Ugh. I live in Iowa, Des Moines, mere miles from the incident which I am about to recount. The incident being the holiday destruction of one Baphomet statue at the Iowa state capitol building. This drew national attention, and here I’m obligated to speak up. This is because I am the only person you will ever get the sane version of this story from.
Everybody else in this story is a goober.
Spoilers: They Caught the Guy
The man who busted up the statue has, as of the very week of this writing, been identified, apprehended, and charged with a hate crime. The fellow happens to be 35-year-old Michael Cassidy of Lauderdale, Mississippi, this goober.
Who just so happens to have run for office in Mississippi, and possibly might yet still. No really, we live in a country where a guy charged with masterminding insurrection against the nation while in office as president is running for president again, the rulebook is all torn up and fit for fireplace kindling now.
I would be tempted to pour more derision upon his head were not everyone else in this story a goober too. Certainly goober Governor Kim Reynolds shares some blame; she spit out the following statement after the goobers at the Satanic Temple, tongues firmly in cheek, managed to file the right forms to get the statue erected, as they have on other occasions and capitols.
While she didn’t explicitly say “somebody come out here and maul this scary goat-man with a baseball bat,” she didn’t make it sound like removing the statue would ruin her day either. That could be taken as invitation, verily incitement. Indeed, it turns out Iowa’s code on hate crimes
729A.2 Violation of individual rights — hate crime. “Hate crime” means one of the following public offenses when committed against a person or a person’s property because of the person’s race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation, sex, sexual orientation, age, or disability, or the person’s association with a person of a certain race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation, sex, sexual orientation, age, or disability: 1. Assault in violation of individual rights under section 708.2C. 2. Violations of individual rights under section 712.9. 3. Criminal mischief in violation of individual rights under section 716.6A. 4. Trespass in violation of individual rights under section 716.8, subsections 3 and 4.
is almost specifically aimed at punishing this kind of thing. I’m pretty sure goober Kim hadn’t read this code at the time of her statement.
Anyway, despite the possibility of pardon from one hard-orange-R to another, readers may rest assured that justice of some degree is, if not served, at least warming up in the microwave.
Yes, I said the Satanic Temple are goobers too. Don’t cry tears for me that they’re trying to push back against theocracy blah blah, they do a shit job of it. Pulling clown stunts like this does no favors for Civil Rights. I wouldn’t want the Satanic Temple to be a theocracy either; they get everything as wrong as the Christians do. Before you take these modern-day Yippies too seriously, remember they sell branded hot sauce. How pious.
BUT we have to back up here first…
I’ve had a dozen conversations by now with my fellow Iowans that boil down to:
- ME: (spots religious pamphlets at cash register) Can I bring in some Baphomet pamphlets too?
- Cashier: NO! Baphomet is in league with Satan!
- ME: Um. He is? Where does it say that?
- Cashier: (throwing me out of store)
Well I’m right, dammit, and when it comes to religion, when I say there’s no such thing as an American Christian, it’s because I’m sick of arguing with goobers who think Jesus was white, blonde, American, owned a gun, and hated everybody but rich white male Republicans. These same goobers insist that Satan has red skin and pointy horns and a trident.
This is bad:
But the answer is not this:
After the jump: Your complete schooling on Baphomet:
Baphomet For Dummies 101
In the first place, you will not find mention of this “Baphomet” character in any known established holy scripture. Baphomet is not mentioned once in the Bible, nor the Talmud, nor the Quran, nor even the Book of Mormon. He’s not even mentioned in the Doctrine and Covenants nor the Pearl of Great Price, not in the Tao Te Ching, not in any Veda or Sutra or Tantra.
The first mention of Baphomet occurs in the year 1307, in the transcriptions of the confessions of the Knights Templar, under torture at the time courtesy of the Catholic Inquisition. WHY the Knights Templar found themselves at such a crossroads is a story for the next George R.R. Martin to novelize, but suffice it to say at this point in history, “Goober King Philip IV of France had a wild hair up his ass about the Knights Templar, and moved to take them down.”
Working together with goober Pope Pope Clement V, who swore out a papal bull “Vox in excelso” declaring the Knights Templar removed from authority, King Philip gained the legal support to have Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, and 60 of his senior knights arrested in Paris, France and charged with heresy, blasphemy, and an amazing array of trumped-up hooey.
“Baphomet” was allegedly the name of a dark spirit worshiped by this order of knights. In the exact recovery of events as told in Peter Partner’s The Knights Templar and Their Myth, the knights confessed to:
“supposed worship of a heathen idol-head known as a Baphomet. ][ The description of the object changed from confession to confession; some Templars denied any knowledge of it, while others, who confessed under torture, described it as being either a severed head, a cat, or a head with three faces.”
You don’t need to be a legal expert to understand why we don’t count confession under torture as binding testimony. But at this point, all we have for evidence of the existence of this Baphomet is the screamed gibberings of some goober getting his joints dislocated on a rack because the king owed them too much money.
Since then, scholars have picked through this case and raised the possibility that “Baphomet” was a mistranslation of other words, possibly even a French word for the Muslims’ Mohammad.
Had matters ended there, nobody in modern times would know the name. But then…
Mr. Crowley, Won’t You Ride My White Horse?
Aleister Crowley, British occultist, poet, goober, and pervert, seized upon the name Baphomet about the turn of the 20th century. In his writing, The Gnostic Mass, he outlines a congregational chant “And I believe in the Serpent and the Lion, Mystery of Mysteries, in His name BAPHOMET.”
That was long about 1913, while Crowley was traveling Russia. From there, Crowley wove this blank check of a deity into his Thelema philosophy, declaring Baphomet as a figure of significance. The self-declared prophet even assumed the name Baphomet for himself briefly, and otherwise identified Baphomet as “the hieroglyph of arcane perfection” related to central Thelema maxims such as “as above, so below.”
From here on out, you know the rest of the story. Ozzy Osbourne made a song about Crowley, the occult world ate up his mad and sticky-paged raving, and a thousand teenage girls saw The Craft and became Wiccans because those CGI effects looked so cool!
Baphomet has about as much scriptural credibility as a Spirit Halloween devil costume. Baphomet has since been fleshed out in popular culture through the medium of Tarot cards and Dungeons & Dragons books. Board games.
Iowans Need a Sense of Humor
Lemme just recap this. We have:
- The historic equivalent of a typo
- Reinterpreted as an occult figure
- Paraded around by a reactionary troll religion arranged to challenge Christianity
- But applied through legal channels and protected under law anyway
- Installed for a few days over winter break and ALL ANYBODY HAD TO DO WAS IGNORE IT
- But scared goobers emerged to hold prayer circles, and engaged in their own occult rituals to combat this perceived psychic attack
- The statue was scheduled to come down anyway in three days
- Nope, not soon enough, the governor dog-whistles for the nearest goober to come beat up the doll
- A goober did
- Because the statue of this 100% fabricated fantasy was still just too threatening
By the way, “the Satanic Temple does not actually profess belief in Satan” – yeah, so WHY USE A FIGURE OF SATANISM invented by a Satanist? All you had to do was name it “the Humanist Temple” and you could get your point across more effectively – and not have to go around explaining “oh no we don’t really believe in the mythical figure we named the church after.”
In conclusion: You’re all goobers. You are why we can’t have nice things.
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