Baphomet

Lévi’s Baphomet, reproduced in A. E. Waite’s 1896 translation, printed p. 174.

Lévi’s Baphomet, reproduced in A. E. Waite’s 1896 translation, printed p. 174. Source and original. Public domain.

Baphomet is a name with several distinct histories: a term in medieval accusations against the Knights Templar; the title attached to Éliphas Lévi’s nineteenth-century image of a winged, goat-headed figure; a name adopted by Aleister Crowley in the O.T.O.; and a divine name in the creed of the Gnostic Mass. These uses overlap through deliberate borrowing, but they do not establish an unchanged doctrine transmitted from the medieval Templars to Thelema.

For Thelemic study, the most useful starting points are Crowley’s actual uses of the name and the particular symbolic traditions he reworked. Baphomet can designate an author’s initiatory identity, a figure in a liturgical confession, or an image discussed in relation to the Tarot. The surrounding text determines which meaning is intended.

The medieval name and the Templar accusations

The Templar proceedings contain accusations of idol worship, including references in some southern French testimony to a figure called “baffomet.” The evidence is inconsistent: descriptions vary, witnesses are few, and the interrogations followed questions already shaped by allegations of heresy. No securely identified Templar idol was recovered. These records document accusations and coerced investigations, not a reliable description of a secret religion.10)

The medieval word is associated with a Provençal form of the name Muhammad. Its use for an alleged idol belongs to Christian polemical representations of Islam; it does not describe Islamic worship. Later occult explanations of the name therefore need to be distinguished from its medieval linguistic setting. The familiar goat-headed drawing belongs to a much later period, and should not be used as an illustration of what the trial witnesses actually saw.

Lévi’s composite figure

Lévi’s Dogme et rituel de la haute magie gave Baphomet its best-known full-body form. The illustration reproduced here comes from A. E. Waite’s 1896 English translation, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual. In the second part, chapter XV, Lévi explains the figure as a constructed hieroglyph combining opposites and several orders of natural and spiritual symbolism. His proposed connections with ancient mysteries and the Templars are part of his occult interpretation, not independent historical verification.11)

The figure joins a goat’s head and cloven lower limbs to a human torso, breasts and arms. Wings and a flame rising between the horns introduce further levels of imagery. One hand points upwards and the other downwards. The words Solve and Coagula on the arms invoke the alchemical operations of dissolution and combination. This is an emblem whose parts are meant to be read together, rather than a naturalistic portrait of a single animal or deity.

Feature Lévi’s explanation or the visible design
Upright pentagram on the forehead The ordered or luminous principle of intelligence. The star is not the inverted pentagram enclosing a goat’s head in some later emblems.
Flame between the horns Intelligence or the soul rising above matter, while retaining a relationship to it comparable to flame and fuel.
Upward and downward gestures A balance expressed through the white moon of Chesed and the black moon of Geburah: mercy and severity.
Caduceus in the lower torso A sign of life substituted for the sexual organ.
Scales, feathers and surrounding forms A combination of watery, airy and volatile qualities.
Human breasts and arms Humanity included within the composite figure.

Lévi’s explanation retains a moral vocabulary of harmony, disorder, responsibility and purification. Reading the picture only as a general celebration of “balance” loses this argumentative setting. Equally, identifying the whole drawing with an independent evil power misses his explicit rejection of a personal Satan conceived as a rival supernatural sovereignty. The image is provocative because it gathers apparently incompatible features into one intelligible figure; its explanatory text is essential to understanding what Lévi intended.

Crowley’s O.T.O. name

Crowley used Baphomet as his O.T.O. name. The order’s published history identifies him as Baphomet X° and records Theodor Reuss’s charter of 21 April 1912 appointing him National Grand Master General for Great Britain and Ireland. The appointment included authority over the English-language rite called Mysteria Mystica Maxima.12)

Consequently, a signature or photograph labelled “Baphomet X°” may refer to Crowley in an organisational capacity. It should not automatically be read as a claim that he physically embodied Lévi’s drawing. A magical name can express a chosen symbolic identity while also functioning quite practically in correspondence, publications and the documentation of an office.

Baphomet in the Gnostic Mass

In Liber XV, the Gnostic Mass, Baphomet appears in the creed spoken by the congregation during the Introit. The sequence first names Chaos and Babalon, then professes belief in the mystery associated with the Serpent and the Lion, under the name Baphomet. It continues with the Gnostic and Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the Mass, baptism and individual life.13)

This placement matters. Baphomet is part of a sustained liturgical account of divine reality, generation and sacramental participation. The creed does not give a prose commentary on every feature of Lévi’s illustration, and its named animal pair is the serpent and lion. A discussion of the Mass should therefore begin with this wording and its neighbours in the creed, rather than importing the entire iconographic explanation of the winged goat.

The contrast also shows how a symbol changes when it enters a ritual. In Lévi, the reader examines an image and follows its interpretation. In the Mass, a congregation speaks a confession within a sequence of ceremonial actions. The name participates in worship and collective speech, not simply in the classification of an illustration. Interpretations of the serpent and lion should be identified as interpretations of this particular formula.

