Bahomet Pt IV

 

 

 

 

It is not too hard to understand with Christian religion having what are a mass of pagan encrustations fomenting beneath the surface, why Protestantism took hold so easily  It was clearly a purer  imitation of Christ.  Way more important to all this was that the printing press provided universal access to the canonical gospels. 

 

Traditions sustained in the race of an illiterate population  simply lost traction by been too wierd by half once that population could read the source material.

That same problem has allowed Islam to be sustained as well.  The text remained opague to most with both illiteracy and language working against been understood..

 

Birth of Dionysus

Dionysus is said to be the “first-born heir” of Zeus (although the same was also said of Apollo). But having an heir was purportedly what he wanted to avoid when he swallowed Metis. After all, as an immortal, he would have to lose his immortality before Dionysus could inherit his throne, or at least die the type of death that gods are occasionally described as experiencing in Greek myths: 1) it involves being drained of ichor, and 2) it involves being locked in Tartarus, the womb of the Earth (where all the gods came from) once again. However, all they seem to retain some semblance of life down there and their return from there through resurrection seems to be possible in the right circumstances.

This resurrection seems to involve “return through the rectum.” Certainly this is what I see in the image of Dionysus coming from the “thigh” of Zeus. Now, many scholars have noted similarities between Dionysus and Jesus—far too many to enumerate here. Anatoly Fomenko, of course, thinks that Dionysus was actually Jesus. So given everything we’ve just reviewed, is it possible to identify the Virgin Mary with Sophia-Barbelo, and to say that she generated her son, who is God, in the same manner of autogenes? Is it possible that she was a “virgin” because she was not exclusively a “she”? Does that explain why the Catholic Church seems to venerate Mary almost as much as God and Jesus himself: because she is the Holy Spirit, and they are all part of the same triplicate beast, all joined together, stuck within each other?

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

Quite possibly, it seems, the answer is “it springs up through πρωκτον (prokton, Greek, ‘the rectum’).”

A rosary, by the way, is said by the Church to symbolize Mary’s rose garden specifically. The word “rosebud” is, as I mentioned in Genuflect , a term used in the modern pornography industry to refer to an anus that has prolapsed and extended externally due to repeated abuse during sex acts.

Perhaps this is what’s going on beneath the blanket draped over Baphomet’s crotch, and may explain why he/she is called the “Goat with 1000 Young.” It could also explain the look on Baphomet’s face. Levi futher writes of Baphomet in Dogme et Rituel that:

The beasts head expresses the horror of the sinner, whose materially acting, solely responsible part has to bear the punishment exclusively; because the soul is insensitive according to its nature and can only suffer when it materializes.

Golems, according to the Kabbalists, reportedly don’t have souls. Perhaps that would be why, in the Ophite world-view, creating such children is not a bad thing, since you are not entrapping souls in the world. But, as Crowley’s writings would suggest rather, such creatures can also be occupied by the geniuses of gods, enticed to come into human form. Does this constitute bringing down the Archons from Heaven, perhaps thus allowing you to destroy them? Is this was is symbolized by the image on the Mete Coffer of Metis pulling the Sun and Moon down from the sky with the very chains that Zeus has used to bind them all?

Where Mete she bound? In the gullet of Zeus, of course. As it was said that Zeus used Metis as a chair-leg, forcing her to hold up his throne, does that mean that she was performing the role of Atlas and is being shown shrugging gleefully? As the seven “days” of creation in Genesis are really the seven aeons, does that mean that Mete is the seventh, upon which God—that is Jehovah, Jove, Jupiter, or Zeus—chose to rest?

Priapus with a caduceus

+Right, the “Savior of the World.” Left, two Templar seals featuring Abraxasand the words Templi Secretum (“Secret of the Temple”)

The Golden Dawn has a ritual attitude which they call “the Sign of Theoricus,” named after one of their grades. The title of this grade is derived from a Latin term pertaining to theorizing and consideration. Aleister Crowley’s Astron Argentum order also used the same sign for their grade 2°=9°, and in their literature they openly describe the attitude as “the God Shu supporting the sky.” This grade is dedicated to the element of air, and so the idea is that you are the pillar of air supporting the roof of the Temple.

The Golden Dawn’s Sign of Theoricus involves mimicking Atlas holding up the Heavens

However, the O.T.O. also has another, similar gesture, described as “Isis in Welcome,” used during the “Babe of the Abyss” grade, in which you form your body into the letter X, like how Saint Andrew was crucified. It seems appropriate, then, that the “Isis in Welcome” gesture is officially named the “Sign of Mulier,” after a fourteenth-century Anglo-French word that translates to both “wife” and “born in wedlock.” Dictionary.com says “A tone of contempt often attaches to mulier and its derivatives. Wictionary.com says that mulier means “woman” in Latin from mollior, meaning “softer, weaker”… “comparative of mollis (‘soft, tender’).” This brings to my mind the she-goat Amalthea who is said to have nursed Zeus when he was a babe in exile, whom he afterwards sacrificed, making a buckler out of her skin. Her name is translated as “tender,” as this word originally meant “nurse” in English.

 

Sign of Mulier, “Attitude of Baphomet, Isis in Welcome”

These connections with the life of Zeus and his relationship with his surrogate goat mother seem to go along with the fact that Crowley also labeled the Sign of Mulier as the “Attitude of Baphomet.” In The Book of Thoth, Crowley wrote “that Baphomet’s pictorial correspondence is most easily seen in the figure of Zeus Arrhenothelus.” I could not find any other examples of “Arrhenothelus” use anywhere, but I note that it is very similar to “Arsenothelus,” a word meaning “hermaphrodite” that is used in Hammer-Purgstall’s Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum. Crowley was clearly quite familiar with this text, but could have easily misread this word, and those copying him would not have known any better. Or it’s possible that it was typed incorrectly by a secretary, and the typo has never been fixed.

What seems to be implied by Crowley’s use of this term—which I believe he understood the meaning of, if not the correct spelling of it—is that he thought Zeus, when combined with Metis either inside of his stomach or supporting his throne from below, formed a hermaphroditic being. Also note that the etymology of the English word “arse” is traced, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, to the Proto-Indo-European ors, meaning “buttock, backside,” which, that website claims, is the “source also of Greek orros, [meaning] ‘tail, rump, base of the spine.’” The same site tells us that “arsy-versy,” meaning “backside foremost,” goes all the way back to the sixteenth century! So does this image below (of unknown provenance) represent arsenothelus?

In the trials of European witches, they often confessed that at their Sabbats, the Devil would appear to them as a goat-headed figure like Baphomet, and make them kiss his second face, located beneath his tail, as a sign of respect. That face was frequently described as feminine in appearance. My guess is that this is Mete, and that, despite the claim on the idols that “return through the rectum is easy,” it’s not easy enough, because she’s presumably still being anally retained.

 

The Osculum Infame (‘Obscene Kiss’) of the Witches’ Sabbath

But perhaps in the form of her “son,” also of ambiguous sexual identity, she has managed to send a piece of herself out as an envoy. Perhaps that’s what the Greek story of Dionysus, and the Gnostic story of Christ as her son, are implying.

Is it possible, then, that the reason why effigies of the knights at Temple Church in London, and many other burial grounds for Crusaders, are actually being shown as giving anal birth to monstrous dragons? Could that explain why their legs are twisted in that manner, and why they have those strange luck-dragon creatures beneath their feet? Looking at the way Hammer-Purgstall drew his own impressions of these same effigies (Tab. IV, fig. 7), one looking like an aborted lion fetus, the other like a severed and stomped-on human penis, I feel that this is a strong possibility, and that he may have been hinting at this when choosing which features of the dragons to emphasize in his reproduction. Many of the other images presented by him fit this hypothesis as well.

Tab IV, fig. 7, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum (right half)

Tab IV, fig. 7, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum (left half)

Tab. I, fig. 15-16 (front and back, respectively)

Tab. III, fig. 2

Tab. II, fig. 4

Tab. III, fig. 8

Tab. IV, fig. 34 (top and bottom, respectively)

Tab. IV, fig. 10-12, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum

Tab. IV, fig. 17-18, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum

 

Tab. IV, fig. 22, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum

Tab. IV, fig. 23, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum

Tab. IV, fig. 24, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum

Tab. IV, fig. 12 (right half), Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum 

Tab. IV, fig. 29-30, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum

Tab. II, fig. 16, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum. Hammer-Purgstall says the serpents are issuing forth from the “buttocks” of an enthroned Mete

As I briefly mentioned before, the key to understanding these effigies lies in the hidden connections between the Knights Templar, the “ancient” cult of Cybele, and the “ancient” cult of Mithras. I must say that I did not really understand the significance of the symbols on these coffers until a couple of years after publishing Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled. This was because I hadn’t looked deeply enough into the cults of Cybele and Mithras. I only knew that bull sacrifices ere associated with both the cult of Cybele and the mysteries of Mithras. This should have been a red flag for me, because a bull sacrifice was depicted on the side of the allegedly Templar-originated “Mete coffer” I found at the British Museum.

However, the truth is that I didn’t, at the time, realize the depth of their commonalities, nor how their myths and symbol sets operated together to tell the secret of Baphomet. Indeed, they also teach us how to correctly interpret Greek and Roman, and Persian mythology. However, it seems that nobody else has noticed these things before either. Luckily, in writing my novel Genuflect, I ended up forcing myself to do this, and that’s when all of these things opened up for me.

I started looking for connections between Mithras and Cybele. I found quickly that a debate had been raging among scholars on the subject for the last 250 years. They couldn’t agree on whether or not these two cults, both of Eastern origin and active concurrently in the late Roman Empire, were related at all. It was mostly modern scholars who were claiming that they were not. I shall give you a history of the two religions, based mostly on accepted theories and chronology (though I don’t necessary wholly embrace these things in whole, as you will no doubt ascertain through the course of this essay.

Cybele had been adopted into Hellenistic Greece from their western Anatolian colonies as early as the sixth century BC. The Greeks compounded her with Rhea, the wife of Chronos and mother of Zeus. The aspect of her relationship with Attis, some historians said, was really only fully adopted by the Western version of the cult after the Romans absorbed it into their official religion in the second century BC. (Attis, by the way, was said to be the father of King Lydus, after whom the Lydians, in this legend, were purportedly named.)

