tortured into confessions in October 1307.[1] The name Baphomet appeared in trial transcripts for the Inquisition of the Knights Templar that same year. Over 100 different charges had been leveled against the Templars, including heresy, homosexual relations, spitting and urinating on the cross, and sodomy. Most of them were dubious, as they were the same charges that were leveled against the Cathars and many of King Philip's enemies; he had earlier kidnapped Pope Boniface VIII and charged him with nearly identical offenses. Yet Malcolm Barber observes that historians "find it difficult to accept that an affair of such enormity rests upon total fabrication". The "Chinon Parchment suggests that the Templars did indeed spit on the cross", says Sean Martin, and that these acts were intended to simulate the kind of humiliation and torture that a Crusader might be subjected to if captured by the Saracens, where they were taught how to commit apostasy "with the mind only and not with the heart". Similarly, Michael Haag suggests that the simulated worship of Baphomet did indeed form part of a Templar initiation rite:[7]
The name Baphomet comes up in several of these dubious confessions. Peter Partner states in his 1987 book The Knights Templar and their Myth: "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)."[8] The description of the object changed from confession to confession; some Templars denied any knowledge of it, while others, who confessed under torture, described it as being either a severed head, a cat, or a head with three faces. The Templars did possess several silver-gilt heads as reliquaries, including one marked Latin: capud {{smallcaps|lviii,[9] another said to be St. Euphemia, and possibly the actual head of Hugues de Payens.[10] The claims of an idol named Baphomet were unique to the Inquisition of the Templars.[11] Karen Ralls, author of the Knights Templar Encyclopedia, argues that it is significant that "no specific evidence [of Baphomet] appears in either the Templar Rule or in other medieval period Templar documents."
The name Baphomet came into popular English usage in the 19th century during debate and speculation on the reasons for the suppression of the Templars. Modern scholars agree that the name of Baphomet was an Old French corruption of the name "Mohammed", 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.[12] Alain Demurger, however, rejects the idea that the Templars could have adopted the doctrines of their enemies.[13] Helen Nicholson writes that the charges were essentially "manipulative"—the Templars "were accused of becoming fairy-tale Muslims". Medieval Christians believed that Muslims were idolatrous and worshipped Muhammad as a god, with mahomet becoming mammet in English, meaning an idol or false god (see also Medieval Christian views on Muhammad). This idol-worship is attributed to Muslims in several French, Old (842-ca.1400);: [[Chanson de geste|chansons de geste]]. For example, one finds the gods Occitan (post 1500);: Bafum e [[Termagant|Travagan]] in a Provençal poem on the life of St. Honorat, completed in 1300. In the French: Chanson de Simon Pouille, written before 1235, a Saracen idol is called Bafumetz.
While modern scholars and the Oxford English Dictionary[14] state that the origin of the name Baphomet was a probable Old French version of "Mahomet",[8] [12] alternative etymologies have also been proposed.
According to Pierre Klossowski in French: Le Baphomet (1965, Editions Mercure de France, Paris; translated into English by Sophie Hawkes and published as The Baphomet in 1988 by Eridanos Press): "The Baphomet has diverse etymologies ... the three phonemes that constitute the denomination are also said to signify, in coded fashion, Latin: '''Ba'''sileus philoso'''pho'''rum '''met'''aloricum: the sovereign (basileus) of metallurgical philosophers, that is, of the alchemical laboratories that were supposedly established in various chapters of the Temple. The androgynous nature of the figure apparently goes back to the Adam Kadmon of the Chaldeans, which one finds in the Zohar" (pages 164–165).
