Pagan Symbols with Hebrew Letters

Post Reply New Topic

I've noticed that there are a bunch of images online showing pagan goat-head-and-inverted-pentagram symbols surrounded by Hebrew letters. As a Jew, I'm not sure how I should feel about these pictures.

image one

Okay, so the first image has the word "Leviathan", as in the creature mentioned near the end of the Book of Job: "Can you pull the Leviathan with a hook, can you embed a line in his tongue?"

image two

This one's got the word "Baphomet", referring to a deity associated with some modern occultist and Satanic religions.

image three

This next one contains the name "Sophia", which is what you get when you run "Baphomet" through the Ashbat cipher.

image four

I'm having trouble reading this last one; starting from the bottom and going counter-clockwise like with the other pictures, it has a TZaddik (or rather, it's "final form" used at the end of words), a Bet, a Zayin, a Nun and a Resh. Maybe I'm reading it wrong...

So, what are your thoughts on these images? Have you seen anything like them recently while surfing the web or while offline?

I'm having a lot of browsing issues with WP. I'll try to answer this as best I can, if not tonight maybe tomorrow. I spent about three or four years studying this so I can say a lot on it, but it'll take some effort to keep it short and concise - it a long story, a lot of history, and for whatever reason (likely mainstream religious ones) it's really not taught in school and exists as a sort of 'b-side' western history.

The best way to start the story is that it starts in the early Renaissance with the fracturing of power in the Catholic church, the rise of Florence Italy as a financial powerhouse, and Cosimo Di Medici as well as many people of his time having a thirst for ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian manuscripts that were found to still exist in former Byzantine monasteries. Back at that time they were really getting their first breath above water and at that time the quality of education and philosophic thought available in those manuscripts were superior to what was by and large available.

One of the most important body of texts that shaped the Renaissance on the mystical, occult, and alchemical side was the Corpus Hermeticum. At the time there was the mythical figure of Hermes Trismegistus who was thought to be a contemporary of Mosus and many Christians considered that he may have been another patriarch whose writings were lost. Marsilio Ficino was doing most of the translating work for Di Medici and was told to stop translating Plato's Symposium (according to the story) when Corpus Hermeticum came though.

What you ended up with in the academic circles of Europe, along side the prevalent Catholicism and new Protestant sects, was a body of inquiry that held the bible up against old Greek philosophy as well as what they had of Ptolemaic Greco-Egyptian philosophy which attempted to phrase Egyptian thought and mythology in Greek terms. TBH when I'd been reading the New Testament of the bible and had the chance to read the Corpus Hermeticum myself I saw why it was so attractive - ie. it has a very similar flavor the Gospel of John in a lot of ways and the language is very pious and caries the familiar monotheistic overtones.

From this you had a rebirth of a lot of the esoteric forms of philosophy like alchemy, astrology, and one of the things that got really popular early on was kabbalah. One of the first Europeans to study kabbalah extensively and write about it was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in the late 15th century. You also had John Reuchlin, one of Martin Luther's close friends, studying it a fair amount and one of the most famous versions of the Tree of Life actually came later from a 17th century Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, and his version came to be referred to as the Kircher version of the Tree.

Along with the Christian appropriation of the kabbalistic Tree of life and attempts to insert Jesus in the sphere of Tiphareth you also had the Hebrew alphabet become the primary 'magical language' in Europe. I think this is partly due to the import of kabbalah and the fascination with the new inject of looking at the bible through the lens of gematria, notarikon, and temura, partly that Christianity's original grounding was in the Torah (albeit a pretty big Hellenistic departure from it), and actually all the way through the 19th century ceremonial magic and ceremonial magic traditions were fundamentally Judao-Christian oriented or Judao-Christian-Egyptian, along the lines where Hermetic philosophy melded in.

One of the earliest philosophic groups in the esoteric world to make a name for themselves, in the early 17th century, were a circle of academics at a German university penned at least the first two of the three famous Rosicrucian manifestos starting in 1614.

The stuff you're looking at, in your illustrations, mostly centers around French occultism of the 19th century and a particular Catholic mystic by the name of Alphonse Louis Constant who renamed himself Elphas Levi.

