BAPHOMET

Baphomet is an idol or image of uncertain provenance. The name can be traced back to medieval times, where it appeared in trial transcripts during the Inquisition of the Knights Templar. It came to popular consciousness in the nineteenth century, when it was applied to pseudo-historical conspiracy theories elaborating on the suppression of the Templars, and it became associated with a "Sabbatic Goat" image drawn by Eliphas Lévi.
HISTORY: The name Baphomet traces back to the end of the Crusades, when the medieval order of the Knights Templar was suppressed by King Philip IV of France. On October 13, 1307, King 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 said to have been worshipping. The description of the object changed from confession to confession, being described as either a severed head, a cat, or a head with three faces. The charge was notable because it was different from usual forced confessions. Over 100 different charges had been leveled against the Templars, most of them clearly false, as they were the same charges that were leveled against other 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 charges about the worship of an idol named Baphomet, were unique to the Inquisition of the Templars. Malcolm Barber, in his 1994 The New Knighthood, believes that the name of Baphomet in the trial depositions was an Old French corruption of the name Mohammed. The interpretation was that some of the Templars, through their long occupation of the Outremer, had begun incorporating Islamic ideas into their belief system.
Aleister Crowley's further fanciful connections linked the ram-god of Mendes with the syncretic Ptolemaic-Roman Harpocrates, a version elaborated upon the child-form of the Egyptian god Horus. Harpocrates was a granter of fertility, but he was not associated with debauch or lust and, most important, in animal-form, he was a ram, not a buck goat. The Baphomet of Lévi was to become an important figure within the cosmology of Thelema, the mystical system established by Crowley in the early twentieth century. Crowley identified Baphomet with Harpocrates and also with what he called the Lion-Serpent. Crowley agreed that Baphomet was a divine androgyne, while also being bi-sexual (as Crowley was) and "the hieroglyph of arcane perfection". In The Law is for All Crowley identifies the Lion-Serpent with one's "Secret Self", which he also called the Holy Guardian Angel. In Magick, Crowley writes, "The devil is this serpent, Satan. He is life and love. He is light, and his zodiacal image is Capricornus, the 'leaping goat,' 'the god head.'" 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. Cover of Léo Taxil, Les Mystères de la franc-maçonnerie dévoilés, adapts Lévi's invention Cover of Léo Taxil, Les Mystères de la franc-maçonnerie dévoilés, adapts Lévi's invention. But Crowley saw Baphomet as more than the Union of Opposites—-he is also the Lust that leads to such Union. Baphomet is depicted in Crowley's Thoth Tarot deck, in the card "Devil" (Atu XV). Here, he is identified with the Greek god Pan, the All-Begetter. He is "creative energy in its most material form [...], the goat leaping with lust upon the summits of earth [...], the divine madness of spring". Crowley, who was known as "The Beast," also identified himself with Baphomet. In The Equinox of the Gods he describes another card from the Tarot, this time "Lust" (Atu XI), "It shows the Scarlet Woman, BABALON, riding (or conjoined with) me The Beast ; and this card is my special card, for I am Baphomet, 'the Lion and the Serpent,' and 666, the 'full number' of the Sun". It is perhaps for this reason that Crowley assumed the magical name of Baphomet when he was risen to the X° within Ordo Templi Orientis.
Etymology of "Baphomet" - Different theories exist as to the origin of the term, including:
* A deformation of the Latinised "Mahomet", a medieval Latin or Old French rendering of Muhammad (????), the name of the prophet of Islam.
* Idries Shah proposed that "Baphomet" may actually derive from the Arabic word ??? ???? Abufihamat, meaning "The Father of Understanding".[16] "Probably relying on contemporary Eastern sources, Western scholars have recently concluded that 'Bafomet' has no connection with Mohammed (????), but could well be a corruption of the Arabic "Abufihamat" (pronounced in the Moorish Spanish similar to bufihamat). The word means 'father of understanding'. In Arabic, 'father' is taken to mean 'source, chief seat of,' and so on."
* Lévi proposed that the name was composed from a series of abbreviations: 'Temp. ohp. Ab.' which originates from Latin 'Templi omnium hominum pacis abhas,' meaning "the father of universal peace among men." An alternative reading could be tem. o. h. p. ab. for templi omnium hominum pacis abbas. The translation in this case is abbot of the temple of peace of all mankind, perhaps referring to the Templars themselves.
* Emile Littré (1801-1881) in Dictionnaire de la langue francaise asserted that this 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.
* Atbash cipher for Sophia. Dr Hugh J. Schonfield,[18] one of the scholars who worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls, argued in his book 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 becomes ?????; interpreted using Atbash, it becomes ?????, which can be interpreted as the Greek word "Sophia", or wisdom. This fact is an important part of the plot of Dan Brown's bestselling 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code.
* The Rev. Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers (1880-1948), compiler of The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926) and The Geography of Wichcraft (1927) was able to form Baphomet from the Greek words 'baphe and 'Metis'. The two words together would mean "Baptism of Wisdom".
* Satanists from the Church of Satan, founded by Anton LaVey in 1966, usually claim that Baphomet is the name of their identifying sigil, a point-down pentagram enclosing a goat's head, surrounded by five Hebrew letters spelling out LVYThN (?????, "Leviathan").
* Edward Alexander "Aleister" Crowley, deployed the name not only as his title within the O.T.O. but also incorporated the tradition of Templar symbolism within that of the Gnostic Catholic Church.
...Yin and Yang, a tiger and a dragon...
...When the dragons and the tigers will work together, the gates' heaven will be opened for the world...
...I AM...
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