The Obscene Idols of the Knights Templar
A secret meeting about a dead researcher, a translation its own team believed was cursed, and the accusation that killed Europe's first bank.
In 1818, one of the most decorated orientalists in the Habsburg Empire announced that he had found physical evidence, carved on church walls and engraved on cups, coins, and coffers, that the Knights Templar practiced a secret religion marked by heresy, sodomy, idol worship, ritual abuse, and child sacrifice.
That was what made it so insidious. The charge landed on the closest thing medieval Europe had to a multinational bank: a military-religious order built on money, secrecy, sacred authority, and trust. Sound familiar?
His colleagues never forgave him. They never quite refuted him either.
Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall was no crank. He was a diplomat and interpreter who had served the empire from Istanbul to Cairo, the translator whose complete German edition of Hafez helped inspire Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan, and the man who would later become the first president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. When he published Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum, “The Mystery of Baphomet Revealed,” in the sixth volume of his own journal Fundgruben des Orients, the first European periodical devoted to oriental studies, he was at the height of a serious reputation. He spent a measurable portion of it on this treatise, written in Latin, salted with Greek and Arabic, and accompanied by plates of the strangest objects ever attributed to a medieval military order.
The treatise has spent two centuries in a scholarly unmarked grave. I have my own reasons for opening that grave, and they begin with a meeting I did not expect to have.
The Meeting
When my publisher commissioned Baphomet Revealed, the assignment was modest: a short introductory historiography, a first doorway for readers encountering the figure, tracing how a name from the Templar trials became the most recognizable emblem in Western occultism. I wrote that book, and I stand by it for what it is. It did not prove or disprove anything about the Templars, and it never claimed to. What it did, quietly, was force me to read the standard explanations closely. Baphomet was a torture-chamber phantom. The trial was Philip’s propaganda. Lévi invented the image from whole cloth. Case closed, the scholars said.
I had heard “case closed” from scholars before. In a previous H-File, I documented what I found in the Masonic encyclopedias preserved in President Garfield’s library: a real androgynous rite called the Palladium, described decades before Léo Taxil supposedly invented it, an order that generations of academics insisted had never existed in any form. The documents were sitting in Ohio the whole time. That discovery taught me a habit I cannot unlearn: when the official account of an esoteric scandal is suspiciously tidy, go find the primary sources and check. You can read that here:
The deepest primary source on Baphomet is Hammer-Purgstall’s treatise, and the only reason English readers can examine it at all is because of he late researcher Tracy R. Twyman. Twyman commissioned a scholar credited publicly only as “Professor X” to produce the first full English translation, edited it with her own commentary, and had every plate photographed from the original printing and painstakingly restored, the first time the complete illustrations had been available anywhere outside the 1818 volume itself. The translator asked for anonymity, partly because of the subject matter, and partly, in Twyman’s telling, because he and an associate experienced disturbing phenomena while working on the text. Twyman went further: she came to believe the material itself was cursed. She and her collaborators coined a name, the fog, for the confusion, inertia, and weariness that settled over anyone who sat down to work on it. In her account, one member of the team concluded that “someone or something does not want the secrets inside this text to be known.”
Some time ago, Professor X reached out to me. We met privately. The conversation concerned the circumstances surrounding Tracy’s death and her engagement with the Baphomet material in the period before she died. I am not going to publish the substance of that meeting until I can do it carefully with documentation and likely behind the paywall, but what I can tell you publicly is what the meeting did: it took a file I had treated as historical curiosity and made it a live case. Tracy opened this investigation and died with it open. The man who built her key came to me. This essay is me picking the file up, and what follows in the coming months is the work of carrying it.
The Bank Behind the Cross
To understand what Hammer-Purgstall claimed, you need the original accusation, and to understand the accusation, you need, as always, to follow the money.
By the end of the thirteenth century, the Order of the Temple was the closest thing medieval Europe had to an international financial institution. A pilgrim could deposit funds at the Temple in London and withdraw them in Acre against a letter of credit. Kings borrowed from the order. The Paris Temple served for long stretches as the treasury of the French crown. The knights answered to no bishop and no king, only to the Pope, and their network of fortified houses ran from Scotland to the Levant. Wealth, immunity, secrecy, and an army: it is difficult to design an institution better positioned to be envied, feared, and owed.
