Baphomet
A 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.
Meaning
Baphomet, said BAF-uh-met, has meant three different things. In the Templar trials it was one of several names for an idol that witnesses described in contradictory ways; the historian Henry Charles Lea read it as a garbled form of Mahomet. Éliphas Lévi made it a picture: the frontispiece he drew for his Dogme et rituel de la haute magie shows a winged goat-headed figure on a throne, a torch between its horns and a pentagram on its brow, which he explained as a symbol of balance, not of evil. Today two Satanic organisations use the name, in different ways: the Church of Satan for its emblem, a goat’s head in an inverted pentagram, and The Satanic Temple, which does not believe in Satan, for a bronze statue it has taken to the Arkansas State Capitol.
Origin and history
On 13 October 1307 Philip the Fair had every Templar in France arrested on the same day. The Knights Templar were accused of spitting on the cross, denying Christ, sodomy and worshipping an idol, and most confessed under torture, the Catholic Encyclopedia (1912) records; the grand master, Jacques de Molay, later said he had lied to save his life. Pope Clement V protested at the king’s proceedings and opened his own inquiry, and in a bull of 22 March 1312 he dissolved the order without condemning it. On 19 March 1314, Lea writes, de Molay and three other leaders were brought out on a scaffold before Notre-Dame to hear their sentence. De Molay proclaimed the order innocent and his confession false, and by Philip’s order he and another of them were burned at the stake. The encyclopedia found historians split into two camps over the order’s guilt, with the newest documents, from the archives of Aragon, telling “more and more strongly in favour of the order”.
Did the Templars worship Baphomet?
No reliable evidence shows that they did. Henry Charles Lea, the historian of the Inquisition, writing in 1888, found the idol as inconsistent as the rest of the evidence. Most witnesses had never seen it or heard of it, and of those who said they had, scarcely two described it alike: a head, black or white, sometimes with a long white beard, with two faces or three, sometimes called the Saviour and sometimes Bafomet or Maguineth, which Lea read as corruptions of Mahomet. The nearest thing to it found in the Paris Temple was a metal reliquary shaped like a woman’s head, which held a small skull. Lévi, writing in 1856, took the opposite view: he was convinced the Templar grand masters had worshipped the Baphomet, though as the god Pan, not the devil, and he cited a carved coffer from a Templar commandery on which antiquaries saw a baphometic figure. Lea dismissed that kind of evidence, singling out an 1852 study that leapt from a stone coffer found at Essarois in 1789 to the conclusion that it had belonged to the Templars and held the Baphometic idol.
Lévi’s goat of 1856
Lévi called his figure “the Baphomet of the Templars, the bearded idol of the alchemists, the obscene deity of Mendes, the goat of the Sabbath”, and then, in A. E. Waite’s translation, explained it part by part. The pentagram on the forehead, one point up, marks it as a symbol of light. One hand points up to a white moon and the other down to a black moon, a sign of “the perfect harmony of mercy with justice”; one arm is female and the other male. The torch between the horns is “the magical light of universal equilibrium”, the caduceus in place of the genitals stands for eternal life, and the breasts and the arms stand for humanity. Understood this way, Lévi wrote, the Baphomet is “only an innocent and even pious hieroglyph”. He also offered an etymology: read backwards, he said, the name abbreviates Templi omnium hominum pacis abbas, “the father of the temple of universal peace among men”. It changed the tarot too: Waite wrote in 1910 that since 1856 Lévi’s influence had changed the face of the Devil card, and Waite’s own Devil is the horned goat of Mendes with bat’s wings, standing on an altar.
The Church of Satan’s sigil
The Church of Satan’s emblem, which it calls the Sigil of Baphomet, is a different image from Lévi’s: a goat’s head drawn inside a pentagram with two points up, ringed by two circles holding the Hebrew letters of the name Leviathan. Lévi had written, in a passage the church quotes, that the pentagram with two points up stands for Satan as the goat of the Sabbath. The church’s own history, by Peter H. Gilmore and Robert Merciless, traces the goat in the star to an engraving in Stanislas de Guaita’s La Clef de la Magie Noire (1897), which Anton LaVey knew from a book by Maurice Bessy that reproduced it and redrew it on its cover. For The Satanic Bible (1969) the church redrew it with an exact star, perfect circles and serpentine Hebrew letters, and in 1983 it received a trademark for the sigil with the words “Church of Satan”, which is why it is described here and not shown. The church says the name Baphomet comes from the Templar trials but that there is no clear evidence its symbol derives from them, and that before its founding in 1966 Satanism was usually shown by inverted crosses, not by this graphic. It calls the sigil “the preeminent visual distillation of the iconoclastic philosophy of Satanism”.
The Satanic Temple’s statue
The Satanic Temple’s Baphomet is a bronze statue by Mark Porter, eight and a half feet tall and over 3,000 pounds: a seated, winged, goat-headed figure with two smiling children beside it. The temple follows Lévi’s figure but, for practical reasons, gave it a male chest, and it describes the statue’s core as “the union of opposites”. The temple offered it to Oklahoma, where a Ten Commandments monument stood at the capitol until the state Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, unveiled it in Detroit in 2015, and brought it to a rally at the Arkansas State Capitol on 16 August 2018 against the Ten Commandments monument there. On 31 March 2026 Chief US District Judge Kristine Baker ruled for the plaintiffs, the temple among them, finding that it had been prevented from competing with Christianity on an equal footing for a place on the capitol grounds, and ordered the Ten Commandments monument removed; the order to remove it is stayed while an appeal is possible. For the temple the statue is “not simply a symbol of freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, and religious liberty, but an exercise of those values”; its members, it says, do not believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. The statue stands at the temple’s headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts.
See also
Caduceus, The Devil, Ouroboros.
Sources
- 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
- The Knights Templars, Charles Moeller, The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–1912), via New Advent, Their tragic end
- 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
- Visit us in Salem: the Baphomet monument, The Satanic Temple, The Baphomet Monument
- The Satanic Temple Wins Historic Ten Commandments Lawsuit in Arkansas, The Satanic Temple
- Satanic Temple unveils Baphomet statue at Arkansas Capitol, Hannah Grabenstein and Nick Viviani, 17 August 2018 (AP report and photograph), WIBW 13 News
- Do you worship Satan? (FAQ), The Satanic Temple, Do you worship Satan?
- Baphomet (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com, Pronunciation
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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research