April 14, 2023

All Hail Techno-Baphomet!

Symbolic and aesthetic counter-measures to Christian transphobia

One of a handful adaptions of the classic Baphomet symbol painted by HR Giger, selected here for his commitment to undermining the human body with technology.

About a month ago, Daily Wire host and transphobic propagandist Michael Knowles, who is most famous for calling for transgender people to be “eradicated from public life”, made a more bizarre statement than usual about trans people.

In this short clip accessed thanks to Media Matters, Knowles argued that “attacks” on the line between male and female are literally demonic. As in, actual, honest-to-god demons are responsible for “transgenderism”, which I take to mean the existence of trans people. As evidence, he points to historical depictions of demons, which tended towards grotesquerie.

Take one of the most famous artistic depictions of the devil, Michael Pacher’s The Devil Presenting St. Augustine with the Book of Vices, painted sometime between 1455-1498. Here, the Prince of Darkness is humanoid but has green skin, horns, massive tusks, hooves, batlike wings, and– most prominently– another face on his ass. The message here of course is that the evil nature of demons is reflected visually in the ugliness of the physical forms they take.

However, for Knowles, the demonstration of the demonic nature of trans people reaches its apotheosis in a 19th-century depiction of Baphomet– perhaps the most well-known symbol of occultism in popular culture– by the French occultist and poet Éliphas Lévi.

To explain all the symbolism in this illustration and how it relates to Lévi’s esoteric system would take far too long and is not relevant (although it is fascinating, and anyone interested in personal or scholarly study of the occult would benefit from reading his book Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magic). Instead, we will stick to the most relevant points. Although the Baphomet was not meant to represent Satan or evil, or even a demon, Lévi drew from historical depictions of demons to create it, especially le Diable of the Marseille Tarot deck. Hooves, wings, and a goat’s head are present, as are a scaled abdomen, a flaming torch of “divine revelation” and a caduceus obscuring the genitals (Lévi associated Baphomet with Mercury).1

The most notable aspect of this to Knowles is that the Baphomet is an androgyne. Lévi wrote that each arm is taken from a man and woman respectively. It also has breasts and is meant to have a penis and testicles, although in this case it is replaced by the notably phallic caduceus. In Knowles’ interpretation, this makes it a trans body. This is not to say he is wrong about that, as I personally know trans people that take it as a particularly empowering and profound artistic depiction of a trans body, but of course, that isn’t Knowles’ opinion.

Knowles additionally goes on to locate the origins of what he calls the ideology of “transgenderism” in the alchemical motto of solve et coagula, written on Baphomet’s forearms. He states in the clip:

“Break everything down, put it back together in this really grotesque, weird, unnatural sort of way. It is no coincidence that these depictions are what we see in this highly, highly dangerous ideology.”

Finally, he accuses liberals of engaging in religious arguments that present themselves as secular, but are in fact occult and implicitly heretical as opposed to the “true religion”:

“They'll say, your soul is who you really are. Your body is not who you really are. Your soul can be opposed to your body. And so, when there's an apparent conflict between your soul and your body, you should chop up your body. Which is -- they did that in the ancient world too, except they attributed it to demons in the ancient world.”

The accusation of straying from “true religion” is quite ironic, as Lévi himself intended the Baphomet to symbolize what he believed to be the true religion. It seems Knowles and Lévi had this interest in common.

Moving on, it goes without saying that this is a strawman. Instead of lending this argument legitimacy by responding to it, it is far more fruitful to examine its underlying assumptions.

First, the obvious is that he takes both the Baphomet and trans people to be monstrous grotesques, in the technical sense of grotesquerie as a juxtaposition of disparate elements in one thing, such as the Greek Chimera or the Egyptian deity Ammit. Second, he conceives of transness as specifically referring to trans women, who are naturally the most common targets of the Right’s current crusade of trans-eliminationism2. Finally, he conceives of transness, or what he calls the ideology of “transgenderism”, as literally being of a demonic, Satanist, and occult nature. This sort of conspiracy theory that lumps all of the Right’s enemies into one basket– from QAnon to the slur “islamo-leftism” in French politics– is typically found among the right wing of White Evangelicals in America, which is notable as Knowles is Catholic.

