Baphomet

BAPHOMET

Baphomet is not a demon to be summoned but a mirror to be understood: the Sabbatic Goat in whom every opposite is joined, light and dark, man and woman, above and below, held in a single balanced figure.

Who Baphomet is to practitioners today

Baphomet is the great symbol of the occult: the horned, winged, half-human figure who unites all opposites, and for the people who work with the image today he is a focus for balance, self-knowledge and the reconciliation of the parts of themselves they were taught to divide.

He is not one of the seventy-two spirits of the Goetia, and strictly he is not a demon at all. The familiar image was drawn in 1856 by the French occultist Eliphas Levi, who built it to carry a single idea: the equilibrium of the opposites.

Modern practitioners meet Baphomet in two ways that overlap. Some treat him purely as a symbol to meditate on and arrange their altar around. Others work with him as a living figure, a goat-headed presence invoked for gnosis, shadow integration and the courage to stand as a whole, undivided self.

Since the Church of Satan made the goat-pentagram its emblem and the Satanic Temple raised its bronze statue, Baphomet has also become the public face of a whole tradition.

This page starts with how people actually work with the image now, the prayers and meditations they use and the questions they ask, and ends with where the figure came from.

The figure stands on a statement older than Levi: as above, so below. Things on earth come from, and answer to, things above, the stars and the planets; the phrase also names the gaining of power and the realising of your true potential.

Above and below, masculine and feminine, man and woman, white and black, good and bad: you cannot have one without the other, and so one is not better than the other. In our view there really is no bad, only what works for you and what does not.

In Thelemic terms Baphomet is the Union of Opposites, mystically personified in Chaos and Babalon combined, and biologically manifest in the sperm and egg united in the zygote.

Why people work with Baphomet

People turn to the right symbol for the right purpose. These are the reasons practitioners come to Baphomet, from the oldest meanings of the image to what people actually use him for today.

Classic meanings

• The union of opposites: male and female, light and dark, mercy and justice, held in balance
• “As above, so below”: the hand raised and the hand lowered, the harmony of the heavens and the earth
• Solve et coagula: dissolve and bind, the alchemical work of breaking down and remaking
• The Universal Agent: Levi’s “astral light,” the hidden force that moves through all things
• The torch of knowledge: intelligence and illumination set between the horns
• The hermetic mystery: a single figure holding the whole doctrine “everywhere the same and everywhere concealed”

Modern reasons

• Balance: practitioners meditate on Baphomet to bring opposing forces in their lives into equilibrium
• Shadow work: people work with Baphomet to face and integrate the parts of themselves they were taught to reject
• Uniting masculine and feminine: invoking the androgyne to honour both within, beyond the roles they were handed
• Self-knowledge and gnosis: calling on Baphomet as a keeper of hidden wisdom and “Know thyself”
• Satanic and Luciferian identity: taking the goat-pentagram as a sign of one’s own path and pride
• Overcoming shame: embracing the body, the appetites and the animal self as holy rather than base
• Personal transformation: working the solve-et-coagula current to dissolve an old self and build a new one
• A ritual focal point: many simply place his image at the centre of an altar to anchor the whole working
• Standing against dogma: the figure as a banner for blasphemy, pluralism and freedom of conscience
• Thelemic work: for those in Crowley’s current, Baphomet as the androgyne of arcane perfection and of initiation

Traditional, for reference

What the old sources attach to the name and the image. This is historical background, not modern practice.

• The Templar trials (1307 onward): the idol “Baphomet” the Knights were accused, under torture, of worshipping
• Eliphas Levi (1856): the Sabbatic Goat of Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, the equilibrium of opposites
• Stanislas de Guaita (1897): the goat’s head set inside the inverted pentagram, in La Clef de la Magie Noire
• Aleister Crowley (1910s): Baphomet as a divine androgyne and “the hieroglyph of arcane perfection,” a name Crowley took in the O.T.O.
• Church of Satan (1969): the Sigil of Baphomet, the goat-pentagram adopted as the emblem of LaVeyan Satanism

Baphomet at a glance

• Nature: a symbol and ritual figure, not a Goetic spirit or a classical demon
• Other names: the Sabbatic Goat, the Goat of Mendes, Baphometh (Templar spelling)
• Name origin: debated; often read as an Old French corruption of “Mahomet,” or decoded by Levi’s followers as a cipher for wisdom (Sophia)
• Drawn by: Eliphas Levi, 1856, in Transcendental Magic
• Core idea: the equilibrium and union of all opposites
• Key motto: SOLVE et COAGULA — dissolve and bind
• Emblem today: the Sigil of Baphomet, a goat’s head within an inverted pentagram