I have to double back slightly to say a bit more about the French tradition in the 18th century first. Freemasonry hatched out of England in the early 18th century, caught on in France I think within a few decades, and a lot of the earlier lodges were very mystically inclined in that Freemasonry was the first hangout for humanists of the sort who didn't want religion to dominate the world and wanted to inquire into things that popular culture would want to stone or burn them for. Among the many famous 18th century Freemasons was a mystic whose referred to as Martinez de Pasqually, that's not his full name but suffice to say he had like eight parts to his full name so no one bothers writing it. He started a magical theurgic order, trying to contact angels and quite likely the intelligences of the various spheres and paths of the Tree of Life and either he called this order the Elus Cohen or they took the name later. The Hermetic Golden Dawn owes the structure of their magical system to him and Aleister Crowley later took the Golden Dawn system and rebuilt it as the A.'.A.'..

When Martinez de Pasqually had his theurgic order up and running another Mason by the name of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin joined the order. While he was interested and gained a lot from it he became a lot more interested in Jacob Boehme, started to consider magical/theurgic work as a dead end, and preferred a lot of the mystic mantras like the Greek Orthodox Jesus prayer and similar prayers of the heart (his particular branch is often called Voix Cardique for that reason).

Between Martinez de Pasqually and Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin the collective philosophies and efforts of both men came to commonly be called, at least as of the 19th century, 'Martinism'.

Within that same current starting in the 1840's and 1850's Eliphas Levi wrote a lot of his seminal works and considering that his Transcendental Magic text was written in 22 chapters, and because he had said so much and so often about the tarot as a mystical lock pick for the brain, he had a lot to do with the western Hermetic traditions from then on, such as the Hermetic Golden Dawn or anyone who branched out of that later, to ground the 22 major trump of the tarot in the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet - as another dimension of accrostics and another way of studying the archetypes in the tarot. From there they grafted the tarot deck also the kabbalistic Tree of Life, to the sephira, the paths of wisdom, and there are still a lot books out there to this day that cover the refined output of that (Robert Wang's Qabalistic Tarot being one of the more well known).

Getting back to the mid 19th century - you had several other gentleman behind Martinism at that time. Gerard Encausse, ie. Papus, was a well known writer and thinker in the French Hermetic community and interestingly he went almost the same path as de Saint-Martin by starting off writing deeply on esotericism and the occult in his 20's and being impressed enough by a local healer that he left that for the more traditional Catholic/Orthodox mystic type of path.

The last couple names I'll bring up real quick who are relevant to your pictures are Stanislas de Guaita and his secretary, Oswald Wirth. Oswald Wirth of course is well known for the Wirth Tarot but he'd ultimately met de Guaita when he was in his mid 20's and doing a lot of teaching and writing on occult topics. Apparently de Guaita was a pretty well accomplished and highly decorated Martinist and probably a well decorated Mason as the Martinist degrees for a long time were only within Freemasonry and he had written some very good scripts for Martinist initiations.

So with Stanislas de Guita, he's the guy who famously drew that first 'Goat of Mendez' pentagram with the point directed down, the goat's head in it, and Samael/Lilith in the circle as (I'm guessing) dual influences of Saturn and Mars.

Quick apologies - I went full Antiques Roadshow on that so I'll shift my thoughts here and try to give you a conclusion (as well as something for the TL:DR audience).

So about that B-side of European history I was talking about, it really just amounts to what I said earlier - a bunch of various/diverse scraps of mystical technique raided from different traditions as Europeans were trying to sort of organically cobble together their own equivalent of the Hindu Yogas. I could go into that more later but the reason I think that happened is that the four or five paths of Yoga and their analogous paths in Christian mysticism and occultism really hit certain neurological pathways and in a way that yields persuasive results.

To this date I really don't know what I make of the 'goat of mendez' pentagram, or I at least I have my own ideas on certain layers of its significance (symbols tend to stack quite deeply though so I'm not comfortable in suggesting that I have an authoritative answer). I do know that the obverse or right-side-up pentagram is seen as on par with the Christian crucifix as far as a holy symbol. Technically in some ways it has more mathematical right to that title because the pentagram star has phi/Golden Mean proportions and I think that's part of why Pythagoras got as excited as he did about it and had his followers hold the pentagram in the circle as a holy symbol. Modern occultism suggests that the star upright has its upward point symbolizing spirit and the four lower points the classical four elements of Aristotle, a message that essentially means mind over matter or mind over base human impulse. The inverse or 'satanic' pentagram, my own best guess at understanding it, is that it's pointing toward Jungian shadow work and confrontations with one's own shadow or guardian of the threshold. For the fact that pop pseudo-Satanists loved appropriating it from the 1960's onward and that 80's metal bands loved it but I have yet to see anyone fly planes into buildings or scream "Hail Satan!" when they shoot up schools or malls - I have to assume that my interpretation is probably not too far from the truth at least in how people relate to it and use it.

