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Well, the baphomet imagery and history have nothing to do with either kabbalah or qabalah, so this may not be the best place to discuss it. That's something to be determined in the near future.
Inducing visionary states has a lot to do with both streams of qabalah, so, we can talk about baphomet in the context of visionary states, tho.
You say you are convinced it was baphomet - but, as a person who has been entering and exploring visionary states since I was a young teenager - and thats a lot of years now - I KNOW that visionary logic doesn't work with such absulute certainty that makes it possible for you to know for certain that you had an absolute baphomet vision.
Visionary logic is fluid, associative, and dreamlike. Visionary “beings” often “lie”. (for lack of a better word - it's not really a lie - visionary logic doesn't use words and numbers and images the way the verbal mind or the rest of the brain does.)
There's no easy way for you to figure out wether or not I'm right in sayingthese things to you unless you study the visionary states. I don't expect you to take my word for it. But consider that I might be telling you something that should be considered - that visionary states are MUCH more complex than they appear.
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Now, baphomet is a fascinating image from recent history - only a few hundred years old, and appearing 'out of the blue', as it were. The name has no convincing history before it was used to condem the templars to death and prison, and as a justification for confiscating their wealth and power.
However, the name and image have entered popular culture in a pretty potent way, as a metaphor for the devil, commonly portrayed in hundreds of movies and shows and in artwork and other pop culture forms. The classic modern image comes from a famous illustration in Eliphas Levi's “Transcendental Magic” - the goat with a torch between it's horns, marked with the upside down pentagram. This image has been used directly and as a reference for many many other images.
In the actual templar trials, as I recall, baphomet was just described as a “head' that was worsjipped and kissed - the goat imagery was added later, because the image of the goat from the witch trials and burnings was well established - the two images kind of flowed together, because the same propaganda machine used to condemn witches and confiscate their property was used to destroy the templars.
Not that I'm the world's best expert on the templar thing. I see the templars as mostly interesting for their cultural effect - there's no good evidence of real templar mysticism, only their power as a secret society, and I'm mostly interested in mysticism and psycholgies, not just secret politiocal groups.
Have you learned the most common explaination for the origin of the name?
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Now, as for your experience itself - it's a classic type of visionary state. The brains of certain people can produce these things without training, and that sounds like what happened to you.
Now, I started training myslef when I was 11 years old, so I can never know if my brain produces these things naturally, or because of the training, but they happen to me all the time as well - thousands of times over the years.
In any case, it happened to you, and as you can tell, it's very powerful and can effect the rest of one's life with various kinds of interests and convictions.
Now, we can go into more complex details of how the visionary state works, and how yours worked, but this is already long - so, later.
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