Baphomet and the Templars

During the Great Purge in Russia in the 1930s NKVD, the Russian secret police, recreated Leon Trotsky as a great Satan at the head of fascist-rightist conspiracy to kill Stalin and his party comrades and thus bring down the Soviet Union. Having conjured up this unlikely demon they then forced those destined to be processed in the public show trails to admit that it was all true. No evidence was required, just beatings and all the subtle tortures, psychological and otherwise, in which they specialised.

There are historical precedents that they might have drawn on for their modern demonology. In the early fourteenth century, on the urging of King Philip IV of France, the Knights Templar, a Crusading order, was suppressed on an accusation of heresy. Philip wanted to get his hands on the order's wealth but simple dissolution was not enough, no, the knights had to stand accused of the most elaborate of crimes. And one of the crimes they stood accused of was worshiping an idol by the name of Baphomet.

There are no independent accounts of the existence of this devil-like creature beyond the records of the Templar interrogations and an earlier twelfth century poem. Twelve of over two hundred knights examined admitted to his existence. It's as well to remember that the confessions, like those obtained in Russia by the NKVD, were the result of systematic torture. Baphomet, in other words, may very well just have been the invention of a particularly imaginative Inquisitor, whose existence was confirmed by those anxious to avoid any further pain. The thing is we just can't be sure. After all, the elaborate schemes woven around the head of Trotsky in Russia did not take away from the fact that he was indeed an enemy of Stalin, constantly critical of contemporary Soviet policy.

But who, or what, is Baphomet, and why was Satan not sufficient, a figure who appeared repeatedly in the trials of alleged witches? The records are confused and contradictory. He was worshipped in the form of a head, either as a skull, a head with a beard, or a head with two or three faces. He was a black cat, an obvious witchcraft familiar. He had a goat's head and horns and a body combining the features of a dog, a donkey and a bull.

It would seem to be an amalgam of Pagan deities and Christian monsters. The name itself would seem to suggest Mahomet, an archaic and corrupt spelling of the name of the Prophet Muhammad. After all the Templars had close dealings through history -and not always hostile - with the Muslim communities of the Middle East. But if it is it is based on the deepest ignorance; for Muslims abhorred idolatry, and there is nothing in Islamic tradition that resembled anything like the forms of worship of which the Templars were accused. Those who take the view that Baphomet represents an attempt to syncretise Islam and Christianity simply ignore the fact that the Templars were never accused of dabbling in Islam in any form. No, they were, like witches, Christian heretics.

So, while it seems unlikely, the possibility remains that the Templars were engaged in the worship of some form of the horned god, either in the form of the Christian devil or in an older pre-Christian guise, and here Pan comes to mind. Personally I see this as a crude device by long-dead interrogators, but even so Baphomet has had a long afterlife.

In 1854 Eliphas Levi, a French occultist, published Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Dogmas and Rituals of High Magic) in which an image of Baphomet appeared, drawn by himself. It was clearly an imaginative effort, because it bears little resemblance to the Templar testimony. It's an odd kind of amalgam, one whose sex is even indeterminate. Although he makes no such admission himself, Levi may have drawn on the grotesques depicted in the Templar churches of Lanleff in Brittany and Saint Merri in Paris, which show a bearded man with bat wings, female breasts, horns and goat-like hindquarters. Levi explained the significance of the figure, which appears on the front cover of his book, thus;

The goat on the frontispiece carries the sign of the pentagram on the forehead, with one point at the top, a symbol of light, his two hands forming the sign of hermetism, the one pointing up to the white moon of Chesed, the other pointing down to the black one of Geburah. This sign expresses the perfect harmony of mercy with justice. His one arm is female, the other male like the ones of the androgyn of Khunrath, the attributes of which we had to unite with those of our goat because he is one and the same symbol. The flame of intelligence shining between his horns is the magic light of the universal balance, the image of the soul elevated above matter, as the flame, whilst being tied to matter, shines above it. The beast's head expresses the horror of the sinner, whose materially acting, solely responsible part has to bear the punishment exclusively; because the soul is insensitive according to its nature and can only suffer when it materializes. The rod standing instead of genitals symbolizes eternal life, the body covered with scales the water, the semi-circle above it the atmosphere, the feathers following above the volatile. Humanity is represented by the two breasts and the androgyn arms of this sphinx of the occult sciences.

