The Origins and Alchemy of
Éliphas Lévi’s Baphomet

by Estha K. V. McNevin

Have you ever wondered why occultists always dress in black? Why you’ll never see bright colors on their back and why their appearance seems to have a somber tone? Do you know the reason for the clothes they wear? Woven into those deeply held cultural habits, Hermetic philosophy unites alchemy and the occult through symbolism. For many who seek the truth of magick, the black shroud of Baphomet is emblematic of initiation. It unveils the mystical power of rational self-education as a prerequisite intelligence; reason is mandatory in maintaining the self-preserving secrecy of the Craft. To will, to know, to dare, to keep silent—these are the powers of the magician, with which one weaves reality in accordance to the mastery of will using magick.

Occultists in the know often wear the color black in honorific recognition of the protection and self-respect that initiation affords. It is from others that we learn the one singular alchemical formula that will dominate our own journey to enlightenment: solve et coagula, dissolve and reconstitute. Like it or not, by way of oblivion and reformation, we humans are essentially always adapting, grappling in the darkness as we decay and are reborn according to our karmic cycles.

Shadow Boxing

Many of the profound occult philosophies are rooted in the Hindu Vedas as well as the Hebrew Qabalah. These are ye olde texts of antiquity from which astrology and the tarot have been reconstructed for the New Age of the West. Classical Hermetic arts can be hard to wrap our modern minds around because they shroud the original paradoxical principals of pagan culture from that lost garden of chaos. Our spiritual culture upholds the psychological truth that symbols are things, images are symbols, and all things have a deeper level of meaning than what we assume from the surface. There is empathy to be found when we explore the substance of a proper noun. Personally, this sort of deep thinking saved my life from uncertain rhetoric as a student by destroying my concept of “taboo.” All the while, magick has challenged my assumption that reality is authentic.

Meditating on Baphomet in my early phases of initiation and training was fundamental to my development as clergy because it helped me define my ceremonial practice as a lucid Gnostic process. Oh, the devil is there, all right, in each of us, riding our primeval impulses like a topless Babylonian banshee in the best of times. In the worst of times, however, he looms like a Satanic bank manager, more aware of our desires and limitations than we are and therefore quick to satiate instinctive self-indulgence. In an effort to out-exploit us, the devilish details are ever ready to tether us to yet another exhaustive learning curve. Elucidating our own pursuit of enlightenment, Baphomet is a symbolic essay; the image reminds us to be careful what we wish for in very deed!

These Hermetic ideas from antiquity challenge and guide seekers in the school of hard knocks, with good reason. They test the enslavement of our ego to assumption. Esoteric liberation only happens when matter-of-fact experiences yield understanding. If separation is a delusion, as swamis of Hinduism would have us believe, then unity is the real goal of enlightenment. Oneness excludes nothing. Baphomet looks scary, doesn’t he? But he proves his truth in spades. We need every religious perspective there is to understand our shared reality; each and every path to enlightenment is necessary for someone in the collective.

Our own choices are the only ones imperative to us. At times, however, our stubborn pride, riddled with our willful ambitions, will long to know. Even our pious vows made in service can set us up for a sort of Gnostic selfish suffering, that burden of the martyr. As we grapple for enlightenment beyond self-identity, we have to work on ourselves most of all. In alchemy, the orphic aura is a glass egg filled with the black bile of our choices; our reaction to it is what affects our karmic learning curve the most. Yet in life, amid the throbbing heat of circumstance, instantaneously dissolving and reconstructing the ego is so much easier said than done—wouldn’t you agree? Perhaps this little devil is trying to give you fifteen trump reasons to sort yourself out.

From French Bohemian to Hippie Occultist

Behind every obscure idol there is a human story of Gnosis, longing, and attainment. For Paris-native Alphonse Louis Constant, life in the 1830s proved itself beholden to the Roman Catholic Ancien Régime doctrines of the colonial crusades. They who “had,” had in abundance, and everyone else was among the unwashed masses. Disillusioned during his studies at Saint Sulpice Seminary, this occult pioneer left to join a radical new movement of socialist bohemians. He went on to become a prominent Romantic writer on the Neo-Catholic socialist movement as well as Qabalah and the occult.

Many of these magickal and foreign ideas proved transformative to early occultists because they exposed them to a lost world of fantasy, planetary allegory, and astrological code, revealing the very lacework of Western mythology. It was while studying the Qabalah that Alphonse Louis Constant took the Hebrew name Éliphas Lévi around 1835. This was also when he began writing extensively on magick and the occult. Moreover, as a result of Lévi’s work with planetary and zodiacal classifications of the Qabalah, the occult sciences took on a more alchemical tone, in many ways adapting a scientific model to ceremonial magick.

Lévi was rooting out these layers to the onion when he so famously divided this science into two parts in his seminal work Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual. There he introduces Baphomet in relation to the Devil, Trump XV, and provides a self-drawn sketch. To Lévi, Baphomet was a hieroglyph of occult science and magick, disguised for a Neo-Platonist Christian world hell-bent on censorship and disavowed of idolatry in the human form. Nevertheless, it still permitted all manner of scary monsters and demons of antiquity. Lévi clarifies, “adores of this sign do not consider it as do we, a devil; on the contrary, for them it is that of the god Pan.”

