Baphomet - How the Church Created the Image of the Devil

THE ELIPHAS LEVI BAPHOMET DRAWING

and

HOW THE CHURCH CREATED THE IMAGE OF THE DEVIL.

The rise of the early Christian church was marked by a battle to individualise itself by usurping and suppressing pantheistic ethos of all peasant cultures with which it came into contact. The purpose of pantheism is not idolatry (as the church has continually misinformed us) but a method of representing the method of nature.

At the top of the scale were the God and Goddess images, which were simply human most perfect form. These were icons to which peasants ASPIRE. At the 'bottom' the icons used were those things animate and inanimate, which encapsulated or symbolised elemental or physical forces such as fertility of animals and crops, these were things upon which the populations well being were dependant.

In the rustic communities, which then existed, their reverence for animals and birds went back into prehistory and all organised pagan ceremonies (and later, monotheistic ones) were just developments or dramatisations of these ancient rustic perceptions and rituals, supposedly enacted for the benefit of the community. An example of this might be the sacrifice of a pig from the flock to the god that made pigs grow big This was simply an extension of the development of feudalism where the head of the tribe took a percentage of the peasants stock or food.

Animals were often used by pagans as Totems. The symbols carved into Totem poles by Native American Indians were not 'devils', but simply respect for the spirits, souls and dignity of animals. Even so they were still considered 'devils' by the early Christian missionaries to America.

As early Christianity developed, for the first few hundred years like other religions it adapted much of the pagan worldview to suit it's purpose. e.g. the myth of the Christ god was virtually a direct adaptation of the Mithraic religion.

Christianity also had to compromise with local habits and customs, which is why many Anglo-Saxon churches had two altars; one for the Christians and one for the Pagans that also worshipped there. This was how the Christian missionaries to Britain surreptitiously commandeered exclusively for their own use the sacred sites, which Pagans had used in pre-history and continued with the adaptation of Pagan festivals.

When Christianity was weak it conjoined with what was expected tradition. When it became powerful enough to dictate what its followers should think and do, it soon began to divest itself of non-Christian pantheistic symbols, suppressing any Pagan content in festivals by firstly ascribing evil, anti-social, destructive, immoral and malevolent influences to them. Thereby establishing misdirection to enable the victimisation and suppression of peasants who chose not to conform.

Admissions and inventions extracted from pantheists via torture or punishment were manipulated into further corroboration of the previously invented propaganda and the demonization of Witchcraft was developed progressively by the Church just as the mythology of Satanic Abuse is being developed and used against Neo-Pagans and other non-conformists today.

Goats were a terribly important part of most tribal cultures back into prehistory. They were an indigenous resource, which was plentiful across Europe. Goats could survive on rough pasture; they provided all that the tribe needed in the way of food, clothing, thread, wool, milk, horn etc. Goat milk could even be used to succour human babies. This is still true today in many rustic parts of the Mediterranean countries where goat herders continue husbandry, which is thousands of years old.

In ancient times goats were revered and their image found its way into virtually every Pagan pantheon. The most frequent symbol of male dominance was horns, usually those of a goat, but sometimes also that of a bull or ram. The Church became fixated upon any image with horns as a symbol of paganism - the religion they wished to replace. This was particularly the case in relation to Judaism (from whence most early Christians were converted) for in the Jewish religion the four elemental animals whose Image support heaven (and the altar in the Synagogue) comprise four animals, including a Horned Bull. The altar itself has, by tradition, horns as a decoration on each corner, and of course the goat was sacred to the Old Testament angel Azaxel who was the 'Messenger of the Lord' and who was sent to Earth each Atonement Day to take away the Scapegoat and purify Mankind's sins. Anti-Semitism made the link with Sin, Goat and Jew in a different way and in Wade Baskin's Dictionary of Sorcerery (1972) he writes: 'The goat appears in mediaeval folklore as the symbol of Judaism and the Jewish God. The goat's beard or goatee, a supposedly characteristic feature of the Jewish physiognomy, was also considered to be a physical token of the Jew's Satanism.'

It is true that most of the 'devil' images in demonology were created during a time when the Jews were being hounded and persecuted throughout Christian controlled Europe. The religiously pious King Edward I ordered the expulsion of every Jew in England following several decades of Jew-bashing which had been started by rumours of Jews sacrificing children at their rituals. This is the same kind of scare tactic that was repeated by Satan Hunters in the social services in 1989. Massacres of Jews occurred in London and York where some 400 were burned to death en-masse at Clifford's Tower. It is estimated that around 16,000 English Jews were dispossessed. Edward then promptly confiscated all Jewish property in order to bale out his ailing treasury.

Throughout the world indigenous religions all used a horned animal of some kind to represent power, virility, strength, courage and plenty, and each one was discredited in turn as being heretical or Satanic when the Christian war machine overpowered that society and then tried to suppress any religious competition.

To give you some idea of how prevalent and benign the Goat icon was I quote from Barbara Walker in her 'Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects' in which she says: 'Sacrifices of goats identified with men or gods were common in ancient Greece. The oldest Athenian religious festival was Apaturia, which featured Dionysus in a black goatskin. In Rome the sacrificial god of the Mamuralia was a man dressed in a goatskin who was lead through the streets and flogged as a symbol of atonement. The goat people mythologized as satyrs and fauns were originally men identified with the sacred goats, on whose images the mediaeval goat-horned goat-hoofed devils were modelled. Scandinavians were admonished