The Mystery of Baphomet and Understanding the Duality of Occultism
Esoteric Degrees and Stealing from the Devil
Today I have been meditating on the mystery of Baphomet. Last night I received a certain secret degree, and the festivals of the temples were solemn for this reason.
The curious thing about this case was that the black magicians, full of hate, commented on my degree saying that I was “stealing from them”. And indeed, with sword in hand I have had to battle them in order to extract the esoteric degrees from my spinal column.
‘Heaven is taken by force’, or as it is sometimes said ‘by assault’. [see Matt. 11:12]
We must extract the light from the darkness. Wisdom is elaborated with the knowledge of sin and the vertigo of the absolute. The rose elaborates its perfume with the mud of the earth.
Thus, the mystery of Baphomet is a mystery of alchemy. Among the horns of the devil shines the torch of the verb.
The fire of heaven must be stolen from the devil, because the devil is God inverted.
The mystery of Baphomet is represented by the “male goat of Mendes”.
The torch placed between the two horns of Baphomet, is the verb of life, it is the sacred fire that we have to steal from the devil, learning to enjoy sex without spilling the Cup of Hermes.
This is the fire of the Kundalini, whose “degrees” we have to steal from the black magicians, even if they qualify us as thieves.
This is the mystery of Baphomet.
The light comes out of the darkness and the Cosmos comes out of the Chaos.
-Paraphrase from Ch. 5 ‘March 1st, 1952’ of Secret Notes of a Guru
Gnostic Explanation of Baphomet
Baphomet is a devil with a five-pointed star on his forehead, has female breasts, one arm is male and another female. With one hand he points to the white moon, and with the other to the black moon; the lower belly is veiled, and the sexual organs are expressed by the Caduceus of Mercury. The face of Baphomet is that of a male goat.
The picture of Baphomet encloses the secret of sexual magic.
The five-pointed star above the brow of Baphomet is the eye of Brahma, it is the clairvoyance of the clairvoyants, which is the “INTIMUS”.
When the soul merges with the Intimus, then the five-pointed star shines on its forehead; and the union with the Intimus is only obtained by learning to enjoy the woman without spilling the seminal energy.
Thus the torch of fire is stolen from Baphomet.
Thus one steals the fire from the devil, because by connecting sexually with the woman we are filled with the terrible fire of carnal passion, and then, by retaining the seminal energy and dominating the passion, we steal the fire from the devil and become angels.
This is the mystery of Baphomet. This is the occult significance of the male goat of Mendes.
The fire must be stolen from the devil, and that is why the devil lives in the fire.
-Paraphrase from Ch. 5 ‘March 1st, 1952’ of Secret Notes of a Guru
God, the Devil and Temptation
In Ch. 4 of Eliphas Levi’s book The Science of the Spirits , he gives 37 ‘Kabbalistic Dogmas’ or Axioms.
Although they are mostly insightful, there are two which are of particular interest to us: #18 and #4.
“#18 Dæmon est Deus inversus. – The devil is God reversed/inverted.
The devil is but the antithesis of God, and if he could have a real existence, then God certainly would not exist.
“The devil is a liar like his father”, said Jesus.
Now, who is the father of the devil? The father of the devil is the lie.
The devil denies what God affirms. The consequence of this is that God denies what the devil dares to affirm.
The devil affirms his own existence, and God, by always making the good triumph over evil, gives to Satan an eternal denial.”
#4 …Man’s passions excite him to the battle of life, but they would also drag him to his doom had he not reason in order to vanquish and subjugate them.It is thus that he creates virtue within himself (which is an ethical strength/force), and temptations are necessary for this.
Since strength/force is only produced in relation to resistance…
-Paraphrase from Ch. 4 of The Science of the Spirits by Eliphas Levi
Demon Est Deus Inversus.
The above symbolic sentence, in its many-sided forms, is certainly most dangerous and iconoclastic in the face of all the dualistic later religions — or rather theologies — and especially so in the light of Christianity.
Yet it is neither just nor correct to say that it is Christianity which has conceived and brought forth Satan.
… If “God” is Absolute, Infinite, and the Universal Root of all and everything in Nature and its universe, whence comes Evil or D’Evil if not from the same “Golden Womb” of the absolute?
