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Baphomet is this atlas's only bridge between its beings and creatures and its orders, societies and movements, and the name it carries first appears in an interrogation record rather than in any account of belief.

A Name From an Interrogation

The name Baphomet first appears in the confessions extracted from Knights Templar brothers during the order's suppression from 1307, where accused brothers described venerating a head or an idol so called. What the name meant, and whether anything of the kind existed outside the interrogation record, is not settled; the most common proposal is a garbling of Mahomet, and the confessions were taken under torture. The Knights Templar themselves, the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, were a Catholic military order that combined monastic vows with the duties of a warrior, recognized by the Church and endowed across Christendom before their sudden fall made them a lasting subject of legend.

An Image With a Known Author, Passed Along Four Times

The figure most people picture is much later and has an author. Eliphas Levi drew the Sabbatic Goat in 1856, a winged goat headed hermaphrodite seated with one arm raised and one lowered, a torch between the horns, and wrote it as a symbol of the balance of opposites rather than as a devil. From Levi it passed to Aleister Crowley, who took Baphomet as his own name in the Ordo Templi Orientis, then to the Church of Satan, whose sigil is Levi's goat inside an inverted pentagram, and then to The Satanic Temple, whose Baphomet statue is placed in public argument over religious display on government land. A word spoken under duress in 1307 has passed through five very different hands since, and this atlas's only link into the orders and societies section runs through the first of them.

Where To Read More

• BaphometEmblematic FiguresThe figure whose name first appears in the 1307 Templar confessions, this atlas's only bridge into orders and societies
• Knights TemplarMilitant SocietiesThe order whose suppression produced the confessions naming Baphomet