The Head That Wouldn't Die: The Baffling Baphomet

" 'Ed . . . you don't know what you're talking about!'

'Oh yes I do! I was a Mason until I found out about Baphomet!'
'Who?'
'This "Great Architect of the Universe" you pray to is NOT the God of the Bible . . . It's really Baphomet! And he's
ugly, frightening and completely satanic.'
'That's impossible! I've never even heard that name. Have you, Sally?'
'No, I haven't.'
'Of course not, Sally. Most Masons don't learn about Baphomet . . . until they get to the highest degrees. Wait here, I've
got a picture of him in the car. I'll be right back.' "
-- Alex, Ed, and Sally, in The Curse of Baphomet, by Jack T. Chick

Sadly, the picture Ed brings back from his car is not Baphomet at all, but the famed "Goat of Mendes" drawing (or
"the Devil," in most Tarot decks), misnamed Baphomet by the excitable, if sloppy, Eliphas Levi. Of all the many
things the tortured Templars described their putative idol as, a goat is not really on the list. So, without Ed to guide us,
we shall have to look elsewhere for the truth. And perhaps, in the unblinking eyes of Baphomet, we'll see truths that
will either raise us to superhuman levels of numinous power or send us shrieking back into welcome catatonia. But,
let's not get ahead of ourselves.

"[Seek] a man's head with a large beard, which head they kiss and worship at all their provincial chapters, but this
not all the brothers know, save only the Grand Master and the old ones."
-- from the instructions for the arrest of the Templars

The fifth article of accusation against the Templars held "that the brothers practiced idol worship of a cat or a head."
The putative idol of the Templars (which, in the Real World, they sadly didn't possess, as Edward Burman notes in his
Supremely Abominable Crimes) became known as "Baphomet" at some point during the trial. Whether the inquisitors
or the tortured knights first named it remains uncertain. As, in fact, does the appearance of Baphomet -- of the 231
knights examined by the Inquisition, only 12 of them mentioned the head specifically. The consensus description is of
a very fierce, bearded head, usually with long hair, and occasionally depicted with glowing eyes. However, Baphomet
is also described as having two or three faces, being made of golden or silvery metal or of wood, being a human skull,
or even being a woman's head. The formal charges of 1308 took this variance into account, arguing that "in each
province the order had idols, namely heads, of which some had three races and some one, and others had a human
skull."

"Then it is really foolish to fight the Turks, now that Jesus Christ no longer opposes them. They have vanquished the
Franks and Tartars and Armenians and Persians, and they continue to do so. And daily, they impose new defeats on
us: for God, who used to watch on our behalf, is now asleep, and Bafometz puts forth his power to support the Sultan."
-- from a poem by the troubadour Ricaut Bonomel, ca. 1265

The real explanation, prosaic as it may be, is that in Provencal, Mohammed (or Mahomet, to the medieval Europeans)
is often rendered Bahomet, or Bafomet, or Bafometz. King Philip accused the Templars, essentially, of collaborating
with the enemy by worshiping the "demon" Mahomet. (The fact that the last thing secret Muslims would do is worship
a humaniform idol is enough to clear the Templars of both charges.) If the Templars did have a symbolic head in their
commanderies (and aside from one dubious silver reliquary, no such head turned up when they were searched), it may
have been the skull of the first Grand Master, Hugues de Payens. Whose coat of arms, it turns out, was three black
heads on a golden field -- recalling both the gold and the "three faces" mentioned under torture.

" . . . 'Bafomet' has no connection with Mohammed, but could well be a corruption of the Arabic abufihamet
(pronounced in the Moorish Spanish something like 'bufihimat'). The word means 'father of understanding.' In Arabic,
'father' is taken to mean 'source, chief seat of,' and so on. In Sufi terminology, ras el-fahmat (head of knowledge)
means the mentation of man after undergoing refinement - the transmuted consciousness."
-- Idries Shah, The Sufis

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 But before we go racing ahead toward our three faces, it's worth mentioning some of the other ingenious explanations
people have offered over the years. By cleverly plugging B-P-W-M-T ("Baphomet") into the Atbash Cipher used in
some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, maverick Biblical historian Hugh Schonfield gets SH-W-P-Y-A -- close enough to the
Greek word "Sophia," or wisdom. Austrian Orientalist, Freemason, and diplomat Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall got to
"wisdom" with less effort (and in 1818, no less), by deciding that the "met" in "Baphomet" was "Metis," the Titaness
of Wisdom and mother of Athena. (Is the birth of Athena, female wisdom, from Zeus' male head an alchemical
creation, recombined in Baphomet's androgyny?) The "Baphomet" was therefore the "Baptism in Wisdom." My
personal favorite is another gem from the fevered brow of Eliphas Levi -- "Baphomet" is actually "TEM. O.H.P. AB."
backwards! That being short, you see, for Templi omnium hominum pacis abbas, meaning "In the Temple is the father
of universal peace among men." The "father of peace" recalls Idries Shah's theory mentioned above that "Baphomet" is
a corruption of the Arabic abufihamet, or "father of wisdom" (again with the wisdom!). One Frater Baraka goes even
farther and assumes that the "abu-Fihamet" refers to an actual person, the Sufi master Hussein ibn-Mansur al-Hallaj,
beheaded (!) in 922 A.D. and (says Sufi fan Ernest Scott in The People of the Secret) later known as "Hiram Abiff"
(short for "Abifihamet"?) in Masonic lore. And there you have another Mason-Templar link, as if you needed one.