As for Baphomet, that's really alchemical, but suffice to say that it's something that's a symbol of man in his (and her) 'fallen' state, ie. bestialized, and the solve et coagula formula written on the arms of Baphomet stands for the process of self-analysis and self-criticism by which humanity lifts and refines itself through reason, becomes less bestial, and moves along the arch of progress intended which is toward the conclusion of the Great Work, or Summum Bonum which they essentially looked at as the reincarnational process of fixing yourself until your not broke anymore and then, like in the Book of Revelations, getting your golden wedding garment for the supper of the lamb.


I hope that helps? Again I really apologize for the wall texts but it's an attempt to abstract five hundred years of European history in somewhere less than 2,000 words and most people haven't even been taught the most basic pieces of that in grade school, secondary, or even college. To say that Western history is badly fractured and poorly taught is quite the understatement.

The very last thing I'll say for the night, and I'm offering this with a caveat - I may be reaching here or simply offering you my own interpretation of symbolic match up, but you asked specficially about לויתן. In several places, mostly from Dion Fortune's Cosmic Doctrine and a few honorable mentions from Paul Foster Case and I believe William G Gray, there's a concept that the universe as we know it has an outer-bound or an edge to it, a bit like the concept that if there's a conscious self-aware core that's organizing itself it exists in a sea of conscious entropy and our battles in life are its attempts to eat and assimilate that entropy into itself. That outer-boundary of the universe is often reffered to as the 'ring pass-not'.

This is where I'm somewhat going out on a limb, I can't remember where I heard this but I believe it was Rudolph Steiner (Anthroposophy), that there was a concept of an inner loop and outer loop. The inner was bounded by Behemoth, the outer was bounded by Leviathan. Additionally there's a whole thing about an evolutionary spiral loop of seven (when they start talking seven's and twelves I tend to ignore them - it's almost a fetish in the occult community) and that the loop can be opened or closed, somewhat like the wheel of incarnation. That's called the ouroboros and it's designated by a snake eating its tail.

Whether Leviathan here symbolizes the ring pass-not or whether it symbolizes the wheel of incarnation I can't say for sure. I think either one of those could be a good candidate and the later might, at least if I'm going to take that shadow-work statement about the Mendez pentagram seriously, it would fit that interpretation well.

Either way though nope - none of this suggests that the Hebrew language is somehow satanic, it just found a very interesting niche in western philosophic and literary history.

A quick pitch on BZNRTz - I tried looking anything up that matched values for 349 or 1159 (90 or 900 for Tzaddi) and all of the letter in that order or otherwise, no luck. My guess is it's probably an acrostic, much like AGLA stands for Atah Gibor Le-olam Adonai. What that is I don't know and I'd have to do some research, maybe over the weekend if I have time, to see who that originated with and see if its possible to track down their particular intention in their own words.

Thanks for the info, techstepgenr8tion. Since you know a little something about Hebrew, would you mind looking at a picture of a tattoo in another thread and translating it for me?

http://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=339539

Sorry, I didn't get much farther than you guys did in the last thread. That's a really bad picture of the tattoo, even blowing it up and color-adjusting really doesn't get you past the resh. Without the rest of it no dice.

I'm guessing this has to do with Aleister Crowley's fascination with Kabbalah, and mysticism more generally. He was big with promoting the Baphomet image.

Crowley is THE occult writer, and he influenced everyone from Anton LaVey (founder of the Church of Satan), to Gerald Gardner (founder of Wicca). He was heavily into any mysticism he could find. I think Egyptology was his biggest interest, but it would make sense for him to be into Kabbalah. In addition to those fringe occult people, he's particularly well known for his popularity among edgy rockstars, notably Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, and industrial music figures like Genesis P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle) and Jaz Coleman (Killing Joke).

The Baphomet isn't a pagan symbol, it's an occult symbol. There's a difference. Christians obviously appropriated images of pagan gods and made them demonic In an attempt to (literally) demonize early pagan beliefs, but I don't think the Baphomet is one of those. From my understanding, the Baphomet was the demon that the Knights Templar were accused of worshipping.

