Baphomet

Documented origin

The winged, androgynous, goat-headed figure was drawn by Éliphas Lévi in 1856 as “the Sabbatic Goat,” a deliberate synthesis of opposites — male and female, human and animal, light and dark, the arms inscribed solve and coagula. The name “Baphomet” is older than the picture: it appears in a 1098 letter from the First Crusade and again in the 14th-century trials of the Knights Templar, long before Lévi gave it this now-famous form.

The reading

Mark Passio reads Baphomet not as a devil but as a teaching diagram — the union of opposites and the balance of natural law, every paired element answering its opposite. Lévi himself intended the figure as “the equilibrium of opposites,” solve et coagula, the Hermetic axiom as above, so below rendered as a single body. Manly P. Hall places it in the same lineage of the reconciled pair, wholeness assembled from contraries.

Where it hides today

It recurs in occult art, in the Tarot’s Devil card, and in the imagery of modern Satanic organizations — a 19th-century drawing of balance now read, by turns, as a warning and as a creed.