The Sabbatic Goat or God of the Sabbath.
When the sun entered the sign of Capricorn, it was reborn as, or christ
came as the goat, that individual on whom the Jews used to load all
their sins and then drive him forth into the wilderness. They sacrificed
goats on the altar because the goat was one of the ancient redeemers.
Caesar says of Egyptian sacrifices: “Imprecations were uttered over the
head of the expiatory victim, around whose horns a piece of byblus was
rolled. The animal was generally led to some barren region sacred to
Typhon. It is in this custom that lies the origin of the scapegoat of
the Jews, who, when the ass-headed god was rejected by the Egyptians,
began sacrificing to another deity, the red heifer.”
It was claimed by Madam Blavatsky and Elephas Levi that the
hermaphrodite Goat of Mendes, or Baphomet, was anciently an object of
worship and adoration by the mystic societies and at the Witches’
Sabbath. In Mysteries of Magic, 7 and 75, the author thus describes a
Witches’ Sabbath: “Approach stealthily this cross roads among the rocks.
A hoarse and funeral trumpet is heard, lurid torches burn on every side,
a disorderly assembly surges around an empty seat. All look around in
expectation, then suddenly fall prostrate and mutter: ‘He is here, ’tis
himself.’ A goat-headed prince comes forward with bounds, he ascends the
throne, turns around and stooping presents his back to the audience,
which everyone approaches, black taper in hand, to salute and to kiss.
Then he stands up with a discordant laugh and distributes to his
favorites gold, secret instructions, occult medicines and poisons.”
The Goat of Mendes is pictured by Elephas Levi as a regular god. He
wears the male emblem on his head like all gods in good standing and
holds up three fingers, and has the double triangle in his forehead, and
the caduceus, or male and female emblems, on his stomach. With one hand
he coagulates or creates, and with the other he dissolves or destroys.
“Let us say boldly and loudly that all the inferior initiates of the
occult sciences and the betrayers of the Great Arcanum have adored, do
and will always adore that which is signified by the frightful figure of
the Sabbatic Goat. Yes in our profound conviction, the Grand Masters of
the ancient orders of the Templars adored Baphomet.”—Elephas Levi. It
will be seen by the chart that the Masonic coat of arms, consisting of
the four zodiacal beasts, is supported on either side by the goat god
Pan.
Pan, the Good Shepherd, the son of Deus, with the horns and feet of a
goat, is the same as the Devil or christ. At the Witches’ Sabbath in
England, the women made manikins, or images of men, of clay or wax, and
these they worshipped and played with. And when these images were
properly magnetized, they could perform miracles therewith and summon up
demons from the abyss. If they possessed sufficient will power and knew
the occult and secret form of words to use, they could play that the
manikin was an enemy, and then stick him through the heart with a
needle, and the next morning the enemy would be dead. If their magical
power was sufficiently potent, they could summon a satyr or subordinate
goat god to take the place of the manikin and consummate the Sabbatical
marriage ceremony. Their spells were said to be sufficiently powerful to
reduce a human being to the primordial protoplasm, and then cause it to
again pursue the path of evolution through the cell, the blastoderm, the
devil-fish and all the other beasts constituting eternity’s great
highway by which the soul walks down. This is similar to the unavoidable
cycle, the circle of necessity, the inexorable doom of the sacred
mysteries of the Serpents’ Catacombs of Egypt.