But the Gallu of the temples of the Great Mother Goddess Inanna in Sumer also practiced the same rite, and had a myth about the son of the goddess, Baal, who was identical in many ways to Attis. Like him, Baal was a victim who played essentially the same role with the goddess Inanna (a.k.a. Ishtar). The anniversary of her murder of her own son/husband, for the exact same reason that Cybele killed Attis (erotic jealousy), was observed as a holiday of morning by her worshippers, as it was with Cybele’s. Likewise, Baal’s resurrection was celebrated joyously a few days afterwards. This took place during the Spring Equinox, which was also their New Year’s Day, morphing eventually into the European holiday of Easter, which was named after Ishtar/Inanna.

There in Mesopotamia, her priests were called the Gallu, almost the exact same word as the title of Cybele’s priests, the Galli. It’s derived from the Sumerian word “gal,” meaning “cup” or “vagina.” The Gallu, just like the Galli, were also castrated and dressed as women. In both cults, the priests were actually considered women from this point on, and addressed as such.

Fragment from Tab. I, fig. 1, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum. A disembodied phallus with testes has been smudged out by prudish Hammer-Purgstall for “decency.” Right: Phallus revealed by P. Gonzalez, who scannedour only copy of Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum from the original. This result was obtained by tracing “dotted lines” (his words) visible when the image is enlarged. 

Tab. I, fig. 1 with phallus restored, from Thomas Wright’s Worship of the Generative Powers.

Mithras Leocephaline (“lion-headed”), with winged serpent draped

over his head, its his entering his mouth. Compare with Tab. I, fig. 1.

This Mithas Leocephaline would fit in with Hammer-Purgstall’s Mete idols easily

The Babylonian equinox rites also included the sacrifice of the Celestial Bull, Gugalanna, just like Cybele was honored with the taurobolium, a bull sacrifice in which her priests were completely drenched in the blood of the victim. This was performed in Cybele’s specially-outfitted slaughterhouse temples, known as metroons, after her title “Magna Mater” (“Great Mother”).

Mithraism, however, had been imported from Persia much later, starting in the first century after Christ. There were many obvious differences. Mithraism was an all-male cult that, at first blush, seems to promote masculine attributes and shun everything feminine. It was popular in the military, particularly among the foreign legions, and indeed, that is where it had originally begun its spread throughout the empire.

It took a couple of centuries for it to be anything more than a barely tolerated subterranean mystery school (operating literally underground, in caves on the frontiers, and in the basements of other buildings in cities). But eventually, some of the emperors were converted, and the cult, which had originally forbidden its members to join any other religious groups, began to allow amalgamation with the followers of “Sol Invictus” (“Invincible Sun”), a.k.a. Helios. This new and improved Mithraism became the dominant religious force at the end of the empire, until its rival, Christianity, with which it shared mutual influence, eclipsed it altogether.

Early in the twentieth century, two authors—Franz Cumont and Jessie Weston—separately published important works arguing that Mithraists had also made formal pacts with Cybele worshippers. Cumont had stated it as though it were established fact in his 1903 book The Mysteries of Mithra. There he had argued that:

…[I]n conciliating the priests of Magna Mater, the sectaries of Mithra obtained the support of a powerful and officially recognized clergy, and so shared in some measure in the protection afforded it by the State.

He also pointed out that the temples of both cults (mithraeums and metroons) were often very close to one another. In Ostia in Italy, where the oldest known mithraeum has been found (along with dozens of others scattered throughout the same town), the two temples were actually attached contiguously. Cumont suggested that they may have shared ritual materials, and perhaps even conducted joint rituals.

If the two cults did work together, it would actually put to rest one of the points of argument between historians on the subject. Cumont had claimed that both the Cybelists and the Mithraists practiced the rite of taurobolium. This was the ceremony wherein the priest would rip open the guts of the victim on a platform with a metal grate over it so that the blood would pour down onto an initiate positioned below. It was a form of sanguinary baptism, after which the recipient was said to be renatus in aeternum “reborn for eternity”).

Modern scholars, criticizing Cumont, argue that, although the central myth of the cult is about Mithras hunting and killing a bull, a true taurobolium would have been impossible to conduct inside of a tiny underground mithraeum. But they ignore the fact that Cumont had already addressed this issue. He said the evidence suggested that Mithraists performed few if any of their own sacrifices of.

Instead, he thought that they most likely contracted this work out to a professional victimarius (sacrificial butcher), which was a common practice at the time. Any metroon would have been equipped for this, and the Cybelists may have been the ones to fulfill this purpose. Cumont also noted that mithraeums were usually built directly upon a source of running water. He proposed that the relatively sophisticated plumbing systems they usually sported might have been useful to the Cybelists, and that access to these things might have been traded to them by the Mithraists in exchange for help with butchery.

It seems to me that Cybele’s anti-male transvestite priesthood and the Mithraists’ aversion to femininity may have made them an odd yet complimentary pair: they both were against traditional sexuality. Furthermore the mythologies of both cult figures complemented each other in the same way. I told you before that according to some sources, Cybele wasn’t always just a woman. Prudentius, a Roman Christian poet, writing in the fourth century, said in Peristephanon: 10.1071-3:

Both sexes are displeasing to Cybele’s holiness, so he keeps a middle gender between the two.

As I mentioned, initiates of Cybele’s priesthood went through an orgiastic public ritual in which they were expected to go mad on drugs and wine. They would then become possessed by the goddess, just like Attis, so that they would be inspired to castrate themselves just like he did. These priests were thereafter referred to as women, just like the Gallu priests of Sumer before them, and just like a post-op transgender person would be in modern times. Like the Gallu, they dressed in women’s clothes, spoke in affected effeminate voices, and sang in an effeminate manner that was supposed to be pleasing to the goddess.

Earlier, in the first century BC, another Roman poet, Gaius Valerius Catullus, had written in Carmina, Poem 63 about how Attis castrated himself and thus became a priestess of Cybele. From that point on, she was thereby immediately referred to as feminine:

Over the vast main borne by swift-sailing ship, Attis, as with hasty hurried foot he reached the Phrygian wood and gained the tree-girt gloomy sanctuary of the Goddess, there roused by rabid rage and mind astray, with sharp-edged flint downwards dashed his burden of virility. Then as he felt his limbs were left without their manhood, and the fresh spilt blood staining the soil, with bloodless hand she hastily took a tambour light to hold, your tambourine, Cybele, your initiate rite, and with feeble fingers beating the hollowed bullock’s back, she rose up quivering…

Later, when her reason returned to her, she lamented the loss of her penis and the fact that she was now a “slave” to the mother goddess:

Then when from quiet rest torn, her delirium over, Attis at once recalled to mind her deed, and with lucid thought saw what she had lost, and where she stood, with heaving heart she backwards traced her steps to the landing-place. There, gazing over the vast main with tear-filled eyes, with saddened voice in tristful soliloquy thus did she lament…

This all appears to be an echo of the earliest versions of the Cybele myth, influenced more closely by the Phrygian version. In these, she was called “Agditis,” and was said to have originated in the realm of the gods. She had been formed when some of Zeus’ semen fell upon a rock called “Agdo.” But the other gods found Agditis to be a freak, and so they had her castrated, and cast her down to Earth. This, then, would explain why Cybele was sometimes represented by a rock, particularly a meteorite—a “stone that fell from heaven.”

As the story continues, according to a Greek travelogue from Pausanias in the second century AD, the goddess then became pregnant with a boy, whom she abandoned at birth and left for dead. The boy was born so beautiful that he was rescued by a she-goat that felt pity for him. Eventually, when she found him again, his own mother fell in love with him.

He was later engaged to a princess. But during the wedding, Agditis/Cybele possessed his mind and inspired him to castrate himself, resulting in his death. Afterwards, in regret, she “persuaded Zeus to grant the body of Attis should neither rot at all nor decay” (according to a travelogue of Phrygia written in the second century AD by the Greek geographer Pausanias). This is the skeletal story, upon which a variety of flourishes about the boy’s death, resurrection, and alleged “love” for his mother were added.

Some obvious parallels between this and the story of Mithras jump out right away. Just as they say Agditis was born from a petra genetrix (“fecund rock”), so too was Mithras. Votive depictions of the god’s birth show him emerging as a fully-grown young man, with a torch in one hand and a knife in the other, which he used to find his way and tear himself out.

On either side of the rock they always depicted the two Chiaramonti (“Torchbearers”), two male youths who wore Phrygian hats just like Mithras, and just Attis Cybele’s Galli priests. The Chiaramonti were also often shown in that same peculiar cross-legged attitude; just like how Attis and the Galli were often shown, whether standing or laying; just like the effigies of the cross-legged knights on the graves at Temple church. The names of the two Chiaramonti were Cautes and Cautophanes. Each held a torch, with one pointing it upwards, and the other pointing it downwards, respectively. Seeing this reminded me again of Eliphas Levi’s depiction of the Templar demon Baphomet, with one hand pointing up, and the other pointing down, along with a torch burning between his goat horns.

The ultimate provenance of Mithras is a mystery. It was a true parthenogenesis, “fertilized by the heavenly father’s phallic lightning,” as Barbara Walker wrote. He was truly the self-born,” like the nameless figure identified by Jesus in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, where he said:

When you see him who was not born of woman, fall down upon your faces and worship him; that one is your Father.

Thus during the initiations, according to the one-surviving Mithras Liturgy, inductees took an oath to the god which included the words:

I… who was born from the mortal womb of (his mother’s name) and from the fluid of semen, and who, since he has been born again from you today…resolves to worship you.

In the myth of Mithras, when the time came to have progeny of his own, he chose to mate with a rock because he detested females. A writer known as “Pseudo-Plutarch” wrote in De Fluviis 23.4 about a certain mountain in Armenia called “Diorphos.” This was named after “Diorphos the Earth-born (or the Titan),” about whom it was said:

Mithras, who wanted to have a son but hated the race of women, ejaculated onto a stone. The stone became pregnant and—after the appropriate time—produced a boy called Diorphos.

The name of this figure brought to mind the myth of the “Orphic Egg” from the Orphic Mystery Schools, which went back to Greece in the fifth century. They taught that the primordial being was a figure named “Phanes,” whom they also called “Eros.” The creator of this egg was “Nyx,” whose name meant “Night,” just like what the name of the Kabbalistic demoness Lilith translates to. I felt that Phanes might also relate to Ophion, a serpent who, with his Titan bride Eurynome, was said to have ruled the Earth for a spell after being “cast down” by Chronos and Rhea. This again indicates an identification with Diorphos, the son of Mithras, identified with Chronos/Saturn.

