First life: Baphometh in Anselm of Ribemont's 1098 letter from Antioch, Old French for Mahomet. Second life: 1307, Philip IV's inquisition, a handful of torture confessions naming Baphomet as the Templar idol, descriptions wildly contradictory, retracted when the torture stopped, absent from every Templar document, and the Chinon Parchment, published 2007, showing Clement V absolved the order in 1308. Third life: Eliphas Levi's 1856 frontispiece, the Sabbatic Goat, solve and coagula on the arms, a Hermetic diagram of reconciled opposites Levi explicitly said was not Satan. The Church of Satan's sigil adoption in the 1960s completed the rebranding Levi never intended.
The esoteric literature generated its own etymologies: Nicolai's baphe metous, baptism of wisdom; Littre's reversed abbreviation, abbot of the temple of peace of all men; Schonfield's Atbash solution, Baphomet in Hebrew letters decoding to Sophia, wisdom, the reading The Da Vinci Code borrowed; and Crowley's BaphometR totaling 729, nine cubed, Father Mithras. Each solution is presented by its author as the key. Philologists keep voting for the crusader's mishearing, which has the unique defect of explaining everything and satisfying no one.
The claim: Baphomet is the purest case of a belief system manufactured by its enemies, the inquisition invented the idol to convict the order, occultism adopted the invention to spite the inquisition, and the modern sigil is a drawing of an accusation, meaning the devil in the picture was authored, in sequence, by a king's torturers and a deacon's pen. Verdict: the documented chain supports it almost completely, there is no pre-1307 Baphomet the entity, only Baphometh the name. The archive's closing note belongs to this whole wing: the most durable demons are legal documents. The Templars got the flames. The torturers got the debts cancelled. The name got a franchise. Solve et coagula indeed.
If the devil's most famous image began as a transliteration error, what else in the demonology is a scribe's mistake with a franchise?