The countersign of the Witches’ Sabbath was the closed hand with the
thumb between the first and second fingers pointing downward to the
abyss. The meeting place was lighted only by the altar fire, where the
human sacrifice sizzled to attract the phantoms and ghosts. And the
devotees, singing mystic songs, danced hand in hand in a circle around
the god Pan. They used the holy grail like the churches and mystic
societies, and the drafts from this poisonous cup, the singing, the
whirling dance and the incense from the altar brought on the oft-times
fatal frenzies in which the victims fell shrieking to the ground, as
they do among certain Christian sects. They were seized and possessed by
foul fiends from the Pit, or elementary spirits, and sometimes by the
spirits of serpents that materialized themselves in the writhing human
victims and crawled out of the prostrate bodies in plain view of the
audience. There in the blackest hour of the night the Vinum Sabbati was
prepared, a few grains of white powder thrown into a glass of water. And
each one that drank found himself attended by a companion, a shape of
glamour and unearthly allurement beckoning him apart to share in joys
more exquisite, more piercing than the thrill of any dream.—Machen’s
House of Souls, 438.
Similar to these convulsionaries are the miserable creatures in Russia
afflicted by strange disorders, which people attributed to possession by
the Devil. They throng the entrance of cathedrals without daring to
enter, lest their controlling demons cast them on the ground. At the
Elevation of the Host, these half maniacs, half mediums begin crowing
like cocks, barking, bellowing and braying, and finally fall down in
fearful convulsions. They prophesy and see visions. Paracelsus, the
magician, could cast the demons out of the persons so possessed by the
power of a stronger demon which he carried around in his pocket. That
reminds us of the Salem witch that fled from a mob of Christolators who
were intent on burning her, but when they were about to seize her, she
crawled into a bottle, and nobody ever saw her afterward.
In the Devil’s Mass of the Yezdis, or Devil worshippers and sorcerers of
Mesopotamia, the Jakshas or aerial spirits carry their prayers to the
Devil and the Afrites of the desert. In their prayer meeting they dance
in a ring about their high priest and whirl and leap in the air and cut
each other with daggers until they are soaked with blood for the purpose
of attracting the ghosts. The mystic circle induces Satan to manifest
himself in miracles. Enormous globes of fire appear and assume the
shapes of monsters.
The Sabbath was the Sunday of the Hebrew Kabalists, the day of their
religious assembly, or rather the night of their habitual meetings. This
festival, surrounded by mysteries as it was, found its safeguard in the
very fright of the vulgar and escaped persecution through the terror it
occasioned. The early Christians celebrated the pagan Mysteries of Jesus
and probably held a Witches’ Sabbath.—See Mystic Christianity, 212.
One should trim his finger nails on Friday, never on Thursday, otherwise
the nails will commence growing on the Sabbath, and it is very wicked
for the nails to grow on the Sabbath.—Kabala. The Israelite, after the
endless Sabbath observances, should fold up his veil, but if he forgets
to do so, he is to shake it thoroughly the next morning, so as to shake
all the devils out of it. And the reason is known to the Lords of the
Kabala.—Kabala Kitzur Sh’lh. It is a very pious act to say a prayer to
the moon at the close of the Sabbath, for the moon is a symbol of Jacob,
the lesser light, (who was a christ). The full moon, the Queen of Heaven
is his mother, and the sun is his father. The new moon is Jacob or
Christ.—Ibid, fol. 72, col. 2. You should learn these things together
with all the other profound wisdom of the Talmud, for Rabbi Yochannan
says that it is lawful to split open an unlearned man like a fish.
Constantine, the Roman Emperor and canonized saint, the
superstition-besotted, the assassin, the fratricide, the parricide, the
uxoricide, the filicide, the regicide, chosen from Heaven as the
murderer-in-chief of the world, according to Eusebius, “held up by God
to the human race as an exemplary pattern of godliness and destined to
share the Empire of Heaven with Christ,” this was the bloated, red-faced
profligate who established Sunday worship in 321 A. D. and compelled the
Christians to worship the sun-god on Dies Solis, the Day of the Sun,
because his own god was Apollo.—See First Council of Nice, 28.
Constantine was the founder of Christianity, and, like father like son,
it followed in his footsteps. He could not obtain absolution for his
crimes from pagan priests, but Eusebius washed them whiter than snow.
Some said that Constantine had to sacrifice an infant to obtain the
blood for the absolution.