Depictions of Phanes with his body surrounded by a serpent, strongly resemble the images of the leontocephaline (lion-headed) version of Mithras as Saturn (also shown wrapped in a snake) that were found in many mithraeums, as were Orphic depictions of the cosmic egg. Other related symbols include the one-snaked rod of Asclepius and the double-snaked rod of Hermes, the caduceus

Like Baphomet, the Persians had originally seen their Mitra as an intermediary power, helping connect creatures on our plane with both the celestial powers above and the infernal powers below. In the Roman mystery school version, he became identified with Saturn, the furthest from Earth of the planets then known about, seen in classical astrology as the highest of the heavens. But he was also identified, especially in the latter years of the Roman Empire, with Sol, the Sun. In the old geocentric systems, Sol occupied the middle sphere of the heavens, with other spheres, including those of Jupiter and Saturn, on top of that.

The worshippers of Sol Invictus, like the Egyptians, saw the Sun as the ultimate symbol of an omnipotent god. But in the Mithraic Mysteries, which attempted to incorporate this cult in its later years, the initiate made a symbolic journey through each of the heavens, in imitation of this enhanced story of the adventures of Mithras. This did not merely involve him passing through the various gates of Heaven with special passwords. This (taught by Gnostic and Hermetic schools as necessary for the soul to ascend to the highest realm after death). Rather, in this case, it seems that Mithras actually conquered the intelligences that ruled over these spheres, subduing them to his will.

After slaying the bull from which the material world was made, he ascended this stairway to heaven, the “ladder of lights” we know as the seven classical planets, until he got to Sol’s kingdom. There, after the sun was overthrown, the luminary was forced to bow down on one knee to his new master, Mithras. The two then shook hands as friends, and then feasted together on the bull, with the domination of the new sun god now having been established. Then Mithras took the reigns of the Sun’s chariot and ascended to the next realm, which was that of Saturn. Mithras then took on as his own identity as well, indicating that he overtook that god just like he did the others, and henceforth ruled all of the kingdoms below.

I think it is because he victoriously overthrew both the Sun and Saturn, then took on both of their roles, that Mithras was seen as the source of a light more primordial, beyond the known universe, the “sun beyond the Sun.” The realm of light beyond the sphere of Saturn was called Hyperurania. It was named after Saturn’s father Uranus, for the same reason the planet beyond Saturn was so named by modern astronomers. A document called “the Mithras Liturgy” described a Mithraic initiate, in imitation of Mithras, entering the palace of the “Seven Pole Lords” with the faces of black bulls. These are the guys who turn the wheels of the heavens, causing earthquakes, thunder and lightning. But Mithras basically makes slavish bitches out of them all.

The fact that Mithras was known for literally “storming heaven,” invading the highest realm of the universe with shock and awe, seemed to be part of why his cult was popular with the military of an imperial power. Cybele was already an official patroness of the Roman military, and it is no accident that her holy week took place during the month dedicated to the war god Mars. But whereas the Magna Mater was seen as the protectress of the state, and the status quo Mithras was a god of rebellion.

The red Phrygian cap worn by Mithras and his helpers Cautes and Cautophanes—as well as by Cybele’s Galli, coincidentally—is also known as a “liberty cap,” because in Rome it was the symbol of a slave that had been freed. Saturn himself was shown wearing it too, which is the origin of the hat that Santa Claus slaves wore them during the festival of Saturnalia at the winter solstice, because they were considered free during this time period. Indeed, all rules were considered null during these days, giving way to orgies, drinking, and much mischief.

This was done in honor of Saturn and his Golden Age, when nobody had to work. It is the reason why we all take vacation around Christmas, and why Santa Claus wears that funny red hat. It’s also why we get wildly drunk on New Year’s Eve, just like the “Feast of Fools” celebrated in medieval Europe, when the social order would be upturned in honor of the “Lord of Misrule.” It’s why the liberty cap became the symbol of the French Revolution, inspired by Freemasons, who, like the Mithraists, gave no regard to social status within the boundaries of their lodges. The seals of the US Army and the US Senate bear this symbol as well.

The record on the Mithraists is a bit confusing. On the one hand, there are sources saying that the cult valued abstinence from sex, as an extension of their general hatred of women, and that many of their priests took vows of chastity. But at the same time they had a ceremony for the second degree of their order, which is called “Nymphus”—“the Bride.” It was dedicated to the love goddess Venus. The initiate would be married to another brother in the order, dressed in a bridal veil.

From a Mithraic temple

In my research, I found indications that both Cybele and Mithras frowned upon all practice of procreative heterosexual relations, and that both had been born from inseminated rocks. I thought about the castration of Cybele, and her original hermaphroditic state, in comparison to Baphomet, also missing his penis, according to Eliphas Levi, and sporting a caduceus instead.

These revelations about the nature of these two cults, apparently connected, do fit in with what we know about Ophite Gnostics, the Knights Templar, and the neo-Gnostic, neo-Templar order started by Aleister Crowley. Crowley believed that new universes—new aeons—could be created through homosexual sex magick. He and his partners recorded in their journals that they could see with their own eyes the presence of “universes” of their semen-filled rectums, formed by the fluids there, and imagining they saw various events occurring with the inhabitants thereof. Again, see the notes from “the Paris Working,” which state:

Inspection of Cakkras…. Muladhara. Blood-red, velvety, deep-bell shape. Around it the Kundalini coiled, but in constant spiral motion. Luminous triangle—mirror-like—opens at base (very small.) I looked down through infinite stages of these triangles, at the bottom glitters a pearl-like (but self-luminous and most intense) phallus. Presently this goes, and up the tunnel march millions of men of every race, creed, caste and colour—not a single woman.

The Muladhara is the base chakra, a.k.a. the “Fundament.” So he is talking about a universe formed inside of an anus. As for this celebration of the lack of women in the race of beings they witnessed, this same attitude can be found in the Mithraic mystery schools, where women were not allowed and were considered superfluous to life. It can also be found in the fictional world of “The Smurfs,” which, as I explain in Genuflect, is a model of a Mithraic commune, populated by an all-male race of blue beings, led by Papa Smurf, a figure clearly modeled on Mithras, the “Pater,” and all wearing Phrygian hats. They were originally created, and can only reproduce, through alchemical magic.

These Smurfs look just like not only Mithras himself, but also the Chiaramonti, and Attis. The creatures seen on the sides of the coffers in the British Museum, presented later on this this essay, look similar, but without the hats: they seem short and hairless. This seems to be what an all-male (or perhaps asexual) race of homunculi, look like. Crowley would have seen them as a superior breed of humanity, as he saw women to be only an obstacle standing in the way of man’s salvation through sexual Gnosis.

It seems the Templars had a similar world-view. According to their own confessions, as detailed by the Chinon Parchment released by the Vatican in 2007, newly-inducted Templars promised to refrain from the “impurity” of sex with women (including their own wives, many of whom were reportedly abandoned when their husbands were inducted into the order). They promised to instead unleash their lusts upon one another, swearing to never deny their brothers’ requests for sexual favors.

This is in keeping with Ophite Gnostic doctrine. Perhaps the composers of the Templars’ secret doctrine felt that transgressive sex was somehow “pure” compared to normal, procreative sex with a female. In the Ophite view, the latter form of sex is harmful because it has the potential to lock more souls in the prison of the Demiurge by engendering children. But transgressive sex went against the grain of the creative world, therefore taking away a bit of Jaldabaoth’s over them.

While we may find it hard to believe that grown men of respectable positions (such as the Templars always were) would convince themselves that sexual abuse of children and animals was somehow spiritually enlightening, we should also keep in mind that this could also be yet another veneer, with a more practical agenda behind it. In our own time, our politics is occasionally rocked with scandals of child sex abuse by the rich and powerful. This often involves so-called “pedophile rings” that are quite secret and exclusive, making use of child prostitutes that have often been obtained from orphanages. Photos are usually taken at their meetings, for the purpose of establishing the ever-present threat of blackmail and mutually-assured destruction should any members of the abuse ring be tempted to give information to the authorities about what they’ve been involved in. This ties the participants together in a bond of evil, which is used for the coalescence of power into the hands of a cabal. On more than one occasion it has come out that these rings were actually being orchestrated by the intelligence services acting on orders of some group within government that was using it to control other powerful people. (See my 2008 book Mind-Controlled Sex Slaves and the CIA for more on this subject.) According to Hammer-Purgstall, something similar may have been going on with the Templars:

It remains for us to comment on yet another expansion, or rather subversion, of the Delphic dictum. They substituted in place of that golden sentence, “Know yourself,” the crafty, “know all, but let no one know you.” On this truly Machiavellian principle rests their whole politic, which up to now they try to sustain by the gospel precept, “Be wise as serpents.” To this depraved wisdom they connect unrestrained conduct, so that, “Pursue all, and all is permitted,” they seem to have proposed as the highest branch of wisdom…. Such persons, already destined by nature as leaders, sought the highest goal of their labors, not in satisfying desires, but in conducting state affairs. Finally, people eagerly followed this doctrine because, once a person wickedly indulges every sensual craving, it renders his associates more inclined to all types of illicit activities.

In addition to the sexual crimes, Hammer-Purgstall’s artifacts evidenced what I would consider the most outrageous accusation against the Templars: the sacrifice of babes in a “Baptism of Fire.” There are several pictures of babies or young boys either standing inside of a burning brazier, or standing over one as if he they are about to. According to Jules Michelet’s History of France, Volume 1, published in 1860 (and drawing on the Chroniques Francaises de Saint-Denys, compiled during the Templar trials), there were:

…reports spread among the people against the Templars, ‘… that a new-born infant, begotten of a Templar and a maid, was cooked and roasted by the fire, and all the grease roasted out, and their idol consecrated and anointed with it.’

Similarly, Thomas Wright described a group that once met in Orleans, about which a document was found at the abbey of St. Pere in Chartres that told of their alleged activities. After calling a demonic spirit to appear “in the form of an animal,” they would purportedly indulge in group sex (men and women both). Then, Wright says:

The child which was the fruit of this intercourse was taken on the eighth day, and purified by fire, ‘in the manner of the ancient pagans’—so says the contemporary writer of this document—it was burnt to ashes in a large fire made for that purpose. The ashes were collected with great reverence, and preserved to be administered to members of the society who were dying, just as good Christians received the viaticum. It is added that there was such a virtue in these ashes, that an individual who had once tasted them would hardly ever be able to turn his mind from that heresy and take the path of truth.

