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To: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.satanism,alt.politics.satanism,talk.religion.misc,alt.christnet.demonology From: catherine yronwodeSubject: Re: Baphomet Demystified (was Baphomet or Satan?) Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 11:29:50 GMT SOD of the CoE wrote: > c) LaVey's Baphomet was a found object of very > simple design; its components are a point-down > unicursal pentagram, whose meaning is given > by stargod enthusiasts and their inversos as > the victory of the concrete over the spiritual, > triumph of the demonic over the angelic, etc.; > the Goathead is typically ascribed to 'Azazel', > which see, and the Scapegoat of Jews which > sets into motion the martyrdom of neuvo- > religious, plus there are comparisons made > between the 'sheep' of Christian churches > and the 'goats' of Satanist grottos; the > Hebrew letters at the five points are those > implying the name 'Leviathan', a monstrosity > from Jewish scripture (artist may have been > Oswald Wirth, but I don't remember a firm > identification: cf. MAquino's or someone > else's analysis which is archived in Google > or at luckymojo.com) The original drawing was by Oswald Wirth. LaVey took as his form of this image a simplified and less precisely rendered version of the Wirth art that had been redrawn by an anonymous graphic designer at a French publishing house in the 1960s for use in stamping the cloth cover of an encyclopedia of magic by Maurice Besey. Inside the book the original Wirth illustration was run without credit to Wirth, further complicating matters. Cordially, cat yronwode Path: typhoon.sonic.net!not-for-mail Message-ID: <40FAEE2A.A8934AD6@luckymojo.com> From: catherine yronwode Reply-To: cat@luckymojo.com Organization: Lucky Mojo Curio Co. X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 (Macintosh; U; PPC) X-Accept-Language: en,en-GB MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.magick,alt.satanism,alt.magick.tyagi Subject: Re: Baphomet or Satan? References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 109 Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 21:29:18 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.148.125.218 X-Complaints-To: abuse@sonic.net X-Trace: typhoon.sonic.net 1090186158 209.148.125.218 (Sun, 18 Jul 2004 14:29:18 PDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 14:29:18 PDT Xref: typhoon.sonic.net alt.magick:380142 alt.satanism:245139 alt.magick.tyagi:47913 People's Commissar wrote: > > "Stone Wolf" wrote > > Actually, the Sigil of Baphomet historically originated with the > > Templars. I think not. I think you will find it originated in the art of a 19th and early 20th century European occultist named Oswald Wirth, a Tarot card designer and excellent artist of occult insignias. > > When the Templars were persecuted, some of them made > > claims that the order worshipped a mysterious entity or idol > > called Baphomet. Their "Baphomet" was described by their persecutors as a "bearded head," specifically. The Templars offered no image or sigil of Baphomet at all, their own symbol being two men riding on one horse, to indicate their vows of poverty. > > They were imprisoned and since they were presumably not in contact > > with each other, their stories couldn't have been collaborated > > between each other, yet, several of them did talk about the same > > entity,Baphomet. That's one of the mysteries surrounding the > > Templars. There is no mystery there. Torturers are known for their ability to elicit whatever kind of speech -- including specific words -- will result in a temporary cessation of the torture. You and three of your friends whose names were picked at random could, God forbid, be picked up and tortured in three separate jails as a demonstration of this Within two weeks, all three of you could be made to "confess" to having formerly ingested "purple daisies," to having had a shared password such as "pompadour tea" or to having sworn allegiance to an entity named "teekanne." That's why confessions under torture have proven so unreliable -- the victims will say whatever is suggested in order to bring the pain to a halt. > > exactly did they come up with the Baphomet? What was it's > > significance? What did it mean? Perhaps a mispronunciation of Mohammed, a term their accusers wanted to put into their mouths, thus painting them as traitors to Christendom. > > The Church, in it's 'infinite' wisdom immediately assumed the > > Baphomet was a demon, or an allusion to the devil. There ya go. > > Baphomet de-mystified. Kinda. > > http://www.geocities.com/satanicreds/baph.html > > The original did not have the letters that spell "Leviathan" in it. Anton LaVey's "original" is a crude copy by a publisher's in-house graphic designer of a detailed drawing by the Swiss artist Oswald Wirth. It most certainly does include the five Hebrew letters that spell "Leviathan" on it, just as Wirth designed it. Wirth's original also has, in the Latin alphabet, the names "Samael" and "Lilith." These names were left out of the simplified rendition of Wirth's emblem that was adapted as a cover-stamping device by the publisher of Maurice Bessey's encyclopedia of occultism, from whence LaVey copied it. The full version of Wirth's sigil appears inside Bessey's book, "A Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural." It is important to note too that Wirth's Leviatahan-Samael-Lilith sigil was designed as a counterpart to another sigil, also of Wirth's devising, in which a naked human figure in an upward-pointing pentagram is surrounded by the five Hebrew letters spelling "Yeshua" (Jesus) and, in the Latin alphabet, the names "Adam" and "Eve." Wirth was constructing a dualistic, Biblical emblem-set based around the concept of the upward and downward pentacles as applied to the Book of Revelations: Upward was humankind (Adam and Eve) and their saviour Jesus; downward was demonkind (Samael and Lilith) and their commander, Leviathan. Anyone with a grounding in Christian occultism can understand these symbols -- and can recognize that they have no actual relationship to the Knights Templar o to Baphomet, either historically or as claimed by Wirth, who certainly knew better than that and whose drawing was appropriated by LaVey long after his death. Incidentally, Wirth's use of a goat head to represent the downward facing demonic pentacle (rather than the more typical sea-monster Leviathan of the Book of Revelations) probably derives from his indebtedness to Eliphas Levi and Levi's famous "Solve et Coagulum" drawing of the 1850s, which was published in "Transcendental Magic." Wirth had begun his career as an occult artist by illustrating Eliphas Levi's notations for an occult tarot deck. He later drew a second, more sophisticated tarot deck of his own, which is still in print from U.S. Games Systems and is well worth the price, as it is quite lovely. He also wrote a book on the tarot, published in French, which influenced the British and American occult revival of the tarot, at least among those who, like Crowley, Waite, Mathers, et al, could read French. It is currently available in English translation under the title "Tarot of the Magicians," and i recommend it highly. If you obtain either the Oswald Wirth Tarot, or better yet, his "Tarot of the Magicians," you will immediately recognize his artistic style and see his hand as the creator of the emblem that LaVey and his followers have wrongly dubbed the "Baphomet sigil." Cordially, cat yronwode
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