Nowadays, it seems like the Baphomet is most associated with The Satanic Temple, basically a politically progressive, philosophically individualist offshoot of the Church of Satan, most well known for pulling political stunts to advocate for religious pluralism. For example, when evangelicals push for statues of the 10 commandments at courthouses, the Satanic Temple will try to erect a Baphomet statue next to it, as a statement about religious equality.

tl;dr goofy occultists like mysticism, including Kabbalah, and they also like demonic images, so they slapped them together.

^

You can take what I wrote above, especially in the first at-length response, at Wikipedia.org and verify just about all of it.

The Goat of Mendez inverse pentagram was authored by Stanislas de Guaita.

Technically Eliphas Levi didn't necessarily originate the Baphomet image, it was likely one of the pre-Renaissance Gnostic groups whether Cathar or whoever else, and whether or not the Knights Templar bought into it King Philip IV used that as a 'get out of debt free card' in 1307 by burning his creditors for heresy. Levi is credited however with expanding out the details of the Baphomet symbol. Levi is also famous for this particular version of the pentagram which very blatantly illustrates the four elements and spirit interpretation with the four elements being the implied Y-H-V-H of Yahweh:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/de/e4/d1 ... 518ea6.jpg

Crowley lived 1875 to 1947, Eliphas Levi 1810 to 1875, Stanislas de Gauita from 1861 to 1897 - it would have been impossible for Levi and Crowley to meet (though oddly Crowley liked to say he was Levi incarnated, no evidence for that), while he could have met de Gauita I don't think they ran in the same circles and TBH, Crowley wasn't looking for properly 'satanic' imagery as strange as that might sound compared to his reputation - he was more particularly a tantric yogi and kabbalist and the significance of Chokmah and Binah on the Tree of Life doesn't change whether you call them Christ and Sophia or The Beast and Babalon. Really Crowley was trying to punk-rock what was a Judao-Christian system and dress the sheep in wolves clothing to make it 'edgy' or have it appeal to people like himself who'd been badly bible-beaten in their youth and needed a spiritual path that was pro-growth had the subversive flavor that such people would want. As I said above most of what he did was raid the Golden Dawn system after William Butler Yeats and Florence Farr (Crowley's girlfriend at the time no less) decided that he wasn't morally fit for be initiated into the second order of the system, Butler Yeats making a comment that he didn't know that the Golden Dawn was a reformatory. To the extent that Crowley raided a lot of his knowledge from the Golden Dawn that means his direct influences and teachers were W Wynn Wescott, Samuel McGregor Mathers, his friend George Cecil Jones, and of course the man he first wrote to in the Golden Dawn who he later had a major falling out with - Arthur Edward Waite.

The maybe three things that Crowley did differently:
1) He centered his system more around Egyptian deities even than the Golden Dawn, especially those present in his 1904 Book of the Law
2) He complained that the Golden Dawn's kabbalistic grades were strictly ceremonial/formal, that people graduated through them for showing up, so he made his system - A.'.A.'. - much more performance based per grade (for which a lot of people do prefer the rigor).
3) He threw in a lot more formal Eastern Yoga and asanas than the Golden Dawn did. It's that much more of a definite Hindu Yoga and Egyptian Hermetic crossover whereas the Golden Dawn was more Greco-Egyptian meets Judao-Christian.

As for distinguishing pagan from occult, the occult is just a special subset of both pagan and Judao-Christian doctrine.

Occult just means hidden. In some ways, at least in the west, there was always an 'exoteric doctrine' in religion (ie. public version) and an 'esoteric' which was for a smaller and more private/learned group. Quite often the esoteric doctrine was heretical, even worse it was a DIY path to God without the clergy, and so it stayed hidden because it was rightly seen as a direct competitor with the church.

Pagan deities were anthropomorphisms of natural laws and, at a time where paper and writing materials weren't a matter of going to Staples or OfficeMax, they used what they could in nature to hang their stories on and one of the more popular choices was the night sky because the constellations were the one thing that was truly stable.

I don't know if the symbol of Baphomet, before it ever became a well known thing, was what people think of it as today but it seems like ever since the 19th century, and quite possibly earlier, the meaning of the Baphomet symbol has been alchemical.