All this was backed up by papal pronouncements that had been made both before Hammer-Purgstall’s time, and before. Pope Pius IX, in his “Allocution against the Templars,” said:

Their watchword was, to become wealthy, in order to buy the world. They became so, and in 1312 they possessed in Europe alone more than nine thousand seignories. Riches were the shoal on which they were wrecked. They became insolent, and unwisely showed their contempt for the religious and social institutions which they aimed to overthrow. Their ambition was fatal to them. Their projects were divined and prevented. Pope Clement V and King Philip le Bel gave the signal to Europe, and the Templars, taken as it were in an immense net, were arrested, disarmed, and cast into prison. Never was a Coup d’Etat accomplished with a more formidable concert of action. The whole world was struck with stupor, and eagerly waited for the strange revelations of a process that was to echo through so many ages.

It was impossible to unfold to the people the conspiracy of the Templars against the Thrones and the Tiara. It was impossible to expose to them the doctrines of the Chiefs of the Order. The Templars were gravely accused of spitting upon Christ and denying God at their receptions, of gross obscenities, conversations with female devils, and the worship of a monstrous idol.

In 2007, during Benedict XVI’s reign, a book called Processus Contra Templarios was published by the Vatican in a limited edition of 799 copies selling for $9000 each. It purported to reveal the “truth” about a document they had dubbed the “Chinon Parchment.” It had been purportedly discovered six years earlier in the Vatican Secret Archives by a paleographist who worked there named Barbara Frale, “misfiled,” allegedly, for 700 years. The book release was timed to coincide with the 700th anniversary of the arrest of the Templars by the French police on October 13, 1307, and gained a great deal of attention from the international press.

What grabbed the headlines was the extraordinary claim that the document proved that Pope Clement V had held his own trial of the Templar leadership after King Philip IV’s, the results of which had “exonerated” knights and proved that they were “innocent” after all. These were the terms used in newspaper articles that were published. They were also the words used by Barbara Frale herself when she published a more accessible book on the subject several years later, called The Templars: The Secret History Revealed. This would certainly seem newsworthy: both the discovery of the document, and the revision of history that its existence would apparently require.

The only thing is that once you read what Frale writes about what’s actually in the document, you find that it proves nothing of the sort. If fact, trying to follow Frale’s version of the story of the end of the Templars, it quickly becomes very confusing, mostly because of the meaning she attaches to certain elements of it. She has her own spin on things, but frequently asserts these opinions as though they are facts. It was these assertions that journalists repeated unquestioningly. For instance, here is an utterly misleading description of the document’s content from BBC News, using Frale’s own words:

However, according to Prof Frale, study of the document shows that the knights were not heretics as had been believed for 700 years.

In fact she says ‘the Pope was obliged to ask for pardons from the knights… the document we have found absolves them.’

Actually, according to the Parchment, they did confess to what most Christians today would consider blasphemy, including denying Christ and spitting on the cross, as the BBC article states:

In the hearings before Clement V, the knights reportedly admitted spitting on the cross, denying Jesus and kissing the lower back of the man proposing them during initiation ceremonies.

This mention of the “kiss on the lower back” (which was also applied to the navel and mouth, according to the document) is as close as the BBC comes to addressing one of the most shocking things that one of the knights, Hughes de Perraud, confessed to Clement’s cardinals: that the brotherhood had a doctrine condoning—even insisting upon—homosexuality. As the show relates, the knights were obliged to swear off all contact with women the moment they joined the order (dumping their wives and children, in many instances). So, as one of the knights told the cardinals questioning him, they were instructed that if they couldn’t control their desires, they should turn to each other for relief, and not refuse one another’s advances. As Frale wrote in her book:

[T]he preceptor exhorted the new Templar not to have sexual relations with women, inviting him, should he absolutely not be able to live chastely, to unite with his brothers and not refuse them should they request sexual favors from him. The novice often reacted angrily, but there were no consequences because the ritual sequence did not provide for any concrete application of this ‘precept of homosexuality.’

As far as the absolution the BBC refers to in their article, this was the absolution of sin after confession, which of course the cardinals had the right to issue. It in no way negated the fact that the sin had taken place. But why did the BBC’s writers have the wrong idea here? Even the Catholic News Agency presented the news with this spin when Frale’s book came out in 2007, using the word “exonerated”:

The investigation took place in Rome between 1307 and 1312. According to the document, Pope Clement V exonerated the Templars on the charge of heresy, but found them guilty of other infractions. He also ordered the Knights Templar to disband.

The BBC article had also used the word “exonerated,” and went even further:

The official who found the paper says it exonerates the knights entirely.

The last sentence refers to Ms. Frale. One can certainly see upon inspecting her book where the authors of the news articles got their ideas. In the first chapter, she declares that her discovery has finally set the record straight on the Templar issue, even using the word “innocent”:

[The Chinon Parchment] reveals that the grand master and other high-ranking Templars were found innocent of the charges of heresy, were absolved for less serious offenses by the apostolic authority, and were fully integrated into the Catholic community. Historians believed that the Templars were innocent of the charges brought against them by Philip IV, but many outside academia still suspected the Templars of having been heretics and occultists. The Chinon Parchment is the definitive and incontrovertible proof of the Templars’ innocence and should finally put this question to rest.

Apparently, only the uneducated ever had any doubt in the first place! Now this word “innocence,” which has now been repeated by so many other writers on the subject without any qualifications, could only conceivably be used in regards to the very narrow definition of heresy given by Ms. Frale. After describing the juicy details of the secret Templar initiation ceremony, as the knights confessed it to Clement’s cardinals, she says:

Although it was an unworthy tradition that the Templars had further embellished with other vulgar and violent practices, under no circumstances could it be confused with heresy, an offense that implied a strict and long-term adherence to subversive doctrines.

So the Templars were not heretics, she thinks, because their bizarre practices were not part of a religious lifestyle to the individual knights, who, perhaps at least initially, had no idea why they were being asked to do these things. She tells the story of the circumstances that led up to the papal inquiry. Prior to sending the cardinals to question the knights, and prior to Philip’s arrest of them, in March 1307 Pope Clement personally interviewed a couple of them. First he called in grand master Jacques de Molay himself “and immediately demanded an explanation for the infamous rumors of the idol said to be secretly venerated in the Temple. . . .” This the grand master denied, and insisted that the matter be investigated to clear the Order’s reputation. She writes:

The grand master of the Templars, indignant at the rumors the sovereign had been spreading, expressly requested the pope to open an inquest into the state of the Temple so as to demonstrate that the slanderous accusations were unfounded. . . .

“Slander” of course would mean that they were the targets of willful lies. But is that what we’re talking about here? When the Pope then interviewed Hughes de Perraud, he “confirmed to the pope that the Templars practiced a ritual that required new members to spit on the cross during their induction ceremony.”

After the knights were arrested by Philip, Clement sent the cardinals to question the leaders mentioned, and that is when they all, including De Molay, confirmed many of the accusations, as we have discussed. That is also when all of the details about the initiation ceremony finally came out. Frale’s description of events is full of contradictions. For instance, she writes:

The written statutes of the Temple, which date back to the second half of the thirteenth century, contain the complete text of the initiation ceremony.

But she then admits that the controversial final elements of the ceremony were not written in the Rule, and “can be constructed only from the testimony given at the trial.” So the statutes didn’t in fact give the complete ceremony, as she’d said earlier. According to her, after the knight had sworn his oath to the Order and donned his mantle, he was taken to an ante room, where he was suddenly told to spit on the cross to prove his obedience. Frale gives the details of the ceremony, which she put together from all of the similar elements found in each of the confessions:

A systematic analysis of all the testimony revealed that at this point most of the brothers resigned themselves to doing what had been commanded, perhaps attempting to spit in the direction of the cross without actually hitting it, while others adamantly refused. . . . Sometimes a candidate’s firmness was respected, and he was asked nothing more, but more often his brothers threatened him with prison or death, beating him brutally with their bare fists or holding a sword to his throat. Then the preceptor gave him the kiss of monastic brotherhood—on the mouth. Often this kiss, common to all religious orders, was followed by two more kisses on the belly and the posterior, which was usually covered by the tunic, but at times there were officiators who exposed their bottoms and, according to some witnesses, even obscenely proposed kisses on the penis. Most postulants obeyed without arguing when the request was moderately humiliating, such as a kiss on the behind, and refused in more extreme cases. While the preceptors demanded that a postulant at least deny Christ or spit on the cross, they usually overlooked a refusal of kisses, and unwilling candidates were not forced to comply.

Now a couple of questions about this clearly need to be asked. For one thing, does spitting on the cross and denying faith in Jesus constitute blasphemy for a Christian knight? Well, Ms. Frale manages to describe the spiritual consequences of this without actually using that term:

Although it was clear that they were not heretics, it was equally clear that under church doctrine they were guilty, albeit of a much lesser offence. According to canon law, anyone who commits an act of rejection of the faith, even if he does so without conviction, removes himself from the Catholic community, effectively excommunicating himself. The excommunicant can be absolved of his guilt but cannot be acquitted.

At this point in the story, the knights had been excommunicated, but this decision got reversed later, according to the Chinon Parchment, for reasons we will discuss shortly.

The second question that comes to mind after learning the details of the Parchment is this: why was more of an issue not made about the institutionalized homosexuality in the Order? According to Frale, Pope Clement wanted to assign the knights penance, grant them absolution (forgiveness), reverse their excommunication, and then combine the Order with the Knights Hospitaller so that he could launch a new Crusade. How could he even think of doing this in medieval Catholic Europe with a bunch of guys who had all been kissing each others’ butts and penises at the very least, and who had sworn not to refuse each others’ sexual advances? The Parchment even details the initiation of an eleven-year-old relative of the king of England, who was purportedly subject to the same treatment (and pathetically begged for his uncle to save him when they told him to spit on the cross). Frale seems to think that almost no homosexual activity occurred beyond the homoerotic initiation rite and oath. She writes:

The surviving trial testimony consists of approximately one thousand depositions with only six attesting to homosexual relations, all of which were described as long-term relationships that almost always had a dimension of affection. . . .

