With groups like The Satanic Temple getting more media attention around their activism against theocracy, one symbolic icon, Baphomet, has been getting more public exposure. A majority of the Magnolia Films movie “Hail Satan?” centered around the Satanic Temple’s efforts to erect their Baphomet Statue on Government properties where Ten Commandments statue had been placed to emphasize the Government’s stance on freedom of religion as stated in the constitution. Additionally, they countered arguments that the Ten Commandments had cultural significance by stating that Baphomet had cultural significance as well just as any Judeo-Christian iconography does. That got me to thinking, “who is Baphomet?” I personally didn’t have much knowledge about Baphomet or it’s history, so I set out to learn more about what Baphomet is really about.

Joseph Von Hammer-Purgstall — Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum

The Birth Of Baphomet

Historians have noted that the first written occurrence of Baphomet was in 1098 by Anselm of Ribemont, who was “count of Ostrevant and Valenciennes,” and is considered to be “one of the most brilliant figures in the first crusade”(1). Anselm of Rebemont made many written eye-witness accounts of the events of the first crusade. Anselm recounted in his writing the events of the Siege of Antioch, during which, he stated that, “the Turks ‘called loudly upon Baphomet,’” and, given the context, “most scholars believe that the word [referred] to Muhammad, the founder of Islam” (2). As recounted in Zrinka Stahuljak’s book, Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation, German author Christoph Friedrich Nicolai wrote in 1782 about Baphomet being mentioned during the course of a “deposition of to [Templar] witnesses interrogated by the ecclesiastical authorities in Carcassone,” where the witnesses mentioned that Baphomet “‘was not the name of the idol, but rather a hieroglyph imprinted on it. The head… had been a symbol, the image of the eternal Father in a state of rest, as the ancient Gnostics represented him’”(3). It is further mentioned that the Templars were “supposedly introduced to Gnosticism in the Orient, since ‘the Orient, above all Syria, was the refuge for all of the sectarians and heretics banished by the Western [Christian] Empire’”(3). Stahuljak goes on to note how Baphomet was merely an idol for the Templars, and not in any way a God, given that the Templar “denied God, and spat on the cross,” and it was postulated by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall in his book Ancient Alphabets and Hieroglyphic Characters Explained (1806) that “‘Bahumed or Bahumet [was] one of their secret and mysterious formulas, with which they addressed the idol of a calf in their secret assemblies,’” due to the fact that “Bahúmid” translated into “calf” in the Arabic language (3).

What I find to be particularly fascinating is that, given the secretive and mysterious nature of the Templars in this regard, it has since been quite a topic of debate, with many theories, yet few definitive answers as to the true meaning of what Baphomet truly meant to the Templars. For example, just 4 years after Hammer-Purgstall released his book on hieroglyphics, “Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838), France’s great Orientalist and Arabist, shook the ground under Hammer-Purgstall’s affirmations by pointing out the impossibility that knowledge of hieroglyphs as transferred from the ancients to the Arabs, accusing Hammer-Purgstall of failing to show ‘how knowledge of hieroglyphic writing, [which was] lost, or so it appears, long before the Arabs were the masters of Egypt, could have emerged from the shadows that covered it to pass into their hands’” (3). Given this idea, Sacy made the argument that it was more likely that “the relation between the word Baffumettus (as cited in the records of the Templar trial) and Bahoumid is purley accidental, without a grounding in etymology,” and therefore it must have been a term which actually stood to mean Mohammed.

To further add fuel to the argumentative fire, François Raynouard wrote in the 1813 edition of his Monumens historiques that “Baphomet was a simple scribal error or mispronunciation, and not an esoteric mystery,” arguing that scribe who recounted the questioning of the witnesses in the deposition clearly made a mistake in spelling or pronunciation when transcribing the testimony, “‘either because in the Southern provinces the name of Mohammed was thus pronounced, or because the scribe wrote Baffometi in error, as he also wrote asorar instead of adorare; and what must leave no doubt in this respect is that the witness claimed that he was made to pronounce Yalla, a Saracen word, which, he says, means God’” (3).

