So, I’ve been having incredible fun with my new Mishka Boogie Man. My favorite thing about him—aside from the awesome Lamour Supreme concepted head—is the Lamour Supreme concepted Baphomet mask that it comes with. It’s amazing. Not only does it work well with the Boogie itself, it complements almost any toy that it’ll fit on. Which is aces. My last post illustrates this phenomenon quite well. To boot.

I have, however, throughout the course of playing with my toys, started to wonder about this kid Baphomet. None of us are new to the idea of a pentagram or a pentagram with a goat’s head scribed within it, but, well, really: what’s the scoop on it? Does the goat-a-gram mean that you’re a satanist? A magician? A purveyor of black metals and night crystals?

I got in touch with our good friend Wikipedia and learned the following easy-to-digest factoids about everybody’s favorite goat-demon.

1. ‘Baphomet’ is what you eventually get when you ask some French knights to mispronounce the name Muhammad. They were apparently getting their asses handed to them so forcefully at the end of the crusades. We’ve been mispronouncing Saddam Hussein’s name for years and years…what sort of demon will he become?

2. The symbolism of the original Baphomet image is astoundingly detailed, and borderline ridiculous. Eliphas Levi—the original artist—goes on and on about the thing being a hermaphrodite, symbolizing equal parts something and something; one arm is white and points up, one arm is black and points down…symbolizing something and something; the goat itself has the breasts of a woman, symbolizing something…it’s basically just a big yin-yang with horns and boobs.

3. Levi constructed the mythos surrounding his ‘Sabbatic Goat’ based on an account from Ancient Greek philosopher Herodotus. Herod’ went to the Egyptian town of Mendes and saw a goat-show and turned it into some holy-right-where-those-people-worship-goats. He wrote it all down, and the rest is history.

In spite of how ridiculous it all is, it’s actually quite interesting, from a historical point of view. It’s funny: I am just about as whitebread-corny-Southern-Baptist as it gets. When I was a kid, I wasn’t exposed to much, and so I tended to grow up with intensified superstitions about things like goat-head-pentagrams and upside down crosses and all that. Not to say that what those things represent in some instances isn’t awful and ugly, but when you get right down to it, these are just silly drawings that some dude somewhere decided mean something.

It’s amazing what prehistoric French knights will dream up when they’re bored, scared shitless, and have to pee.

- Hateball