Baphomet

The idol the Templars confessed to under torture, drawn six centuries later by a French magician.

You have seen the image, even if you did not know its name. A seated figure with the body of a human, the head and horns of a goat, wings, a torch flaming between the horns, one hand raised, one lowered. It is on album covers and tattoos and internet arguments. Most people think it is ancient. Most people think it is a devil. Almost everything most people think about Baphomet is younger than the camera. This is the story of how an accusation became an icon. Start with the documented history. On Friday the 13th of October 1307, King Philip IV of France had the Knights Templar, the fabulously wealthy warrior-monks of the Crusades, arrested en masse. Under torture, some Templars confessed to a list of shocking charges: spitting on the cross, obscene kisses, and worshipping an idol. In the surviving trial records that idol is sometimes called 'Baphomet,' a word most scholars read as a garbled Old French corruption of 'Mahomet,' that is, Muhammad, reflecting crusader confusion about Islam. Descriptions of it were wildly inconsistent, a head, a cat, a bearded figure, exactly what you would expect from confessions extracted by torture to fit a prosecutor's script. The Order was dissolved and its last grand master, Jacques de Molay, was burned in 1314. That is the real trail: a name in a coerced accusation, nothing more. So here's where it gets strange. For five centuries Baphomet is a footnote, an obscure word from a medieval scandal. Then, in 1854 and 1856, a French former deacon turned occultist named Éliphas Lévi published 'Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie,' and drew a picture. He called it the 'Sabbatic Goat,' the 'Baphomet of Mendes,' a winged, goat-headed hermaphrodite figure he built out of tarot, alchemy, and his own elaborate symbolism, meant to represent the balance of opposites, not literal devil worship. That single illustration is the Baphomet everyone pictures today. Lévi invented the look. He did not recover it from the Templars. From there the image traveled. It seeped into later occultism, into the imagination of Aleister crowley, who used the name Baphomet as a magical motto, into 20th-century ceremonial magic and, eventually, into pop culture and modern Satanism as a deliberate symbol of dissent. Each step added meaning the Templars never gave it. So hold the two threads apart, because the truth lives in the gap between them. The DOCUMENTED history is a mysterious word in the 1307 charges against the templars, of uncertain meaning, most likely a slur against Islam, attached to no reliable image at all. The LEGEND, the goat-headed god everyone knows, is a work of 19th-century art by one imaginative Frenchman. There is no verified evidence the Templars worshipped any such being. Which is why on this map Baphomet is a bridge. One road runs back to the templars, the accusation that gave it a name. The other runs forward to crowley, the occultist who gave the name new life. Baphomet is the place where a torture-room rumor became a modern icon.