The Tree 528 Part IV: Whither Baphomet?
Interlude 1
Part I - Part II - Part III
The weather was strangely warm that October. Watchfires that normally would have been zealously tended were left to smolder and die fitfully, the sleepy guards warm enough with their blankets and mulled wine. Or maybe it was the lure of gold, furtively changing hands, a young Brother who felt slighted... or worse.
Whatever the reason, the plot hatched a month before to break the back of the greatest (and wealthiest) fighting force in Christendom went off without a hitch. October 13th, Friday. At dawn...
For nearly two centuries the power of the Templars had grown. At first pledged to guard the roads to Jerusalem for penitents and travellers after the successes of the Early Crusades, and quickly becoming the elite of elite of crack troops, known for their devotion to the Church and their policy of never, ever surrendering (even as the Moslem world pushed back, recouping earlier losses). Matching their prowess in battle was their prowess in finance. Bequeathments and Papal largesse quickly swelled their coffers till their might and wealth (and standing army of trained soldiers) seemed to some, that were perhaps not so enamoured of the secular power of the Church, to be a growing threat to the political stability of Europe itself.
Murmurs and cracks began to form. Rumors of strange rites, heretical rites. The worship of foreign idols and lewd acts, arcane secrets found buried in the tunnels under the Temple Mount, unnatural acts, even (Mon Dieu!) the repudiation of the Sacrament. The Denial of the Christ...
Perhaps this was simply propaganda, surely these plain and simple Knights, who made an oath of Poverty and Fealty to the Church, surely this was just the envy of lesser and more venial men... (or a good way to welch on their debts - the Templars were the first International Banking Conglomerate after all...).
Or was there some truth to what was said about what went on behind the stone walls of the Templar Keeps?
Whatever the reason, on that Fateful Day, that Friday the 13th of October, 1307 - the entire leadership of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon were arrested in a secret dawn attack, subjected to torture and forced to confess to the most heinous sins. The great wealth of the Templars both in land and gold, across all of Western Europe was confiscated. Despite years of legal wrangling and defiant retractions of confessions, the Head of the Order, Jacques de Molay was burnt alive at the stake in Paris on March 18th, 1314. As the flames wreathed about him, he cried out a curse: "God knows who is wrong and who has sinned. Calamity will come to those who have condemned us!". Both Pope Clement V and King Philip IV of France died within the year.
One of the charges levied against the Order was that they secretly worshipped idols... variously described as a statue of a bearded woman, or the head of a woman, or an ancient and shriveled head that had been discovered under the Temple mount... or perhaps a series of heads - silver or wooden reliquaries... an idol (or idols) named Baphomet.
Much speculation as to the etymology of this curious name - which is really obviously just a bad corruption of the name of the Prophet Muhammed - has been bandied about in the centuries after the destruction of the Templar Order, especially during the Occult explosion of the Age of Enlightenment - a time that saw the rise of Esoteric Masonry and myriad Secret Societies, and on through the 18th and 19th centuries. It was Baphe Metis or Baphe Metous a terrible mangling of a phrase intended to mean "Baptism of Wisdom". Or the extremely strained suggestion of the phrase templi omnium hominim pacis abbas (Father of the Temple of Peace of All Men), abbreviated as tem.o.h.p.ab and then written backwards.
That last is attributed to Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Constant), magician extraordinaire of the 19th Century, who imbued the figure of Baphomet with most of the symbology used today - the depiction as a horned and bearded goat-man-woman, the Divine Androgyne, The Great God Pan, Mendes, and the Sabbatical patsy, an alchemical hodge-podge pointing up Above to the white moon of Chesed and down Below to the dark of Geburah. Solve et Coagula. It is his depiction that so captured the imagination, the Devil of the Tarot, the Satan-cum-Savior.
Aleister Crowley, who at one point claimed to be Levi reborn, took up the mantle, claiming the name was a corruption of "Father Mithras" (language uncertain... maybe Latin?), going so far to take Baphomet as his Magickal Name of Office as the X° Outer head of the O.T.O.. Crowley experimented with variant spellings in Hebrew transliteration till he arrived at a (to him) satisfactory combination of letters and Gematria - BAVAaMIThR באועמיתר having a value of 729 (93), but lacking any semblance of being anywhere close to an actual word...
...and called it Macaroni!
In 1984, in a book called "The Essene Odyssey", Dr. Hugh Schonfield (1901 - 1988), a translator and scholar of the New Testament, author of "The Passover Plot" and "Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls" came up with a solution to the etymology of the mysterious Baphomet. He determined that it was in code - using the Atbash Cipher, wherein the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet are swapped out - the first for the last, the second for the second to last, and so on - that it was spelled (in Hebrew) BPVMTh בפומת which, when run through the Cipher became ShVPIA שופיא, Sophia Σοφíα- the Greek word for Wisdom (and the Gnostic apotheosis of the Feminine Divine).
That the way the Greek word Sophia would technically be transliterated into Hebrew would slightly differ than that (what is presented as a Vav ו would more properly be presented as a Ayin ע, the letter Peh undoubtedly should be the Greek Pi π which is not in the word Sophia, rather than Phi φ which is, but doesn't really have a Hebrew parallel, etc.) - that though it is perhaps not technically correct, the solution of Schonfield does have the benefit of being both elegant, and of being aesthetic. It has narrative consistency. The meaning of Sophia absolutely and in every way matches the intended (at least from Levi onward) meaning of the Baphomet symbol. In addition, both in meaning, and by the related Gematria of the resultant Hebrew is not only narratively consistent with the usage in the Baphometric Tree 528... it's coded into the structure itself....