Correspondences

Used in Black Witch Coven (from our own practice):

• Direction: the centre, the point where the four quarters meet
• Element: all four in union, which is to say Spirit
• Colours: black, red and gold
• Number: five, for the pentagram
• Candles: one black and one white, or red and black, burned as a pair for the balance of opposites
• Incense: dragon’s blood resin, sandalwood and myrrh
• Symbols: the inverted pentagram, the torch between the horns, the caduceus, the raised and lowered hands

Also used by other practitioners:

• Zodiac: Capricorn, the goat, following Crowley’s reading of the figure
• Stones: obsidian and clear quartz paired for dark and light, labradorite for the hidden, garnet for the body
• Plants: vervain, mugwort and rue for vision and the crossing of thresholds
• Offerings: wine, bread, tobacco, a drop of one’s own blood on the candle, and acts of honest self-examination
• Images: Levi’s engraving, the Sigil of Baphomet, or the Satanic Temple’s bronze, set at the altar’s centre

Working with Baphomet today

There is no grimoire rite for Baphomet, because he was never a grimoire spirit. What practitioners do instead falls into two streams: using the image as a symbol to contemplate and build an altar around, and working with Baphomet as a figure to invoke. Both are described below, with how we approach the image in Black Witch Coven.

The image as a focus

For many, Baphomet is first of all something to sit with. His picture is placed at the centre of the altar, and the practitioner meditates on what each part of the figure holds: the opposites joined, the hands pointing up and down, the torch of the mind, the beast and the human in one body. Used this way he is less a being to petition than a map of the self to study and a reminder of the balance the whole practice aims at.

Invoking Baphomet as a figure

• Set his image at the centre, flanked by a pair of candles for the opposites he unites
• Burn dragon’s blood or sandalwood and let the room grow quiet
• Make the sign if it suits you: one hand raised, one lowered, “as above, so below”
• Speak the invocation plainly, naming the balance or the wisdom you seek
• Sit in the presence and watch for the shift in the room, then close with thanks

Shadow work with the goat

Baphomet’s most common serious use today is shadow work: turning toward the parts of yourself you were taught to despise and finding their place in the whole. The beast’s head, the body, the appetites — the figure insists these are not beneath you but part of you. Practitioners journal before the image, name what they have hidden, and work to integrate it rather than exile it. The aim practitioners describe is to stop being ruled by what they refuse to look at.

The work of balance

• Name the two forces you feel pulled between: duty and desire, caution and daring, head and heart
• Set a candle for each, with the image between them
• Speak each side honestly, giving it its due
• Ask Baphomet not to pick a winner but to hold them in equilibrium
• Let both candles burn together; keep nothing, decide nothing, until the pull eases

Solve et coagula: dissolving and remaking

The words on the figure’s arms name a whole method. Solve, to dissolve: breaking down a belief, a habit or an old version of yourself. Coagula, to bind: setting the freed material into a new and chosen form.

Practitioners work this as a two-part rite, a dissolving phase where the old is named and released, and a binding phase where the new self is declared and sealed. It is slow, honest, inner alchemy, and it is the heart of what Baphomet is for.

Signs of contact

• A deep, settling calm, the feeling of two things that were at war coming to rest
• Dreams of doubled or androgynous figures, mirrors, goats, or a torch in the dark
• A sudden clarity about a contradiction you had been avoiding
• The sense of being seen whole, without the usual division into “good” and “bad” parts

Prayers and invocations to Baphomet

Baphomet has no traditional enn, because he belongs to the ceremonial and Satanic streams rather than the demonolatry one. People invoke him with spoken invocations, chants and meditations instead.

The pieces below are written by Black Witch Coven for your own use. Speak them as they are, or let them show you the shape and then use your own words.

How people invoke him

• Standing before the image: addressing the figure directly, often with the up-and-down hand sign
• With paired candles: one light, one dark, lit together to embody the balance
• As a repeated chant: a short line said seven, nine or eleven times to deepen a meditation
• In silence after speaking: most of the work is the stillness that follows the words
• In writing: journalling the dialogue, especially in shadow work

Invocation of the balance

Baphomet, Goat of the balanced flame,
in whom the high and the low are one,
I stand before you whole.
Join in me what the world has split:
the light hand and the dark,
the beast and the mind,
the man and the woman,
mercy and justice, above and below.
Teach me the equilibrium you hold.