Chimera of Arezzo, approx. 400 BCE. Discovered in Arezzo, Central Italy.

Per ResearchGate: Thoth and Ammit from the Papyrus of Ani (BM inv. no. EA 10.470,3); painted papyrus; Thebes, Upper Egypt; ca. 1250 BCE.

All in all, Knowles’ statements here fall in line with his previous rhetoric regarding trans people, although we must once again point out that he only ever refers to them with the euphemism “transgenderism”. By literally demonizing an out-group, he is laying the groundwork for the wholesale elimination of trans people as a group, whether through death or detransition, most likely both. He may only claim to want to forcibly detransition every trans person, but as this would most certainly kill millions, it is a signal of the intent to slaughter regardless of if he realizes it or not. The only real question then becomes how to respond to this rhetoric.

Publicly identifying it as eliminationist is one thing, but this is the negation. Equally important is the positive counterexample to be expressed rhetorically and in symbols, protest signs, graffiti, aesthetic presentation, and other non-rhetorical acts of communication. To take a page from Deleuze’s teaching style, the only valid response is to say: “Yes, and so?”. To some, the Baphomet is already a powerful countercultural symbol opposed to the tyranny of certain conservative factions of Christianity, and I argue that appropriating it as a symbol of transfeminism– especially at a time of rising Christian nationalism allied with transphobia and restrictions on bodily autonomy– is more fitting than ever.

Recall the slogan solve et coagula Lévi wrote on Baphomet’s arms. Knowles attributes it to the occult generally, but it derives from the alchemical tradition. Contrary to its contemporary reputation as a primitive proto-science, for most of its history alchemy was widely practiced by respected members of the European intelligentsia, including Enlightenment figures like Isaac Newton. Particularly in the medieval period, magic, religion, alchemy, and science were considered to be one thing rather than three superstitions and one valid way of seeking the capital-t Truth. Scholar Julian Strube even argues that the Baphomet in Lévi’s work is “the embodiment of a politically connoted tradition of ‘true religion’ which would realize a synthesis of religion, science, and politics.”

Appropriate to its prestige in the European Renaissance, it remains a slogan almost custom-made for the Enlightenment: if one can understand the composition of a given thing (solve), one can gain mastery over it by reconstructing it or otherwise manipulating it (coagula). Although alchemy has been surpassed as a way to understand the natural world, this principle still applies to science, including all of medicine, including trans medicine. We first understand the composition of the body and use that understanding to manipulate it to our will. Or consider how many queers first break down and understand the cultural connotations of certain ways of dress and behavior, then remix these things to present a new image that is in some measures feminine, masculine, both, or neither. A conservative, transphobic mindset would favor never crossing these boundaries due to an underlying naturalistic fallacy. This is not exclusive to the Right, historically, as shown in the work of radical republican Romantics such as Mary Shelley. In her novels, we can locate the same naturalistic fallacy and give the same reply.

As opposed to the boundless potential of science her Enlightenment parents would have believed in, Shelley in Frankenstein warns of the danger of science going "too far". But let's say we drop the moralism. What we have left, as the subtitle of the novel states, is a retelling of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. It is a boon to humanity but an affront to the gods, who punish Prometheus accordingly… that is, until he is freed by Heracles, defender of humanity with the permission of Zeus himself! Right and wrong does not enter into it in the original tale of Prometheus. It is an amoral tale of angering the gods by partly blurring the boundary between them and humanity. And now let us drop the theistic interpretation and instead call it the blurring of lines between the human and non-human. Shelley was correct to warn us of the ways this may go wrong and portray it as terrifying. New territories are always terrifying, but this does not make them bad. “If nature is unjust, change nature!”

In this sense, Baphomet– both in its androgyny and appeal to a scientific understanding of the body to change it– is the ultimate symbol of transfeminism. We are living in an age where the cultural ideas of what a person can be is expanding at an accelerating pace, not only in the words we use to try to grasp the ungraspable complexity of human sexual and gender identity, but also in the advent of further integration of the body and technology. All hail techno-Baphomet!

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