He was to call his creation the Goat of Mendes, another derivative, drawing on Herodotus’ description of the ram-deity worshipped in the Egyptian town of Dejedet. And by this route Baphomet made it into modern occult practices, a central figure in the cosmology of Thelema, devised by Aleister Crowley, a great magus or a great fraud, I leave it to you to choose which. Nosce te Ipsum :-)

Dark Light

At the beginning of time, according to Jewish tradition, some angels visited Earth, there falling in love with mortal women. In consequence they taught their lovers all sorts of magical arts, revealing all sorts of divine secrets. God, in his anger, banished them from heaven. These rebel spirits, homeless and bitter, turned malevolent, associating themselves with witchcraft and the blacker arts. Now they were to be described in some sources as demons. These dangerous spirits included Azazel, Samael, and one described as the Son of the Morning Star. He is better known as Lucifer.

The Fallen Angels, Lucifer included, entered into Christian tradition, where the story continued to evolve, taking on new forms. In Jewish tradition they were sinners, punished for their transgression against divine law in much the same way that Prometheus was punished in Greek tradition. But the Christians added a new twist: Lucifer and his party were expelled from Heaven because of their pride, because they believed that they were at least equal or even superior to God. They were, in other words, the first rebels.

Cast into Hell the rebels brooded and plotted revenge. Because of their associations with women, because many of the demons were believed to have human mothers, medieval witch hunters, including the notorious Heinrich Kramer, author of the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammerer of the Witches), believed that women in general were more susceptible to devilish temptations than men, especially those of Lucifer, by this time more commonly referred to as the Devil, the horned God, who seems to be an amalgam of the Greek Pan and the Jewish Bringer of Light. Here again we are seeing a corruption of earlier tradition; for beauty has become ugly and light has become dark.

By the earliest accounts the Light Bringer was depicted as beautiful, not ugly and certainly not horned. The early Christians make no distinction between him and the other angels, except that he is always portrayed as falling. But by the fourth century AD Lucifer began to emerge as the Adversary, drawing on another Biblical concept, that of Ha-Satan, who acts in Jewish tradition as a kind of prosecutor in the underworld, judging the souls of the dead, a fearful figure, yes, but still relatively neutral. The Christians transformed him into a monster, in part a weapon in their ongoing struggle with the remnants of pagan worship, where the horned god was a benevolent, life-enhancing spirit.

There is no description of Lucifer or Satan in the New Testament. He was simply given the attributes of the pagan nature god by the Church, suitably demonised along with the earth worship that the old traditions entailed. Nature itself, the realm of the Horned One, was distanced as something wild and dangerous. There was an implicit dualism here: all spiritual entities were either on the side of good or of evil, on the side of God or of Lucifer.

It was during the time of Pope Gregory the Great in the seventh century that Lucifer took on his final form, that of a hunchbacked, goat-skinned man with cloven-hooves, horns and an evil stench. He was also said to carry a stick. either used to punish people or because he was lame, a disability he received when he was cast out of Heaven.

There is the most wonderful process of confusion and syncretism in this. For the Church, Satan - he and Lucifer are now interchangeable -, the limping devil, is clearly linked to various pagan deities and heroes, including Hephasteus, the god of the smiths (Satan is often said to have the skills of a blacksmith), Dionysus, Oedipus, Achilles and Hermes with his one sandal and his shepherd’s crook.

I think it accurate to say that Lucifer or Satan or the Devil is the greatest of the Christian scapegoats, a necessary evil, if you will, a weapon with which to attack pagans and non-believers, an excuse for every misfortune. It is here that Christianity can and does fall into forms of Manichean dualism, a world perceived as a struggle between light and dark, though paradoxically dualism itself was condemned, like witchcraft, as a heresy. But Lucifer, the greatest of the rebels, travelled on his path, finally achieving a kind of resurrection, a heroic transcendence, in Milton's Paradise Lost.

Satan in the Vatican

Last year I read Satan: a Biography by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, a nice little trot through the old devil’s life and times. In a subsequent review I concluded as follows;

By the nineteenth century the great division had set in between ‘reason’ and ‘superstition’, casting Satan into the uncertain realms between disbelief and sensationalism. But Satan is always with us, a personification not of the beastly but the all too human; a personification of the darker side of humanity. If the eighteenth century was the age of reason then the twentieth century surely became the age of Satan. Is he a symbol or is he a living presence? Well, I leave you to make up your own mind.

Well, now the Vatican has; not only is he a living presence but he’s living in the Vatican! At least he is according to Father Gabriele Amorth, who is Rome's chief exorcist.

