This is a very long article and i have roughly broken it into several parts. It appears to provide serious insight into pagan theology in particular as respects the Greek Mythos. That such has plausibly survived in several modern guises is no surprise and needs to be better understood as those modern Memes are apparently coming to bite us.
Most of this material i am obliquely aware of as occasional references in other works. We now discover what we have here, perhaps a whole meme.
My first caution is to understand that these writings represent a deep understanding of the sources employed and cannot be dismissed out of hand, even when you are sure they are all on the wrong track altogether. They are also a window into a world not otherwise encountered.
What is impressive is the solid sources behind all the original material itself.
.
Meet Mete: Twyman’s Introduction to Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum
Above: The Distinguished Charity of Mete by Jesse Peper
(Frontispiece to Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled by Tracy R. Twyman and Alexander Rivera.)
Introduction to the first English Translation of Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, 1818.+
(Translation commissioned, edited, and annotated by Tracy R. Twyman, Copyright 2015-2017) [Read the Translation Here]
For 25 years, I have been writing professionally about history and current events, viewed through the angle of comparative mythology and the anthropology of religion. One of my areas of focus has been the influence of occult ideas and groups on civilization, particularly that of the West. Early on, I chose the subjects of Freemasonry, and the mythos of the Holy Grail as topics of research, and this inevitably led me to Baphomet, the idol allegedly worshipped by the Knights Templar. My interest in Baphomet was especially ignited by a series of personal supernatural encounters I had with this entity myself through a Ouija board, beginning in 2001. I detail these encounters in my 2014 book Clock Shavings.
These events sparked a life-long fascination and dedication to
solving the mysteries of Baphomet: what it was, where it came from, what
its name meant, and what purpose it had served for the Templars. The
culmination of this research, which I was aided in during the latter
years by research partner Alexander Rivera, was published in 2015 under
the title (Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled), co-authored with Rivera.
As part of the research for that book, I hired someone to translate
the contents of a very important essay written in Latin and published in
1818: Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum, or The Mystery of Baphomet Revealed by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. It was originally published in Volume 6 of the Viennese research journal Fundgruben des Orients (Treasures of the Orient).
This translator, (whom we shall call “Professor X,” for reasons I shall
explain) completed his work shortly before I finished my book with
Rivera, allowing us to utilize lengthy quotes from the text, as well as
many of the images. However, it became clear that much work still needed
to be done on this translation before I could present it in full to the
public.
Therefore I scrapped my original plan, which was to include this text
as an appendix to that book (now weighing in at over 600 pages even
without Hammer-Purgstall’s text added), and decided instead to publish
it separately after I had “smoothed it out a bit.” I of course assumed
that this would not take very much longer, and of course, I was
completely wrong. What you see now is the result of two years’ work on
my part. In addition to “smoothing out” the text, there were many
segments that needed to be retranslated entirely, mostly because the
meaning of the esoteric concepts behind the images presented is so
ambiguous and multi-faceted.
I was repeatedly reminded of the words of advice given to readers by the authors of the cryptic poem Le Serpent Rouge,
published by the French secret society called the Priory of Sion:
“Meditate and meditate again. The dense lead of my writing may perhaps
contain the purest gold.” I mentally mumbled this mantra thousands of
times through hundreds of rough hours spent pouring over the muddled
mélange and menagerie spread out upon my desk: printouts of the original
text and pictures (at which I could often be seen gazing through a
magnifying glass); printout of my translator’s English version; my Latin
dictionary; the Bible; plus several reference books on Gnostic sects,
European history, Greek mythology, and Western philosophy. In addition,
both versions of the Mysterium text were usually open on my on
my two computer screens also, along with at least two browsers: one for
Google Translate and Lexilogos; the other for the average 250 tabs I had
open at any given time, researching various subjects related to the
contents of the text. This was why, on the days that I chose to work on
this project, the nights always ended with a terrible headache.
In my opinion, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum is, in
addition to being a study of history, also a piece of history itself,
and is history’s most important document pertaining to Baphomet, aside
from the Templar trial documents themselves (including the
recently-revealed “Chinon Parchment,” discussed below) and Jules
Michelet’s coverage in his History of France. This is because, as we demonstrate amply in Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled,
while the story of Baphomet (as an entity under that name) may have
begun with the Templars, it really developed as a concept mostly since
Hammer-Purgstall’s time, under his influence, both directly and
indirectly.
My research, and that of my partner Alexander Rivera, makes it quite clear that Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum
was the source upon which occultist Eliphas Levi based his own
speculations about Baphomet a few decades after Hammer-Purgstall’s
writing. It was the inspiration for his famous illustration of the
Baphomet figure as a hermaphroditic goat-man/woman. It is clear that he
was referring to it in Magic: A History of Its Rites, Rituals and Mysteries, where he wrote about the Templars that:
They even went so far as to recognize the pantheistic symbolism
of the grand masters of Black Magic, and the better to isolate
themselves from obedience to a religion by which they were condemned
beforehand, they rendered divine honors to the monstrous idol Baphomet,
even as of old the dissenting tribes had adored the Golden Calf of Dan
and Bethel. Certain monuments of recent discovery… offer abundant proof
of all that is advanced here.