As for the sexual humiliation and forced alienation from God that each knight experienced during initiation, Frale says that these feelings were alleviated afterwards because the neophytes were encouraged to confess their “sins” immediately afterwards. This is in fact how all those “slanderous” rumors got started, she says– you know, the slanderous rumors that accurately stated exactly what the Templars were doing? As she put it:

At the end of the ceremony, the ‘victim’ of all these impositions was invited to report to the chaplain of the order to confess the sins he had just committed and ask for forgiveness. The priests of the Temple comforted these penitents by telling them that they had not committed grave offenses and that if they demonstrated remorse and shame, they would be absolved. Often, however, the brothers confessed to priests outside the Temple, generally Franciscans or Dominicans, who, naturally, were dumbfounded and amplified the brothers’ moral disquiet by telling them that they had committed mortal sins, sometimes encouraging them to leave the order. These indiscretions of these honest priests, who were totally ignorant of the real function of the secret ceremony within the Temple, undoubtedly contributed to the gossip circulating in the secular world about the ‘dark side’ of the order.

So what on Earth was the supposed reason for doing any of this stuff in the first place, if they were not heretics or even “occultists,” as she put it? Ms. Frale trips all over herself to argue that it was just a test of the postulant’s mettle.

Bernard of Clairvaux . . . insisted on inserting into the text of the Rule a clause exhorting the leaders of the order not to accept new vocations too hurriedly, but rather to subject candidates to a test to ascertain their character and commitment. The exact nature of the test is unclear. Bernard elegantly alluded to Saint Paul’s advice to ‘put them to the test to see if they come from God. . . .’

The written Rule offers no details as to how the preceptor might discourage postulants who were less than totally convincing. . . .

In her imagination, without specific instruction it was only logical that over time tests would be devised that involved blaspheming Jesus and making people kiss their private parts. But she simultaneously makes two contradictory claims about the purpose of this:
+ 

1) To see if a candidate would have the courage not to renounce Christ if the Saracens tried to force him to.
+ 

2) To see if a candidate would be obedient to his superiors no matter what.+

So which were they looking for: loyalty to the Order, or loyalty to Christ and Christian morality? Apparently, nobody flunked the test no matter how they reacted. Frale’s opinion on the matter is confusing (especially when she claims that it has somehow been established by the evidence of the Parchment whilst still admitting that it’s purely theoretical on her part). Regarding the need for strict obedience within the Order, she states:

A cardinal point of the Templars’ ethical code was absolute obedience to one’s immediate superiors. . . .

As for the idea that they were testing their recruits to see how they’d stand up to the religious persuasion tactics of the Muslim enemy, here is what she bases it on. She says:

Perhaps they [did these things] because it immediately confronted the new Templar with the violence that he would be subjected to if he were captured by the Saracens.

. . .

We know that the Saracens used to beat and torture capture Christians, forcing them to deny Christ and spit on the cross before ultimately compelling them to convert to Islam.

. . .

The ritual took place according to a fixed script based on the actual experiences of Templar escapees from Muslim prisons, and dated back to the earliest days of the order… Over time, extraneous elements were added, such as the kiss on the buttocks, a true example of hazing aimed at humiliating the recruit in front of the veterans, and the verbal exhortation to homosexuality, which probably started as a parody of the precept that required Templars to give their whole selves to the order and to their brethren. These vulgar and derisive practices were typical of the often crude behavior found among military corps, and probably arose when the order’s traditional discipline began to deteriorate.
+ 

This does not seem to fit with the existing legend of the brave Templar knight. How is it that men who were charged never to retreat on the battlefield when fighting Muslims for God would crumple under a bit of peer pressure when asked by their superiors to renounce Christ? Also, how does committing the blasphemy beforehand, without torture, help to prevent you from doing so again later under torture from the enemy? If renouncing Christ is a big deal with real spiritual ramifications, and they were being trained to avoid having to do that, why would they go ahead and commit the blasphemy during the training?

+At any rate, this is what the Templars confessed to, twice, both to the king of France’s inquisitors, and to the Pope’s. So while they may have had their reasons (if you follow and believe Frale’s twisted apologist logic), and while they may have been absolved (as any murderer or rapist who confessed to a priest would be), they were certainly not innocent, either by contemporary standards, or today’s.
+ 

But it does seem that when Frale says “exonerated,” she means reconciled with the Church. She seems to place all the importance on the Templars’ charter and the fact that it put them under the sole authority of the Pope. She completely rejects the notion that the king of France should have anything to say about the activities of the knights who were stationed in his country. She constantly describes Clement as having the best of intentions. She says he wanted to use his power to protect them, but was constantly thwarted by the king of France trying to “illegally” (her word) claim jurisdiction over them.
+ 

The battle for political supremacy between the French crown and the Papacy had been going on for several years. The election of Clement, historians say, had been orchestrated by Philip IV in the first place, as he felt that Clement could be a useful puppet. He then insisted that Clement move the seat of St. Peter from Rome to Avignon, France, where it remained until 1378. Prior to this, there had been a feud between Philip and Clement’s predecessor, Pope Boniface VIII.
+ 

It is interesting that, according to a National Geographic documentary that featured Frale, one of the ways in which Philip kept Clement in line was by threatening to publicly accuse Clement of heresy as well. Furthermore, as she states in her book, Philip even wanted to exhume the bones of Pope Boniface VIII and put him on trial as “a heretic, a blasphemer, an atheist, and a practitioner of witchcraft.” She describes how the bishops in France wanted to separate from the papacy because they believed it “to have reached a state of decadence as to be incapable of performing its traditional role.” Then she complains about how a bishop in Troyes named Guichard was burned at the stake for witchcraft at this time, “despite having been acquitted by the pope.”
+ 

Frale describes the bizarre ending to this series of events. In December of 1307, Jacques de Molay recanted his confession to Philip IV’s inquisitors, claiming he’d lied because he was under torture, and publicly displaying his wounds before an audience he was granted at Notre Dame cathedral. The Pope’s panels of bishops decided that the knights should be absolved, but that the leaders who were already in prison must remain there for the rest of their lives to pay for what they had done. The way Frale puts it, the papacy saw this as a compromise, bargained down from the death penalty that Philip wanted (although Philip had not actually negotiated with them at all). The Church leaders thought this would enable them to wrap up the matter quickly so they could get about the business of launching another war in the Middle East:+

Upon the return of the three cardinals to Poitiers, the pope drafted a second version of his bull faciens misericordiam. It reiterated the main points expressed in the first release, but added that the leaders of the Temple had been absolved and were now protected by judicial immunity and that no one, except the Roman pontiff, could so much as interrogate them.

But as it turned out, De Molay and his sidekick, Geoffrey de Charny, did not care for this solution. They then recanted their confessions again, this time presumably including the ones they gave to the Church authorities who, according to Frale, had not tortured them. Instead, as Frale put it, they proclaimed “the Temple’s absolute innocence of all the charges brought against them. . . .” Again, it is hard to see how any of this behavior could be classified as particularly noble, considering that even Frale acknowledged that the Templars were, on many of the counts, “guilty,” which normally is thought of as the opposite of “innocent,” a term she also used to describe the knights.

At any rate, Frale still seems to think that the Church’s authority here, which had failed on all counts, should have continued to reign supreme over the situation. She describes what happened next as a violation of the rights of the Church, as Philip took matters into his own hand and acted decisively:

In 1310 [Philip IV] ordered 54 Templars who had been found innocent burned at the stake, in total violation of papal authority. Even the theologians of Sorbonne opposed this decision, declaring it completely illegal, but their opinion was ignored.

In the south of France, where the powers of the Inquisition were strongest, there were records of convictions for violations associated with witchcraft, such as the witch’s Sabbath and group orgies, which even went beyond the accusations of Philip the Fair in his indictment.

These Frale calls “the most baseless charges, which drew from the most abominable fantasies of the popular imagination.” Then, she says, Philip thwarted Clement’s authority once again:

Although the leaders of the Temple were still detained illegally by Philip IV, the pope granted them judicial immunity. Templar grand master Jacques de Molay tried multiple times to obtain an audience with the pope, but royal agents prevented that meetings from ever taking place. Nor were the Templars allowed to be in contact with their grand master. . . .

Finally, Philip had De Molay and De Charny both executed, burnt at the stake. Predictably, Frale sees these deaths as nothing short of noble martyrdom. She writes:

Accounts of the execution attested to the great heroism demonstrated by the two leaders. Jacques de Molay asked his executioners to untie the knots around his wrists, raised his eyes to the cathedral of Notre Dame, and prayed to the Virgin Mary. . . With his prayer, the grand master bore glorious witness to the demise of the Temple and proclaimed its innocence and fidelity to the Christian faith.

So clearly, the Templars have in no way been exculpated. They seem to have been quite guilty of the elements of blasphemy (at least according to the common definition) and committing homosexual acts. Many people have been executed for less. The idea that this was not done as part of a larger heretical doctrine is unproven and groundless. Contrary to the sweeping claims of Barbara Frale (who in 2009 also claimed to have found the name of Jesus written on the Shroud of Turin), the question of why they did these things, and the extent to which they did, as well what other crimes they may have committed, is as unanswered today as before the Chinon Parchment was discovered in 2001. As for the question of the Baphomet idol, Frale offers one sentence, proposing what seems a very odd idea:

The last point raised in the indictment against the Templars concerned the secret veneration of an idol in the shape of a bearded head. There is clear evidence of the existence of an unusual image of Christ in the religious life of the order, as well as a mysterious cult devoted to the Sacred Blood.

So is she suggesting that the Baphomet head was a representation of Jesus. It seems so. As strange as this may seem, the same idea was the subject of the 1998 book The Head of God: The Lost Treasure of the Templars by Keith Laidler. However, instead of claiming that it was a mere representation of Christ, he theorized that actual man’s head had been removed and preserved by them. He proposed that it is now buried underneath Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. Perhaps he gave Frale the spark of insight that led to her concocting the only “innocent” explanation she could come up with for why the knights would be prostrating themselves before a mummified head that the confessors described as “terrifying.” But we need not go that far. The skulls and mummified remains of many saints, including John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene, are regularly venerated by Christians the world over, and all of them look rather creepy. As we mentioned, the Templars were involved in the relic trade. It could have been any one of these that the Templars used in their ceremonies, or something else altogether.