King Philip IV of France was owed nothing. He owed them.
As the familiar story goes, on Friday, October 13, 1307, Philip’s agents arrested the Templars across his kingdom in a single coordinated operation. The charges were calibrated for maximum horror: the knights denied Christ at initiation, spat or trampled on the cross, exchanged obscene kisses, and worshipped an idol, sometimes described as a bearded head, to which the name Baphomet became attached. Confessions followed, extracted under torture and frequently recanted. The order was dissolved by papal decree in 1312. The last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burned in Paris in 1314, reportedly proclaiming the order’s innocence from the fire. The debts died with the order.
Most modern historians read the charges as a fabrication engineered by Philip’s lawyers to destroy a creditor too powerful to tax and too rich to tolerate. That reading is probably correct as far as the trial goes, and it teaches a lesson that should be written in ink: an accusation of crimes against children is a weapon that can kill a bank.
The trial, however, is not where the story ends, because five centuries later a scholar with no stake in Philip’s debts claimed the idol had left fingerprints.
You can read some of the actual Templar trial transcripts here.
What the Plates Show
Hammer-Purgstall assembled a catalog of objects he said had been recovered from former Templar properties, imperial collections, and churches across what are now Austria, Germany, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, with a few from France: idols, caskets, bowls, coins, and bas-reliefs cut into church walls. Per Twyman’s editorial notes, most of those churches no longer exist, and some of the towns that held them have changed names. Aside from the trial records themselves and Jules Michelet’s documentation, this catalog is the most important body of material ever assembled on the Templar idol.
A word on the images you are about to see. The plates reproduced here are from Thomas Wright’s The Worship of the Generative Powers During the Middle Ages of Western Europe, privately printed in London in 1865, which redrew a number of the same artifacts for an English readership four decades after Hammer-Purgstall. Wright was working downstream of the original treatise, sometimes engraving objects Hammer-Purgstall described but had not illustrated. They still have the power to stop a reader cold.
The recurring figure is a horned or crowned being, sometimes female, more often androgynous, bearded and breasted at once. Some figures are covered in eyes. Some have two faces, recalling the double-faced head certain Templars described under interrogation. On the lid of a coffer reportedly found in Burgundy, the crowned figure holds two chains, with the sun hanging from one and the moon from the other, both faces inverted and scowling, dragged down out of the sky. Beneath the figure’s feet sit a seven-pointed star, a pentagram, and a human skull.
Around the image below run inscriptions in a deliberate cipher of mixed alphabets, Greek words in Arabic letters and Arabic in Greek, sometimes anagrammatized. The name they repeat is Mete, which Hammer-Purgstall connected to Metis, the Greek personification of wisdom. Other scenes he interpreted as records of ritual orgies, the abuse of boys, and the sacrifice of children and animals, performed by smiling participants under the gaze of the idol. I am describing these at the level of category deliberately, and that is where they will stay in this essay. For paid subscribers, I keep a working archive of the primary sources behind this investigation, including the 1865 Wright volume that preserves many of these engravings, the same material I am drawing on to reconstruct what Hammer-Purgstall believed these images revealed.
Hammer-Purgstall’s conclusion was that the Templars, or a current within them, were never Christians at all. They were heirs of the Ophite Gnostics, the sect that revered the serpent of Genesis and every villain of scripture for their opposition to the creator. Baphomet was no demon’s name. It was a title, Baphe Meteos, the Baptism of Wisdom, the order’s supreme rite. The charges of 1307 were not invented, he argued. They were garbled courtroom descriptions of a real secret religion, and the objects in his plates were its surviving equipment, some of it built into the fabric of churches where congregations had prayed beneath it for centuries without knowing what they were looking at. Because Freemasonry of his own era claimed descent from the Templars, the treatise landed as an accusation against the living as much as the dead.
The Theology of the Uprooting
What gives the treatise its weight is that Hammer-Purgstall did more than catalog horrors. He decoded a coherent theology out of them, and the theology explains the images.