Eliphas Levi’s Baphomet
By “monuments of recent discovery,” he is referring to the
“Baphometic Idols” that Hammer-Purgstall presents line drawings of.
These consisted mostly of statuettes, coffers, cups, and coins that he
claimed had been found in churches on formerly Templar properties, all
located in what are now Austria, Germany, France, Hungary, and the Czech
Republic.
Hammer-Purgstall believed that these were all actual Templar
artifacts that demonstrate the truth about their secret doctrine and
rituals. This would be amazing if true, as many of these objects depict
orgies involving children and animals, as well as child and animal
sacrifice. Hammer-Purgstall claimed that these pictures show the secret
religious practices of the Templars, and that they were actually Ophite
Gnostics rather than Christians, something that Pope Pius IX also
accused them of.
Hammer-Purgstall’s artifacts present strange images of both human and
inhuman or quasi-human figures with breasts, beards, and horns. Some of
the figures have eyes all over their bodies, or multiple faces, and
there are some that are just heads, including some with two faces, much
akin to the descriptions given by some Templars of the Baphomet head.
One image in particular, from the lid to a coffer allegedly found in
Burgundy (which writer Thomas Wright calls the “most interesting” of the
artifacts), shows a bearded, full-breasted figure crowned with towers a la
the goddess Cybele of the ancient world. She shown holding a pair of
chains, with shackles and the bottom that seem to have just been broken
off from her legs. The Sun is attached to the top of one chain, and the
Moon is attached to the other. The solar and lunar faces are shown
upside-down and looking angry. Below the figure’s feet are a
seven-pointed star, a pentagram, and a humanoid skull.
While ridiculed by fellow scholars at the time, and by many historians since, Hammer-Purgstall’s revelation of the Gnosis of Mete found a fertile medium in which to grow in the Satanic stylings of Anton LaVey and Aleister Crowley, particularly the latter. Aleister Crowley not only adapted many of Eliphas Levi’s ideas about Baphomet and ritual magick, but saw himself as a reincarnation of Levi. He took on “Baphomet” as his own initiatory name in the magical order he headed: the Order of Oriental Templars (a.k.a. “Ordo Templi Orientis,” or “OTO”), when he proclaimed himself the “Caliph” of. He had taken over leadership of an older German order (many members of which carried on without him), and made it his own. As for the meaning of the name of the Templar demon, Crowley wrote in his Confessions:
Baphomet was Father Mithras, the cubical stone which was the corner of the Temple.
He also mentioned that the word “totaled 729” when interpreted
cabalistically. TI have discovered indications that Crowley based some
of the elements of the rituals he wrote for the O.T.O. on this text (as I
shall explain).
Like Crowley, almost none of the historians who wrote about
Hammer-Purgstall’s essay had actually read it all the way through. In
addition to the text being in Latin, the messages found by the author on
the “Templar artifacts” were often found written in Greek and
Arabic—both separately, and in combination (sometimes with Greek words
written in Arabic letters, or vice versa). Therefore, a working
knowledge of all of these languages would have been necessary to
understand it. It has also been hard to get ahold of, historically. Up
until my friends and I got involved, there were no copies of the full
set of illustrations available anywhere besides the original copies of
the periodical it was published in.+
+
+
Several historians, most of whom seem not to have looked at
Hammer-Purgstall’s work themselves, have claimed that these are not
genuine Templar items. Some even accused Hammer-Purgstall and his
patron, Louis, Duc de Blacas, of deliberately trying to pass off forged
antiquities. This would be extraordinary if true, considering that
Hammer-Purgstall’s influential works on other subjects are still
referred to by scholars quite often, from his definitive History of the Assassins,
to his translation of Ancient Alphabets and Hieroglyphic Characters
Explained by ibn Wahshiyya, which contains what may be the first
pre-Templar mention of a demon called “Bafomid.”[1]
Illustration of demon “Bafomid,” from ibn Wahshiyya’s De Alphabetis Incognitis
Various portraits of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, and postage stamp from 1981
Included on Hammer-Purgstall’s illustrious resume is the fact that he was the first president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Austrian Oriental Society in Vienna still bears his name as a tribute in their longer formal title. Today they teach German to immigrants, amongst other things. In addition to working closely with the powerful and connected Duc de Blacas, Hammer-Purgstall was friends with Johann von Goethe and Ludwig von Beethoven. He provided them both with his translation of the Koran, which influenced them both notably in different ways. Despite the attempts by some to trash his good name, he is still considered a national treasure in Austria, and has even been featured on a postage stamp.
While not all critics of his Baphometic artifacts have outright
accused Hammer-Purgstall of fraud, many have doubted their authenticity.
Charles William King didn’t think much of them when he took up the
subject in his 1887 book The Gnostics and Their Remains. There he proclaimed that any “sober archaeologist” would conclude them to be:
…Nothing more than a portion of the paraphernalia of those
Rosicrucian or alchemical quacks, who fattened upon the credulity of
that arch-virtuoso, Rudolf II, ever since whose reign these “fonts” have
been treasured up in the Imperial Cabinet.
