A commenter recently brought my attention to the site Vigilant Citizen, which provides us with essays explaining how today’s pop culture is loaded with occult symbolism.
I really dislike this sort of thing. Conspiracism in general, and occult conspiracism in particular, is a house of mirrors where it becomes hard to tell reflection from reality. Huge amounts of pseudo-scholarship are produced about things that don’t exist, until all of the sound and fury actually brings them into existence.
Origins
Pullquote: Conspiracy Theory is the sophistication of the ignorant.
Take the example of Baphomet, which the Vigilant Citizen tells us is “the horned idol of Western occultism.” The first appearance of the name Baphomet occurs in poetry relating to the crusades in the 12th century. It seems to represent an idol or a deity worshiped by the opponents of the Crusaders – that is, the Muslims.
Europeans at the time had some bizarre ideas about what the Muslims were up to. For example, the Song of Roland, the 13th century French epic, gives us this depiction:
And the admiral [a Muslim] calls upon Apollin
And Tervagan and Mahum, prays and speaks:
“My lords and gods, I’ve done you much service;
Your images, in gold I’ll fashion each;
Apollin (Apollo?), Mahum (Mohammad?) and Tervagan (no clue): three of the deities of the “pagan” Muslims. Yeah. Anyway, like these deities, Baphomet was a product of the European’s inability to understand their opponents. “Baphomet” is probably a corruption of “Mahomet” or “Mohammad.”
The name is most famous for its relation to the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon, or the Knights Templar. They really were a fascinating group. Created as a monastic order to protect pilgrims on the way to the holy land, the Templars combined the discipline of monks with the armor and weapons of a medieval knight. This combination of order and arms made them the closest thing to a modern army the world had seen since the fall of the Roman legions.
Even though they’d taken vows of poverty, the Knights were expensive. So the Church granted them the authority to accept tithes and sell indulgences, and donating to them became a popular way of supporting the crusades. The order became wealthy, and began to make loans to the crowned heads of Europe. They found out too late that no one really likes their banker.
When the Crusades fell apart in the late 13th century, so did the popularity of the Templars. In 1307, Philip the Fair, king of France, moved in. He arrested many of the members and had confessions of heresy and apostasy tortured out of them. Then he seized their property – probably the real point of the operation — and had their grand master burned at the stake. Other rulers followed, and the Templars were destroyed.
One of the crimes that members of the order “confessed” to was the worship of the idol of Baphomet. This probably made sense to the accusers. Since Baphomet was seen as a Muslim idol, they were essentially accusing the Templars of adopting Muslim gods and becoming traitors to Christendom. This way they could declare that the Crusades had failed because Europe had been stabbed in the back – an accusation that has resonance in the 20th century.
Transmission
Pullquote: Conspiracies unfold – often enough, not the ones intended. And then history zigs where you might have expected it to zag.
Flash forward to the French Revolution. The period immediately thereafter was a fertile time for conspiracy theories, and much of modern secret society conspicism can be traced to this period. Someone had to be blamed for the Revolution, and many scholars trotted out their favorite villains.
One scholar was the Austrian Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, an extremely knowledgeable Orientalist whose translations are still published today. However, he also popularized the notion that the Knights Templar were still in existence and operating in secret. He linked them to the Freemasons and to the character of Baphomet.
Thus Baphomet entered into the mainstream of conspiracy lore. It really ought to have stayed there, but this is when we enter the house of mirrors. In the 19th century, practitioners of the occult (read: Victorians with too much time on their hands) began to search around for forgotten lore. One of them, Eliphas Levi, created the modern image of the squatting, goated-headed figure we know as Baphomet. He gave it a fictitious provenance and interpretation, which was then picked up by other occultists, including the famous Aleister Crowley.
The accusations against the Templars produced differing depictions of what Baphomet was supposed to look like, so Levi’s image is likely a hodge-podge of different influences. But it has stuck around, becoming the enduring figure of Satan and other demons.
In the world of conspiracy theory, there’s an odd interplay between the accuser and the accused. Most new ideas are actually developed and advanced by the self-appointed conspiracy hunters. However, once the idea has been introduced into the mainstream, some impressionable people will frequently attempt to make it a reality. It’s impossible to tell a conspiracy theorist that their idea doesn’t exist in reality, because likely as not some 17-year-old is even now trying to convince his friends to go along with it.
And so, through this tortured process, a really bad idea about Muslim worship has become one of our most famous symbols of the occult. Can we leave this house of mirrors now?
WTF? Calling a Muslim a Pagan is like saying a kiwi fruit is a piece of bacon. Of course, in the Xian world, they teach that anything outside their little world is devil-worship. I remember being a kid and being taught that mindset. That stuff never made sense to me, even when I was 7.
I love to watch Christians squirm when you tell them that Islam is an offshoot of Christianity, and that Muslims believe in the virgin birth of Jesus and that he’s still the guy who comes back at the end of the world.
