The most reproduced image in modern occultism began as a frontispiece: the goat headed, winged, androgynous figure Levi drew for his Dogme et rituel de la haute magie. He did not intend a portrait of the devil, whose personal existence he denied, and he did not call the figure Satan. His caption and his text name it the Baphomet of Mendes, the sabbatic goat, and he explains it as a pantacle, a deliberately composite symbol of the equilibrium of opposites in the astral light: one arm raised and one lowered with solve and coagula written on the flesh, male and female in one body, animal and human, the torch of intelligence between the horns, the caduceus at the belly. It is a diagram of his central doctrine, that a single plastic medium, the astral light, underlies all magical action and can be fixed or dissolved by the trained will, and that every attribute of the accusers' devil is a misread symbol of that force.
The drawing's afterlife escaped him completely. Church polemic and later popular culture took it as the face of devil worship; the Church of Satan set a version of it in its sigil; and the word Baphomet, which Levi had lifted from the confessions extracted from the Templars five centuries earlier, became permanently welded to his goat. The misreading is itself instructive: Levi built an emblem that requires interpretation, and the world, as he himself taught it would, saw in the astral mirror what it brought.