THE TEMPLARS AND BAPHOMET Part 1: CONSPIRACY, PROPAGANDA AND HETERODOXY by Fraternitas Loki The figure or rather the

name, of Baphomet in all its various guises has become in the occult world of the West something of a totem. Indeed amongst some branches of Satanism it has come to represent something as integral, on the feminine side, as the figure of Satan himself on the masculine. With the growing trend for orthodoxy, mandate, and tradition in some circles this article may unleash claims and counter claims. Its purpose however is not to deny or support any of groups claiming to represent real Satanism. Rather as in much else we do, to offer some unprejudiced observations and information to enable individuals the luxury of free enquiry without the cancer of dualism, dogma or territorialism. The simple fact is that the most effective, if not the singular, source for the inculcation of both the name, cult and the image of Baphomet into the European mind is the Knights Templars. To this very day the image and mystique of The Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon is powerful: countless books written, bizarre claims made, fantastic world conspiracies concerning their descendants, many myths and legends circulated concerning their powers and wealth. Three things are clear historically however: they became the most powerful non-governmental military machine and trading force of the medieval world, even having its own state (initially the Holy Land then later Cyprus); their collapse and disappearance was spectacular and bizarre yet all evidence points to a final hiding place and transmission into Freemasonry; their suppression in France under Phillippe IV and the Pope in his pocket was incredible for its perversity, brutality and neurosis. It is to the latter that we may seek the historical derivation of Baphomet and the delusory relationship to so called Satanism, whilst also more clearly understanding the relationship of certain branches of modern Thelemism to Baphomet. Philippe la Bel was playing a game for high stakes and had ambitions for his country and himself. He also owed the Knights Templars vast sums of money. Yet by scheming he had by 1305 installed his own puppet the Bishop of Bordeaux on the throne of St. Peter as Pope Clement V and in 1309 even moved the Papacy to Avignon. His hatred of the Templars was cancerous: aside from his debts and their vast might and glory, he harboured a grudge: they had humiliated him by refusing him an honorary. He had even more cause to fear them though. Phillippe had grand designs on claiming back all Frankish lands still in possession of the English Plantagenet kings, extending French domains elsewhere and becoming Holy Roman Emperor. He believed himself to have every right to be the premier monarch of all Europe. The Templars last bastion in the Holy Land, at Accre, had fallen in 1291, and although they had established a base on Cyprus it was no secret that they harboured designs to establish a permanent state of their own in Europe and the Languedoc seemed a likely candidate. In June 1306 Phillippe was forced to take refuge in the Preceptory

from the Paris mob and saw for himself the fabulous Templar wealth. He plotted. At dawn on Friday 13th. October 1307 the Temple in Paris was occupied by Phillippes troops and its officers arrested simultaneous with raid on all Preceptories across France. However to overturn such a powerful force as the Knights Templars required a strategy and a propaganda campaign of guile and vastness. Infiltrators had been sent into the Order, and a renegade knight was persuaded to concoct an elaborate picture of blasphemy and heresy. Gradually a bizarre catalogue of charges was compiled which via extensive torture and false confession shocked Europe into accepting the need to suppress the Order. There were many charges but the crucial one was of heresy and that the Knights worshipped a female head (variously described as a bearded female head) whom they called "Baphomet". Other charges included sodomy, spitting and trampling on the cross, infanticide, teaching women how to abort, obscene kisses in rituals and prayers, and subverting the mass. The concept that the Knights who had laid down their lives to defend the Cross, Christianity and Europe against the Saracen should have been corrupted to deny their Christ in favour of an alien deity seems improbable, so improbable it could be true! However, the wild claims and forced confessions fell upon a rapt and credulous audience. This was an age when the feminine in Europes psyche was suppressed, Nature worship and the cycle of the Goddess ravaged and any attempt for her to emerge from the confines of rural superstition and folkloric custom was met with the horror of the Holy Inquisition. It is interesting how most torturers at the time made persistent attempts to extract confession lurid detail of sexual impropriety. So it was with the Templars. A Europe bereft of the feminine (the cult of the Virgin grew almost against the wishes of the church) was fascinated with bizarre tales of the greatest Christian warriors of all time worshipping a Middle Eastern satanic goddess. Only the Templars may have had some intimation of the feminine via the remains of worship of Ishtar, Cybele, Lilith, Astarte during their sojourns in the east. All of the confessions must be treated with circumspection since they were all extracted under torture, except one and not in France. The Order had been officially dissolved on March 22nd. 1312. Philippe ever since 1309 had attempted to badger his fellow monarchs into suppressing the Templars across Europe with the aid of an Inquisition under his protege Pope. He met with qualified success. England had been a hot bed of Templars refuge and Philippe had constantly demanded that Edward II suppress them. It required the Pope to castigate the English King in 1310 and finally the Inquisition arrived in 1311. Stephen de Stapelbrugge was apprehended in Salisbury and made almost voluntary confession of his inductions into the Order. He claimed that the Orders errors had originated in the heart of the Cathar heresy which had been brutally erased by the French kings in the Albigensian Crusade with great slaughter. One of the central features of the Cathar

