Sigil of Baphomet

The name Baphomet appears for the first time in October 1307, in the depositions of Knights Templar being interrogated by agents of Philip IV of France. The king had ordered the simultaneous arrest of every Templar in France on Friday the 13th of October, and his inquisitors had a prepared list of charges. Among them: that the knights worshiped a mysterious idol called Baphomet.

The confessions that followed were extracted under torture. The descriptions of the idol contradicted each other. Some Templars said it was a head with two faces. Others said three faces. Others described a skull, a cat, or a wooden figure. The inconsistency is what you would expect from men being asked leading questions under pain and giving whatever answers would make the pain stop.

The name without a meaning

Seven hundred years later, the etymology of Baphomet remains unsettled. The leading candidates are:

A corruption of Muhammad. Medieval Europeans sometimes rendered the prophet’s name as Mahomet, and French inquisitors may have accused the Templars of Muslim worship as part of the standard heresy package. The Templars had spent two centuries in the Levant, which made the accusation superficially plausible.

An Atbash cipher for Sophia. Hugh Schonfield proposed in 1984 that if you apply the Atbash cipher, a Hebrew letter-substitution system that replaces the first letter of the alphabet with the last, Baphomet decodes to Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom. The theory is elegant but rests on the assumption that whoever coined the name was working in Hebrew cryptography, which the Templar rank and file almost certainly were not.

A compound of Greek words. Baphe (immersion, absorption) and metis (knowledge, understanding) would produce something like “absorption of knowledge.” This reading fits the idea of an initiatory secret but has no direct textual support.

The honest position is that we do not know what the word means because the people who first used it were torturers writing down whatever their victims said.

Lévi’s goat

In 1856, Éliphas Lévi, the French occultist born Alphonse Louis Constant, published Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie with an illustration that changed the symbol’s career permanently. His drawing showed a winged humanoid with a goat’s head, seated on a globe. A torch burned between the horns. One hand pointed up, the other down. The right arm bore the word SOLVE, the left arm COAGULA. The figure had female breasts and a caduceus rising from the lap.

Lévi called it the Sabbatic Goat or the Baphomet of Mendes. He connected it to the Egyptian ram-god Banebdjedet of Mendes, though Banebdjedet was a ram, not a goat, and had no connection to European witchcraft. Lévi did not present Baphomet as a devil. He described it as a symbol of the totality of natural forces, the reconciliation of every opposition: male and female, human and animal, mercy and severity, the work of dissolution (solve) and the work of recombination (coagula).

The image was compelling enough to outlast the theology behind it. Lévi’s Baphomet became the single most reproduced image in the history of Western occultism.

The sigil

In 1966, Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco and placed an inverted pentagram containing a goat’s head at the center of his iconography. He enclosed the design in a double circle bearing the Hebrew letters Lamed, Vav, Yod, Tav, and Nun, spelling Leviathan, the biblical sea monster. He called it the Sigil of Baphomet.

LaVey drew from Lévi but stripped away the Frenchman’s philosophical nuance. The Sigil of Baphomet was confrontational by design, meant to provoke the exact reaction it received: alarm, fascination, and free publicity. The Satanic Bible, published in 1969, codified it as the emblem of a philosophy LaVey described as a religion of the flesh rather than the spirit.

The Church of Satan trademarked the Sigil of Baphomet in 1983. It is now the most widely recognized symbol of Satanism in popular culture, which has had the side effect of making the inverted pentagram inseparable from diabolism in the public imagination, despite the fact that inverted pentagrams appeared in Christian architecture centuries before Lévi or LaVey.

The symbol carries three distinct layers. At the bottom is a medieval heresy accusation that was probably fabricated. In the middle is a 19th-century French occultist’s attempt to represent the unity of opposites. On top is a 20th-century American showman’s deliberate provocation. Each layer tells you more about the person who applied it than about any actual tradition of worship.

Related reading

• Pentagram. The five-pointed star whose inversion Lévi turned into a symbol of the diabolical.
• Seal of Solomon. Another geometric symbol that the Templars’ enemies associated with forbidden knowledge.
• The Freemason Origin Myth. The lodge tradition that inherited Templar legends and Rosicrucian imagery.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Templar trial depositions (1307–1312, French royal archives) — first appearance of the name Baphomet
• Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1856) — the Sabbatic Goat illustration with the inscription SOLVE and COAGULA
• Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible (1969) — adoption of the Sigil of Baphomet as the Church of Satan emblem
• Hugh Schonfield, The Essene Odyssey (1984) — Atbash cipher theory for the etymology of Baphomet
• Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars (1978, 2nd ed. 2006) — standard historical treatment of the Templar proceedings