Baphomet
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Baphometis an imagined pagan deity (i.e., a product of Christian folklore concerning pagans), revived in the 19th century as a figure of Satanism. It first appeared in a late 12th-century Provençal poem as a corruption of "Muhammad", but later it appeared as a term for a pagan idol in trial transcripts of the Inquisition of the Knights Templar in the early 14th century. In the 19th century the name came into popular English-speaking consciousness with the publication of various works of pseudo-history that tried to link the Knights Templar with conspiracy theories elaborating on their suppression. The name Baphomet then became associated with a "Sabbatic Goat" image drawn by Eliphas Lévi.
Eliphas Levi
In the 19th century, the name of Baphomet became associated with the occult. In 1854, Eliphas Levi published Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie ("Dogmas and Rituals of High Magic"), 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 (illustration, top). This image has become the best-known representation of Baphomet.
Levi's depiction is similar to that of the Devil in early tarot cards, but it may also have been partly inspired by grotesque carvings on the Templar churches of Lanleff in Brittany and St. Merri in Paris, which depict squatting bearded men with bat wings, female breasts, horns and the shaggy hindquarters of a beast.
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: Template:Quote
Levi called his image "The Goat of Mendes", presumably following Herodotus' account that the god of Mendes — the Greek name for Djedet, Egypt — 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. However the deity that was venerated at Egyptian Mendes was actually a ram deity Banebdjed (literally Ba of the lord of djed, and titled "the Lord of Mendes"), who was the soul of Osiris. Levi combined the images of the Tarot of Marseilles Devil card and refigured the ram Banebdjed as a he-goat, further imagined by him as "copulator in Anep and inseminator in the district of Mendes".
Egyptian connections aside, Lévi's depiction, for all its modern fame, does not match the historical descriptions from the Templar trials, although it is akin to some grotesques found on Templar churches, or, more specifically, to Viollet-le-Duc's vivid gargoyles that were added to Notre Dame de Paris about the same time as Lévi's illustration.
Levi's now-familiar image of a "Sabbatic Goat" shows parallels with works by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, who more than once painted a "Witch's Sabbath"; in the version ca 1821-23, El gran cabrón now at the Prado, a group of seated women offer their dead infant children to a seated goat.
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