The Monstrefact: Baphomet, The Goat of Mendes

Rides Out. The most well known image of this monstrous humanoid is the eighteen fifty six drawing in French occultist Elaphus Levey's book Dogma and Ritual of High Magic. We see a creature with the head and legs of a goat, the torso of a woman, the wings of a bird, and a lit torch emerging between his horns. It bears a pentagram on its forehead and additional symbols illustrate its

body and environment. As with many examples of divine imagery, the image of Baha May is highly symbolic and has been incorporated into various occult traditions, subcultures, and new religious movements. It is also highly suggestive of various traditions of hornet gods in human history, such as pan in Greek tradition. We don't have time to follow all of these threads regarding the entity, but two major historical notes are of

special interest. The first concerns the trial of the Knights Templars, and the other concerns the writings of Herodotus on the religion of ancient Egypt. First, the Templars the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon was the religious military order of the Catholic Church during the Crusades, which ran ten They were intended to serve as protectors for pilgrims on their way to the Whole Lands, but

a sort of power creep occurred. They were given free reign to move across borders, made exempt from taxes, and ended up playing key military roles in various battles of the Crusades. But even the non warriors of this order became important, managing the movement of funds across vast distances of the Crusades and setting up a kind of proto banking system. They became powerful, and so they made powerful enemies.

As the Crusades failed, the Templars were blamed. Finally Fillip the fourth of France, with the aid of Pope Clement the Fifth, then based in France, the order was suppressed and falsely accused on charges of blasphemy and heresy, among other things. The charges included the notion that they worshiped a severed head called bapho May. Some of the templars were burned at the stake, fifty six in total, I believe, including Grandmaster Jacques de Malay, and others were absorbed into

different militaries, etcetera. The name bappo May, sometimes pronounced Bafflement, is generally understood to be a French corruption of the name Muhammad. The monstrous templar god. Baphi May is a product of trumped up charges that the Templars had converted to the Islamic faith of their enemies, and the French impapal accusers here invoke a fanciful and grotesque degradation of Islam and a corruption of Islamic ideas. To make the case to be clear, nowhere in Islamic tradition does one

find such a creature as this. As for the goat of Mendis, this is the name given by Alaphus Leavey, most likely referring to the writings of fifth century Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote of supposed goat like deities and reverence for actual goats in the region of Mendis, the Greek name for the ancient Egyptian city Jeget, which is now known as Tell El Ruba. Their ancient practices did concern a hornet god, but it is often referred to as a ram rather than a goat. The deity bey

neb Digit. To quote S. Birch's translation of Herodotus, Now, the reason why those Egyptians whom I have mentioned do not sacrifice goats, female or male, is this The Mendesians

count Pan to be one of the eight gods. Now, those eight gods, they say, came into being before the twelve gods, and the painters and image makers represent impainting and sculpture the figure of Pan, just as the Hellenists do with goat's face and legs, not supposing him to be really like this, but to resemble the other gods. The cause, however, why they represent him in this form, I prefer not to say. The Mendesians then reverence all goats and the males more than the females, and the

goatherds too have greater honor than either herdsmen. But of the goats, one especially is reverenced, and when he dies there is great mourning in the Mendesian district, and both the goat and pan are called in the Egyptian tongue Mendies.

As Geraldine Pinch explains in her book Egyptian Mythology, the word for ram bah and the word for soul or manifestation sounded much the same in Egyptian, so they were often regarded as manifestations of other deities such as Osiris, though ben Ebjujet is also sometimes treated as an independent deity as opposed to a manifestation. And just as goats will be goats, rams will be rams, and their association with virility seems to have colored traditions of an Ebjdette,

just as they colored traditions of Pan and others. Pinch writes quote the sexual aspect of the cult at Mendi's made it particularly disliked by early Christians. Ben Jiujette's form as a ram or goat headed man was reinterpreted as a devil figure who entered Western tradition as the horned

King of the Witches. It is curious that Baffa May, the goat of Mendez, has become so closely associated with Satanism, a d it dy that never quite existed, for theology that likewise never quite existed either, but that hasn't stopped the entity from taking on various meanings for assorted ideologies, subcultures, and creative visions. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

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