As for Barbara Frale herself, who’s worked at the Vatican Secret Archives since 2001, she comes across as a Church spokeswoman apologizing for what happened to the knights, and offering up excuses for why the Pope failed to protect them from Philip. While Philip’s control of Clement has long been known, to us it seems that an attempt is being made by her to rehabilitate the reputations of both the Church and the Temple. We can only speculate on whether this is personal interest on her part, or something that her employers have asked her to do, but the Church certainly doesn’t seem to have corrected the record at all on these issues in the intervening fourteen years since she allegedly discovered the Chinon Parchment in 2001.

We should also note that, long before the Templars were openly accused and arrested by Philip IV, several papal pronouncements had stated explicitly that the Templars were guilty of the same sort of things they were eventually prosecuted for. Prince Michael of Albany, in his 2006 book The Knights Templar of the Middle East (co-authored with Walid Amine Salhab), recounts some of these:

Innocent II (1198-1216), writing to the grand visitor of the order, said, ‘The crimes of your brothers pain us deeply by the scandal that they provoke within the Church. The knights Templar practice the doctrines of Satan.’ Gregory IX (1227-1241) mentions the fact that he knew that the Templars practiced the act of homosexuality and occult sexual magic under a secret new rule established by Roncelin de Fos (later master of Tortosa and Syria) in 1240. This new rule was written in a Templar book known as ‘the book of baptismal (sic) by fire.’

This final item is of great interest to us. We found mention of The Book of the Baptism by Fire in a few other places, but not many (although we were not able to corroborate that it was ever mentioned by Gregory IX, who as we said previously, also condemned the Cathars for worshipping the anuses of black cats). Oddvar Olsen writes about it in The Templar Papers, also from 2006:

In 1877, a German Masonic specialist named Merzdorf claimed to have found, among other Masonic manuscripts, two Latin ‘Rules’ of the Templars (purported to date from the 13th century). One was the Rule for the ‘chosen brothers,’ and the other for the ‘consoled brothers.’ The first Rule describes the church as the ‘Synagogue of Anti-Christ,’ and stipulates an elect reception ceremony (involving various ritual kisses—one on the male member—and including readings from opening verses of the Koran). The latter Rule implies strongly that the Templars shared the doctrines of the Cathars, including that of the ‘consolamentumm (sp),’ or mystical baptism. Still authenticity of these has yet to be determined.

. . . I have recently been referred to a text called The Book of the Baptism of Fire (The credence of this text needs to be ascertained, so I will just briefly mention it here.) The text was apparently transcribed by the Grand Master in England (Robert Sandford), in 1240 AD. It lists the different articles of The Order of the Weather. Some of the articles refer to both the “chosen” and “consoled” brothers. There is also mention of Baphomet and “the Secret Science of the great philosophy: Abrax and the Talisman.”

So according to Prince Michael, The Book of the Baptism of Fire (which he calls the “baptismal”) actually contained these secret rules, while Olsen claims that they are separate documents that nonetheless seem to confirm one another. Yet another author, Timothy Hogan, in his 2012 book Entering the Chain of Union, tells the story differently still (drawing on a French website edited by one Jean-Pierre Schmit):

There is a series of documents first published in 1877 by Theodore Merzdorff, which were said to come from the Masonic Grand Lodge of Hamburg. These Latin documents were the official Rule of the Knights Templar followed by three other documents said to be secret statutes of the Order. They were said to be copies of the original documents that existed in the Vatican, which were copied in the 1780s-1790s by the Danish scientist Frederic Münter. The documents were translated into German, and from there into French in 1957 by Rene Gilles.

Hogan adds an extra “f” to the end of Merzdorf’s first name and tells us that before they were stumbled upon at a German Mason’s lodge, they were stumbled upon in Latin in the Vatican archives and translated into German. That’s a whole lot of stumbling upon something that is of such great historical importance, and presumably excuses the Church’s treatment of the Templars. But yet again—whoopsy!—those Vatican file clerks just can’t do anything right! Masonic lodges, as you will find later in this chapter, are just the natural place for such things to show up later for historians to find them. Hogan goes on to describe in more detail what some of the documents were:

The third document dated July 1240 opens with “Here begins the ‘liber consolamenti’ or secret statutes, written by Master Roncelinus for the Consoled Brothers of the militia of the Temple.” These statutes, composed of twenty articles are signed by Master Roncelinus and another dignitary of the Templar Order, brother Robert of Samford, Procurator of the Knights Templar in England. . . . The last piece dated August 1240 starts with “Here begins the list of secret signs that master Roncelinus has assembled in eighteen articles and addressed to the same Robert of Samford.”

Yet another version of the story, told by Mark Amaru Pinkham in his article for Atlantis Rising Magazine, entitled “The Templars’ Biggest Secret & the Vatican,” calls the text Baptism of Fire of the Brothers-Consulate, and says that it was discovered in 1780 at the Vatican Library by “a Danish Bishop” (not, as Hogan had claimed, “Danish scientist Frederic Münter”). Also, like the others but unlike Oddvar Olsen, Pinkham purports that this document is one and the same as that which, he says, is “often referred to by Templar historians as the ‘Secret Rule of the Templars.’” 

According to him, the document contains quite a few amazing admissions not mentioned by the other writers on the subject:

Said to have been written in 1240 AD. by a French Templar Master named Roncelinus, it appears to give a green light to all the heretical offenses that the Knights were accused of in the 14th century. Permission to indulge in all manner of Templar heresy can be found in this document, including defilement of the Cross, denial of Christ as the Savior, sexual liaison, and the worship of the idolic head known as Baphomet. There is even a passage within the document that gives the Knights permission to initiate other [G]nostics into their order, including Cathars, Bogomils, and even Assassins. If the Baptism of Fire of the Brothers-Consulate was indeed in circulation beginning in 1240 AD. It would have been an easy task for a Church or Royal spy to procure a copy for their employers.

The references made by the above-quoted sources to the “Consoled Brothers,” “Brothers Consulate,” and “consolamenti” are taken by Oddvar Olsen to imply that the Templars practiced the consolamentum of the Cathars, which he describes as a “mystical baptism.” Benjamin Walker tells us more about this mysterious ritual in Gnosticism: Its Influence and History:

The central Cathar rite was the consolamentum, a kind of adult baptism of the spirit, which was administered only once. It was reserved as a rule for those who had attained the level of the Perfect, but it could be given to any Cathar prepared to make an irrevocable renunciation of the flesh and consecrate his or her life to God. The rite was preceded by a fast and imparted by the laying on of hands and placing on the head the gospel of St John. If anyone sinned after being “consoled,” he was expelled from the Cathar communion.

So strict were the requirements that many Cathars only underwent the rite at the point of death, so as to avoid any further chance of sinning. Because it was generally held that death through illness or old age only proved that Satan was still in control of the body, some Cathars hastened the end by what was called the endura, a ritual suicide or killing. It was thought best to be purified by the consolamentum and then face the endura, for then salvation was certain. The methods of endura included fasting to death or taking poison, or being smothered by one or more of the Perfect who held a pillow over the mouth of the endurist, or strangled him.

So this is the ritual that the “Consoled Brothers” of the so-called Book of the Baptism by Fire were named after? We presently cannot be sure. A copy of the book in which the alleged document was published, compiled by Theodor Merzdorf (who spelled his first name without an “e” on the end, a detail that none of the authors quoted above got right), has been obtained by our research staff and is now being analyzed. It has an extremely long title in German. But it seems to us that Prince Michael was probably able to read the text, or at least knew someone who could, because it appears that some of the “inside information” in his book about the Templars must have come from this.

One thing we do know, though, is that this Roncelin/Roncelinus fellow has been associated with the Cathars, and blamed for introducing blasphemous rituals to Templar tradition, in many books before. The Temple and the Lodge by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh (1989) tells us:

Between 1248 and 1250, the Master of Provence was one Roncelin de Fos. Then, between 1251 and 1253, Roncelin was Master of England. By 1260, he was again Master of Provence, and presided in that capacity until 1278. It is thus quite possible that Roncelin brought aspects of heretical Cathare thought from their native soil in France to England. This suggestion is supported by the testimony before the Inquisition of Geoffroy de Gonneville, Preceptor of Aquitaine and Poitou. According to Geoffroy, unnamed individuals allege that all evil and perverse rules and innovations in the Temple had been introduced by a certain Brother Roncelin, formerly a Master of the Order. The Brother Roncelin in question is bound to have been Roncelin de Fos.

Pope Pius IX (reigning from 1846 to 1878), in his “Allocution Against the Freemasons,” charged that the Templars had tapped into the existence of a secret Johannite church. Here are some of his words on the subject, as quoted by Albert Pike in Morals and Dogma:

The Johannites ascribed to Saint John the foundation of their Secret Church, and the Grand Pontiffs of the Sect assumed the title of Christos, Anointed, or Consecrated, and claimed to have succeeded one another from Saint John by an uninterrupted succession of pontifical powers. He who, at the period of the foundation of the Order of the Temple, claimed these imaginary prerogatives, was named THEOCLET; he knew HUGUES DE PAYENS, he initiated him into the Mysteries and hopes of his pretended church, he seduced him by the notions of Sovereign Priesthood and Supreme royalty, and finally designated him as his successor.

Thus the Order of Knights of the Temple was at its very origin devoted to the cause of opposition to the tiara of Rome and the crowns of Kings, and the Apostolate of Kabbalistic Gnosticism was vested in its chiefs. For Saint John himself was the Father of the Gnostics, and the current translation of his polemic against the heretical of his Sect and the pagans who denied that Christ was the Word, is throughout a misrepresentation, or misunderstanding at least, of the whole Spirit of that Evangel.

On the one hand, the implication seems to be that the person who initiated Hughes de Payens (whose name means “Hugh the Pagan”) into the secret doctrine of Johannism was John the Baptist himself—or, at least, that the Templar tradition claimed he was. This created a bizarre unexplained gap of 1000 years between the alleged date of the death of John and the alleged date of the inception of the Templar order. But this gap is eliminated if we consider the chronological revisions of Anatoly Fomenko, which eliminates the Middle Ages and puts the Crusades right after the death of Christ. Also, another intriguing possibility is allowed which makes this whole matter potentially much simpler. One can then consider the perspective that maybe the Templars were, in fact, practicing the religion of the Church that chartered them. However, the rituals and teachings of the Church may have been quite different than what has been handed down to us today. It may be that, somewhere along the line, a decision was made to sanitize the religion, to make it more palatable with the developing mores of the day. This may have required the public sacrifice of the Templars, Cathars, and other Christians, now “heretics,” to make it look as though the “impurities” of the Church had been dispensed with. If we consider this, then a lot of the most peculiar elements of Christian mythos and doctrine, as well as many of the otherwise bewildering physical artifacts left behind by our Christian ancestors, make a lot more sense.