The precise sentence is short enough to keep its entire construction in view:

And I believe in the Serpent and the Lion, Mystery of Mystery, in his name BAPHOMET.

— Aleister Crowley, Liber XV: The Gnostic Mass.14)

One profession of belief brings two animal images under one name. The phrase “Mystery of Mystery” repeats language used in the surrounding declarations, making Baphomet part of the creed’s continuous sequence. The sentence supplies no independent narrative about the medieval Templars. Its theological work is performed by the combination of images, the naming and the congregation’s act of assent.

The Devil in The Book of Thoth

Crowley discusses Baphomet and Lévi in his account of trump XV, The Devil, in The Book of Thoth. He assigns the card to Ayin and Capricorn and interprets it through creative energy in material form, with Pan as an important reference. This provides a specific setting for the goat imagery: the card’s astrological and Qabalistic relationships form part of the argument.15)

The chapter is an example of Crowley reinterpreting inherited occult material. It is not evidence that all historical images called “the Devil,” every use of the name Baphomet, and the creed of the Mass have one interchangeable meaning. Comparing the sources is productive precisely because they place related imagery in different structures: a composite hieroglyph, a Tarot system and a liturgical formula.

After discussing Lévi and Baphomet, Crowley specifies the generative emphasis of his own card:

The card represents Pan Pangenetor, the All-Begetter.

— Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth.16)

The surrounding description develops this through the goat, the Tree and its rising sap. It also places Death, Art and the Devil in relation as paths associated with the manifestation of form. Pan therefore enters a connected account of production and transformation. This provides a more precise account of the card’s purpose than a generic identification of goat imagery with evil, while leaving Crowley’s historical assertions about the Templars open to separate scrutiny.

Later emblems and visual distinctions

The Sigil of Baphomet used by the Church of Satan is a different design: a goat’s head enclosed in an inverted pentagram, with surrounding lettering. The organisation’s own history traces the graphic through earlier printed sources and its later adoption. It is visually distinct from Lévi’s seated, winged, full-body figure with an upright star on its forehead.17)

Captions should identify the particular image and its source. “Baphomet” alone does not tell the reader whether an illustration represents Lévi’s design, a later institutional emblem, a Tarot interpretation or Crowley’s adopted name. Maintaining those distinctions makes the history clearer while allowing the relationships among these uses to be studied.

Baphomet in a comparison of bodily signs

In Liber V vel Reguli, Baphomet also appears in a comparison used to explain Mulier. Crowley groups the name with Isis in Welcome and the Microcosm of Vitruvius, then refers to Book 4, Part II. This is a use of the name within a ritual description, alongside the other uses discussed above.18)

The corresponding Book 4 chapter illustrates a human microcosm as a possible altar-top design. That illustration is reproduced here to identify the comparison’s visual setting. Its caption does not call it Baphomet, and its bodily position differs in detail from Reguli’s written description. It should therefore be kept distinct from Lévi’s goat-headed figure and from a modern institutional sigil.

The human microcosm in Book 4, Part II (1913), printed as an altar-top design. Shown here in connection with Reguli’s comparison of Mulier, Baphomet and the microcosm.

The human microcosm in Book 4, Part II (1913), printed as an altar-top design. Shown here in connection with Reguli’s comparison of Mulier, Baphomet and the microcosm. Source facsimile: Keep Silence. Public domain: original published by 1913. Click the image to enlarge.

Video: Baphomet’s history and imagery

This Blazing Star O.T.O. presentation examines the history and iconography of Baphomet and considers magical and philosophical interpretations of the figure. It complements the article's separation of medieval accusations, Lévi's image and Crowley's later uses of the name. The programme's proposed implications are interpretations to compare with those historical layers, rather than evidence that all uses have one unchanged meaning.

From Gold Forge Steel: Exploring Baphomet

From Gold Forge Steel: Exploring Baphomet — Blazing Star O.T.O.; 46:44. Watch on YouTube.

Related articles

See Gnostic Mass, Babalon, The Book of Thoth and Ordo Templi Orientis.

10)
Anke Napp, “Baphomet,” Templerlexikon, Research Center for Comparative History of Religious Orders, TU Dresden.
11)
Éliphas Lévi, trans. A. E. Waite, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual (1896), “The Sabbath of the Sorcerers,” pp. 288–291; illustration at printed p. 174.
12)
Sabazius X° and AMT IX°, History of O.T.O., “O.T.O. Under Reuss and Crowley.”
13)
Liber XV: The Gnostic Mass, section III, “Of the Ceremony of the Introit.”
14)
Liber XV: The Gnostic Mass, section III, creed; Magick in Theory and Practice, p. 347.
15)
The Book of Thoth, part II, “XV. The Devil.”
16)
The Book of Thoth, part II, “XV. The Devil” (1944), p. 105.
17)
The History of the Origin of the Sigil of Baphomet and its Use in the Church of Satan.
18)
Liber Reguli, Second Gesture, §17, p. 333.
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  • Last modified: 2026/10/04 10:17
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