To which they usually reply with something about Muslims being deceived and how Mohamed co-opted Christian traditions to fill his own agenda and that adding to the gospel is not allowed.
To which you can reply, “Oh, but it was okay when Jesus did that to Judaism?”
Watching religious people try to justify their own brand of fan-fiction is entertaining.
Never managed to get a straight answer for this one. If god is so perfect you would expect that he would be able to get it right the first time. You have to give it to Mohammad for the forsigt he seen what Xtianity had done with Judaism and what he was doing with Xtianity so he introduced a code line in the program that read “god told me this is the last one, really, trust me I’m the messenger of god” and a kill order if anyone tries to modify the program.
He arrested many of the members and had confessions of heresy and apostasy tortured out of them.
This is just one of several justified criticisms of the practice of torture. You can make almost anyone confess to literally anything. Those who support the practice of torture bear responsibilty for the false confessions obtained and punished through that torture. This is of the same cloth with the Inquisition and the witch hunts.
Indeed, torture is a terrible thing. The sad thing is that so many of the “pro-life” Christians here in the US support it, as well as all the wars and such. There are anti-war Christians, but I can’t think of any fundamentalists like that. The only ant-war Christian I can name at the moment would be Lew Rockwell, though he is hardly mainstream in any sense of the word.
On a slightly derailing note:
The idea Stephen King’s masterwork, the Dark Tower series, is based on The Song of Roland. Thoroughly, thoroughly good fantasy writing, I heartily recommend it.
I did some rechecking because I always had thought that it was based on the Browning poem. But apparently Brownings inspiration was Song of Roland, kind of a fascinating trail. The Dark Tower series was and is one of my favrorites series as well. I remember feeling kind like an a-hole because one of my first reactions when King was hurt that he may not finish the series. He did finish it though and we’re all the richer for it.
Perhaps Tervagan has some reference in Termagant?
It’s interesting to note that the Knights Templars weren’t the only ones to be accused of falling into Muslim practices. The loss of Edessa, and the failures of the Second and later Crusades, were frequently attributed to the Crusaders themselves having “gone native” (to use a colloquial paraphrase).
At various times, the ability of the Crusader princes to deal with their Muslim neighbors in a constructive way was continually undermined by accusations of this sort. For instance, on his deathbed, Amalric I, king of Jerusalem, named Miles de Plancy — who was not related to the royal family and was unqualified militarily, since every expedition he was involved with had failed utterly — as Regent for his young son (Baldwin IV), because Amalric feared that others within the royal family who were more qualified to lead (such as count of Edessa-in-exile Joscelin II de Courtenay) might deign to reason with the local Muslim princes rather than engage them. Of course, de Plancy did continue an expedition against Banyas (in Syria) after Amalric’s death, but that too failed (whodathunkit?) and he was later assassinated.
Later during Baldwin IV’s reign — when there was such a truce in place — Baldwin’s uncle Reynald de Chatillon purposely chose to violate it, under the pretense that an agreement made with any non-Christian was not binding on a Christian … and also to reinforce among other Latin nobles that he was not one of those horrible “Muslim collaborators” such as Raymond III of Tripoli. (He was angling for influence since Baldwin, though young, was dying of leprosy.) He also did this in the most incendiary way possible, by raiding a caravan headed on pilgrimage to Mecca (prior to this, for the preceding 20 years or so, past pilgrims of either religion had been granted passage by their opposing rulers.)
The result? A new eruption of war between the Latins and Saladin, which would — after Baldwin’s death — lead to the destruction of the Latin kingdom. (That Baldwin’s successor was also an unqualified ass didn’t help, either; however the force Saladin was able to bring to bear on the Crusaders was likely beyond the skill of almost anyone to resist.)
The accusations of “collaborating with Muslims” or even “worshipping as Muslims worship” were, effectively, psychologically pathological reactions which were to the detriment of Christians in the Crusader realms as well as back in Europe. Nothing good came of them … not one thing.
Not one good thing came from the Crusades? Cooks would beg to differ. And then there are the French-Armenian families like mine, who fled to Cyprus, and thence spread their tinhattery around the world. In 19th-century New Orleans, you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a descendant of Lusignan, d’Ibelin, Bouillon, or Mamikonian.
I didn’t say nothing good came of the Crusades. I said nothing good came from the compulsion to avoid any appearance of even trying to get along with the Muslims who were the neighbors of the Crusader princes. Some such princes did arrive at truces or agreements with them. A few others actually allied — if only briefly, or in limited scope — with Muslim factions such as the Hashashin.
In truth, the Crusader states might have endured much longer than they did, had the Crusaders been able to treat the neighboring Muslim states on a similar diplomatic-political-feudal basis that they dealt with other states. But they couldn’t do this, as long as ecclesiastical and theological pressure was on to continually confront them and repeatedly go on the offensive against them, rather than “get along.”
