The Book of Baphomet.An introductory address delivered at the book launch, 4/8/12, Glastonbury, by Pete Carroll.

I’d like to begin by looking a little at the life and work of the man who brought the idea of Baphomet to the modern world,  Eliphas Lévi, born Alphonse Louis Constant (February 8, 1810 - May 31, 1875),

 He trained as a Catholic priest but resigned due to falling in love, he then started to write revolutionary politics/theology, for which he got imprisoned twice during the various political crises in mid 19^th century France. After that he began an influential career in esoterics and magic, writing several books and visiting Britain where his ideas would eventually have a great impact on the Golden Dawn.   

He made a journey from CLERGYMAN, to RADICAL, to MAGUS.

Apart from a little light reading in witchcraft, Levi’s books provided me with my first introduction to magic.

It was largely through the occultists inspired by him that Lévi is remembered as one of the key founders of the 20th century revival of magic. He came up with four ideas which seem important: -

1) Astral Light theory. This departure from straight neo-platonic ideas at least had the virtue of making people think a bit more deeply about how magic might work.

2) The Upright and Averse pentagrams as symbols having different meanings.

3) The equation between the 22 Trumps of the Tarot and the Hebrew Alphabet and the elements, with this he opened up a huge field of syncretic speculation.

4)Baphomet, an image worth a thousand words.

This may look a bit Kitsch now, having appeared on rather too many black leather jackets, but the ideas it appears to represent graphically have had enormous impact, basically Levi hints that this image constitutes his vision of God.

Levi seems to have written about it in rather guarded, almost milquetoast terms, but remember he had already got himself imprisoned for writing too plainly about politics.

The Image of Baphomet he presents seems to exhibit 7 qualities: -

DUALISTIC  God-Devil

ANDROGYNOUS Includes the Female.

LUCIFERIC Torch, light bringer, forbidden wisdom.

THERIOMORPHIC Half human half animal, Pan-like, Pagan, incorporates the ‘lower’ selfs’

SEXUALISED Breasts and symbolic penis. Goats as horny/satanic.

MAGICAL Caduceus, magical gestures, waxing and waning moon.

SHAMANIC Horned, theriomorphic, wild.

This seemed like just about everything I wanted in a deity!I thus offered it as a central rite of the Pact, in the Mass of Chaos (B).

So where did Levi get the idea from? Well partly from historical myth and legend and partly from his personal feelings and imagination and mysticism one suspects.

The Catholic Church and the French King accused the Templars of Heresy, almost certainly falsely, and their inquisitors threw in all the usual accusations of sex, sorcery, blasphemy, and Baphomet worship.

Occultists admire the Templars on the basis that they might just have actually had a taste for sex and blasphemy and maybe magic. However their actual sin as far as western Christendom was concerned was LOOSING THE HOLY LAND, following their disastrous defeat at Hattin.

The accusation of Baphomet worship arose from a mispronunciation, Muhammad = Mohamed = Mahomet = Baphomet. The crusaders imagined that the Moslems worshipped some mad primitive savage deity/devil, and it seemed that their deity was beating ours.

The Templars were really accused of going native and sympathizing with the Islamic enemy. The blasphemy accusations arose because part of their training involved getting prepared to appear to renounce their faith if captured. The Vatican has recently accepted this.

All gods and all religions and all magical traditions get cobbled together out of bits and pieces of previous traditions. It’s all syncretic, scholarship confirms this, and Chaos Magic adopts it as a guiding principle without apology or evasion.

So, starting with Levi’s drawing, what have modern esotericists done with Baphomet?

DUALISTIC           ANDROGYNOUS             LUCIFERIC           THERIOMORPHIC    

 SEXUALISED           MAGICAL                     SHAMANIC          +  GAIANISTIC

 They have added GAIA, a sense of the sacredness of the Biosphere and Ecology, Life on Earth.

And that makes a rather pleasing Eight!

This new book by Nikki Ward and Julian Vayne resumes the fascinating history of the development of the concept of Baphomet from its earliest historical mention through its development by Levi and then to the cutting edge of its current manifestation.