Now there is another surprise; I did not know that Rome had a chief exorcist, or any exorcist, for that matter. The surprises just keep coming: apparently the Church obliges every diocese across the world to keep an official exorcist, a practice established in the Middle Ages, though some of them are remarkably coy about the office, even denying it exists, according to a report I read in the Daily Telegraph recently. Considering the number of diocese involved there must be an awful lot of priests doing little other than staring into vacant devilish space, but of course I'm not allowing for the possibility that some figure in holy orders has this function tucked away among his general remit, and has either forgotten about or is too embarrassed to admit that he carries responsibility for this rather discredited ministry.

Not so Father Gabriele, who, cobwebs dusted off, has emerged into the light from some dusty recess in the Vatican to promote his book, one with the rather upbeat and distinctly modern title of Memoirs of an Exorcist. I rather get the impression that the good priest has his eye on the main chance, hoping to stimulate sales still further by telling La Republica that the Devil is lodging in the Vatican. He clearly does not mean that the evil one lives in the Vatican alone; for he goes on to demonstrate his presence in the actions of paedophile priests, amongst other things, and as we know from America, from Italy, from Ireland, from the Netherlands and now from Pope's own German homeland, these people are everywhere. It is this particular scandal, I think, that takes us right to the heart of the matter. For, you see, this evil, the evil over which the Church remained silent for so long, the evil it never exorcised, is not its fault, not the fault of over-sexed, depraved and celibate priests; no, it's all down to Old Nick.

Nick was everywhere in the Middle Ages; one simply could not get away from him; in mystery plays, in paintings, in mass possessions, in witch trails, in the hysterical heresy hunts of the Inquisition. He was most often to be found in times of crisis, in times of uncertainty over the status of the faith. But then came the Age of Reason and the Devil started to become a bit of a joke. No longer. He's back; he's back in the depraved vestments of paedophile and sadistic priests, friars, bishops and nuns; he's back in a new time of crisis. I suspect if the old fashionable silence had been maintained over sexual abuse we would never have heard of Father Gabriele and his sensationalist book.

The Devil is such a convenient scapegoat, is he not, absolving individuals and institutions from responsibility and moral culpability. It wasn't me, the cry goes up, it was the Devil; he told me to do it, he told us to keep silent about those who were doing it. Paedophile priests are not a sign of moral decay in the Church; no; they are a sign of the Devil's work. The problem has been objectified and externalised; the goat banished into the wilderness; a wrong sublimated under Medieval obfuscation. Still, I think it only right that Nick is entitled to a share of Father Exorcist's no doubt lucrative royalties.

The Age of Satan

I’ve not long finished Satan: a Biography by P G. Maxwell-Stuart, an expert on the history of witchcraft and magic in Europe. It’s a stimulating account, sober and scholarly rather than sensationalist, which explores perceptions of the devil in Europe and beyond, from the earliest times right up to the present day; from religious fears to cultish hysteria.

It’s also, I suppose, an exploration of the function of the great adversary, the purpose he has served through the ages; from seducer of Eve to the friend and comforter of witches. The remarkable thing is the range of identities he could and did assume, not always that of the grotesque and frightening but the beautiful and the seductive. I never really understood why Satan would ever want to come in the form of the beast if his mission was to entice people to take his particular path, rather than the path of God. :-)

Arguably the most enticing part of this book is the way in which Maxwell-Stuart takes confessions of satanic pacts, which one naturally assumes to have been forced, usually by torture or the threat of torture, and tales of demonic possession, at face value, as evidence of a ‘genuine’ experience, evidence which he tests and explores. Dreams, the effects of drug-taking and even real life encounters are all given serious scholarly attention. The important thing here is that the author avoids the usual condescending view of the past. For the most part his account proceeds through the ‘age of faith’, when the supernatural, the experience of the supernatural, was a reality accepted by all sections of society, from scholar to scullery maid.

By the nineteenth century the great division had set in between ‘reason’ and ‘superstition’, casting Satan into the uncertain realms between disbelief and sensationalism. But Satan is always with us, a personification not of the beastly but the all too human; a personification of the darker side of humanity. If the eighteenth century was the age of reason then the twentieth century surely became the age of Satan. Is he a symbol or is he a living presence? Well, I leave you to make up your own mind. :-)

The Demon is always moving about at my side;
He floats about me like an impalpable air;
I swallow him, I feel him burn my lungs
And fill them with an eternal, sinful desire.

Sometimes, knowing my deep love for Art, he assumes
The form of a most seductive woman,
And, with pretexts specious and hypocritical,
Accustoms my lips to infamous philtres.

He leads me thus, far from the sight of God,
Panting and broken with fatigue, into the midst
Of the plains of Ennui, endless and deserted,

And thrusts before my eyes full of bewilderment,
Dirty filthy garments and open, gaping wounds,
And all the bloody instruments of Destruction!