By “getting along” I don’t necessarily mean being openly friendly or helpful. No feudal state was completely “friendly” with any of its neighbors. The Crusader princes moreover were certainly not always “friendly” to Christian states like Byzantium, which they ended up attacking in the Fourth Crusade, or even the Armenian princes, whom they also tangled with (e.g. Baldwin of Boulogne, who usurped his adoptive father Thoros of Edessa and became its first Latin count).
But even with that admission, the truth is that the Crusader states basically treated even rival Christian states of the region much differently, on a somewhat more equal basis, than they did the Muslim states. They repeatedly attacked the latter, even when it was to their own detriment to do so, and even when their own numbers were dwindling to dangerously small levels.
BTW one major “benefit” of the Crusades which I openly acknowledge was the reacquisition of the Greek language, and the rediscovery of the Greek classics (both via Arabic/Persian translation and in Greek via physical discoveries once western Europeans were in the Near East). That isn’t a small matter. Arguably this development turned western scholasticism into a major movement, and that in turn led to a chain of later developments, which included the beginnings of European science.
The Vigilant Citizen raving on about Lady Gaga is priceless! “Her left eye is in her hand, referring to the Hand of Fatima (evil eye). Also, one can’t ignore the resemblance with good ol’ Baphomet.” Wow, I didn’t know Baphomet had boobies. Poor fundies, they have absolutely no resistance to the satanic lures of sex, and thus cannot get jaded, like us godless types.
A nerdy aside- the apotropaic Hand of Fatima design was taken over from the worshipers of the Goddess Tanit, (Hamsa hand) much as Christians took over the image of the Good Shepherd from earlier religions.
And a rather ‘phallically’ placed caduceus! ;-)
http://marcoponce.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/baphomet11.jpg
errm Baphomet is supposed to be a hermaphrodite. If you look at the illustrations you will in fact discover he/she has “boobies”
Fascinating stuff, Vorjack.
Lots of things to go and do more reading on.
Yeah those Muslims, they are all about idolatry, right?
Wait what was it you said about shoddy scholarship? What did you use; Google?
Somebody is failing at reading comprehension in an ironic way.
Haha I stopped reading after this post said that Baphomet was a Muslim idol. I see now that is not what is said in the rest of the post. I think the author might consider clarifying how the subject is introduced. Ty, thanks for bringing me back to read more.
You will find that Vorjack’s articles are very well researched. That is, in fact, what he does for a living. They are always worth reading to the end.
I spent a decade exploring what we called “hardcore occultism.” I belonged to and founded occult organizations and read hundreds of books on these matters. Baphomet was central to my studies and participation. I researched all available works attempting to solve the “mystery” of who or what Baphomet was and I ultimately rejected the theory that it was a corruption of Mohammed and all of the other popular notions. Ultimately, I found that it derives from an ancient Egyptian cultus on the Nile near the Delta. The deity represented by the Levi illustration is a palimpsest of the idol of a Ram-worshiping sect of pagan polytheistic Egypt. I do not entertain a thought that I wasted ten years before becoming an atheistic Buddhist person. Occultism was a way station on the path to the enlightenment brought by science and reason.
I found that it derives from an ancient Egyptian cultus on the Nile near the Delta.
Skeptical. IIRC, Peter Partner et.al. stated that the Egyptian deity in question was “Banebdjed”, which relates it to the area in which it was worshiped. Levi could have gotten some of his inspiration for his classic Baphomet image from Herodotus’ recounting of the ram deity, but the name and identity as a demon and idol probably came through the mistaken beliefs about the Muslims and the Templars.
If we’re to connect the modern Baphomet to a deity mentioned in Herodotus, we have to explain how the name got on the pens of the poets of the Crusades. We’d need to explain how they came to associate it with Muslim worship. We’d need to explain how people who could be so out of touch that they thought that the Muslims were polytheists somehow found out about an obscure Egyptian deity. I think Partner’s explanation is the more parsimonious one.
I think Partner’s explanation is the more parsimonious one.
Which is why hard core occultists will reject it. They aren’t called “occultists” for nothing you know. A straightforward explanation that conforms to history, psychology and other analysis will always be rejected in favor of a more obscure explanation that ties the occult lore in question back to a more ancient time period, even if that linkage is tenuous at best. (Though I think that the idea that Levi used the images from Herodotus has merit – Victorian occultists were incredible plagiarists and were manic for anything that could make their occult imagery sound more legit. Hence their claims that their newly made-up rituals had roots in Ancient Egypt).
And Tervagan is almost certainly Termagant (or Tervagant) – a name that appears to have been made up whole cloth by Europeans and given to the God of the Muslims because, well, those pagans certainly couldn’t have been worshiping the same God as the Christians, could they?
The above comment appears to be an example of stereotyping. I am an occultist and do not have such cognitive biases in the least. The origin of the word is irrelevant to its esoteric significance as far as I and many other occultists are concerned.
Vorjack, have you listened to the podcast “The Speech in the Silence?” The current episode has a lecture on Baphomet, I think it is towards the end. It’s not the usual claptrap.