First, let us note that the way in which some anti-Christian Roman chroniclers described the “Agape feasts” of early Christian sects sounded more similar to descriptions of the Satanic Black Mass or the Witches’ Sabbath, rather than what we think of now as the traditional Eucharist celebration. These rituals reportedly involved intoxication, orgies, infant sacrifice and cannibalism. It is now thought by most scholars that these chroniclers were probably mixing up reports on the activities of both Christian groups, Gnostic Christian groups, and non-Christian Gnostic groups, not being able to tell the difference. Perhaps, though, the differences were not quite as great as modern Christians would like to think.

La tentation de Saint Antoine (1878), Felicien Rops

The Agape feast

Another thing to note is the presence of a great many “medieval” churches in Europe containing idols and other artwork involving Priapian symbolism. I already mentioned the bust of a rooster with a penis for a nose called “The Savior of the World,” once on display in a museum at the Vatican. Much more can be found in the form of fascinum present in old churches throughout Britain and the Continent, along with vagina-flashing, masturbating Melusines (called “Shiela-na-Gig” by the Irish), and thousands of monstrous beings, often shown contorting with another like the host of Hell, or giving birth, anally or otherwise, to more monsters. These latter are called “gargoyles,” and laughed off by church historians as superstitious luck charms intended to “scare away” demons. (Obviously, the idea is that nothing is more intimidating for demons than other demons, which has mind-blowing implications when you consider the Ophite view that Christ, like the rest of the family of immortals he came from, was a serpent too.

Gargoyle from the Church of St. Peter in York, England
 

Gargoyles at Temple Church, London

Anatoly Fomenko’s radical view of history is the only thing I have seen that makes perfect sense of a conundrum I have dealt with in my research for decades: the fact that Christianity and traditions labeled “pagan” or even “Satanic” seem to have a common origin. When it comes to the Black Mass and the Witches’ Sabbath, Fomenko comes right out and says what I have been thinking for some time:

According to the experts in the history of religions, the Western European Christians of the Middle Ages had . . . religious rituals including nocturnal congregations called ‘agapes,’ or ‘nights of love.’ Despite the efforts of the late medieval and modern commentators to convince us that these Christian ‘love suppers’ involved nothing but ‘comradely libations’ and ‘platonic cordialities,’ the initial meaning of the word ‘agape’ reveals something completely different. As N.A. Morozov duly remarks, the correct Greek word for fraternal love is philia, whereas agape is solely used for erotic love.

Therefore the ‘agapes’ have most probably merely been the way Christians referred to the medieval Western European baccanals of the Dionysian cult with all of their orgiastic attributes–the attributes considered ‘extremely ancient’ nowadays. . . .

. . .

The medieval descriptions of the infamous ‘diabiolic sabbats’ in Western Europe must have been based on the same archetypal ‘agape’ Baccanals as mentioned above, but these have already been declared ‘a creation of the devil.’ Let us remind the reader that dissolute orgiastic excesses had been a notable feature of the agapes or sabbats (according to Scaligerian history). Quite naturally, the new ‘reformed’ Western European church conveniently delegated the responsibility for the agapes (or sabbats, or Baccanals) to ‘the devil’ in order to smother all recollections of the recent Bacchic Christian past in the congregation. The people’s own history was thus ruthlessly severed and attributed to a ‘different religion’ or even to ‘the devil.’

This matches up precisely with something that my former colleague Nicholas De Vere once wrote in his book The Dragon Legacy: The Secret History of an Ancient Bloodline . In De Vere’s worldview, Jesus was a genetic descendant of Satan, part of what he called the “Dragon bloodline,” which he identified as being the same as the “Grail bloodline.” He said that the ritual known as the “Black Mass” is: “the original mass of Jesus which the Catholics later stole and sanitized for public consumption. . . .” Also, he wrote:

. . . Royal Witchcraft, or Witchcraft proper, from the early Dark Ages onwards owes as much to its clearly Christian [origins] as it does to its direct Druidic origins. Both [traditions], [both] in their original form, and in the publicly disseminated opinion of the Catholic popes, were and are Satanic. Jesus’ heredity, and the descent of the Druidic dynasties both derived from an identical Dragon nascence that the Roman Catholics decided was devilish, because the descent of both bloodlines was from the Sumerian Enki who was the Akkadian Samael; the Roman Lucifer and thus the Catholic Satan. In Jesus’ case the Roman church, as do all outsiders who know they are onto a good thing, sanitized his rituals and concealed his descent. All those who continued to follow Jesus’ original teachings—like the witches—they burned as ‘heretics’. . . .

Bacchanalia

The Witches’ Sabbath

Certain rites that early Christians were found to be celebrating, which were then forbidden by the church, included those called “The Feast of the Mad,” “The Feast of the Innocent,” and “The Feast of the Ass.” These have been compared in symbolism to the Black Mass, in that they contain what seems to be mocking imitation of Catholic rituals. However, Fomenko again theorizes that they were not making fun of Jesus but rather celebrating him in authentic form.

Illustration of Black Mass from Juliette by the Marquis De Sade.

Furthermore, Fomenko unequivocally sees the early Catholic Church as perpetuating the rites of both Mithras and Cybele, whom he believes were worshipped together. Quoting two other writers, he reports:

…[I]t isn’t a case of Christ resembling the ‘ancient’ Mithras, but rather that Mithraism was a form of the Christian cult after the XI century A.D. …

A. Drews says this about strong and extensive parallels between ‘ancient’ Mithraism and mediaeval Christianity:

‘The main Roman sanctuary of Mithras was in the Vatican, on the site of St. Peter’s Cathedral. That is where he was worshipped, together with Attis, who had been recognized officially even earlier…. Mithras, or Attis, was called Pater, or Father. The High Priest of this deity was also called ‘Pater’ (or the Father of Fathers); the Roman Pope is still called the Holy Father. The latter wears a tiara, or a mitre, on his head, which is a head-dress of Mithraism, or Attis… and red soldier shoes of the priests of Mithras, as well as keeping the keys of the ‘Rock God’ [or St. Peter—A.F.], and has ‘the power to bind, and the power to permit….’ The Catholic Pope’s equal in rank was the Pater, the Pope of the Mithraist cult. This pagan Pope resided in the Vatican, worshipped the sun as the savior, and Cybele as the virginal Mother of God, who was usually depicted sitting with a child in her lap—her Christian double is the Virgin Mary.’…

Like medieval Christianity, ‘ancient’ Mithraism had a concept of purgatory; the two also shared the use of the aspersorium, and the tradition of crossing oneself… Ecclesial ceremonialism and public forms of church office are similar—the liturgy was read in a dead language that the masses did not understand, both services used hosts (wafers, or altar bread), albs, wide cingula, episcopal hats, etc….

N.A. Koun also tells us that ‘the Mithraist oblation is virtually similar to the Christian Eucharist… Christians, as well as Mithraists, considered Sunday a Holy Day, and celebrated… Christmas in the Christian tradition, on the 25 December, as the day their ‘Invincible’ deity was born’…Some monuments depicting a clandestine Mithraist Lord’s Supper have reached our age. We can see altar bread with Christian crosses on these ‘ancient’ pictures. The famous Cathedra Petri, or the Chair of Peter in Vatican, also appears to belong to the Mithras cult.

If true, this would mean that the cult practices which we know were done in the mystery schools of Cybele and Mithras, including the public castrations in drug-induced frenzies, the transgendered priestesses, the bestiality, the marriages of boy initiates as young as 7 to older males, the subjection of initiates to hallucinogenic drug trips while confined in a coffin, and all the other so-called “Tortures of Mithras” that the Church Fathers wrote about, were all part of the early Christian Church itself. This explains why all of the Christian holidays are all based on the cycles of the solar year.

The article “Secrets of the Ordo Templi Orientis” article on parareligion.ch quotes Aleister Crowley as writing, in a letter to William Bernard Crow (1895–1976), dated 11th November 1944, that the purpose of the O.T.O. was “to restore Christianity to its real status as a solar-phallic religion.” Where did he get this radical viewpoint, when almost no scholars at the time would have thought that way? Everyone else writing on the subject merely thought that the symbols of antiquity had been co-opted by the Church.

All this brings us back to the question of the Templars. As I have shown, the Templars confessed to such things as spitting on the cross, kissing each others’ butts and penises, and taking an oath not to refuse each others’ homosexual advances, all as part of their initiation rite. They confessed to this twice, once to the French government, and once to the Pope, according to the Chinon Parchment, which, as you now know, says that the Pope then assigned the knights minor penance and absolved them. Modern Christians would think such practices unforgivable, but the Pope was reportedly ready to send the knights out on a new Crusade, had the King of France not had them executed instead. The king had also accused the previous Pope, Boniface VIII, of witchcraft, and exhumed his body so that it could be tried of this charge.

 

Depiction of the death of Boniface in a 15th-century copy of Boccaccio’s De Casibus

It seems that the French crown viewed the Church as a threat, and, being more powerful than the church at the time, France had forced the church headquarters to be moved to Avignon rather than Rome, so that they could keep a close eye on the situation. I suggested earlier that perhaps the first French King, Meroveus, rumored to be a descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, may have actually been Jesus himself, if we accept a chronological rearrangement such as that suggested by Fomenko. So maybe they had reason to believe that the Church and its most favored militia had been infiltrated by the anti-Christian enemy beyond the point of reconciliation, and sought to destroy them.

Considering all of the foregoing, is it not possible that Christianity was an entirely different animal at the time that the Templars were founded? Am I right to speculate that their initiation rites, having much in common with the Black Mass and the Witches’ Sabbath, were not considered unusual at the time, but fell out of practice later, and eventually became an embarrassment to the Church? Is this the real reason why the French crown persecuted them while the Church tried to protect them?