Stahuljak argues that “since Muslims do not worship Mohammed but Allah, such an error of substitution could point to an outright falsification by the office of the Inquisitor in the effort to turn Templars into follows of Islam,” which is also entirely likely given that any of the Inquisitors from the Western (Christian) Empire likely knew that Muslims held Mohammed to great importance, yet had little in-depth knowledge of the fact that Muslims do not in fact worship Mohammed, nor do they have any images or idols in the Islam faith. Whether this was a bad faith attempt to justify vilifying the Templars further, nobody can say for sure, but it is an interesting possibility to consider. As time went on, other historians continued to argue against Hammer-Purgstall’s Baphomet philosophy, such as Jules Michelet in Histoire du Moyen Âge (published between 1833–1844) who noted that the Templars “‘experimented with some Oriental superstitions, Saracen magic,’” yet they “‘did without priests,’” and they did not particularly have a religion or God; however he noted that “‘their true God, it seems, became the Order itself’” (3). The Templars seemed to fall into “‘a fierce religion of itself, in a satanical self-absorption [égoïsme],’” which led the Western (Christian) Empire to believe the Templars “to have lost their moral bearings and renounced Christianity, symbolized in the ritual spitting on the cross” (3). Additionally, comtemporary historian Henri Martin looked deeper into Baphomet’s symbolic interpretation in Histoire de France (published between 1834–1836), “giving credence to the archaeological legend of Baphomet, ‘the androgynous and bearded god or genie,’” which seemed to be “a remnant of Gnosticism, ‘an amalgamation of ideas and rituals half borrowed from recent Muslim heresies, half from old Christian heresies that had never completely disappeared from the Orient’” (3). From then on, especially from 1830 to the 1850’s, “Baphomet came to be thought of as the name of an androgynous figure associated with sodomy,” who was mainly a “symbol of a ‘deviant’ and secret sexuality” (3).

To continue the semantic argument of the meaning and origin of Baphomet, Hugh J. Schonfield published a book called The Essene Odyssey in 1984 in which he argued that the word Baphomet likely as created through the Atbash substitution cipher, which was a cipher which was used to encrypt Hebrew by mirroring the Hebrew alphabet. (20). Schonfield argued that using the Atbash substitution cipher, Baphomet can be translated to mean שופיא (šwpy‘, “Shofya’”), which he interpreted as the Greek word which stood for wisdom. As Reddit user u/michael1150 pointed out to me, “instead of being a simple mispronunciation of ‘Muhammed’, the word may have been deliberately crafted by means of the cipher, and since the word/name Sophia was used by some as a reference to the Wisdom of the Holy Spirit (and may I also add, the feminine tense of that term!) it could be that the implication was one of an inclusive wisdom,” and additionally that “Eliphas Levi may have specifically included visual symbology which was pointedly inclusive of not only the Divine Feminine, but also Higher Divine Wisdom that could be gained from sources usually rejected as associated with Darkness, Sin, and Evil, and as I myself have theorized, quite possibly a more than simple/casual connection to Abraxas, the Basilidean Gnostic Deity that was held as the Highest of the three hundred and sixty five levels of the Celestial / Heavenly Spheres of Basilidean Gnosticism” (21).

The Modern Baphomet We Know Today

In 1856 Éliphas Lévi published Dogme et ritual de la haute magie in which he depicted Baphomet. Lévi’s depiction of Baphomet has become the primary idea of what Baphomet looks like in the occult communities ever since it was originally published.

Lévi’s Baphomet has some unique features that had not yet been prevalent in previous depictions of the Templar’s Baphomet. Lévi’s Baphomet has unique features such as words carved in its arms, a torch on its head, and quite a few others. In a passage from his book, Lévi describes some of these unique features as such:

“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 occultism, 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 androgyne 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 androgyne arms of this sphinx of the occult sciences” (5).

