Occult and alchemical symbols
Symbols from alchemy and the Western occult tradition, where each came from, and how later movements have used them.
This section follows two symbols of the Western occult tradition from their first record to their uses now. Both have gathered meanings that later writers read back into earlier times, and the pages separate what the record shows from what was added, naming who added it. The ouroboros is a serpent with its tail in its mouth. Baphomet is a name from a medieval trial that became a picture in 1856.
- OuroborosA serpent curled into a circle with its tail in its mouth. The oldest known example is on a gilded shrine of Tutankhamun; Greek alchemists in Egypt later drew it around the words “the all is one”, and since the Renaissance it has usually been read as eternity.
- BaphometA name first recorded in the trials of the Knights Templar (1307–1314), where confessions made under torture described an idol the knights were said to worship. The winged, goat-headed figure people picture was drawn by the French occultist Éliphas Lévi in 1856.
The ouroboros, from Egypt to Kekulé
The earliest known example is on the second gold shrine of Tutankhamun, from the New Kingdom, where serpents with their tails in their mouths surround the head and feet of a huge mummiform figure. The Egyptologist Dana Reemes argues that in Egypt it was never a discrete symbol, only one variant among related images, and that what it mostly meant there was protective enclosure. The word is Greek, first recorded three or four centuries after the Egyptian phrases proposed as its source. In the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, a page of Greek alchemy known from a Byzantine copy, the serpent encloses the words Marcellin Berthelot translated in 1887 as “le tout est un”, the all is one. Eternity came last. Reemes traces the link with time to the Latin writer Servius in the fourth century and to Marsilio Ficino, who in 1492 gave the serpent the meaning “time”. In 1890 August Kekulé told a gathering of his peers that the benzene ring had come to him in a daydream of a snake biting its tail. William Ashworth of the Linda Hall Library writes that most historians see no reason to doubt the story, while others think Kekulé told it to support his claim to priority.
Baphomet, from the Templar trials to Lévi and today
The Knights Templar in France were arrested on a single day, 13 October 1307, and most confessed under torture to charges that included worshipping an idol. Henry Charles Lea, the historian of the Inquisition, found that scarcely two of the witnesses who said they had seen the idol described it alike, and read its name, Bafomet, as a corruption of Mahomet. Éliphas Lévi gave the name a body in 1856: a goat-headed figure seated on a throne, a torch between its horns and a pentagram, one point up, on its brow. He explained it part by part, reading the hands, one pointing up and one down, as “the perfect harmony of mercy with justice”, and called the whole “only an innocent and even pious hieroglyph”. It also changed the Devil card of the tarot. Two Satanic organisations use the name today. The Church of Satan’s emblem, the Sigil of Baphomet, is a goat’s head in a pentagram with two points up, inside two circles that hold the name Leviathan in Hebrew; the church traces the goat in the star to an engraving by Stanislas de Guaita (1897) and holds a 1983 trademark on the sigil with the words “Church of Satan”, so these pages describe it and never show it. The Satanic Temple, which says it does not believe in the existence of Satan, took its bronze statue after Lévi’s figure to the Arkansas State Capitol in 2018.
Sources
- The Egyptian Ouroboros: An Iconological and Theological Study, Dana Michael Reemes; PhD dissertation, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles, 2015 (eScholarship), Abstract; ch. 1–3; figure 34; ch. 6 (Greek and Latin reception)
- Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, vol. 1, by Marcellin Berthelot, with Ch.-Em. Ruelle, Georges Steinheil, Paris, 1887 (scan on the Internet Archive), Introduction: Papyrus de Leide; Figures d’appareils, figure 11 (pp. 132–134)
- August Kekulé (Scientist of the Day), William B. Ashworth, Jr., Linda Hall Library
- The Knights Templars, Charles Moeller, The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–1912), via New Advent, Their tragic end
- A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, vol. 3, by Henry Charles Lea, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1888 (scan on the Internet Archive), Book III, ch. 5, “Political Heresy: the State” (the Templars), pp. 264–270
- Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual, by Éliphas Lévi, translated by A. E. Waite, George Redway, London, 1896 (scan on the Internet Archive), Ritual, ch. 15, “The Sabbath of the Sorcerers”, pp. 288–296
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major: XV, The Devil
- The History of the Origin of the Sigil of Baphomet and its Use in the Church of Satan, Magus Peter H. Gilmore and Magister Robert Merciless, Church of Satan
- Satanic Temple unveils Baphomet statue at Arkansas Capitol, Hannah Grabenstein and Nick Viviani, 17 August 2018 (AP report and photograph), WIBW 13 News
- Visit us in Salem: the Baphomet monument, The Satanic Temple, The Baphomet Monument
- Do you worship Satan? (FAQ), The Satanic Temple, Do you worship Satan?
Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research