heresy was that Jesus was not the son of God but a prophet and that he had married. It also taught gnosticism - self wisdom through spiritual transcendence and failed to recognise heresy of other religions - indeed even consider an Almighty God as evil (many sects flourished in southern France at that time). If there was any connection between the Templars and the remaining outposts of the Cathar heresy then this would have represented as great a threat to orthodox Catholic christianity since suppression of the Celtic Church 300 years earlier. With a Templar state in the south of France, no monarch in Europe (least of all Philippe) could have withstood their inevitable military control of western Europe and with it whatever unorthodox religious views would have seeped into Western culture replacing that of the Papacy which had originally granted them effective clerical autonomy. Whatever the political and spiritual ambitions of the Templars may have been, the tactics used by their enemies is clear: total damnation as agents of satan. Since that time the concept of black and white has been the tendency in the West when dealing with this and other issues. One side may paint the Templars as the very progenitors of modern satanism around a real cult of Baphomet, others stating that it was a mere fabrication to confiscate their. The truth may be somewhere in between and there are in fact five distinct possibilities. We shall discuss these in part 2: The Cult of Baphomet Gnosticism and Islam Alchemy Druid Grail Cult of the Head Veneration of the Turin Shroud The formal charges brought against the Templars were mainly nine: Defiling of the cross and denial of Christ. Adoration of an Idol. A perverted sacrament performed. Ritual murders. The wearing of cord of heretical significance. The ritual kiss Alteration of the ceremony of the mass and an unorthodox form of absolution. Immortality. Treachery to other sections. Before we move on to an examination and description of the various scenarios of 1-5 above, we must bear in mind some simple facts of the time (and indeed of any time). Firstly that all evidence from outside sources were obtained by infiltrators who at best were merely evesdroppers to snippets of conversations, or the ceremony itself. That the Templars had spent many years in the Middle East and toward the end of their time had been known to have traded with and have dealings with the Muslims. They certainly learnt many skills of the arts of war, trade and medicine from them and several of the Cathar-like tendencies they were supposed to have manifest can be likened more to the Gnostic aspects of Ophite Islam. Homosexuality irrespective of its being condemned by Islam, Judaism and Christianity was in any case recognised as fairly common place in all societies, and enhanced to an ascetic or almost transcendent level in closed monastic or military communities. Several Popes and Kings, additional to many Bishops and Cardinals, were known to have been variously sodomites, homosexuals, pederasts and even paedophiles. Ascetic homosexuality of a closed, wealthy, highly disciplined and all powerful military caste would have attracted the

