# Baphomet – Symbols and Symbolism



## My Freemasonry (Mar 23, 2015)

In this installment of Symbols & Symbolism, we look at a reading from Albert G. Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, on the infamously nefarious figure of Baphomet – the alleged false idol of the knights Templar and one of the key instruments of their undoing by Pope Clement.

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Pope Clement V


The imaginary idol, or, rather, symbol which the Knights Templars were accused of employing in their mystic rights. The forty-second of the charges preferred against them by Pope Clement is in these words:

Item quod ipsi per singulas provincias habeant idola: videlicet capita quorum aliqua habebant tres facies, et alia unum: et aliqua cranium humanum habebant.

Also, that in all of the provinces they have idols,namely, heads, of which some had three faces, some one, and some had a human skull.

Von Hammer, a bitter enemy of the Templars, in his book entitled _The Mystery of Baphomet Revealed_, revived this old accusation, and attached to the Baphomet an impious signification. He derived the name from the Greek words, _Baph (_βάπτισμα) – _baptism_, and μhtis (σοφία) – wisdom, and thence supposed that it represented the admission of the initiated into the secret mysteries of the Order. From this gratuitous assumption he deduces his theory, set forth even m the very title of his work, that the Templars were convicted, by their own monuments, of being guilty as Gnostics and Ophites of apostasy, idolatry, and impurity. Of this statement he offers no other historical testimony than the Articles of Accusation, themselves devoid of proof, but through which the Templars were made the victims of the jealousy of the Pope and the avarice of the King of France.





Baphomet as imagines in the Taxil Hoax


Others again have thought that they could find in Baphomet a corruption of _Mahomet_ (Mohammed), and hence they have asserted that the Templars had been perverted from their religious faith by the Saracens, with whom they had so much intercourse, sometimes as foes and sometimes as friends. Nicolai, who wrote an _Essay on the Accusations brought against the Templars_, published at Berlin, in 1782, supposes, but doubtingly, that the figure of the Baphomet, _figura Baffometi_, which was depicted on a bust representing the Creator, was nothing else but the Pythagorean pentagon, the symbol of health and prosperity, borrowed by the Templars from the Gnostics, who in turn had obtained it from the School of Pythagoras.

King, in his learned work on the Gnostics, thinks that the Baphomet may have been a symbol of the Manicheans, with whose wide spreading heresy in the Middle Ages he does not doubt that a large portion of the inquiring spirits of the Temple had been intoxicated.

Amid these conflicting views, all merely speculative, it will not be uncharitable or unreasonable to suggest that the Baphomet, or skull of the ancient Templars, was, like the relic of their modern Masonic representatives, simply an impressive symbol teaching the lesson of mortality, and that the latter has really been derived from the former.






 







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## Roy_ (Mar 25, 2015)

> In this context it may not be unimportant to point to the fact that the Knights Templar worshipped a mysterious God called _Baphomet_, who was depicted in the form of a devil. When the master of the order kissed the stature, he yelled: _I alla_. Things get even weirder when they are accused of burning their own children in offering to that God. I cannot get rid of the idea – even though we get on thin ice here – that this mysterious _Bafomet_ is something more than just a devil. Let us not forget that the Knights Templar knew a ‘baptism by fire’, an initiative baptism specific to secret societies. The literal translation of _Bafei meitós_ – contracted into Baphomet – is ‘_baptism of wisdom_‘. The devilish appearance of Baphomet reminds us of Lucifer, the fallen angel, literary ‘_firecarrier_‘, and in the Middle Ages there was an obvious luciferian trend under specific societies: meaning, groups that were convinced that they, as the tenth host of angels, lived here on earth, protecting the Divine fire that Lucifer carried with him during his fall.


Koenraad Logghe in _*De Graal*_ p. 229. My translation from Dutch. I think I just found his source


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