Quote:...it’s high time we actually take an artistic and symbolic look at the Baphomet and what it represents. Instead of focusing on the letter and spirit of the law, let’s think about the spirit of what America is for a minute and ask ‘Why not Baphomet?’
Many of the components of the Baphomet (as conceived by Elias Levi in 1856) are shared with another particularly prominent symbolic representation of the time. The highest point of the statue is a flame, symbolizing enlightenment, the torch of knowledge lighting the world and dispelling the shadows of ignorance. The figure’s right arm is held aloft while the left is held low, symbolizing, perhaps, the duality between the independence that comes with such enlightenment and the society we create together under a rule of law that ensures the least restrictive means to protect freedoms without infringing on those of others.
Baphomet, on the otherhand, is a representation of the unification of opposites, a symbol of disparate notions unified as one. Much like how America’s great melting pot is predicated on the idea that though people may completely disagree about such things as the very nature of reality we can still come together and make an equitable and egalitarian society in which we all can live. E Pluribus Unum. Meanwhile the artistic features of the Baphomet, when compared to other great works of the time, like the Statue of Liberty, evoke the enlightenment principles on which this country was actually founded. No matter how vociferously the likes of revisionist theocrat historians attempt to say otherwise, America is a beacon of Liberty and predicated on the belief that disparate peoples with competing beliefs can live united in these values through the rigorous application of secular laws and values.
In 1875, when construction started on the Statue of Liberty, individuals so revered the idea of Liberty that they deemed it worthy of personification in the form of a 15 story statue in New York Harbor. The world gave it its own island to stand on. In our modern era, those same symbolic references—the flame that is the light of reason and justice, the raised arm, the crown: those artistic symbols of freedom—are being loaded onto a truck and driven down to Arkansas for a rally against theocratic over-reach to combat a cynical attempt to “bring America back to Jesus.”
So next week when TST has their rally, and Baphomet is rolled out into the public eye, remember that what it symbolizes is not just some mere tool to combat Rapert’s theocratic cynicism. The values and meaning enshrined in the Baphomet rightfully deserve their place as a part of what makes America America at least as much, if not far more, than a list of 10 things that make one religion’s petty god mad.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/infernal/20...mandments/