Thus we are forced either to accept the emanation of good and evil …as offshoots from the same trunk of the Tree of Being, or to resign ourselves to the absurdity of believing in two eternal Absolutes!
Having to trace the origin of the idea to the very beginnings of the human mind, it is but just, meanwhile, to give him his due even if it is to the proverbial Devil. Antiquity knew of no isolated, thoroughly and absolutely bad “god of evil”.
Pagan thought represented good and evil as twin brothers, born from the same mother – Nature ; so soon as that thought ceased to be Archaic, Wisdom too became Philosophy.
In the beginning the symbols of good and evil were mere abstractions, Light and Darkness; then their types became chosen among the most natural and ever-recurrent periodical Cosmic phenomena – the Day and the Night, or the Sun and Moon.
Then the Hosts of the Solar and Lunar deities were made to represent them, and the Dragon of Darkness was contrasted with the Dragon of Light (See Stanzas V ., VII. of Book I.)
The Host of Satan is a Son of God, no less than the Host of the B’ni Alhim [Beni HaElohim בני האלהים ], these children of God coming to “present themselves before the Lord,” their father (see Job 2).
2:1 Again there was a day when the Sons of God [Beni HaElohim בני האלהים ] came to present themselves before the LORD [ יְהֹוָה ], and Satan came also among them to present himself before the LORD. (Job 2:1)
“The Sons of God” become the “Fallen Angels” only after perceiving that the daughters of men were fair . (Genesis vi.)
6:1 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,
6:2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.
6:3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
6:4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
6:5 And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. (Gen 6:1-5)
In the Indian philosophy, the Suras are among the earliest and the brightest gods, and become Asuras only when dethroned by Brahminical fancy.Satan never assumed an anthropomorphic, individualized shape, until the creation by man, of a “one living personal God,” had been accomplished; and then merely as a matter of prime necessity.
A screen was needed; a scape-goat to explain the cruelty, blunders, and all but too evident injustice, perpetrated by him for whom absolute perfection, mercy and goodness were claimed.
This was the first Karmic effect of abandoning a philosophical and logical Pantheism, to build, as a prop for lazy man, “a merciful Father in Heaven,” whose daily and hourly actions are seen as Natura Naturans [Nature Acting] in the form of the “attractive Mother but who is stone cold”.
This led to the primal twins, Osiris-Typhon, Ormazd-Ahriman, and finally Cain-Abel and all the rest of the contraries.
-Paraphrase from Section 11 of The Secret Doctrine – Vol.1 “Cosmogenesis” by H.P. Blavatsky
The “Adversary” and great “Deceiver”
Having commenced by being synonymous with Nature, “God”, the Creator, ends up being made its author.
Pascal settles the difficulty very cunningly:
“Nature has perfections, in order to show that she is the image of God; and defects, in order to show that she is only his image,” he says.
The further back one recedes into the darkness of the prehistoric ages, the more philosophical does the prototypical figure of the later Satan appear.
The first “Adversary” in individual human form that one meets with in old Purânic literature is one of her greatest Rishis and Yogis — Nârada, surnamed the “Strife-maker”. And he is a Brahmaputra, a son of Brahmâ, the male…
Who the great “Deceiver” really is, one can ascertain by searching for him with open eyes and an unprejudiced mind, in every old cosmogony and Scripture.
…Once upon a time, a philosophical symbol left to perverse human fancy; afterwards: fashioned into a fiendish, deceiving, cunning, and jealous God.Dragons and other fallen angels being described in other parts of this work, a few words upon the much slandered Satan will be sufficient.
That which the student will do well to remember is that, with every people except the Christian nations, the Devil is to this day no worse an entity than the opposite aspect in the dual nature of the so-called Creator. This is only natural.
One cannot claim God as the synthesis of the whole Universe, as Omnipresent and Omniscient and Infinite, and then divorce him from evil.
As there is far more evil than good in the world, it follows on logical grounds that either God must include evil, or stand as the direct cause of it, or else surrender his claims to absoluteness.
Indeed, evil is but an antagonizing blind force in nature; it is reaction, opposition, and contrast, — evil for some, good for others.
…Everywhere the speculations of the Kabalists treat of Evil as a force, which is antagonistic, but at the same time essential, to Good, as giving it vitality and existence, which it could never have otherwise.