Templars desecrating the Cross at initiation

As we mentioned in Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled, the figure of Jesus shares many aspects with that of Dionysus, but so too does that of John the Baptist. We also explained in that book that there are very real reasons to believe that John was the originator of a Gnostic mystery school of his own, the leadership of which was passed on to Simon Magus after his death, and then from there, to many of the Gnostic groups that followed in his footsteps. Shockingly, in his book The Mysteries of John the Baptist, Tobias Churton described a painting that appears to depict John the Baptist as Dionysus (known to the Romans also as “Bacchus”). He wrote:

Underlying the ambiguous and arguably pagan inspiration of Leonardo’s John is the existence of a similar work, thought to have been painted between 1510 and 1515 by a follower of Leonardo from a drawing by the master. The painting has a dual identity. It is known both as St. John in the Wilderness and as Bacchus, the god of religious ecstasy, wine, and intoxication.

. . .

[The painter] chose to add vine leaves to the figure’s head and leopard spots to John’s hairy loincloth. A vine wreath added to the Baptist’s former staff transformed it into a Bacchic thrysus, Dionysus’ sacred staff borne by his wine-intoxicated followers. According to Euripides, the thrysus dripped with honey….

St. John in the Wilderness/Bacchus

St. John Goes Into the Wilderness, apparently leaving a medieval walled city

Left and Center: John the Baptist in attitude of Levi’s Baphomet (right hand forming Manu Pantea (“Hand of Blessing”), pointing upward, the other pointing down). Right: Crucifixion amulet inscribed “Christ, Orpheus, Bacchus.”

These concepts, and their impact when combined with Hammer-Purgstall’s evidence presented here, make it possible that John himself was the original Templar secret chief while still in the flesh, and that the Baphomet “head” they used for worship and divination was in fact his. This, then, makes perfect sense out of the meaning of Baphomet’s name “Baptizer of Wisdom (i.e., Gnosis).”More amazing things become possible when we allow for a shortening of the chronology. Let us consider another possible identity for the Templar secret chief called the “Theoclet.” We mentioned this idea in Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled. In John 14:16-17 (KJV), Jesus told his apostles before he left them that:

I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever. Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.

The Greek word here, Periclytos, has been variously translated as “comforter” and “consoler.” Some Islamic theologians choose to believe that it is the equivalent of the Arabic word for “praised one,” which is “Ahmad,” one of Mohammed’s epithets. In Sura 61:6 of The Koran (Sahih International translation), Mohammed is identified as the one whose coming was promised by Jesus:

And . . . when Jesus, the son of Mary, said, ‘O children of Israel, indeed I am the messenger of Allah to you confirming what came before me of the Torah and bringing good tidings of a messenger to come after me, whose name is Ahmad.’ But when he came to them with clear evidences, they said, 
‘This is obvious magic.’

However, verse 22 of John Chapter 14 (KJV) makes it clear that the Comforter is in fact the Holy Spirit:

The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.

This would seem to disqualify Mohammed, unless we want to identify the Prophet with the Holy Spirit. Certainly, we previously mentioned evidence that suggests Baphomet may have been identified with the Holy Spirit, as he/she was with Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, which the Church has always equated with the Holy Spirit. So we can connect Mohammed with Allah, Allah with Allat, Allat with Lilith, and Lilith with Sophia, and thus get to the Holy Spirit that way. Also, there is the possibility that the baptism “with fire, and with the Holy Spirit” that John the Baptist promised the one to come after him would bring was, in the eyes of the Knights Templar, the same as their “Baptism of Wisdom.” Let us recall that the Templars’ alleged secret rule, supposedly contained in The Book of the Baptism of Fire, was said to have been written for the “Consoled Brothers,” and possibly referred to the Cathar rite of Consolamentum.

There are images of Mohammed being baptized with such fire, and frequently his head is shown surrounded by flames. Many of these pictures are illustrations of his “Night Journey,” during which he allegedly flew from Mecca to Jerusalem and back in a single night. Actually, The Koran says that he was taken “for a Journey by night from the Sacred Mosque to the farthest Mosque,” but these have always been taken by believers to be the Kaaba in Mecca and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, respectively. He was taken to Heaven during this trip, just like Enoch and Hermes are said to have done. While he was there he met Jesus and John the Baptist.

Supposedly, it all started when he laid his head on the black stone of the Kaaba (analogous to the biblical story of Jacob falling asleep with his head on a sacred beytl stone), and was visited by the archangel Gabriel (the angel of wisdom and communication, similar to Hermes in that regard). He was given a ride on a winged horse with the face of a human female whose name was “Barak” (meaning “Lightning”).

Recall that lightning was what supposedly inseminated the rock that Mithras burst forth out of in the famous depictions of him. This rock, it seems, was Cybele. She, like the meteoric, magnetized Kaaba stone, was thought of as a black rock. Not only does the word Kaaba evoke her name, but qibla, the word for the direction in which Muslims are to pray towards the stone, is almost identical to the way her name was purportedly pronounced by Romans. The fact that Cybele may have been the mother of Mithras makes me wonder if that it why it is now shattered into numerous pieces, most of them seemingly missing. Are we really looking at a broken eggshell here, with the main contents gone long ago?

Amazingly, before the Night Journey began, Mohammed was baptized with “the holy water of wisdom,” including his internal organs (which I take to be “the living waters of Mete”). A hadith attributed to Malik bin Sa`sa`ah (as reported in the first footnote on Sura 53 of the Hilali and Khan translation of The Koran) says that Mohammed told him:

While I was at the House in a state midway between sleep and wakefulness, (an angel recognized me) as the man lying between two men. A golden tray full of wisdom and belief was brought to me and my body was cut open from the throat to the lower part of the abdomen and then my abdomen was washed with Zam-zam water and (my heart was) filled with wisdom and belief. (Emphasis added.)

Zam-zam is used by Muslims today in much the same way that holy water is used by Catholics. It’s the word for water drawn from the sacred well near the Kaaba, which they say miraculously sprang from the ground when Abraham’s first son Ishmael, forefather the of the Arabs, and his mother, the slave-woman Hagar, were dying of thirst in the desert after being ditched there by Abraham.

In this, I see echoes of the Kabbalistic story of the “slave woman” Lilith, who distracted God from his true wife, the Shekinah. We made a case in Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled, as other scholars have done, before us, that Allah and Lilith might be identical. Meanwhile, reminiscent of the castration of Attis, Ishmael had to sacrifice his foreskin in Abraham’s religious ritual. The two Jewish “tokens” of covenant with the Lord—circumcision and the observance of the Sabbath Day on Saturday—and both evidence of devotion to the cult of Saturn.

The whole incident is called “Isra,” which sounds an awful lot like “Israel,” yet is from the root sera, meaning “to travel by night. But these are the actual words that are being translated as “Night Journey.” Although it is described as happening to Mohammed while he was in a state “midway between sleep and wakefulness,” most Muslims take it to have been a literal, physical, and miraculous journey.

However, to us it sounds identical to the term “go forth by night,” which is used in the European witchcraft tradition to refer to the process of astral-projecting in one’s sleep as a method of attending the Witches’ Sabbath on a high mountain peak. After projecting their souls into the ether, it was said that the witches would ride flying goats or broomsticks to the secret meeting place for the ceremony. The Devil or “Black Man” was sometimes said to arrive at the Sabbath by the same method. Just like with Mohammed’s Night Journey, while it sounds like it’s all just a dream, it was taken by the witches themselves to be real. The Church took it to be so real that confessing to it was punishable by death.

Though I haven’t read his thoughts on the matter yet, I’m willing to bet that Anatoly Fomenko sees Islam as, originally, just another branch of Christianity. Not only is Christ heavily venerated in The Koran, as well as Mary, but it even asserts the truth of the Virgin Birth. But it calls Jesus the “spirit of God,” seemingly identifying him with the Holy Spirit, rather than the Son of God, which is a notion that Muslims find blasphemous. Shia Muslims believe in the prophecy of the coming Anti-Christ, and that Jesus will work in tandem with a figure called the Mahdi to cleanse the Earth of his influence.

“Mahdi,” of course, makes me think of Mete. I also think of Saint Demetrios^[11] of Thessaloniki, who is often depicted as the companion of Saint George. They are always shown with their appearance made to compliment each other in several ways. Both are dressed in the armor of knights, mounted and armed. George rides a white horse and is shown spearing a Dragon, while Demetrius commands a red horse and pins down a man with his weapon—supposedly an emperor, either third-century Roman emperor Maximillian or Kayolan of Bulgaria. His epithet is Μυροβλήτης (Greek, Myrovlētēs, “the Myrrh-streamer”), by which I cannot help but be reminded of the Frankish King Meroveus.

Do we see, in the combination of these two saints, Christ and the Mahdi working together to destroy the Great Beast (the Dragon) and his human cohort, the Anti-Christ (the Emperor)? Also, considering the color of their horses, are we looking here at two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? The one on the white horse is usually taken to be Saint Michael, who appears to me, Alexander Rivera, and many other myth interpreters, to be a form of Mithras. Theologians often see him as synonymous with Jesus Christ, which, again, fits right in with the hypotheses I have presented her. The Wikipedia article offers the interpretation that they could be seen as “earthly manifestations of the archangels Michael and Gabriel.” It was Gabriel who acted as guide to Mohammed on the Night Journey.

Then we can’t forget the fact that until Hammer-Purgstall, most writers on this subject assumed the truth of the assumption that the name “Baphomet” was a corruption of “Mohamet.” Also, some prosecuted Templars confessed to using the “words of the Saracens” in their rituals, such as, for instance, “Yallah!”

Jules Michelet reports that some knights said “they have fancied they saw a devil’s head, a mauffe’s head, that in these ceremonies they have seen the devil himself under the shape of a cat, or of a woman. . . .” The word mauffe appears to originate in French as a way of spelling this alleged alteration of Mahomet, the name of the Muslim prophet, more frequently spelled “Mohammed” or “Muhammad,” which supposedly morphed into the word Baphomet. Variations seen in print also include Maufe, Mauffez, and Maphumet (according to the Bulletin de la Societe Academique de Laon, Vol. 21, 1876). .” Also, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “Mahomet” was used in the Middle Ages as a generic word for “idol.”

The term Maphumet, I think, may have common origins with the inspiration for Christopher Marlowe’s invented Devil Mephistopheles, to whom Johannes Faustus sold his soul in the Marlowe play named after him. Centuries later, a new revision on the Faust story was produced by Johann von Goethe. As I mentioned previously, Goethe exchanged correspondence with Hammer-Purgstall and greatly appreciated his translation of The Koran.