In the 18th century, speculative theories arose that sought to tie the Knights Templar with the origins of Freemasonry.[15] Bookseller, Freemason and Illuminatus[16] Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811), in German: Versuch über die Beschuldigungen welche dem Tempelherrenorden gemacht worden, und über dessen Geheimniß (1782), was the first to claim that the Templars were Gnostics, and that "Baphomet" was formed from the Greek words Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: βαφη μητȢς, Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: baphe metous, to mean German: Taufe der Weisheit, "Baptism of Wisdom".[17] Nicolai "attached to it the idea of the image of the supreme God, in the state of quietude attributed to him by the Manichaean Gnostics", according to F. J. M. Raynouard, and "supposed that the Templars had a secret doctrine and initiations of several grades", which "the Saracens had communicated ... to them". He further connected the figura Baffometi with the Pythagorean pentacle:
Émile Littré (1801–1881) in French: Dictionnaire de la langue francaise asserted that the word was cabalistically formed by writing backward tem. o. h. p. ab, an abbreviation of Latin: 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.[18]
Hugh J. Schonfield (1901–1988),[19] 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 (bpwmt); interpreted using Atbash, it becomes (šwpy‘, "Shofya'"), which can be interpreted as the Greek word Sophia, meaning "wisdom". This theory appears as an important plot point in the novel The Da Vinci Code, although it was recently questioned by the French historian Thierry Murcia, who challenges the method of calculation used by Schonfield.[20]
In 1818, the name Baphomet appeared in the essay by the Viennese Orientalist Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, Latin: Mysterium Baphometis revelatum, seu Fratres Militiæ Templi, qua Gnostici et quidem Ophiani, Apostasiæ, Idoloduliæ et Impuritatis convicti, per ipsa eorum Monumenta[21] ("Discovery of the Mystery of Baphomet, by which the Knights Templars, like the Gnostics and Ophites, are convicted of Apostasy, of Idolatry and of moral Impurity, by their own Monuments"), which presented an elaborate pseudohistory constructed to discredit Templarist Masonry and, by extension, Freemasonry. Following Nicolai, 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:
Hammer's essay did not pass unchallenged, and F. J. M. Raynouard published an French: Étude sur 'Mysterium Baphometi revelatum' in French: [[Journal des sçavans|Journal des savants]] the following year.[22] Charles William King criticized Hammer, saying that he had been deceived by "the paraphernalia of ... Rosicrucian or alchemical quacks",[23] and Peter Partner agreed that the images "may have been forgeries from the occultist workshops". At the very least, there was little evidence to tie them to the Knights Templar—in the 19th century some European museums acquired such pseudo-Egyptian objects, which were cataloged as "Baphomets" and credulously thought to have been idols of the Templars.[24]
Later in the 19th century, the name of Baphomet became further associated with the occult. Éliphas Lévi published French: [[Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie]] (Dogma and Rituals of High Magic) as two volumes (Latin: Dogme 1854, Latin: Rituel 1856), 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 (see the illustration). 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:
Lévi's depiction of Baphomet is similar to that of The Devil in the early Tarot.[25] 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". The symbol is said to have originated when Mercury / Hermes once attempted to stop a fight between two snakes by throwing his rod at them, whereupon they twined themselves around the rod. The word Caduceus is from the Greek root meaning "herald’s wand" and was also a badge of diplomatic ambassadors and became associated with commerce, eloquence, alchemy, thievery, and lying. The etymology of Caduceus is from Doric Greek Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: κᾱρύκειον Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: karukeion, from the Greek Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: κῆρυξ Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: kērux meaning "herald".[26]
Lévi believed that the alleged devil worship of the medieval Witches' Sabbath was a perpetuation of ancient pagan rites. A goat with a candle between its horns appears in medieval witchcraft records,[27] and other pieces of lore are cited in French: Dogme et Rituel:
Lévi's Baphomet may have been partly inspired by grotesque carvings on the Templar churches of Lanleff in Brittany and Saint-Merri in Paris, which depict squatting bearded men with bat wings, female breasts, horns and the shaggy hindquarters of a beast.[28]
Lévi's references to the School of Alexandria and the Templars can be explained against the background of debates about the origins and character of true Christianity. It has been pointed out that these debates included contemporary forms of Romantic socialism, or Utopian socialism, which were seen as the heirs of the Gnostics, Templars, and other mystics. Lévi, being himself an adherent of these schools since the 1840s, regarded the socialists and Romantics (such as Alphonse de Lamartine) as the successors of this alleged tradition of true religion. In fact, his narrative mirrors historiographies of socialism, including the French: Histoire des Montagnards (1847) by his best friend and political comrade Alphonse Esquiros. Consequently, the Baphomet is depicted by Lévi as the symbol of a revolutionary heretical tradition that would soon lead to the "emancipation of humanity" and the establishment of a perfect social order.
In Lévi's writings, the Baphomet does not only express a historical-political tradition, but also occult natural forces that are explained by his magical theory of the Astral Light. He developed this notion in the context of what has been called "spiritualist magnetism": theories that stressed the religious implications of magnetism. Often, their representatives were socialists that believed in the social consequences of a "synthesis" of religion and science that was to be achieved by the means of magnetism. Spiritualist magnetists with a socialist background include the Baron du Potet and Henri Delaage, who served as main sources for Lévi. At the same time, Lévi polemicized against famed Catholic authors such as Jules-Eudes de Mirville and Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux, who regarded magnetism as the workings of demons and other infernal powers. The paragraph just before the passage cited in the previous section has to be seen against this background:
Mendes is the Greek name for the ancient Egyptian city of Djedet. Lévi equates his image with "The Goat of Mendes", possibly following the account by Herodotus[29] that the god of Mendes 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.[29] [30] The chief deities of Mendes were the ram deity Banebdjedet (lit. Ba of the Lord of Djedet), who was the Ba of Osiris, and his consort, the fish goddess Hatmehit.[31] [32]
E. A. Wallis Budge writes:
The link between Baphomet and the pagan god Pan was also observed by Aleister Crowley[33] as well as Anton LaVey:
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 20th 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 Mysteries, in His name BAPHOMET."[34]
In Magick (Book 4), Crowley asserted that Baphomet was a divine androgyne and "the hieroglyph of arcane perfection", seen as that which reflects: "What occurs above so reflects below, or As above so below":
For Crowley, Baphomet is further a representative of the spiritual nature of the Spermatozoon, while also being symbolic of the "magical child" produced as a result of sex magic.[35] 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.
