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The second source is a significant indicator of who Baphomet has become today and is important knowledge for anyone wishing to work with this deity magickally in modern times. The source of this information is the chapter on Baphomet from Liber Null & Psychonaught by Pete Carroll.
The Essenes, to avoid persecution and because they were a secret sect, employed the uses of ciphers and codes to hide the identities of important names. One such cipher, known to bible scholars and translators of the Dead Sea Scrolls, is the Atbash Cipher. To use the cipher you swap the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet for the last, second for second to last, third for third to last and so on. This means that Aleph=Tau, Bet=Shin, hence the name Atbash.
Essene knowledge got passed on to the Gnostics, and Gnostics then passed it on to the Cathars. The Knights Templar was at one time enrolling many Cathar nobles as new recruits. It is likely that among the knowledge passed to the Templars from the Cathars, would have been the knowledge of the Essene ciphers, including Atbash.
Hugh Schonfield obviously thought so, since he didn't hesitate in applying the Atbash cipher to what he saw as the "obviously artificial name Baphomet". So Hugh wrote out the name Baphomet in Hebrew, applied the Cipher and revealled the word Sophia! Baphomet was the Greek goddess of wisdom!
The Inquisition had thought that Baphomet was the bearded male head that the Templars prostrated themselves before and which spoke to them and gave them occult powers. Sophia, however, is obviously female and Hugh was not supprised to note that Inquisition records also show that in Templar hands was "a casket surmounted by a great head of gilded silver, most beautiful, and constituting the image of a woman." But what of the male head? This was Adam Kadmon, and the head was denominated in Hebrew as Chokmah, i.e. Wisdom.
Even before the discovery of Baphomet's true name, the feminine side of this deity had begun to manifest. Most modern depictions of Baphomet show him with a goats head, breasts (two, four or even six), wings (angelic or demonic), a phallus (usually a very big one), and hooved legs. So Baphomet had already emerged as androgynous, even before the discovery of his being the blending of Adam Kadmon (essentially a god, although Jews and derivative monotheists wouldn't see it that way) and the Goddess Sophia due to an Inquisition error.
In the second aeon, Men knew me as the Horned God, Pangenitor Panphage
In the third aeon, I was the Dark one, the Devil
In the fourth aeon, Men know me not, for I am the Hidden One
In this new aeon, I appear before you as Baphomet, The God before all gods who shall endure to the end of the Earth.
The above is the aeonic litany from the Invocation of Baphomet found in Liber Null & Psychonaut by Pete Carroll, and it is better understood when one knows what Pete means by aeons, and his view on the nature of the god Baphomet. According to Carroll, Baphomet is the latest incarnation of the animating spirit of all living beings.
In Carrolls first human aeon, the Shamanic aeon, this spirit was known as the Great Spirit, often depicted as a Horned God, a man with antlers.
Agriculture then ushered in Paganism, the second aeon, and all sorts of improbable deities. The Great Spirit became fragmented and different aspects were represented by various new deities. The Horned god was remembered in deities such as Pan, Curnunnos, Pangenitor and Pamphage.
Next came in the third aeon, Monotheism, where religion became a fully institutionalised instrument of the state. With idealised conceptions of unitary gods, and priests that were inept at magick, there was no room for the practise of magick or for a god whose represents the magickal energy of all the living things on the planet, and so the Horned God reappeared as the anti-god of these systems.
The fourth aeon is the aeon through which the leading Earth cultures are now passing, the Atheistic aeon. By a supreme act of selective inattention, atheistic cultures somehow manage to notice only the physical level of reality. The life force of the cosmos and the beings within it became the hidden god.
Some individuals are now, ahead of the rest of humanity, entering the fifth aeon, what Carroll calls the Chaoist aeon where a new conception of psychic reality is forming.
Baphomet is one of the fifth aeon's representations of the Earths psychic field, generated by the totality of living things on the planet.
Interestingly, Pete, unaware of Hughs discovery three years earlier, suggested that the name Baphomet probably arises from the Greek Baph-metis, union with wisdom. Although we now know this to be wrong, bizarrely we also know it to be correct! It is important to understand paradox as a Chaos magician, and also to able to interpret things on several levels of understanding simultaneously.
. This Page was written by Frater Mithrondal 1232 on 22 May 1998. Last updated 22/05/1998.
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