Spoken before the image with a candle lit on either side.

Chant of the opposites

As above, so below;
as within, so without.
Solve et coagula.

Repeated slowly seven, nine or eleven times while gazing at the figure, until the two halves of a thing feel like one.

Prayer for shadow work

Baphomet, you who wear the beast and the human in one body,
show me what I have exiled.
Bring up the parts of me I was taught to hate,
and let me look at them without flinching.
Not to be ruled by them,
but to take them back,
so that nothing in me is left in the dark.

Said before journalling, with the image lit and the room quiet.

Prayer for wisdom and gnosis

Keeper of the hidden doctrine,
torch-bearer between the horns,
lift the veils of what I take for granted.
Let me see the thing itself,
the truth that is everywhere the same
and everywhere concealed.
Grant me the courage to know,
and to be changed by knowing.

Said at the start of study or meditation.

Rite of dissolving and remaking

Solve: I dissolve what no longer serves me.
I loosen the old shape, the old name, the old fear,
and give it to the fire.
Coagula: from what is freed, I bind a new self,
chosen and whole.
As above, so below. So it is made.

Spoken in two parts, the first as something is released to the flame, the second as the new intention is declared and sealed.

Closing

Baphomet, I thank you for the balance you have shown me.
What was divided, let it stay joined.
I carry your equilibrium out of this room and into my days.
The rite is ended.

Spoken before the candles are put out.

Invocation from our earlier page

Baphomet, Lord of the Hidden Light,
I call upon thee, embodiment of balance and knowledge.
Guide me to wisdom, both dark and light,
That I may become whole and free from strife.
With thy horns, I receive the power of transformation,
With thy wings, I transcend limitation.
In your eyes, I see the truth of all things,
And in your form, the unity that life brings.
I stand before you, open and willing,
To embrace the wisdom of all worlds and all beings.
Let me walk in the path of balance and inner sight,
As I seek enlightenment in the day and the night.
So mote it be.

Chant to invoke Baphomet

Baphomet, guide my way,
Through the night and into day.
Wisdom, power, transform me now,
In your light, I take my vow.
Baphomet, Lord of Balance true,
I seek your wisdom, to renew.
Dark and light, both intertwined,
Lead me now, and open my mind.

Repeated seven, nine or eleven times, as the practitioner’s tradition holds.

Chant of the union

Baphomet, union of all that is,
Balance within, peace is my bliss.
Male and female, dark and light,
Bring me harmony, bring me sight.
Baphomet, in your form, I stand,
A being of balance, in your hand.
Guide me to unity, lead me to peace,
Let all my struggles and conflicts cease.

Prayer for knowledge and transformation

Baphomet, keeper of the ancient wisdom,
Illuminate my mind, and set me free.
Through the veils of illusion, let me see,
The mysteries hidden, the truth that is to be.
Grant me the courage to seek and to know,
To journey within, to face my own shadow.
Transform my spirit, as you transform the soul,
Guide me to wholeness, and make me whole.
In your wisdom, I seek to grow,
In your power, I choose to know.
So mote it be.

These four come from our earlier page, said at the start of meditation or ritual.

Questions people actually ask

These are the questions that come up again and again about Baphomet, answered the way we would answer them.

Is Baphomet the Devil?

No, and the confusion is modern. Levi did not draw Satan; he drew a symbol of balance and the “Universal Agent.” When the Church of Satan adopted the goat-pentagram, LaVey was explicit that the figure does not represent the biblical Devil, whom LaVeyan Satanists do not worship in any case, but stands as a metaphor for their values. Baphomet became linked with Satanism by association, not because he is Satan.

Is Baphomet a demon?

Not in the grimoire sense. He is not among the seventy-two spirits of the Goetia and has no classical demonic rank. He is a composite symbol invented in the nineteenth century to carry an idea, which practitioners may then work with as a figure. If you came here from the demon pages, that is the honest answer: Baphomet is something different, and worth understanding on his own terms.

Is Baphomet male or female?

Both, deliberately. Levi gave the figure a woman’s breasts and the arms of an androgyne, one male and one female, precisely to show that the opposites are united. People who work with Baphomet often use “he” out of habit, but the whole point of the image is that it is beyond that division. Many drawn to the figure find exactly that the reason they come.

What does solve et coagula mean?

