We have watched people at public rituals struggle to hold the Baphomet pose for more than thirty seconds. Their arms tremble. Their spines curve. They are trying to look imposing when the pose was never designed for display. The Baphomet pose is not a performance. It is a statement written with the body. The Baphomet pose is a seated posture where the arms form a downward-pointing triangle at the waist and an upward-pointing V above the head, representing the hermetic principle of “as above, so below.” The pose first appeared in Lévi’s 1856 engraving, but its roots reach into alchemical diagrams two centuries older.
Where Did the Baphomet Pose Actually Come From?
The pose did not exist before 1856. That is the year French occultist Éliphas Lévi (born Alphonse Louis Constant) published Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, the book that introduced Baphomet to the modern esoteric world. Lévi’s engraving showed a seated figure with goat’s head, female breasts, and a torch between its horns. The arms formed the same configuration we now call the Baphomet pose: one hand pointing up, the other pointing down, with the Latin words Solve (dissolve) and Coagula (coagulate) inscribed on the forearms.
Lévi took the name Baphomet from the records of the Knights Templar trials between 1307 and 1314. Inquisition documents recorded that Templars were accused of worshipping an idol called Baphomet, though no consistent description of that idol survives. Some scholars argue the name itself is a corruption of Mahomet (Muhammad), reflecting medieval Christian ignorance of Islam. Others trace it through Occitan Bafomet to a Greek root meaning “baptism of wisdom.” We do not know the truth, and neither did Lévi. He used the name as a cipher for what he called the Absolute of the Kabbalists, a symbol of divine unity that contained all contradictions.
The pose itself, however, predates Lévi’s Baphomet. Alchemical woodcuts from the 1600s show the Rebis (the “two-thing,” the hermetic androgyne) standing in a similar gesture. One hand holds a compass, the other a square. The posture says the same thing: the operator must know both the heights and the depths. Lévi did not invent the gesture. He codified it.
What Does the Baphomet Pose Actually Mean?
The pose is a physical argument about the nature of reality. It claims that opposites are not enemies. They are the two poles of a single circuit.
The downward-pointing arm (traditionally the right hand, though sources disagree on consistency) represents Solve: separation, analysis, dissolution of complexes. The upward-pointing arm (the left hand) represents Coagula: synthesis, union, materialization of spirit. Between them, the body of the practitioner becomes the medium where both forces meet. The seated posture reinforces this. You are not standing, not walking, not fleeing. You are rooted, allowing the current to flow through you.
The triangle formed by the arms at waist level mirrors the triangle above the head. In Renaissance alchemical diagrams, these two triangles combine into the Seal of Solomon (the hexagram), the symbol of the macrocosm and microcosm united. The pose says: what is below is like what is above. The material world reflects the spiritual. Your body reflects the cosmos.
Lévi himself described Baphomet as “the symbolic figure of the Absolute in its supreme synthesis.” He was not describing a god or a demon. He was describing a principle. The pose is the human body performing that principle.
What Does the Baphomet Pose Look Like in Practice?
The pose requires precision, not strength. Here is how we have seen it taught in esoteric study groups and ceremonial magic lodges.
Sit upright on a chair or a low stool. Keep your spine straight but not rigid. Your feet should be flat on the floor, knees at a right angle. Place your hands on your thighs, palms down. That is the neutral position.
For the pose itself, raise your right arm so the forearm points straight down, the hand at waist level, palm facing the floor. The upper arm should be parallel to the ground. Then raise your left arm with the forearm pointing straight up, the hand above the crown of the head, palm facing the ceiling. The left arm, too, should have the upper arm parallel to the ground. The spine stays straight. The shoulders stay down. The head faces forward.
Hold it. Most people cannot hold it correctly for more than two minutes without the arms dropping or the spine curving. That is the point. The physical discomfort teaches you to maintain form under stress.
In group rituals, the pose is sometimes taken by the officiant alone while the participants raise their arms in a simpler V-shape. In some Thelemic and Luciferian traditions, the pose is held during specific invocations. Arthur Edward Waite, writing in 1896, criticized the pose as “borrowed from the iconography of the Gnostic Basilidians,” but he offered no evidence. The pose is not Gnostic in origin. It is Lévi’s.
How Does the Baphomet Pose Compare to Other Esoteric Postures?
The Baphomet pose belongs to a family of ritual gestures where the body encodes doctrine. The closest relative is the healer’s posture found in Hermetic and Theosophical illustrations: the standing figure with one hand raised and one hand lowered, sending energy down into the earth and drawing energy from the sky. The Baphomet pose is the seated, meditative version of the same idea.
Christian iconography offers a different comparison. The orans posture (arms raised in prayer, palms open) appears in early Christian catacomb paintings from the 2nd century. It is a gesture of reception, not synthesis. You are not uniting opposites. You are receiving grace from above. The Baphomet pose insists you are also transmitting from below.
Modern ceremonial magic uses the same logic in different forms. The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram uses the sign of the Enterer and the sign of Silence, two gestures that mirror each other as the Baphomet pose mirrors itself. The Golden Dawn system includes the Sign of the Rending of the Veil and the Sign of the Closing of the Veil, a pair that opens and closes spiritual vision. The Baphomet pose collapses the pair into a single posture.
What Do People Get Wrong About the Baphomet Pose?
Three misconceptions dominate public understanding, and we can address them directly.
First, the pose is not satanic. Lévi was not a Satanist. He was a defrocked Catholic priest who spent his career trying to reconcile religion and magic under a Kabbalistic framework. The figure in his engraving has a goat’s head because Lévi associated the goat with the pagan god Pan, who represented nature and fertility. The pose has nothing to do with the Satan of Christian theology. That association comes from 20th-century panic, not from Lévi’s text.
Second, the pose is not a yoga posture. It bears no relation to any asana in classical Hatha Yoga, which was introduced to the West around the same time by Swami Vivekananda (1893) but follows a completely different philosophy. Yoga seeks union with the divine through stillness and breath. The Baphomet pose seeks integration of opposites through directed force. They look different because they do different things.
Third, the pose does not require the goat-headed figure to be present. Lévi’s engraving is an illustration of an idea, not a template for practice. Many practitioners take the pose without any visual representation of Baphomet. The posture is the symbol. The symbol does not need an image to back it up.
FAQ
Is the Baphomet pose the same as the Sign of the Horns? No. The Sign of the Horns (index and little finger extended, middle fingers curled) is a hand gesture. The Baphomet pose is a full-body posture involving both arms in an asymmetrical configuration.
Which hand points up and which points down? Lévi’s engraving shows the right hand pointing down and the left hand pointing up. Some modern traditions reverse this based on their own current. We follow Lévi’s original because the text confirms it.
Can the pose be done standing? Yes, but standing changes the meaning. The seated position emphasizes stability and grounding. The standing version shifts toward invocation and projection. Both are valid, but they are not identical.
Is the Baphomet pose used in modern witchcraft? Some eclectic traditions have adopted it, but it originates in ceremonial magic, not folk witchcraft. Traditional Wicca does not use the pose.
The Baphomet pose is one gesture in a larger vocabulary of ritual postures. If you want to understand how the body becomes a tool of the will, read our guide to ritual gestures in ceremonial magic. For the symbol itself, our entry on Baphomet in the grimoire tradition traces the figure from the Templar trials through Lévi to the present. The pose is a sentence. The tradition it belongs to is a library.