Baphomet

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

Baphomet: the idol the Templars were accused of worshipping in the 1307 trials — under torture, descriptions varied wildly (a head, a cat, a bearded face). No idol was ever produced. In 1856 Éliphas Lévi drew his goat-headed 'Baphomet of Mendes' as a symbol of equilibrium, and that image — Lévi's, not the Templars' — became the face of occult conspiracy, adopted by the Church of Satan and stamped on a century of panic. Documented: trial records, Lévi's engraving, and the gap between them that lore refuses to see.