The Anatomy of a Hieroglyphic Text

To say that Baphomet is rooted in ancient magick would be an understatement. For occultist Aleister Crowley he was the lingam, the regenerative male potential—primordial Shiva, the Hindu creator and destroyer. I love what modern academic Michael Osiris Snuffin says on the subject: “Baphomet is a god of the old religions and schools of thought that were active before the full advent of Christianity, and not a representation of the devil.” Snuffin, like so many magicians, looks at the image created by Lévi and sees a totality of philosophy and a sort of pictorial essay on the fabric of existence. Where literalists might see a god or a fantasist would perhaps contrive a devil, the multilingual and initiated occultist relies on the symbolic reason of antiquity, which has never really fallen out of practice thanks in part to art and religion quite simply because it decodes the hieroglyphs of living and dying.

For Lévi, the figure was not a god but a glyph that held all of the admonitions of a devil as an eternal rebellious idea more related to willfully independent thinking than to a living deity or being. Over time, longing to reclaim our pagan idols, occultists have personified the Devil, Trump XV, with the Christian underworld demigod Satan, himself bound to antiquity by the Jewish corresponding force Moloch (King), the accuser and prince of primeval demons.

So many of the Golden Dawn documents, namely McGregor Mathers’s chief translations of texts on the Tree of Life, were taken from the French translations of Éliphas Lévi. These documents would go on to influence Wicca and Thelema. The Qabalah provided a unique understanding of reality as multidimensional light, the medium of all magick. The planetary and astrological symbolism of antiquity was paired with Hebrew letters and myths from classical European paganism to enhance the tarot into a pictorial collection of the pagan cosmology.

By the time that A. E. Waite began to study Baphomet in anticipation of its symbolic use in his reimagining of the Devil card, ideas of Satanic occultism were flourishing amongst the early Evangelical revival communities of Europe. Subsequent generations have continued to equate Trump XV with Satan, at least on the surface, but, increasingly, the deeper alchemical philosophies have been fermenting in popular culture. From album covers to dorm room posters, Baphomet has achieved a godlike status, the likes of which Lévi himself could have hardly predicted.

Of Angels and Spirits

The original image appears, hand sketched, as black charcoal on a white background. A gargoyle or hieracosphinx, Baphomet is perched squatting on a cubic throne atop a sphere, mocking the vulgarity of the world. The image is unusual and contains a wealth of elemental and alchemical symbolism coded into the obscure body, gestures, and stance. The figure is cross-legged, right over left, and two cloven hooves are visible beneath a Saturnine shroud that is draped over the lap of the image to indicate the veil of secret initiation into the occult. The hooves identify the figure as a satyr and relate it to “IAO Pan,” the occult mantra of creation of which Aleister Crowley was so fond.

From the groin, a caduceus emerges. It rises from an oval sphere of the akasha or aura tattwa of Tantric Hinduism. Behind it, watery fish scales cover the abdomen of a voluptuously breasted Roman satyr, making for a titillating goat-man. The image certainly has a way of lingering in the psyche. Two snakes entwine a rod of light, so iconic of the Upper and Lower lands of Egypt, a metaphor of contrast and union. The white curative snake Nebthet and the black toxic Aset merge in Hadit, an Egyptian symbol for Gnosis. These Greek Hellenistic themes, which evolved out of the cult of Harpocrates, are still essential in the study of the occult, teaching magicians the ability to exercise free and rational nonbiased will secretly, in an effort to achieve a magnum opus, or Great Work of karmic destiny.

Resting on the twenty-sixth path of the Tree of Life, the Trump XV image relates to the nature of reality. This icon of life force is the All-father and All-mother Nuit as well, binding us to the rings of Binah, the cellular boundaries of our own karmic existence. We are slaves to our own primeval and instinctive choices. When a living rebirth is necessary, we seek out esoteric initiation and we transfigure the ego to adapt to new conditions or circumstances to elevate our own consciousness through direct effort. This force of nature is ruled by Capricorn the goat-fish, itself an anthropomorphic architect of our reality, who bestows the benefits of experimentation and applied self-education.

The Great Mother Nuit is associated with Binah on the Tree of Life, the female Saturn. Binah is the Qabalistic Sephira of understanding, and Nuit rules the Saturnine foundations of reality from her throne of creation, upon which Baphomet squats. Our fermentation within the alembic glass egg is within her realm of alchemy. This is because fusion, division, and fission exhibit the ascending and descending energy of fertility and rebirth. In occult doctrine this demonstrates the link between outer physical alchemy and our internal emotional alchemy and gives us a transcendental pictograph of adaptation designed to help us philosophically navigate our more willful choices in life.

Furthermore, Lévi gives us some real clues to the contrasting forces at work within each magician. Baphomet is fitted with eagle or angel wings that suggest the illusion of freedom, for like all winged spirits, he is bound in service and leaded to the formational earth beneath his wild cloven hooves. His arms are poised in an alchemical gesture indicative of esoteric fermentation. The right is muscular and masculine, inscribed with Solve (dissolve) and reaches above with the hand held in the benediction mudra used to draw angels and good spirits from the glowing first quarter Moon of pure light. The left arm is inscribed with Coagula (reconstitute) and reaches below with the hand in a mudra for casting manifestive or dark magick from the last quarter Moon of shadow.

