Baphomet
The name Baphomet is relatively unknown; it’s origins as a deity, or a figure in history are altogether a mystery. It was first used in transcripts from the early 1300’s by the Knights Templar during the Inquisition. The Knights Templar were a an organization of the best military fighters during the Crusades, and endorsed heavily by the Roman Catholic Church. The organization lasted for around two hundreds years. Some theories about Baphomet suggest that it was a misinterpretation by the French, of the Islamic prophet’s name, Mahomet, or Muhammad. Later on, in the 19th century, the name became popularly linked with various conspiracy theories about the Masons being involved with the Knights Templar, as well as being heavily linked with a Sabbatic Goat drawn by a French magician, Eliphas Lévi.
Levi’s description of Baphomet is by all accounts, entirely inaccurate. Some of his theories relate to the Greek disdain for the gods of the Egyptians; the god Osiris’ soul was thought to reside inside of a ram, so the Egyptian people of Mendes, the Greek name for the city of Djedet, Egypt “worshipped” a ram. However, as Herodotus observed merely a heathen gathering of people worshipping a goat, and he recounted an event in which he viewed a woman publicly copulating with said goat in a ceremony. Naturally, to the primary Roman Catholic, this would appear as being a less than Christian practice, however, Osiris was the god of fertility, and ruler of the Underworld among the Egyptians. Said practice would be only a ritual of respect amongst those that held a mainly benevolent god, –that has been compared to Christ himself by scholars.
The image of Baphomet that Levi’s made so popular in modern culture doesn’t even match the image of Baphomet depicted in the texts of the Knights Templar. It instead matches gargoyle-like grotesque images of a figure seated on a globe, with the head and feet of a goat, female breasts, and a bat’s wings that sometimes appeared outside of or on the Templar churches. Levi also identified this image falsely with that of Herodotus’ “Goat of Mendes”. Levi combined the image of the Tarot of Marseilles on the Devil card, and re-imagined the Goat of Mendes, and slanderously referred to it as “copulator in Anep and inseminator in the district of Mendes”. The image was adopted as Aleister Crowley’s described depiction of Satan, and is heavily linked to the modern Church of Satan.