Crowley proposed that Baphomet was derived from "Father Mithras". In his Confessions he describes the circumstances that led to this etymology:[36]
Lévi's Baphomet is the source of the later tarot image of the Devil in the Rider–Waite design.[37] The concept of a downward-pointing pentagram on its forehead was enlarged upon by Lévi in his discussion (without illustration) of the Goat of Mendes arranged within such a pentagram, which he contrasted with the microcosmic man arranged within a similar but upright pentagram.[38] The actual image of a goat in a downward-pointing pentagram first appeared in the 1897 book French: La Clef de la Magie Noire, written by the French occultist Stanislas de Guaita. It was this image that was later adopted as the official symbol—called the Sigil of Baphomet—of the Church of Satan, and continues to be used among Satanists.[39]
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.[40] Christian evangelist Jack T. Chick claimed that Baphomet is a demon worshipped by Freemasons,[41] a claim that apparently originated with the Taxil hoax. Lévi's Baphomet was depicted on the cover of French: Les Mystères de la franc-maçonnerie dévoilés, Léo Taxil's lurid paperback "exposé" of Freemasonry, which, in 1897, he revealed as a hoax intended to ridicule the Catholic Church and its anti-Masonic propaganda.[42] [43]
In 2014, The Satanic Temple commissioned an statue of Baphomet to stand alongside a monument of the Ten Commandments at the Oklahoma State Capitol, citing "respect for diversity and religious minorities" as reasons for the monument.[44] [45] [46] (The Oklahoma Supreme Court ultimately declared religious displays illegal.)[47] The Baphomet statue was unveiled in Detroit on 25 July 2015, as a symbol of the modern Satanist movement.[48] [49] The Satanic Temple transported the Baphomet statue to Little Rock, Arkansas, where another 10 Commandments monument had been recently installed; the statue was publicly displayed during a Temple demonstration on 16 August 2018.[50]
In Sartor Resartus (1833–34) by Thomas Carlyle, protagonist Diogenes Teufelsdröckh describes his spiritual rebirth as a "Baphometic Fire-baptism".[51] Clive Barker's novel Cabal (1988) and its film adaption, Nightbreed (1990), Baphomet is depicted as the god worshipped by the Night Breed creatures.[52]
An interpretation of Baphomet, referred to as The Sword of Baphomet, forms part of the main plot in the 1996 point-and-click adventure game developed by Revolution Software. It is the first game in the Broken Sword series. The player assumes the role of George Stobbart, an American tourist in Paris, as he attempts to unravel a conspiracy, much of which is influenced by and includes factual and fictional references and narrative devices relating to the history of the Knights Templar.
Baphomet appears as a recurring antagonist in the long-running German novel series Geisterjäger John Sinclair, in which he is the master of Vincent van Akkeren and his cult of renegade Knights Templar. The horror novels by author Jason Dark portray Baphomet as one of the three entities that form the unholy trinity of Lucifer, with the other two being Asmodis and Beelzebub.[53]
The 2016 audio drama (based on the TV show Robin of Sherwood), has Robin and his companions come into conflict with the titular Knights. The Knights of the Apocalypse are depicted as a cult which worships Baphomet; the Knights are also depicted as a splinter group from the Knights Templar.[54]
The 2018 Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has a large statue of Baphomet displayed at the Academy of Unseen Arts. The Satanic Temple accused the show of plagiarizing their statue of Baphomet, though later settled out of court.[55]
"Raimundus de Agiles says of the Mahometans: Latin: In ecclesiis autem magnis '''Bafumarias''' faciebant ... habebant monticulum ubi duæ erant '''Bafumariæ'''. The troubadours employ Baformaria for mosque, and Bafomet for Mahomet."
Latin: "Per quem allatum fuit eis quoddam magnum capud argenteum deauratum pulcrum, figuram muliebrem habens, intra quod erant ossa unius capitis, involuta et consuta in quodam panno lineo albo, syndone rubea superposita, et erat ibi quedam cedula consuta in qua erat scriptum capud {{smallcaps|lviii
"It is possible that the head mentioned was in fact a reliquary of Hugh of Payns, containing his actual head."
" French: Le ciel de Mercure, science occulte, magie, commerce, éloquence, mystère, force morale. Hiéroglyphe, {{smallcaps|le diable"
"Since 1856 the influence of Eliphas Lévi and his doctrine of occultism has changed the face of this card, and it now appears as a pseudo-Baphometic figure with the head of a goat and a great torch between the horns; it is seated instead of erect, and in place of the generative organs there is the Hermetic caduceus."
French: "Le pentagramme élevant en l'air deux de ses pointes représente Satan ou le bouc du sabbat, et il représente le Sauveur lorsqu'il élève en l'air un seul de ses rayons ... En le disposant de manière que deux de ses pointes soient en haut et une seule pointe en bas, on peut y voir les cornes, les oreilles et la barbe du bouc hiératique de Mendès, et il devient le signe des évocations infernales."