It certainly looks grotesque, this strange beast pieced together like Frankenstein’s monster. With angel’s wing’s, goat’s face, and androgynous sexual characteristics, it seems to taunt human intelligence, daring us to understand and name it.
This strange spiritual symbol pulled from the depths of the European imagination — the place of gargoyles and goblins — is called Baphomet. It’s believed the Knights Templar performed rites to this figure while fighting in the Crusades, and Hallow’s Eve, when the veil between the visible and invisible worlds becomes diaphanous, is the perfect occasion to examine this mysterious figure.
The origins of Baphomet’s modern depiction are found not in 20th-century pop culture, but rather the mind of Eliphas Levi, renegade Catholic sage of the ancient wisdom. What Levi sought to depict in his 1856 book The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic was hardly the glorification of evil, but rather the nearly impossible to describe primordial energy behind everything in the universe, from loftiest thought to basest matter, highest good to lowest evil.
It is the first thing God creates in the Book of Genesis when He says, “Let there be light,” the prima materia that makes the creation of everything else possible. It is the ultimate energy capable of assuming any form, and because this quintessential first matter is so difficult for the human mind to grasp — after all, this energy is not manifested light as we know it on earth, but divine light — Levi referred to it by a number of terms describing its various properties: Universal Medicine, Great Magnetic Agent, Great Plastic Medium, Great Magical Agent.
The terms have a fearsome air of mystery — rather like Baphomet itself — in keeping with knowledge that pushes the limits of human understanding. But throughout the 20th century, as man drifted farther from God, such metaphysical symbols became shrouded in mist, with fewer enlightened souls able to see them correctly.
Yet many a parable, fairy tale, and work of literature teaches us that things that look frightening are often vital to our understanding, often harboring a secret that will make us stronger and help us navigate the situation in which we find ourselves. In the 1984 children’s fantasy film The Neverending Story, the young hero discovers that the scary monster pursuing him can be interrogated if the boy summons the courage to confront it, and reveals key secrets about what is unfolding in the kingdom of Fantasia. The monster explains that it is the messenger of the dark force called The Nothing, which is a kind of despair that overtakes the land when there is no longer hope in men’s hearts.
Eliphas Levi’s symbol is a more complex depiction of the primordial serpent or dragon known throughout the ancient world. One look at a slithering snake shows why it has served as a universal symbol of the primordial cosmic energy: it goes left and right at the same time. How does the serpent get into the Garden of Eden? By polarizing to good, entering the garden, and then changing its polarity. And so Baphomet represents not evil but rather the neutral power of power itself. But as modern man became intoxicated with his own material ingenuity and so-called scientific rationalism, evil has claimed dominion of the invisible world. There are retail stores, websites, and entire sections of your local bookstore all dedicated to witchcraft, but nothing for the sort of spiritual knighthood Julius Evola writes about in his book on the Holy Grail.
Secular conservatives, moreover, find themselves with literally nothing to fire their heart and lift their spirits: no metaphysics, no religion, no gods, heroes or archetypes. Only a stubborn belief in the rationality of institutions — capitalism, democracy, universities, media — all of which are irreversibly corrupted, being of human invention and not part of the great chain of being descending from Tradition.
Earlier this year, the State Capitol of Iowa unveiled a statue of Baphomet donated by — who else? — the Church of Satan. But the symbol’s journey from Catholic neutrality to the devil’s personification passes through several stages of transformation that eerily mirror the West’s fall from metaphysics to quantum physics, from spiritual orientation to material values. In 1909, Levi’s drawing was used in the famous Rider-Waite tarot deck to represent the Devil card, or life’s inevitable encounter with malevolence. Fast forward throughout the 20th century and everything from rock albums to Hollywood movies to actual Satanic cults have used the figure of Baphomet to personify the Prince of Darkness.
But a sword is neither good nor bad, its use entirely dependent upon the intention of the person wielding it. The failure of the good to understand the primordial neutral energy that animates everything — which Levi most frequently refers to by the term Astral Light — is why the Devil is so successful now. Recall that both Yoda and Obi-Wan admonish the spiritual knight Luke Skywalker, during his apprenticeship of the divine power, to “use the Force.”
And Julius Evola emphatically states that the realizations deriving from esoteric knowledge mean nothing until they are actively employed, which is the entire point of acquiring them on the active path of Heroic Spirituality, as opposed to the contemplative and devotional priestly path. If good can only be passively pious and not actively influence the energies that drive the zeitgeist of society, then evil will. As Levi states, good tends towards passivity while evil is always active.
Let us close with an illustration of what Baphomet seeks to convey symbolically by using the four elements.
Without the sun, nothing in our solar system would exist. The tiniest earthbound insect and mighty planet of Jupiter would not exist without the great fireball of the sun, whose fiery energy reaches earth, which is mostly covered in water, and lifts the second element into the air through the process of evaporation. The moisture gathers in clouds and then rains down, in purified form, upon the earth, the third element, which then sprouts vegetation creating a breathable air, the fourth.
Traditional doctrines teach that everything in God’s creation follows the same pattern according to the law of analogy, and so human beings are powered by the electro-magnetic “fire” of the nervous system, which powers consciousness. But our bodies are mostly water, and we will die from thirst in only a few days. The hard clay of our bodies — muscles, flesh, bones — accounts for the earth, while air is so vital we can’t live for more than a few minutes without it.
The quintessence or fifth element that enables the other four to work together — in the creation of earth and the intelligent beings who populate it — is what Baphomet symbolizes.
To understand and learn to harness this divine power has traveled throughout the ages as the secret doctrine of magic. It provides the ability to perform miracles, to turn despair into hope, poverty into riches, to assist the healing of injury, to cure indigestion and insomnia. It is the power to tap a hitherto unknown wellspring of creative possibilities in art and invention, and to earn the “angel’s wings” that allow exploration of the universe contained within human consciousness, according to the analogy of microcosm and macrocosm.
In the end, as Levi wrote with tireless determination to reconcile ancient metaphysics with Catholic doctrine, what we’re supposed to do with the primordial serpent energy of the cosmos is take command of it with our will and make it do what we want it to do, which is serve good.
If we don’t, he warns, we must remember that it is enough for good men to do nothing for evil to triumph. When all knowledge acquired over millennia falling under the broad term Western Esoteric Tradition is jettisoned — the equivalent of good men doing nothing — evil will claim it for its own, and worse, employ it.
From Catholic imagination to devil figure of the end times, Baphomet stands as the perfect example.
Christian Chensvold is the author of Dark Stars: Heroic Spirituality in the Age of Decadence, which reveals the influence of Julius Evola’s esoteric writings.