There would be no life possible (in the Mayavic sense) without Death, nor regeneration and reconstruction without destruction. Plants would perish in eternal sunlight, and so would man, who would become an automaton without the exercise of his free will and aspirations after that sunlight, which would lose its being and value for him had he nothing but light.
Good is infinite and eternal only in the eternally concealed from us, and this is why we imagine it eternal. On the manifested planes, one equilibrates the other.
Few are those theists and believers in a personal God, who do not make of Satan the shadow of God; or who, confounding both, do not believe they have a right to pray to that idol asking its help and protection for the exercise and impunity of their evil and cruel deeds.
“Lead us not into Temptation” is addressed daily to “our Father, who art in Heaven,” and not to the Devil, by millions of human Christian hearts.
They do so, repeating the very words put in the mouth of their Saviour, and do not give one thought to the fact that their meaning is contradicted point blank by James “the brother of the Lord.”
“Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.” (The Gen. Ep. of James, i, 13).
Why, then, say that it is the Devil who tempts us, when the Church teaches us on the authority of Christ that it is God who does so?
Open any pious volume in which the word “temptation” is defined in its theological sense, and you will find two definitions:
(1) “Those afflictions and troubles whereby God tries his people; ”
(2) Those means and enticements which the Devil makes use of to ensnare and allure mankind. (St. James i., 2 , 12 , and Mat. vi., 13 .)If accepted literally, then the two teachings of Christ and James contradict each other, and what dogma can reconcile the two if the occult meaning is rejected?
-Paraphrase from Section 11 of The Secret Doctrine – Vol.1 “Cosmogenesis” by H.P. Blavatsky
Heaven is Taken by Force
Question: Master, why do you claim that heaven is taken [by force or] by assault ?
Answer: I simply said that heaven is taken by assault because whosoever has the keys of heaven is the devil, and there comes to mind the Fable of “the Donkey of Apuleius” (or “The Golden Ass”).
It is said that Apuleius traveled to Thessaly in search of Initiation and there he met a priestess who promised to teach him, and told him that in order to receive esoteric wisdom, he would have to take the form of a bird, and consequently gave him a potion for this purpose.
When Apuleius took it, instead of turning him into a bird, he turned into a donkey, and wherever he went he was kicked, mistreated, burdened with stones and given hard and heavy jobs until at last, having become tired of wandering and suffering, he submerged himself seven (7) times in the Aegean Sea.
After those seven (7) submersions, the priestess appeared to him and, throwing down a bundle of roses, told him: “You should eat them so that you can regain your former human form, meanwhile the initiator arrives, in order to initiate and instruct in the great mysteries of life.” Apuleius did so and was instantly converted back into a man.
The guardian of Eden is the devil, so the one who conquers him steals the fire and forms their flaming sword, with which one enters heavenly happiness, and that is why Heaven is taken by assault.
The passions are very terrible and you have to go to battle in order to win the sword by overcoming Satan. This is the mystery of Baphomet…
Today I realize exactly why the devil is always painted in fire; because overcoming evil is how one conquers good, because evil gives strength to good, because the warrior is rewarded after the battle, because from the seemingly unclean come plants, beasts, men and gods (because the perfume of the roses comes from the mud of the earth).
Because the enchanting form of a beautiful woman was first (in the beginning) those of a frightful tadpole, because behind good is evil, because the limit of light is darkness, because out of darkness comes the light, because the cosmos comes out of chaos, because wisdom was elaborated with the sapience of sin, and because a repentant sinner is worth more…
-Paraphrase from the Preface (by Julio Medina V.) to Secret Notes of a Guru
Gnosis and the Eight-Fold Path of the Middle
Those who live stuck within the machinery of relativity, do not know the Truth. The world of relativity is the painful world in which we live, the vain world of duality.
Within the terrors of the night, the tenebrous arrows fly against the Initiate. The enemy forces move stealthily in the darkness.
The Initiates of the darkness, like those of the light, fall to the left and to the right.
The Path of the Middle, the eight-fold path of the Boddhisattvas with Compassionate Heart, leads us to the port of liberation.
Unfortunately, very rare are those who are capable of marching on the path of the middle, towards the final liberation; those who do not fall on the tenebrous path of the left, fall on the path of the right.
On the path of the left, the tenebrous ones descend within the abode of Pluto. On the path of the right, the saints ascend, towards the marvelous kingdom of the Light. Both rotate within the Wheel of Samsara.