It is Latin for “dissolve and bind,” written on the figure’s forearms, and it names the alchemical work. Solve is breaking something down, whether a metal, a belief or an old self. Coagula is reforming it into something new and chosen. Together they describe transformation: you cannot build the new without dissolving the old.

What do the torch, the pentagram and the hands mean?

• The torch between the horns is the light of intelligence, the mind raised above matter
• The pentagram on the brow is the star of will and spirit crowning the figure
• The raised and lowered hands point to the white moon and the black, mercy and justice, saying “as above, so below”
• The caduceus at the belly, two serpents round a staff, is the current of life rising through the body

Did the Knights Templar really worship Baphomet?

The name appears in the Templar trial records from 1307, where knights confessed, under torture, to venerating an idol called Baphometh. Most historians treat those confessions as coerced and unreliable, and read “Baphomet” as a garbled form of “Mahomet,” a product of the charges brought against the order rather than evidence of any cult. The Levi image came five centuries later and is a separate creation entirely.

Is Baphomet connected to Islam?

Only through the name. The leading theory is that “Baphomet” is an Old French form of “Mahomet,” from Crusade-era Christian accounts that portrayed Muslims as worshipping Muhammad as an idol. Islam forbids the worship of any figure but God, so the name records how medieval Europe pictured its rivals, not Islamic practice.

Can I work with Baphomet as a deity, not just a symbol?

Many do. In Thelema, Crowley treated Baphomet as a genuine divine figure, the androgyne of arcane perfection, and took the name himself. Theistic Satanists and Luciferians invoke him as a living presence of balance and wisdom.

Whether you meet him as a pure symbol or as a figure who answers is a question your own practice will settle; both are well-trodden roads.

Is it all right to have a Baphomet statue or tattoo?

For practitioners it is a declaration: of balance, of the union of opposites, of a path that does not fear the body or the dark. It carries no obligation in itself. Many keep the image simply as the anchor of an altar. What it means is what you bring to it.

Is Baphomet good for beginners?

As a symbol to meditate on, he is one of the most approachable focuses in the whole tradition, because there is no spirit to offend and no rite to get wrong. The depth is in the honesty you bring to the shadow work and the balance work. Most begin by sitting with the image and learning what each part of it holds.

What is the difference between Levi’s Baphomet and the Sigil of Baphomet?

Levi’s Baphomet (1856) is the full seated goat-figure. The Sigil of Baphomet is just the goat’s head inside an inverted pentagram ringed with the Hebrew letters that spell Leviathan; its goat-pentagram form was first printed by Stanislas de Guaita in 1897 and adopted and named by the Church of Satan in 1969. One is the whole icon, the other the compact emblem drawn from it.

De Guaita’s original set the names Samael and Lilith around the goat: Samael, the accuser and destroyer of Talmudic lore, and Lilith, the night demon.

What works, what doesn’t

These patterns come from practitioner accounts, Satanic and Thelemic writing, and our own coven. None of it is a rule.

What practitioners report works

• Honesty. Shadow work only moves when you tell yourself the truth about what you have hidden.
• Holding contradiction. Letting two opposed things both be true instead of forcing a winner.
• Studying the image. Learning what each element means turns a picture into a working tool.
• Patience. Inner alchemy is slow; the people who stay with it report the deepest change.
• Using him as a centre. Anchoring a whole practice around the figure gives it coherence.

What practitioners report working less well

• Treating him like a vending machine. He is not a wish-granting spirit; he is a mirror and a method.
• Fearing the image. Coming to him through inherited horror rather than understanding keeps you from the actual work.
• Rushing. Expecting fast results from what is, by its nature, slow.

What people report from their first months

• Assuming Baphomet is Satan or a Goetic demon and working him as one
• Reading the figure as evil instead of as balance
• Wanting a quick result from a current built for deep change
• Skipping the study of the symbol and missing what it is actually for

The darker current: the beast, the body and the taboo

Baphomet’s balance is not a polite one. He joins the human to the animal, crowns the body as sacred and refuses the line between clean and unclean, and some practitioners work exactly that edge: the antinomian current that breaks a taboo on purpose to free what it was guarding, and the sexual alchemy in which the union of opposites is enacted rather than contemplated. We would rather explain that than pretend the figure is tame.

Where the figure came from

The living practice above is the real work. The history is its background, and it is worth knowing, because the Baphomet people fear and the Baphomet people work with are five hundred years apart.