It is also important to not that in Lévi’s depiction of Baphomet, it has words carved/tattooed into its arms; “solve” on the arm pointing up, and “coagula” on the arm pointing down. “Solve et coagula” is a symbolic phrase of Latin Alchemy which means “the breaking down of elements,” and “their coming together” (6)(7). The juxtaposition of these words together express “transmutation from base to a finer state, the perpetual goal of spiritual growth and human evolution” (7). Something that I find particularly interesting about their placement on Baphomet is that the word “Solve,” which is the breaking down or apart element of the phrase, is on the arm which is pointing up toward the white moon of Chesed — which is representative of Love or Heaven; while the placement of the word “Coagula,” which is the bringing together element of the phrase, is on the arm pointing down towards the black moon of Geburah, which is representative of Strength or Hell.

Lévi Baphomet was actually named “The Goat of Mendes,” which historians believe was a reference to Herodotus’ depiction of the god of Mendes (the Greek name for the ancient Egyptian city of Djedet) which had a goat’s face and legs (8).

A 1909 Rider-Waite Tarot card scanned by Holly Voley for the public domain, and retrieved from http://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot

Lévi’s Baphomet later became an important icon of Aleister Crowley’s religion, Thelema, and was included in Crowley’s Creed of the Gnostic Catholic Church which was recited during their Gnostic Mass (9). Lévi’s depiction of Baphomet has also been the inspiration for many depictions of Satan or demons in other mediums, such as Rider-Waite’s design on the Devil card in a Tarot card deck from the early 1900s. Waite stated “since 1856 the influence of Éliphas 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” (10).

Additionally, Baphomet was featured in the Dungeons and Dragons adventure module “the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth in 1982 as a demon lord as well as another D&D supplimental source book called Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss in 2006 (11).

Baphomet has also found its way into other popular culture, such as video games, music, and television/movies. A demon very similar to Baphomet was an enemy in the final level of Doom II: Hell On Earth, released in 1994 (12). A Wolfenstein mod released in 2011, called Tristana 3D, featured Baphomet as the antagonist of the game (13). In 2015, musician That Poppy released a song called Lowlife in which she can be seen in the beginning making the pose that baphomet is making in Levi’s depiction, and the video has other imagery of Satan and recognisable poses tied to religion or the occult (14). A staute of Baphomet was also featured in a 2018 Netflix series call Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (15).

The Satanic Temple’s Baphomet Monument. Image Courtesy of The Satanic Temple

In 2014, The Satanic Temple began construction of a Baphomet statue to donate to Oklahoma’s state capitol (16). They desired to donate the statue so that it may be placed beside a Ten Commandments state that had been erected on the capitol’s lawn in 2012 as a way to display America’s freedom of religion and to help the state of Oklahoma from looking like they unfairly support one religion over others. In an interview with Vice News, the Temple’s co-founer and spokesman Lucien Greaves stated that “the idea that the Ten Commandments are foundational to US or Oklahoman law is absurd and obscene… I would argue that the message behind our monument speaks more directly to the formation of US Constitutional values than the Ten Commandments possibly could. It especially does so when it stands directly beside the Ten Commandments, as it affirms no one religion enjoys legal preference” (17). It was also stated by the Satanic Temple that is the Ten Commandments statue was to be taken down, they would no longer have a desire to juxtapose their Baphomet statue there, since the point of wanting their statue placed was to show a dichotomy or religious, thus expressing religious pluralism and freedom in America. When the legislature at the Oklahoma State Capitol refused to accept the Baphomet statue, The Satanic Temple filed a lawsuit agains the State of Oklahoma, which led to a Oklahoma supreme court ruling on June 30, 2015 which said, “in a 7–2 ruling… the display violated a provision in the state constitution prohibiting use of state property to further religions” (18). As a result of the ruling, Oklahoma County Judge Thomas Prince ordered that the Ten Commandments statue to be removal by October 12, 2015. From then, the Baphomet statue traveled to Arkansas to fight once again to be placed on Governmenet property next to a Ten Commandments statue. From the most recent information I could find, it seems that they may still be waiting on a ruling by the Arkansas supreme court on a religious discrimination lawsuit.