The Baphomet Tarot: Part One
[This examination of The Baphomet Tarot by H.R. Giger and Akron was part of the original manuscript submitted to Llewellyn, a chapter in part two of Baphomet: History, Ritual & Magic of the World’s Most Famous Occult Icon. It was removed because I could not obtain permission to quote from Akron’s works. I was unable to do so because both The Baphomet Tarot and the Baphomet album by the band Epilepsy are out of print, and Akron died in 2017 with no clear heir that I can locate from which to seek permission. My editor suggested I paraphrase Akron’s work to get around this, but I disagreed, for unlike the other material analyzed in Part 2 (such as The Book of Baphomet by Nikki Wyrd and Julian Vayne or A Gift of Maggots by Ruth Addams), Akron’s work is out of print and therefore inaccessible to most readers. I also felt that removing most or all of the quotations would make an already short chapter quite anemic and out of place with the other quote-heavy chapters in part two. If I can ever find the person that can grant me the legal rights to quote Akron, I would gladly include this chapter in a revised edition of the book.]
Part 1. A Surreal Icon
In 1977, Swiss surrealist artist H.R. Giger published his breakthrough art book, H.R. Giger’s Necronomicon. Named after the infamous grimoire from the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, the cover featured a section from the painting The Spell IV (1977), an image that would come to be known as Giger’s Baphomet.
Leave it to Giger to create an image more bizarre than Lévi’s original. Giger’s Baphomet is a half human, half-goat wearing a mechanical mask and a harness around the shoulders and arms. Their breasts have become the heads of two babies sitting upon their lap, each bearing a hand grenade. Baphomet has a rifle for a phallus with snakes entwined around it, a perversion of the caduceus. A syringe hangs from their left arm, and their hairy hooves rest upon five skulls.
The most prominent feature of the painting is the head and wings of Baphomet. The base of the torch emerges from their skull, and it supports or penetrates the genitals of a naked, white-skinned woman. The woman bears a wand in each hand, and she stands in the form of a pentagram. Behind her is a white pentagram, and behind that figure is a black pentagram. The woman appears to be supported by the two horns and the black feathered wings of Baphomet.
For the record, Giger did actually create a separate painting titled Baphomet (after Eliphas Lévi) in 1975. In many ways, the piece looks like a simplified version of the Baphomet image that emerged two years later in Spell IV. Giger acknowledges the tarot connection popularized by Waite by inscribing “XV” at the top of the painting, the number of the Devil trump. On the opposite side of the two-page Baphomet section of the Necronomicon, Giger presents the inspiration for his painting, Lévi’s original Baphomet image and a page from Dogma and Ritual of High Magic that describes and defines the symbolism of that image. It also includes a rough sketch from 1975 of the head of Baphomet conjoined with the woman, the common thread between his two Baphomet paintings, an image immortalized as a medallion cast with the aid of Roland Christoph titled Baphomet 1977.
Giger’s book with Baphomet on the cover brought him even greater fame when it was noticed by director Ridley Scott, who had just signed on to direct the sci-fi horror movie Alien. Scott found the inspiration for the monster in a painting titled Necronom IV and hired Giger as a designer for the movie. Alien became an iconic film that spawned a number of successful sequels, and Giger won an Oscar for his contribution to the film.