History
The name Baphomet traces back to the end of the Crusades, when the medieval order of the Knights Templar was suppressed by King Philip IV of France. On Friday, October 13, 1307, King Philip had many French Templars simultaneously arrested, and then tortured into confessions. The name Baphomet comes up in several of these confessions, in reference to an idol of some type that the Templars were said to have been worshipping. The description of the object changed from confession to confession. Some Templars denied any knowledge of it. Others, under torture, described it as being either a severed head, a cat, or a head with three faces.
The charge was notable because it was different from usual forced confessions. Over 100 different charges had been leveled against the Templars, most of them clearly false, as they were the same charges that were leveled against other of King Philip's enemies. For example, he had earlier kidnapped Pope Boniface VIII and charged him with near identical offenses of heresy, spitting and urinating on the cross, and sodomy. However, the charges about the worship of an idol named Baphomet, were unique to the Inquisition of the Templars.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the name's first appearance in English was in Henry Hallam's 1818 work Middle Ages, reproducing an early French corruption of "Mahomet", a common variant of Arabic محمد Muhammad. The name Baphomet also appeared in the English translation of the Viennese Orientalist Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall's Mysterium Baphometis revelatum as The Mystery of Baphomet Revealed, which presented an elaborate pseudohistory constructed to discredit the Freemasons by linking them with "Templar masons". He argued, using archaeological evidence faked by earlier scholars and literary evidence such as the Grail romances, that the Templars were Gnostics and the 'Templars' head' was a Gnostic idol called Baphomet. He did not realise that Gnostics did not have idols.
Some modern scholars such as Peter Partner and Malcolm Barber agree that the name of Baphomet was an Old French corruption of the name Muhammad, with the interpretation being that some of the Templars, through their long military occupation of the Outremer, had begun incorporating Islamic ideas into their belief system, and that this was seen and documented by the Inquisitors as heresy. Peter Partner's 1987 book The Knights Templar and their Myth says, "In the trial of the Templars one of their main charges was their supposed worship of a heathen idol-head known as a 'Baphomet' ('Baphomet' = Mahomet = Muhammad)." Partner's book also provides a quote from a poem written in a Provencal dialect by a troubadour who is thought to have been a Templar. The poem is in reference to some battles in 1265 that were not going well for the Crusaders: "And daily they impose new defeats on us: for God, who used to watch on our behalf, is now asleep, and Muhammad [Bafometz] puts forth his power to support the Sultan.
The use of this poem to prove that "Baphomet" or "Bafometz" was an early French corruption of "Mahomet" ("Muhammad") is critiqued as being circular in a 1995 article published by Kevin Bold ("A History and Mythos of the Knights Templar")[2]. Instead Bold supports Idries Shah's proposal that "Baphomet" derives from the Arabic construction ابو فهمة Abufihamat, meaning "Father of Understanding":
For now I tend to favor the Arabic origins over the Old French for the following reasons: first, as an iconoclastic religion, Islam strictly forbids images, either painted or sculpted, of either God or Muhammad, so the idea of even unorthodox Muslims worshipping an idol is simply ludicrous. Second, of those authors I have read who claim that "any expert on Old French" will say that Baphomet was another name for Muhammad never actually cite any such Old French experts to document this assertion. One such writer was Peter Partner, who even found a French troubadour ballad from the late thirteenth century and published an English translation, showing parenthetically that "Bafometz" had appeared in the original French (he had rendered it as "Mohammed" as if this had somehow proved his point).
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