The Templar trials

The word first appears in the records of the Inquisition’s case against the Knights Templar, begun in 1307. Under torture, some knights confessed to worshipping a heathen idol-head called Baphometh. Most scholars read the name as a corrupted “Mahomet” and the confessions as extracted fictions. There is no reliable evidence the Templars venerated any such figure; the charge was a weapon.

Eliphas Levi and the Sabbatic Goat

The image everyone pictures is barely more than a century and a half old. In 1856 the French occultist Eliphas Levi, a former seminarian turned magician, drew the Sabbatic Goat for his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Transcendental Magic). He built every detail to carry one doctrine, “the equilibrium of the opposites,” and wrote that the flame between the horns is “the magic light of the universal balance.” Levi, not the Templars, is the real father of Baphomet.

De Guaita, Crowley and the Church of Satan

• Stanislas de Guaita (1897): first printed the goat’s head inside the inverted pentagram, in La Clef de la Magie Noire
• Aleister Crowley (1910s): adopted Baphomet as a divine androgyne, “the hieroglyph of arcane perfection,” and used the name as his own motto in the O.T.O.
• Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan (1969): adopted de Guaita’s goat-pentagram, named it the Sigil of Baphomet, and made it the emblem of modern Satanism
• The Satanic Temple (2010s): commissioned the bronze Baphomet monument as a statement of religious pluralism and the right to blaspheme

The Satanic Temple’s plans for the monument set one of its tenets on the front, “The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word,” and on the back a passage from Byron’s Cain: “Then who was the Demon? He who would not let ye live, or he who would have made ye live forever, in the joy and power of knowledge?”

The filmmaker Penny Lane, in her documentary Hail Satan? (2019), suggested that a century from now the statue might be read as a sign of religious pluralism and of standing up to opposition rather than of anything sinister: its meaning, in her words, “religious pluralism, the importance of embracing blasphemy.”

Crowley on the figure

Crowley set out his reading plainly: the Devil as a name is “the God of any people that one personally dislikes,” and the true figure behind it, Baphomet, “the Androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection,” is “therefore Life, and Love,” whose letter is the Eye, so that he is also Light, and whose sign is Capricorn, “that leaping goat whose attribute is Liberty.” It is as good a summary as any of why the figure endures.

Black Witch Coven’s view

We find Baphomet to be the truest single image the Western occult has produced: not a devil to dread but a mirror to grow into. He joins what the old religions spent centuries tearing apart — the body and the spirit, the man and the woman, the light and the dark — and he asks only that you stop fearing half of yourself. Worked as a symbol he steadies a whole practice; worked as a figure he teaches balance, and the slow alchemy of dissolving an old self to build a chosen one. He is gentle on the surface and demanding underneath, because honest self-knowledge always is. Those who sit with him and learn what every part of the image holds find he shows them the equilibrium they are reaching for.

Work with Baphomet through Black Witch Coven

• Baphomet Candle: for the centre of your altar
• Baphomet Oil: for anointing the image, candles and yourself in balance work
• Baphomet Incense Sticks: to carry the atmosphere of the rite
• Baphomet tarot reading: to ask the figure directly where your balance lies
• Candle for Demonic Request: a devotion burned on our altar for you

As with all magick, results are never guaranteed.

Related figures and spirits

• Satan: whose ritual sigil, in LaVey’s system, is the Sigil of Baphomet itself
• Lucifer: the Light-Bearer, kin to the torch between the horns
• Leviathan: whose name rings the Sigil of Baphomet in Hebrew letters
• Lilith: for the dark feminine the androgyne also carries

Sources

Eliphas Levi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie / Transcendental Magic (1856)	The Sabbatic Goat; “the equilibrium of the opposites”; the flame of universal balance
Records of the trial of the Knights Templar (from 1307)	The idol “Baphometh” of the confessions
Stanislas de Guaita, La Clef de la Magie Noire (1897)	The goat’s head within the inverted pentagram
Aleister Crowley, Magick (Book 4) and later writings	Baphomet as divine androgyne, “the hieroglyph of arcane perfection”
Anton LaVey, The Satanic Bible (1969)	The Sigil of Baphomet as emblem; the figure as metaphor, not the biblical Devil

Further reading: Eliphas Levi, Transcendental Magic (Waite translation); Peter Grey, The Red Goddess (on Babalon and the figure’s sexual symbolism).

• Baphomet, Wikipedia
• What is the Baphomet?, BBC News