The figure’s chest reveals the androgyny of the image, of the breasts so evocative of fertility and having one’s wishes fulfilled. The figure’s goat head is a direct reference to Pan and the wild satyr gods of antiquity. The pentagram on his brow evokes the five elements that bless and protect the ajna chakra. A glowing flame of enlightenment, the Hebrew Yod (a Light of God) burns atop his torchlike crown. Verifying the godhead through esoteric study and experiment will reveal the truths inherent in this hieroglyph and manifest the fruits of our desires.

It is the reality of our shared human experience that we dissolve and recreate into our own image and then call it God. This esoteric philosophy is vital to the evolution of magick as well as to our own growth and adaptation, and perhaps that is why Lévi and so many other occultists turn time and again to the alchemist’s idea of evolution. From images like Baphomet, we learn to read in symbolism and to daily orient our thought, speech, and actions to our highest purpose with our own brand of primitive and willful magick.

Baphomet’s Tawdry List of Devilish Correspondences
Tarot	The Devil, XV
Hebrew Letter	Ayin, O, the all-seeing eye and Nazar
Numerical Value	70
Tree of Life	Path 26, the Eye uniting Tiphareth (Beauty) and Hod (Splendor)
Global Mythic Deities	Yoruba Olodumare, Egyptian Typhon, Zoroastrian Ahriman, Babylonian Ea, Greek Python and Pan, English Herne, Celtic Cernunnos, Abrahamic Satan, Hindu Shivling (Lingam of Shiva), Hermetic Baphomet, the obscene deity of Mendes, goat of the Sabbath
Planets	Saturn, the baron Earth authoritarian devouring of life; the smothering mother inundating
Zodiac	Capricorn—goat-fish, architect, intellect; practical, prudent, ambitious, disciplined; a primal urge for order and an emotional need for chaos
Astrological House	Tenth (skill, recognition, triumph, and mastery)
Garden	Rhizomes, bulbs, roots, tubers, and stalks
Flowers	Ivy, heartsease, amaranth, pansy
Trees	Pine, elm, yew, willow, aspen, poplar, red sandalwood (chandan)
Herbs	Hemp, grape, hops, comfrey, knapweed, hemlock, henbane
Incense	Dung, dragon’s blood, sandalwood, cyprus leaf, balm of Gilead
Intoxicants	Wine, marijuana, psilocybin
Metal	Silver, iron, lead
Color	Dark gray, black, dark brown, tan
Hindu Tattwa	Akasha—spirit, rising hope, aura, orbis aetherial
Gemstones	Turquoise, amethyst
Occult Hermetic Axim	Solve et coagula, “dissolve and reconstitute”
Alchemical Process	Fermentation within the alembic glass egg using the perpetuation of fusion, division, and reformation to achieve a refined result; Gnostic intoxication

A Journey to Call One’s Own

There is more to magick than meets the eye. The levels of our culture and very depths of our history are enlightening. In studying ancient symbolism, we come to find joy and curiosity; learning is a fun adventure and is our birthright. We begin where we are, but our potential is only limited by our own fixated assumptions. There is a real liberation in feeling the power of being alive. Real magick is the lotto win, a twenty-first birthday, and Christmas all rolled into one because the universe is euphoric. Our ability to perceive and comprehend it is a miracle.

When we first feel the joy and thrilling power of magick, it feels like being wrapped up in a rainbow every day. I would love to hold life in that feeling and tell the world that everything’s okay. But, like so many other occultists, I fight apathy and my own lazy ignorance, so I proudly wear black, and to conqueror my own karma I carry Levi’s magick on my back.

Selected Resources

Crowley, Aleister. The Book of Thoth (Egyptian Tarot): A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians Being the Equinox Vol. III No. 5. Stamford, CT: US Games Systems, 1988.

Hall, Manly P. The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Hulse, David Allen. The Western Mysteries. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2000.

Lévi, Éliphas. Éliphas Lévi: Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969.

———. Éliphas Lévi: visionnaire romantique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969.

Mann, William F. The Knights Templar in the New World: How Henry Sinclair Brought the Grail to Acadia. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 2004.

Moore, Thomas. The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1990.

Mullen, Diki Jo. “Astrological Keys.” In The Witches’ Almanac. Newport, RI: The Witches’ Almanac LTD, 2016.

Parker, Julia, Derek Parker. Parkers’ Astrology: The Definitive Guide to Using Astrology in Every Aspect of Your Life. New ed. New York: DK Publishing, 2001.

Snuffin, Michael Osiris. “Devil of Astral Light: Éliphas Lévi’s Baphomet.” Hermetic Library. 2009. https://hermetic.com/osiris/levibaphomet.

———. The Thoth Companion: The Key to the True Symbolic Meaning of the Thoth Tarot. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2007.

Stavish, Mark. The Path of Alchemy: Energetic Healing & the World of Natural Magic. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2006.

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