The tenebrous ones pass through the Buddhist Annihilation within the heart of the world. Subsequently, they enter into the elemental paradises of Nature, after having suffered a great deal.
The passage through the subterranean world is millions of times more bitter than bile.
The saints return to the Valley of Samsara. They reincorporate themselves into new human organisms.
Neither the human beings with skin of goats, nor the human beings with skin of sheep achieve the final liberation. Authentic final liberation is only for the rebels, for Those who march on the Path of the Middle.
The Eight-Fold Path of the Boddhisattvas with Compassionate Heart is Difficult.
The limit of good is evil. The limit of evil is good. The Eight-Fold Path of the Boddhisattvas with Compassionate Heart has nothing to do with good or evil.
All that is good for those who march on the path of the right, is evil for those who descend on the tenebrous path of the left. All that is good for the tenebrous of the Abyss, is evil for the walkers who ascend through the path of the right.
Demons and saints look with horror and terror at the revolutionary Adepts of the path of the middle.
No one understands these rebels of the path of the middle.
The revolutionary walker of the Eight-Fold Path, even while being surrounded by many people, walks terribly alone.
Hitler, who was terrorized before the presence of an Adept from the path of the Middle exclaimed: “I know the Super-Man. I have seen him. He is terribly cruel. I, myself, have felt fear.”
The path is sexual and one advances by annihilating the ego and sacrificing oneself for humanity.
The Pratyeka Buddhas, even having built the superior existential bodies of the Being, are not Boddhisattvas. Obviously, the Pratyeka Buddhas fell on the path of the right. There are also a great deal of Masters who fall on the path of the left by means of black Tantrism.
The Boddhisattvas with Compassionate Heart sacrifice themselves for planetary humanities through successive Mahamanvantaras and, finally, they achieve the incarnation of the Christ. Only the Boddhisattvas of the path of the Middle achieve the incarnation of the Christ within themselves.
The Intimate Christ is the true refuge of the Boddhisattva with Compassionate Heart.
The Intimate Christ is beyond all evil and all punishment.
The Angels of the Lord aid the Boddhisattvas with Compassionate Heart.
We need to defeat the tempting serpent of Eden and the horrifying basilisk of evil.
The Boddhisattva with Compassionate Heart must confront the Lion of the Law and defeat the Dragon.
The Intimate Christ saves those who trust in him.
The Lord will assist us in the great tribulations.
The Lord will increase us and show us salvation.
-Paraphrase from Ch. 67 of The Pistis Sophia Unveiled by Samael Aun Weor
The Right Foot and the Left Foot
The Initiate must learn how to walk with two feet. It just so happens that some Initiates do not know how to use the left foot and they fail.
The Pratyekas Buddhas and their Sravaka aspirants are frightened, and they excommunicate the Boddhisattva who knows how to walk with their two legs. The sincere and noble devotees from the path of the right, stone the Initiates who learn to sustain themselves in equilibrium over their left leg.
Every Initiate who knows how to walk with their two legs terrorizes the noble ones of the Right.
I am speaking in parables; I am speaking of sheep and goats. Some Initiates know how to live with sheep, yet they do not know how to live with goats.
The Initiates who are capable of sustaining themselves in complete equilibrium over the left foot are very rare. Whosoever has understanding, let them understand, for there is wisdom therein.
If Christ disguises himself as the Devil in order to descend into the Abyss and save us, why do not we imitate his example? The Devil is whitewashed and transformed into a Maker of Light, into Lucifer; you know this.
I repeat, the Initiate must learn how to move themselves upon their two legs.
The Light is the shield that protects the Initiate. Every Initiate must learn how to dim their Light when they descend to the Infernal Worlds.
If the Initiate descends to the Infernal Worlds and does not learn how to dim their interior light, then they will frighten the demons. Then, they cannot help the lost ones.
The Initiates must learn how to live serenely and gently within the terrors of the Abyss and the night.
There is the need to learn how to handle the Flaming Sword. In the abode of Pluto, the Lord of time teaches us how to handle the Sword.
The abode of Pluto is the Greek Tartarus, the Roman Averno, the infernal worlds within the interior of the Earth.
-Paraphrase from Ch. 67 of The Pistis Sophia Unveiled by Samael Aun Weor
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