envy, even the fantasies, of a self-indulgent and corrupt French aristocracy and clergy. Certainly denial have been part of an elaborate and dramatic ceremonial of initiation. But evidence to the contrary of the necessary heresy and perversion was relegated, or deliberately misconstrued. For example, Petrus Picardi, one of the confessing Knights, stated that the denial was an act of fidelity since those who refused to deny were sent immediately to the Holy Land. Another Knight, Johannis de Elemosina, who yielded and denied was scornfully spurned by his Preceptor and sent for confession. Gonavilla, Preceptor of Poitou and Aquitaine, stated that the denial was a threefold denial in imitation of the denial of the Lord by St. Peter. There is a view, derived from late nineteenth/early twentieth century Masonic writers and archives, to suggest that the cross trampled upon during initiation rites of newly inducted knights may possibly have been was possibly painted or carved on floor in the form of steps or that trampling resembled the movements of steps. In Masonic terminology this would have been the ritual method of progressing from west to east: that is from death or the shadow life or non-being of nonbrotherhood into the light of service and fraternity. West of course represents death or the transformation of what will be the enlightened soul, whole east (aside from representing the Templars centre at Jerusalem) also signals the rising sun of spiritual rebirth. The similarities between Templar ritual, ceremonial, symbolism and allegory and that of the Freemasons has already been commented on in other manuscripts (as has the historical transformation of the former into the latter). Thus the trampling so noted by the Inquisitors would make it a Latin cross and thus similarly denote the trampling of the phallic cross of their passions represented by the cross which had crucified their Lord in the material world. However we must also remember that initiation of this sort, as with the military and secret societies today, is strongly imbued with the flavour of testing the loyalty and the fitness of the candidate under duress. Such tactics are still used. Thus no less so then would the shock-troops of Christendom have been likely to have employed psychological terror to test the loyalty of candidates to their commanders. There is evidence to indicate that the initiate was threatened with drawn swords if he hesitated to spurn the cross. Again the charge of kissing the anus of the Master and other obscene acts may have been a sign of humility and perfect submission (still seen in the animal kingdom and magickal and military elites). There is a final twist regarding heterodoxy. The Templars finally failed their mandate of retrieving and protecting the Holy Land. Christ thus appeared to have failed to defend his believers from the Infidel. As a result many thoughtful minds asked if Jesus was the son of God and if a wider interpretation was now necessary. There are indications that the Templars changed parts of the Mass: a religious military caste, free of obedience to a pedantic clergy and tainted with Gnostic teachings, may have begun the first steps of revisionism. The time was ripe: the possibility of a Templar state on the

European mainland, power of Islam on its borders, the rise of the monastic institutions, survival of Gnostic teachings, and Cathar fragments. In view of this we shall now consider the 5 heretical scenarios. Part 2: VENERATION OF THE TURIN SHROUD by Fraternitas Loki If we are to construct a path for ourselves through the labyrinth of history, the snares of messianism, and the distortion of the West we must always understand that any given reality has its mirror: i) the wider picture of a situation/occurrence which only becomes apparent in the fullness of time, when its energies or implication have run its course and the next stage is ready and ii) the promulgation of an official view and its antithesis which may have in it a sub-text which both the promulgators and detractors have missed. The question of the Templars and Baphomet is riddled with such mirrors and subtexts. The question of the famous head crops up again and again. Thus an entire fabrication with so many counter prevailing arguments, theories, evidence and confessions (many of which contradict on another) from imprisoned Templars, is unlikely, as unlikely as the modern satanist delusion that the Templars were satanists in the image of the modern apologists of such theory. However analysis of statements and of the prevailing cultural and religious climate and spiritual developments may throw light on matters occurring at the time. In part 2 we outlined 5 threads. We will proceed with discussion of them. Veneration Of The Turin Shroud: One of the main pillars of any organisation as powerful and international as the Knights of the Temple would have been its degree of monopoly and status as original source. In the case of their very name and their foundation the establishment of the Grand Preceptory on the very site of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem would have guaranteed this and led many to assume throughout Christendom that the Templars were thus privy to much arcane Christian knowledge: rumours abounded as to whether the Templars had found the Ark of the Covenant much as today people speculate whether the Nazis found it. Excavations it seems had been undertaken. But of far more reliable source for Templar power in terms of Godly or Divine source would have been the contacts with remote Gnostic sects who it is claimed were direct descendants of the original Essenes who were part of Yeshua ben Josefs (Jesus the rabbi) following. Then the other pillar of its power stemmed from its pre-eminent christian position as above and the conditions and guarantees from the Papacy - that it was to be independent. This helped it to amass a fortune of untold wealth based upon its monopolies of trade, international banking and credit (which it effectively created single handed) and also aspects of knowledge itself. Part of this no doubt would have been sacred artefacts. The Papacy itself did a roaring trade in the manufacture of forged bone fragments and said to be from this or that Saint (or even the Christ), or splinters of the Cross, or threads of the Shroud, or blood of the Christ and so on. The financial and power implications of this, well developed by the time of the Templars, could