Rudolf II was the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia in
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. His political
failures, leading to the disastrous Thirty Years’ War, are often blamed
by historians on his preoccupation with the occult. Clearly, King
thought that Hammer-Purgstall’s artifacts may have been items collected
by the emperor because of their seemingly esoteric nature, but with no
real connection to the Templars. In more modern times, Peter Partner
wrote in his 1987 Templar history The Murdered Magicians that:
A few of the archaeological exhibits may have been forgeries from
the occultist workshops; there is an especially suspicious pair of
so-called “Templar caskets,” found after the publication of Hammer’s
first article, which were supposed to have been medieval artefacts of
Templar provenance. The Gnostic “orgies” depicted on these supposedly
medieval caskets are uncannily like the late classical objects which had
a few years earlier been published in the original “Baphomet” thesis.
The “medieval” caskets had come into the possession of the Duc de
Blacas. Since Blacas was a leading figure in the reactionary French
government, and a close personal friend of the renegade Freemason Joseph
de Maistre, it is not impossible that they were forged on his behalf.
Whether they were forged or not, Hammer failed to prove that they had
anything to do with the Templars.
The caskets that Partner calls “especially suspicious” are, in fact,
referring to the two caskets I found in the catalog of non-displayed
items at the British Museum, where the antiquities collections of the
two Ducs du Blacas (Pierre and his son Louis) now reside. I discuss
these caskets in greater detail later on. So did these items, in fact,
have nothing to do with the Templars? If not, who made the decision to
present them as such? Were the artifacts found by chance and
incorporated into the plot, or were they created specifically for that
purpose. What was the point of the plot in the first place?
Peter Partner sees Hammer-Purgstall’s theories as an outgrowth of the
paranoia, rampant during his time, about Adam Weishaupt’s Bavarian
Illuminati, a real secret society that had operated through Masonic
lodges in Europe to foster republican revolutions against the crowns.
Partner accused Hammer-Purgstall, (and, by implication, all of his
informants involved in the research for Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum),
of being part of their own vast right-wing conspiracy to discredit the
French revolution by connecting it, via the Illuminati, then
Freemasonry, and then Templarism, to heresy, Satanism, and debauchery.
Partner derides Hammer-Purgstall as “a writer enrolled in the service of
rampant conservatism, whose duty it was to demonstrate that advanced
radical thought was subverting the foundations of Christian
civilization….” His evidence seems to be that Hammer-Purgstall worked as
a diplomat for the government of Austria, and that some of the
artifacts he showed in his book were owned by Louis, Duc de Blacas, whom
he calls a “reactionary.” Partner wrote:
Hammer was not employed by Metternich [the Austrian Empire’s
foreign minister], the greatest conservative minister in western Europe,
for nothing. The whole drift of Hammer’s argument is in the sense of
that used by the ubiquitous Abbe Barruel.[2]
Everything connects, from the Gnostics of the early Church, to the
Albigensians in the west, the Assassins in the east, thence to the
Templars, thence to the Freemasons, thence to the revolutionary
anarchists. In 1818, the political order of European conservatism was
making its greatest effort to master the threat of radical ideology and
radical sedition. The center of that effort was in Vienna, where Hammer
was employed by the Austrian Chancery.
Louis, like his more famous father Pierre (also an antiquarian), was
indeed a Legitimist (in support of the rule of the older Bourbon dynasty
and against the revolution that had dethroned them). Like his father,
he was very highly ingratiated within this political group. His
godfather was the King of France himself, Louis XVIII, for whom his
father had worked as one of his most trusted ministers. Pierre had also
worked as the French ambassador to the Holy See in Rome.
Furthermore, Pierre’s interest in antiques
was such that he was been involved in discovering and unearthing the
Temple of Castor and Pollux in Rome, and was responsible for creating
the Egyptian Museum within the Louvre. So I suppose it is possible that
his son had both access to the means for faking antiquities, and the
motivation, if you believe that he concocted all of these artifacts to
make the Templars look bad, so as to, in a roundabout way, cast
aspersions on the Revolution.
Louis, Duc du Blacas
Pierre, Duc du Blacas.
The “Blacas Cameo” from the collection of Louis, Duc de Blacas at British Museum. Wikipedia describes it as “an unusually large ancient Roman cameo” with a bust of “Augustus I.” The same source continues: “He has thrown the aegis, an attribute of Jupiter, over his shoulder.”
The “Projecta Casket,” alleged wedding furniture from the “Esquiline Treasure” of Louis, Duc de Blacas at British Museum. Wikipedia reports: “In spite of the Christian inscription on the Projecta Casket, the iconography of the figurative decoration of the treasure is purely pagan, a common mixture in Roman metalwork from the period to about 350, when Early Christian art had not yet devised iconography for essentially secular decoration. Three sides of the Projecta Casket’s lid are decorated with pagan mythological motifs – these include the deity Venus on a cockleshell, nereids (sea-nymphs) riding a ketos (a dragon-like sea monster) and a hippocamp (a monster with the front quarters of a horse and the tail of a fish). The mixture of Christian and pagan inscriptions and symbols may have been a compromise reflecting the affiliations of the bride and groom’s families.”
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