Their brave and audacious exploration of the modern Baphometic current using full-on eroto-gnosis and extreme chemo-gnosis creates a tale which is destined to enter into esoteric legend.

I commend this book to you.

For some years I served as Treasurer to the Bristol Branch of UKIP, my first ever membership of a political party. I joined for several reasons, partly because EU regulatory red tape has started to create idiotic problems for my business without bringing any benefits, but mainly because I didn’t want to see my country subsumed within a developing Synarchist Totalitarianism, or to have to open its already overcrowded shores to uncontrolled immigration.  I attended the triumphalist conference after the 2004 European parliament elections but left after the 2005 Westminster general election campaign. I had three reasons for doing so.

Firstly I don’t think the UKIP MEPs should take the enemy EU shilling. They should not draw any form of salary or expenses, for to do so means compromising and corrupting themselves. Yet their policy of stunts and buffoonery in the EU ‘parliament’ seems perfectly appropriate for a virtually powerless sham parliament that exists merely as a fig leaf for the democratic deficit of the EU. They should seek funding from the UKIP membership or simply keep their day jobs. MEPs have almost nothing of any significance that they can actually do anyway. If UKIP had had such a policy it would not have ended up with crooks and spivs standing for MEP election.

Secondly I deplored the strategic error of contesting far too many Westminster seats in the 2005 general election. This simply destroyed the funds I had spent a lot of time gathering and adding to personally, without applying any significant electoral pressure to the Conservative party whatsoever. The British people seem happy to vent their anger at the EU by sending a two fingered message in the form of a dozen UKIP MEPs, but they remain unwilling to have such buffoonery in Westminster.

Thirdly, and most importantly for me, I found the attempts by UKIP to develop a manifesto policy on the environment lazy, scientifically illiterate, and terrifyingly myopic. Well maybe one doesn’t expect much intellectually from a party that has had to adopt a right-wing-populist agenda to gets its euro-skepticism across, but its Friday, 13^th manifestoes of April 2012 stoop to new depths of contemptible short sighted populism on the subject of ‘Planning for our green and pleasant land’

It includes such gems as: -

“Ban new wind farms and subject existing ones to democratic local planning procedures,

Build new power plants to secure our energy supply,

Close the Climate Change Department saving up to £18billion a year,

End wasteful UK subsidies to ugly, cost ineffective ‘renewable energy’ scams,

Stop all payments to the Intergovernmental Climate Change Panel and other UN climate-related agencies.”

Humanity now faces the tragedy of having Too Much Fossil Fuel with the discovery of the deep gas and the oil shale reserves. This doesn’t actually seem all that surprising, this planet doesn’t naturally have an oxygen atmosphere, free oxygen exists solely because millions of years of photosynthetic activity have liberated it and buried the carbon whist doing so. This planet holds enough fossil fuel to consume all the atmospheric oxygen and if we don’t stop burning it soon the planet will trap ever more energy and the climate will go really crazy, we can look forwards to rising sea levels and severe rain flooding alternating with scorching droughts, welcome to a new dinosaur age.

Both my daughters study ecology at degree and doctoral levels, the evidence for anthropic climate change and mass-species extinction remains increasingly impossible to deny, both they and I remain severely concerned for their futures.

UKIP does not take its nimbyism far enough, okay so most people would rather not have wind turbines and solar panels all over the place, but do they really want an unstable climate, ruined agriculture, resource wars raging all over the world, and climate refugees in their backyard instead?

Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels will have its costs, particularly if Britain’s competitors do not follow suit till later, but Britain should have the courage to make some sacrifices for the future and to set an example. In the longer term, renewable energy technology developed with the customary British genius for science, engineering and innovation will provide an invaluable export commodity.

The current UKIP stance on the environment sounds like cowardly appeasement, oh this carbon dioxide thingy is nothing to worry about, it might be nice to have the place a bit warmer, let the carbon giants get on with it, they pay the bills and keep the trains running, it will all blow over eventually…….

Well no it won’t. It will get bloody serious and threaten our way of life in these green and pleasant lands if we don’t stand up and show a bit of Churchillian foresight and backbone.