"Other descriptions, clearly referring to copies, included mention of gold and silver cases, wooden panels, and the
like. But the Paris head is different. One gets the distinct impression that this was the holy of holies, accorded
ceremonial strikingly reminiscent of that used by the Byzantines."
-- Ian Wilson, The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ?

Of course, you don't need to postulate the Templars as secret Sufis to make the Baphomet a relic. Ian Wilson famously
proposed the Shroud of Turin as the Baphomet, noting that one of the Templars burnt in 1314 along with Jacques de
Molay was one Geoffroi de Charnay -- and the first recorded owner of the Shroud, in 1355, was one Geoffroi de
Charny. De Charny was known as the "bearer of the sacred standard," and lived in Lirey, near the old Templar center
of Troyes. The two-sided Shroud would give a "two-faced" figure, and if it was kept folded up in a reliquary with only
the face visible it could seem a disembodied head to the lay membership. The Shroud (or the Baphomet) may also
have been any of the sacred images of Christ's head from the "Mandylion" cloth of Edessa to the "Veronica" in Rome.
Cooler still is the legend (recounted, among other places, in a continuation of the Templar-symp Chrêtien de Troyes'
Perceval) that St. Nicodemus brought a sacred head with him to Britain when he and Joseph of Arimathea fled there
with the Grail: "Nicodemus had carved and fashioned a head in the likeness of the Lord on the day that he had seen
Him on the cross. But of this I am sure, that the Lord God set His hand to the shaping of it, as they say; for no man
ever saw one like it nor could it be made by human hands." Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, of course, go even that
theory one better, saying that the Grail and Baphomet were the same -- the severed head of John the Baptist, which the
chronicler Robert de Clari says the Crusaders (including the Templars) looted from Constantinople in 1204.

"'Now tell us about the head.' 'Well, the head. I've seen it at seven chapters held by Brother Hugh de Peraud and
others.' 'What did one do to worship it?' 'Well, it was like this. It was presented, and everyone threw himself on the
ground, pushed back his cowl, and worshipped it.' 'What was its face like?' 'Terrible. It seemed to me that it was the
face of a demon, of a maufé. Every time I saw it I was filled with such terror I could scarcely look at it, trembling in
all my members.'"
-- dialogue between an Inquisitor and a Templar, from Procés des Templiers, edited by Jules Michelet

From such heady altitudes, we plummet to the basest diabolism. Picknett and Prince agree that the Templars were,
indeed, craniolatrous heretics; perhaps their magical head was the same as the "brazen head" built by Vergil Magus or
the demoniac Pope Sylvester or the Templar-friendly magus Roger Bacon? The brazen head would, in fact, match the
description of Baphomet as "reddish" as well as explain the various metallic Baphomets. Or, the head may also have
been an older idol still, passed down from the ancient Celtic head-cults, or the worship of the fertility god Bran
(Baphomet was said to make the trees flower and the land germinate), or even one of the carved faces from the
Neolithic shamanic empire of Glozel. Could Baphomet be the severed prophetic head of Orpheus, or of Dionysos, or
of his avatar St. George? St. George, of course, is a redaction not only of Dionysos but of Perseus -- slayer of Medusa,
whose head inspired paralyzing fear in enemies. Could the Templars have dug up the head of the Gorgon? Medusa, of
course, had two sisters, three hellish heads recalling the three-faced goddess Hecate -- and the three faces described on
Baphomet by the terrified Templars.

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 "The point being, our whole planet's genetic intent roots are pirate genesplicers. Pieces of 8, were toroid shadows.
Skull and Bones were Orion bone touch spark gap ritual imported into Templar mnemonics "Baphomet" Skull Touch.
Jon & Magda's skull and bones after the templar banking cartel planets biggest navy got bad PR disappeared into
Scotland and became the pirates, became the CIA. Always massaging the drug cartel for control of externalized
disempowered borg psychokinesis access to the time wormholes."
-- Dan Winter, "Liberty Bell Rings Again, As Genes Sing of the Grail"

We can get in even deeper, as the waters of mystifaction close still further over our heads. Bisociate our boy
Baphomet, then. Baphomet is Orpheus, and John the Baptist, and Bran the Blessed, and Medusa, and Metis. (Don't
those names sound eerily similar?) All of them are aspects of the Watcher at the Threshold, the Opener of the Way --
Bfmaat, in Enochian, as I am reliably informed. Baphomet's "sparking eyes" show his role as one of the Grigori, the
Watchers -- the heads in the subsidiary commanderies serving as Orwellian telescreens for the Templars' true master in
Paris -- or Babylon -- or Hell. If Baphomet is a mechanism, the Brazen Heads become individual control or interface
terminals -- or, perhaps, all three were the same Head, reappearing or reconstructing itself from some demonic
blueprint, a time-shifting (and hence "prophetic") AI. Perhaps the "Templar kiss" and the peculiar transference of
"cords" from Baphomet to his worshipers truly referred to Baphomet's implanting of psychometric controls, or alien
parasites, or a magic toad, in the skulls of his followers in a kind of trepanative impregnation. The central processor
may be a holographic personality imprinted in the center of the Crystal Skull, taken by the Templar Fleet to the
American Refuge in Mexico. Like Yog-Sothoth, Baphomet is only dimly seen as "a congeries of (head-shaped)
spheres" -- like the Grail, its shape is ever-shifting. Perhaps the Templars worshiped Baphomet -- or perhaps only their
sorceries kept it penned up in their round churches and towers. Now that they're gone, Baphomet rules America from
the Skull & Bones fraternity in Yale. Heads up!

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