not have been lost on them. However in the case of the Templars it appears that they were not content with forgeries and dubious artefacts, for they were not concerned with power over the blind masses, but rather over the ones who controlled the blind masses. Thus what would have appealed to them would have been actual sacred objects and artefacts which would have reinforced their divine and pre-eminent christian position amongst the aristocrats, merchants, princes, kings and even bishops and cardinals of Christendom itself. Various confessions at the time of the Templars trials regularly referred to the fact that in the main Preceptories a casket, or box or some such other reliquary was taken out and that initiates were made to kiss the object stored in this box, and that this was a head! It was thereafter described as the head of Baphomet. There is a view amongst some scholars and researches and occultists that the Templars were in possession of nothing other than the famous Shroud of Turin, the piece of linen said to contain the imprint of the body of Christ after his Crucifixion, and that it was stored in its box in such a way that only the head showed. We shall see another time the connection of this to the Neolithic Bran, the Druidic and Celtic Mysteries, of the Grail, the Cauldron and the Cult of the Skull. The descriptions in the Templar trials, under examination and torture, of the head which was supposedly worshipped may also throw some light on the Shroud option. It was described variously as: A deity with two faces: (if the shroud is folded in a certain way it appears to have two faces; additionally could have been placed in its reliquary so as to face both ways out so that two audiences in both sides of a temple or church could see and venerate it). It was androgynous: (if shroud is unwrapped it can appear androgynous since the folds of the shroud over a body give the appearance of male pectorals and/or female breasts, whilst the usual garment folds at the groin would indicate the bulge of male genitalia. It was a human skull: (indeed unfolded or laid out the head does appear emaciated or skull-like. This is on account of the fact that the impression of the body would have come from surface moisture whereby only the higher surface bone ridges etc would have made an impression, and the same is true for any forgery made in the Middle Ages, which some say the Shroud actually is. It was bearded (the bearded lady of Baphomet is a long standing image, even the 19th.C. former French catholic Alphonese Constant aka Eliphas Levi, perpetuated this image; most rabbis were bearded). The they called the head Baphomet: (various emanations have been given for this and it forms the substance of the Gnostic connections to be discussed later. According to the late Montagu Summer, is that it is derived from the Greek Baph metis meaning baptism of wisdom, Summer wrote many books on the occult from an extreme Catholic viewpoint. He states that the word referred to a secret ritual of wisdom known only to the Grand Master of the Templars. This brings us back to the origination of the Templars themselves that they were privy,

because of their sacred task and foundation as guardian of the temple, to the an extreme unction of the Christian faith, or inner knowledge, which the head of their Christ would have symbolised. Madelain Montalban on the other hand describes the word as Bfmaat described from the Enochian language: she translates it as Opener of the Door. Idries Shah, the writer on Sufi subjects, states it is from an Arabic word Abufihamat translated as Father of Wisdom. All have their history and ramifications regarding Templar connections, but can also be traced back to a possible Christian heresy of the Shroud symbolising Templar divine power. An interesting twist here is Levis claim that by reversing the letters to read TEM OHB ABI the anagram in Latin reads Templi omnioum hominum pacis abbas or Father of the Temple of Peace of All Men. It seems that the famous Turin Shroud was in the possession of the Templars between 1204 to 1307. It seems possible that reproductions of the shroud could, have been used in Preceptory temples: one such found in the preceptory of Templecombe in Somerset, England. Another view holdds that the head was indeed a head - that of the head of St.John the Baptist and that the Templars were infected with this heresy in the Middle East that Yeshua (Jesus) was an imposter and that the real Messiah was John. As with much else all theories have an element of truth and in time point out another reality which the near view obscures. Copyright 1997 Fraternitas Loki