Wikipedia-Baphomet

Baphomet

This is part of what I found on wikipedia’s site:

Baphomet is a name of unestablished provenance. It first appeared in trial transcripts during the Inquisition of the knights Templar in the early 1300s. Some modern scholars believe that name to have been an Old French corruption and misspelling of the name Mahomet(Muhammad).
However, in the early 19th Century the name came into popular English-speaking consciousness with the publication of various pseudo-history works that tried to link the Knights Templar with conspiracy theories elaborating on their suppression. The name Baphomet then became associated with a “Sabbatic Goat” image drawn by Eliphas Levi.
The name Baphomet traces back to the end of the Crsades, when the medieval order of the Knights Templar was suppressed by King Philip IV of France. On Friday, October 13,1307, King Philip had many French Templars simultaneuosly arressted, and then tortured into confessions. The name Baphomet comes up in several of these confessions, in reference to an idol of some type that the Templars were said to have been worsipping. The description of the object changed from confession to confession. Some Templars denied any knowledge of it. Others, under torture, described it as being either a severed head, a cat , or a head with three faces.
The charge was notable because it was different from usual forced confessions. Over 100 different charges had been leveled against the Templars, most of them clearly false, as they were the same charges that were leveled against other of King Philip’s enemies. For example, he had earlier kidnapped Pope Boniface VIII and charged him with near identical offenses of heresy, spitting and urinating on the cross, and sodomy. However, the charges about the worship of an idol named Baphomet, were unique to the Inquisition of the Templars.
According to the Oxford English Dictonary, the name’s first appearance in English was in Henry Hallam’s 1818 work ‘Middle Ages’, reproducing an early French corruption of “Mahomet” a common variant of Arabic ‘Muhammad’. The name Baphomet also appeared in the English translation of the Viennese Orientalist Joseph Freih von Hammer-Purgstall’s ‘Mystenum Baphometis revelatum’ as ‘The Mystery of Baphomet Revealed’, which presenteed an elaborate pseudohistory constructed to discredit the Freemasons by linking them with “Templar masons”. He argued, using archeological evidence faked by earlier scholars onf literary evidence such as the Grail remances, that the Templars were Gnostics and the Templars’ ‘head’ was a Gnostic called Baphomet.
Some modern scholars such as Peter Partner and Malcolm Barber agree that the name of Baphomet was an Old French corruption of the name Muhammad, with the interpretation being that some of the Templars, through their long military occupation of the Outremer, had begun incorperating Islamic ideas into the belief system, and that this was seen and documented by the Inquisitors as heresy. Peter Partner’s 1987 book ‘The Knights Templar and their Myth’ says”In the trial of the Templars one of their main charges was their supposed worship of a heathen idol’head known as a ‘Baphomet’ (’Baphomet’=Mahomet=Muhammad).” Partner’s dook also provides a quote from a poem written in a Provencal dilect by a troubadour who is thought to have been a Templar. The poem is in reference to some battles in 1265 that were not going well for the Crusaders:”And daily they impose new defeats on us:For God, who used to watch on our behalf, is now asleep, and Muhammad[Bafometz] puts forth his power to support the Sultan.”
The use of this poem to prove that “Baphomet” or ” Bafomtz” was an early French corruption of “Mahomet” (”Muhammad”) is crtiqued as being circular in a 1995 article published by Kevin Bold (”A History Mythos of the Knights Templar”). Instead Bold supports Idries Shah’s proposal that “Baphomet” derives from Arabic construction Abufihamat, meaning “Father of Understanding”.