Baphomet and blue-green algae

With apologies to John Michael Greer, I just *have* to quote two of his postings from the weekly "Magic Monday" session (source of quote in the links). The first deals with the origins of the curious term "Baphomet" associated with the Knights Templar, the second is a more existential reflection which I find difficult to argue with...although I don´t really like it! Have to meditate...

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No, there's something much subtler going on with that name. In traditional Jewish Cabala, it's common to conceal holy names using various ways of encoding, and one of the simplest is called the "Atbash cipher." What that word means is that you flip the Hebrew alphabet, so that the first letter and the last letter are exchanged, the second and the next to last, and so on. Thus Aleph is replaced by Tau and Tau by Aleph, Beth is replaced by Shin and Shin by Beth. So if you write Baphomet in Hebrew -- Beth, Peh, Vau, Mem, Tau -- and you put it though the Atbash cipher, you get Shin, Vau, Peh, Yod, Aleph...which is the Hebrew spelling of the name of Sophia, the Gnostic goddess of wisdom.

That was the secret of the Templars. They encountered, most likely in the Holy Land, one of the surviving Gnostic sects, and adopted that as their secret teaching. I'm pretty sure, for reasons Jessie Weston covered in her book From Ritual to Romance, that it was either a Naassene sect or something similar -- one that saw Christian orthodoxy as incomplete rather than wrong. But that's why the Catholic church turned with such savagery on the Templars: the Church had just finished committing genocide against one set of Gnostics, the Cathars, in southern France, and all of a sudden another set of Gnostics popped up right in the heart of the Church's most powerful military order. (Of course the greed of Philip IV of France also had a lot to do with the fate of the Templars; it was, as most historical events were, overdetermined.)

https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/83179.html?thread=7896555#cmt7896555


One of the reasons I value classic occult philosophy is that it stresses just how much higher the Great Chain of Being extends above us. Of course it's possible to transcend the human -- but that moves us one notch up the ladder, not instantly all the way to the top. Mind you, that one notch is an immense, life-changing experience from our standpoint...but from the standpoint of the cosmos, it's a little like moving from a life as a blue-green alga to life as a paramecium. A paramecium has vastly greater capacities than a blue-green alga; it has cilia that enable it to move, and chemical senses that allow it to "sniff" its surroundings; it inhabits a much vaster world than a blue-green alga, and were an alga to suddenly gain the state of conciousness of a paramecium, it would doubtless think that it had risen to the ultimate ground of being. Meanwhile we watch them both through microscopes.

https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/83179.html?thread=7923179#cmt7923179