I was paging through the The Sacred Fire: The
Story of Sex in Religion and came across an illustration entitled:
"Idol" of
Knights Templar, showing semitic influences (p 177). There is no
reference in the text to the picture and no source given for the
illustration. However, if its a genuine drawing from the time of the
Inquisition's investigations into the Templars, it could very well be the
source for Eliphas Levi's goat headed, hermaphroditic version of Baphomet,
the mysterious demon the Inquisition accused the Templars of worshipping..
Let me first describe the Templar imagery and then give my reasons for
connecting it to Levi's Baphomet.
Top half:
Crescent moon with face in top left corner,
sun with face in top right corner.
Roundish vase with penis inserted in top, balls showing,
in bottom left corner.
Same vase with baby emerging, bottom right corner.
Bird with outstretched wings in the center of the image.
Naked human figure with small wings sitting on top of the bird,
its genitals obscured by the bird's head. The human figure
has the head of what looks like a sheep to me -- no horns
at all.
The bottom half is divided into two boxes:
right hand box -- A woman with upraised arms, her open robe
showing her breasts and a shaved pubic area. On her head is a
crown with three rectangular segments. Between her feet is
a skull. To the left are six small stars and a large five-pointed
star.
To the right are six small stars and a large six-pointed star. In each
hand she holds what looks like a stiff chain running down the length of
her body and angled slightly inward. At the end of each chain is a small
crescent shape.
left hand box -- Another woman with open robe, upraised arms,
three segmented crown, and stiff chains in her hands, angled
inwards. No stars or skull.
The Templar Revelation (p 146) cites the fact that Levi in his History of
Magic says that the Templars were created by a gnostic Johannite sect that
preserved esoteric secrets and had designs on temporal power. Further,
Levi says that before his execution Jacques de Molay, the last of the
official Templar Grandmasters, 'organized and instituted Occult Masonry.'
In other words, Levi thought he knew what was going on with the
Templars. This gave him license to smush the above imagery together
according to his own understanding.
For the sheep's head he substituted a goat's head, since the imagery
of the top half obviously has a sexual generation theme to it. The
wings became bat wings, because this is supposed to be a demon.
He then moved up elements from the lower half: The five-pointed
star is placed on the goat's head. The exposed breasts are placed on
the naked body of indeterminate sex. The obscured genitals are
replaced with the caduceus, which derives from the interweaving of
the links in the chain-like instruments held by the open-robed women.
Later on, chains are added to the Tarot card of the Devil, based on what
look like chains in this original imagery.
So Levi's iconography says something like Sexuality enslaves men
and women but it can be transmuted into a healing force by a proper
interweaving of male and female elements. I don't know whether he
was referring to an inner alchemy or to physical, ritual sex.
But what does the Templar imagery actually stand for?
Given the crown and the stars, I suspected that the the open robed
women were images of the Queen of Heaven, obviously not the
Virgin Mary, but an earlier incarnation, perhaps Isis. I had the
intuition that the key to understanding was the instrument of
interwoven
links that she carried in her hands. These were obviously not chains,
since they didn't fall like chains, they were stiff and angled inward. But
what were they? They looked vaguely Egyptian to me. I thumbed through a
book on Egyptian Mythology, but didn't find any hieroglyph or sculpture
that fit the image.
The answer came while I was again thumbing through The Sacred Fire.
On page 44 there is an illustration entitled, 'From an old Egyptian
urn'. On the right it shows a man with a club fighting a lioness. On the
left it shows a kneeling man worshipping a cartouche-like oval. Within the
oval is a penis and rising above it is an interwoven chain-like object.
Outside the oval is another interwoven chain-like object with three
sinuous links. The Templar images show objects with eleven and twelve
links, but the similarities between the Egyptian and Templar objects are
clear. Notice: TGS HiddenMysteries and/or the donor of this material may or may not agree with all the data or conclusions of this data. It is presented here 'as is' for your benefit and research. Material for these pages are sent from around the world. If by chance there is a copyrighted article posted which the author does not want read, email the webmaster and it will be removed. If proper credit for authorship is not noted please email the webmaster for corrections to be posted.
So, if B. Z. Goldberg, the author of the Sacred Fire, is not doodling away
out of his own imagination, it looks very much as if the Templars were
secretly into worshiping a naked Queen of Heaven figure with Egyptian
roots. And that this worship had something to do with sexual sublimation,
an appropriate practice for a band of celibate warrior monks.
In keeping with the Egyptian theme I wondered if the sheep-headed
figure was the ba, the soul, the source of life-desiring sexual
energy,
since sheep's say bah. Similarly birds say kah, so the bird that
carries the naked sheep-headed figure on its back might be the ka.
Birds
get a panoramic overview when they fly and have very sharp eyesight,
hence they are symbols of consciousness and discrimination.
Could the upper image be the fusion of the ba and the ka, sexuality
now winged being carried aloft by discriminating consciousness?
The body is naked but we can no longer tell its sex. The head
of the bird replaces its genitals.
Dan Washburn - Jan. 1999
http://www.netmastersinc.com/secrets/templars.htm