Baphomet | The Blog of Baphomet

As I walked through the crowds on New Year’s Eve, and looked around on the last day of term before Xmas, I saw a strange sight in the streets; dozens of young people dressed as animals. Pandas, dogs, cats, tigers, bears, reindeer, wandering the high street with human faces. Inverse Egyptian deities, they embody the deep seated need for humans to be animals.

The Baphometic current is strong in these children of those of us who grew up with the plethora of wildlife upon our screens courtesy of that great demi-god, David Attenborough. They are happy to align themselves with the fur covered bodies of their relatives. While a few mythological creatures appear, with dragons a favourite, alongside various odd coloured monster types, the overwhelming majority of onesies depict real life mammals.

Contrasting with the cosplay/furry/otherkin mindsets, onesie wearing does not change the human centred internal identity of the wearers. They go shopping, talk with friends, attend school, go out with family and friends to watch fireworks, lounge on their sofas surfing the web, and generally do normal stuff. Teenagers go out of an evening to pubs and clubs as lions or zebras with scarcely a second glance from their companions who wear jeans or dresses. Ordinary people, that simply look like animals.

Baphomet is conventionally represented by a human figure with furry legs, and the head of a horned mammal. In aeons past, the costuming of the human head was our way of identifying with the animals around us, as we tried to put their intelligences onto our bodies that we might learn from them. Then, for thousands of years, we only used animal costumes rarely, and human animals became distant figures absent from our daily lives. Nowadays, we seem to prefer to dress up the body as animal, placing our human selves into the animal kingdom while still human; this change betokens a flip in relations with Nature, keeping our own individual faces while simultaneously dressing ourselves as mammals, and not in human clothes.

Does today’s surge of identification with animals (manifested in the onesie craze) emerge from a deeper felt need to come out as ‘animal’? Or does it merely reflect the popularity in mainstream culture of ‘Where the Wild Things Are’?

A human animal, in the wild

I tend towards the former view; young adults today (in this island at least) are well aware of their common ancestry with all mammals, and must have a greater sense of kinship with their cousins than previous generations who, even for those of us in our 40s, were brought up with the Book story of Adam’s dominion over the beasts as an early childhood formative legend. We were told we were different, above the animal kingdom, unique, special and better. Today’s youth has had Life On Earth available to them on DVDs and other media since birth. They know in their bones that humans are just another form of the flourishing of this Life. This is their Normal.

They know their place.

This heartens me greatly: An emotional connection to our furry friends, our bluds, means a different take on issues such as ‘the environment’; when ‘those creatures over there’ fit within the terminology of ‘us’, we make different choices. Whether this might affect future decisions on behaviour, or influence policy decisions, I do not know, though it seems like a positive change of perspective.

As with all such cultural shifts, the phenomenon itself became possible only through the appearance of technologies which allow it to occur. Fluffy fabrics easily manufactured en masse, and distributed across the world, were not a feasible option a century ago, hence the fads for various real animal furs added to clothing. Whilst the clothing industry of here and now does have many ethical questions to answer, the days of thousands of beavers etc slaughtered to satisfy fashion are long gone. The recent abandonment of angora by so many stores, shows we do not like to feel that actual animals have been treated cruelly in the production of clothing items.

Will we one day see onesies depicting other branches of the animal kingdom, or members of the plant/fungi/microbe kingdoms? No one can say. However I feel it is only a matter of time before we see starfish, oak trees, and fly agarics shopping in the High Street, and I look forward to that immensely.

Baphomet. The perfect synthesised deity for the Modern Age, right? The God powerful enough, forceful enough, cunning enough, subtle enough… to break the stultifying force that sits over the world.

I call it the Mundane Spell; this reality field is all around us and it is there because we tolerate it. You know the spell – Shaun of the Dead was right on the money in showing up modern society for a bunch of zombies doing the same thing over and over and ultimately accepting that that’s just how some people are. Call it the Muggle Effect, or the 9-to-5/2.4 kids Trap, the idea that we work to afford the car we don’t want and the house we have to buy near the job we hate so we can get to work the next day…

Baphometic body (by the talented Luke Brown)

So why is the Mundane Spell even here? You can pick your cause. Did the Demiurge install it to stem the rising tide of self-aware proto-Gods achieving the Pleroma? Is it a natural reaction to the attainment of Samadhi by the select few, that the many must be lashed to the wheel of Samsara even harder? Are people just apathetic dicks? You decide.

Of course, we are all the cool kids who took the red pill, “escaped”, and are capable of Dreaming a Dream all around us which is better than that terrible Spell. Or at least we think we are. You know what I mean – we’re okay man. We’re working on it, we’re kicking ass and taking Divine Names and assuming Godforms. We’re alright, Jacobus. Is that enough? I’m not so sure it is, because we can all look to the internal alchemy of becoming Baphomet and realising the Divine within us, but that still leaves everyone else falling behind. So let’s look at something more.

Baphomet is an amazing Deity, because it is the Godform that Ideas can assume. We create things as we go; servitors for this spell or charm, draw in Angels or Demons for that talisman or result, and build Egregores as groups. We can build a God out of these combined Egregores, Servitors, Supernatural Assistants, Fae helpers and personal Angels and Demons. Adam Kadmon for the modern age, the Age of Baphomet. What if we put all these Willed magicks together?

Now, don’t get me wrong, we do not and cannot all Will the same thing at the same time. Do we have to, though? Let me share with you a thought experiment:

“If we are all cells in the Body of God, then surely a mass of cells won’t do very much. Cells specialise, they organise, they form into tissues and organs and systems, and that is how a Body functions.”

Divine organisation

Follow this along. We, the magicians and pagans and occultists and witches and wizards and druids and sorcerers, are the active cells. Everyone else is terribly important – a stomach on its own is just an empty Haggis! – but we are the vital parts, and when we come together in our own groups, we form the Organs of the Body of God. Each Tradition, Order, Lineage – each major group has a purpose, whatever it is, that is concerned with the Great Work – the conscious evolution of the human race towards godhood, one Initiate at a time. They can’t be the same, but then they should not be. We can build Baphomet, out of all of us working together, we can smash the Mundane Spell and make a real Change in the metaphysical terrain. Ultimate Victory, Great Work achieved, back home for Tea and Cakes of Light.

It’s a great theory, and I’d like to test that. To do so, I invite you to the Occult Conference 2014, held in Glastonbury next March 22nd. We will have some excellent speakers, including this Blog’s own Nikki Wyrd and Julian Vayne, and we are making a strong case for the Occult Community becoming a force to be reckoned with.

Let’s build Baphomet, and see what we can really do with Hir power. I dare you!

Sef Salem