The Templar arrests of October 1307 were made on a prepared list of charges, and the interrogations that followed were conducted under torture and under a procedure in which confession was the expected outcome. Among the accusations was the veneration of an idol, and a minority of the accused described one.
The descriptions do not agree. Deponents variously reported a bearded head, a head with two faces, a skull, a cat, a painted panel, an object of wood or of silver, sometimes kept by a single official and shown at chapter meetings, sometimes not seen by the deponent at all. Most of those questioned said nothing about any idol. Nothing answering the descriptions was ever produced, in a suppression that involved the seizure of every Templar house in France.
The name attached to some of these depositions, in the forms Baphometh and Baffometi, was not new. It appears in a letter written by a crusader in 1098 as a name for Muhammad, and the standard philological explanation is that it is a Provencal corruption of that name, carried into the depositions by interrogators or deponents as a general term for an idol of the infidel.
The order was not convicted. The papal document that dissolved it in 1312 did so on the ground that its reputation made it unusable, expressly without a judgment of guilt, and the record known as the Chinon parchment shows the pope absolving the leadership in 1308. What survives is therefore a name in a coerced record, an object nobody found, and a suppression carried out for other reasons.