Signs of Baphomet in Society today [Archive]

earthboar

08-02-2007, 10:21 PM

http://www.luckymojo.com/levibaphomet.gif

If we understand the word Baphomet as a corruption of Mahomet (Mohammed) then we might alleviate much anxiety over what exactly it is we are talking about. Because the word Baphomet carried forward over the centuries, beginning with the Knights Templar days of the Holy Crusades, and then exacerbated by Eliphas Levi's famous (but cool, I think) 19th Century drawing of his conception of "Baphomet", then we can see that Baphomet started as a grammatical error, and then grew to take a life of his own, not unlike the Alfred E. Neuman "What Me Worry" face of MAD Magazine fame.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baphomet

In fact, the more psychic energy we put into making Baphomet real, in the form of fear, uncertainty and doubt, the more dimensionally solid such concepts take, psychologically speaking.

For instance, Baphomet, as depicted by Levi, the French occultist whose real name wasn't even Eliphas Levi but rather Alphonse Louis looks something like a devil, but devil as a horned, cloven-hooved image is a modern, post-Christian era fabrication. Is Baphomet supposed to represent Satan to modern Christians? Or a lesser demon? Perhaps to non-Christians, Baphomet is not a devil at all, but a demiurgic archon. Of course, modern Christianity has summarily re-classified all non-"upper angelic" beings as necessarily underworld or fallen entities. I disagree with that as a position of ignorance. It's pretty much the same as saying that which we do not understand is not one of us, and therefore evil.

Even in Levi's depiction, calling Baphomet a devil or demon is knee jerk reflex based on centuries of cultural conditioning. That depiction was really an hermaphroditic archetype of the polar, dual nature of reality. He was an hermetic expression, the go-between of the upper and lower worlds, and any other dichotomous situation one can think of, including male-female (notice the figure's female breasts) left and right, which symbolized the Kabbalist "Chockma" (pure yang, male, exploding force, like the Big Bang) and Binah (female, death, that which captured the exploding forced and formed it into little balls like planets, stars, etc.) You see, the temperance of the expressive force by the restraining force are Baphomet, in this sense.

However, I am of the opinion that Levi's imagination got the better of him, and he might well have chosen a less ambiguous character, such as the Greek Hermes, or the Hindu Maitreya ("Maitreya, Maitreya, forever dividing, but few can see"). In any case, the fear of the devil is something the Christian world has brought upon themselves, in a state of moral self-flagellation. I welcome the demiurgic presence, and thank it for the worldly things of which I am appreciative.

In summary, I contend that there is no such thing as Baphomet, the word itself was a mistake. Later, this mistake grew all out of proportion by intellectual rebels who refused to conform to papal bull, or by Papists themselves who needed an enemy to make an example of in what would seem to be empire building. It seems no accident that in every Exorcist movie Hollywood produces, there is a Catholic priest countering the Evil presence. In other words, there are other equally valid religious frameworks that don't divide metaphysical reality into such a black and white construct, and are therefore not morally traumatized, as popularly believed must always be the case, by infiltration or intoxication with spirits who might just be passing through.

To these others, of whom there are many, especially in shamanic traditions (even Judaism and Christianity have had shamanic traditions in the form of Kabbalah and Gnosticism; read the Nag Hammadi text "Zostrianos" to get a flavor of this. Also note Ezekiel's and Enoch's and even Emanuel Swedenbourg's ecstatic ascent to the heavens) there is a sort of balancing act, what Kruschev called "living in peaceful coexistence" while he was floating in a swimming pool with Mao Tse-Tung.