To Baphomet, posing as sodomite
“No – it wasn’t that way at all. It was everywhere – a gelatin – a slime – yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes – and a blemish. It was the pit – the maelstrom – the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!”
H.P. Lovecraft, The Unnamable
“He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.”
Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray
Prologue – pre-ritual conversation:
Q: What will happen when Baphomet comes through?
A: I don’t know. It’s better not to predict what might – or might not happen.
Q: But how will I know what to do?
A: That’s a good question … but I don’t have an answer. Why is that important?
Q: Then why are we doing this?
A: excuse me?
Q: I mean, what’s the intent?
A: There isn’t one.
Q: But shouldn’t we be asking for something?
A: Do you always ask someone for something when you meet them for the first time? You ask for something, and you’ve already set limits on what might be possible. Why not open yourself to the encounter? Let yourself be surprised…
When I look at Eliphas Levi’s Baphomet-image, which for the most part has set the tone for artistic representations onwards (Giger and Michael Manning are two that spring to mind), I find myself thinking that despite all the yakking about androgyny; of divine hermaphrodites, of the union, of blurring, of opposites, that this image is, for the most part, masculine – more than that, it suggests a kind of hypermasculinity – a rugby player with comedy breasts. It’s a solid surface, no visible openings (no mouth, no cunt, no arse). Baphomet – in this form at least – can only be a top – a strutting cock-god. Which is all very well, but not necessarily queer in the way that Baphomet is often held up to be.
Similarly, there is a kind of machismo – a baphomachismo – around Baphomet in books of magic – the idea that encountering Baphomet is risky, dangerous, challenging; a walk on the wild side; the heroic journey into the darkness. Sexy, virile, aggressive, confident, this Baphomet reifies the masculine, transgressive outsider stance beloved of occultists, which ignores issues of power and privilege, and even less how “transgression” is bound up with contemporary self-making.
I ask an artist, “what would a Baphomet made of flowers be like?”
“What kind of flowers?”
“How about Pansies?”
“Pansy Baphomet?”
Sissy Baphomet. We all know the words (and many of us grew up with them echoing in our ears): pansy, fag, sissy, flamer, nance, girl, jessie, big girl’s blouse, fairy, swish, queer, nance, cry-baby, mother’s-boy, wimp. It’s interesting how many of these terms denote characteristics associated with femininity – weakness, passivity, vulnerability. To be judged a sissy is to be a failure of masculinity – a nonmale – too female – effeminate. It’s a warning of a boundary about to be crossed; that there are limits and these limits, which constrain and produce the autonomous male subject, are rigorously (and aggressively) policed. The proper response being, to return/share in what Robert Brandon calls “the relentless repudiation of the feminine”.
Effeminacy as a condition is both achieved (lack of exercise, too much time spent with women) and innate (biological, a female soul in a man’s body). In contemporary culture, effeminacy serves as a marker for same-sex interests, but it has historically been used to indicate an excessive interest in the opposite sex too. In eighteenth-century English literature, for example, effeminacy was a charge of excessive behavior which could be directed at either women or men. It held a wide range of meanings relating to luxury, idleness, frivolity, lack of self-restraint, passion – challenges to the emerging neoliberal subjectivity.
In a previous reflection on Baphomet (queering Baphomet) I made the rather obvious point that Baphomet can be thought of a monstrous body; a chimeric assemblage:
“an excess of signs – goat-breasted-horned-fire-winged-phallus; a surface from which multiple abjects – woman-satan-sabbat – bubble and froth. Between goat-horns blazes a fire; not the managed alchemical fire of science, more the fecund moist heat of the compost heap. Snake-entwined cock, hidden cunt. The implosion of possibilities; surfaces; sufferances. Baphomet pulses – is a pulsation of life unbound; the mystery at the heart of the sabbat; a blurred image at the edge of the firelight; an offering to the unspeakable.”
In Baphomet though, beyond the blurring of the distinction between beast/human, god/man, demon/man, woman/man there is a very particular kind of monster – that which is unnamable.
“A deplorable and most lamentable matter, full of bitterness and grief, a monstrous business. a thing that one cannot think of without affright, cannot hear without horror, transgressions unheard of, enormities and atrocities contrary to every sentiment of humanity … have reached our ears.”
from King Philip IV of France’s 1307 indictment of the Knights Templars
Monsters are figures charged with meaning, something more than merely nonhuman, signaling their foreign status with too many organs or not enough; or in the wrong place; a deviation from the corporeal order. Monsters are charged with horror and confusion because they threaten to destabilize all orders, upset all hierarchies; interruptions from those spaces which remain outside the law, evidence of promiscuous couplings. The Latin monstrum (from monere a warning, a threat) – a terrible prodigy, a sign of impending calamity; a messenger from another world, one that demanded interpretation. Monsters are profoundly ambiguous, showing the excesses, potentialities, and variable configurations of flesh and form available, even whilst they made abject and unnatural. Monsters show the limit of the human and in doing so, call the very project of “humanity” into question. Monsters collapse distinctions such as science vs. myth, the actual with the fictive, delirium and the “real”. As Foucault says “there is monstrosity only when the confusion comes up against, overturns, or disturbs civil canon, or religious law”. Similarly, Kristeva’s concept of the abject points to the necessity of the monstrous form – that which is expelled in order to maintain acceptable forms of subjectivity; yet can never fully be set apart, as she explains, it “draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.”
Eliphas Levi’s representation of Baphomet turned the amorphous into form; collapsed the unnamable and the unknowable into a static image, often theorized as elements held in opposition, the thermodynamic equilibrium beloved by the conservative injunction to establish balance rather, to seek excesses.
What magics might a Pansy Baphomet unfold? Something perverse, to be sure. Popular definitions of the perverse tend to coalesce around obsession, deviation, departure from the normative, straying off the path; sexualities which are non-productive. Originally a theological category, it gained its sexual dimension at the close of the nineteenth century, in sexology’s ordering of inchoate desire through the grimoires of Kraft-Ebbing and Hirschfeld, in the creation of the subject through the disciplinary regimes of power. Desire became subjected to taxonomy, dissection, law, regulation, perverse acts became the truths of particular kinds of beings – perverts. But perversion is not a mode of being against which the majoritarian normal reifies itself. Perversion is a withdrawal from the compulsory and the regulative, a means of unbounding desire from linear trajectories.
Not a god, not a deity, this Baphomet has no dominion, no utility; is sufficient to itself, unproductive of anything. Baphomet as constant unfolding-event, a presence felt when skins writhe and unravel, in the folding and blurring of bodies, in the simultaneity of sound – hearing the cry of gulls together with the rumble of a passing train; drinking cold water from a warm plastic cup.
“Chaos is open, it gapes wide, it is not a closed system. In order to code, one has to close, in order to class, one has to define, or shut off with a boundary. Chaos is patent. It is not a system. it is multiplicity. It is multiple, unexpected. Chaos flows, it flows out, an Albula, a white river. I hear a silky white noise, hardly smooth, with little jumping, jolting bits. A white river would not have any direction or precise bank, it wanders, nebulous. Chaos is nebulous. It does not flow out with a point or direction, or following some rule, or abiding some law. Look how much trouble we have thinking or seeing it. The whole of reason protests – I mean logically. Our whole classified rationality, all the coding, habits, and methods, lead us to speak in externals or negations: outlaw and nonsense. But I say positive chaos.”
Michel Serres, Genesis