Mete, he argued, was a dark Gnostic version of Sophia, divine Wisdom. In mainstream Christianity, Sophia is a sanctioned concept. In the Gnostic systems, she is a fallen figure, the goddess whose miscarriage produced the Demiurge, the malformed creator of this world, who rules it through his archons, the planets and stars that administer fate. The Gnostic’s task is escape: obtain gnosis in this life, stay awake after death, and slip the wheel of forced reincarnation that the archons turn.
Read the Burgundy coffer again with that key. The androgynous figure pulling the sun and moon down from the heavens by chains is not decoration. It is the program. Mete is uprooting the world system, dragging down the archons, freeing the reborn from the chains of their masters. One formula Hammer-Purgstall kept finding encoded on the idols, in the treatise’s rendering, declares that the distinguished charity of Mete uproots the enemy, where the enemy is the creator god himself.
The bowls in his catalog he connected to the fourth discourse of the Corpus Hermeticum, in which God fills a great mixing bowl with mind and sends it down from heaven, and a herald invites humanity to immerse themselves in it and be perfected. The ritual bowls were that bowl, he argued, and so, he believed, was the Holy Grail, with the Grail romances read as Templar Gnostic allegory. He was aware, through the Danish bishop Frederik Münter’s reported discovery in the Vatican archives, of an alleged secret Templar rule called the Book of the Baptism of Fire, and it is fire that dominates his most disturbing plate: a small child standing in a flaming bowl. Hammer-Purgstall insisted on reading it as allegory, the initiate depicted as a child because not yet matured in wisdom, dissolved in flame as the soul is freed from the body and its fate. Whether that image records a metaphor or a practice is, in miniature, the entire question this file exists to answer.
The transgressive acts in the plates had a theological logic too, in his reading. Procreative sex serves the Demiurge, locking new souls into the prison of matter. Transgression against the creator’s rules, including the use of the young, steals his power and reverses his work. Centuries later, Aleister Crowley, who took Baphomet as his magical name at the head of the Ordo Templi Orientis, would build a system around a creed lifted from Rabelais, do what thou wilt, with love declared the law. The vocabulary softens. The inversion underneath is the same one Hammer-Purgstall claimed to find carved on the coffers: a religion in which the path upward runs through the violation of the order of creation, and the most absolute violation available involves a child.
The Man Who Reopened the Case
My investigation begins with the man himself, because his biography is stranger than his treatise.
Joseph Hammer was born in Graz in 1774 and trained at Vienna’s Oriental Academy, the school that produced the empire’s interpreters. In the Habsburg service, an interpreter was never merely a translator. He was the crown’s eyes inside foreign courts. Hammer was posted to the embassy in Istanbul in 1799, accompanied British operations against the French in Egypt, and in 1809 was sent into Napoleon’s Paris to negotiate the return of manuscripts looted from Vienna’s libraries. He spent his prime working under Metternich, the chancellor who ran the most sophisticated surveillance and diplomatic intelligence operation in Europe.
In 1816, two years before the treatise, he married Caroline von Henikstein, daughter of Joseph von Henikstein, one of Vienna’s prominent financiers and a celebrated patron of the arts who had counted Mozart among his friends. The marriage made Hammer financially independent for life. His brother-in-law Alfred would rise to become Chief of the General Staff of the Austrian army. In 1835 a Scottish countess, the widow of his closest friend, bequeathed him the Purgstall estates and name, and in 1847 the Emperor approved the Academy of Sciences he had lobbied a decade for, with Hammer-Purgstall as its first president. He remains a national treasure in Austria; the country’s Oriental Society still bears his name.
The family he married into carries its own history, and it is the part of this file I am actively working. The Heniksteins descended from the Hönig family of Bohemia, imperial tobacco-monopoly holders and army provisioners under Maria Theresa, among the handful of privileged Jewish families tolerated in Vienna, operating as wholesalers and bankers between Vienna and Prague. Within a single generation, that family split three ways over the question every elite Jewish house in the empire faced. Israel Hönig was ennobled in 1789 while remaining Jewish, the first such case in Austrian history, and was buried in a Jewish cemetery. His brothers Adam Albert and Lazar converted to Catholicism in 1781, and Adam Albert’s line became the Heniksteins, directing a Moravian bank and merging fully into the throne-and-altar establishment of restoration Vienna. A third branch was baptized together after their mother’s death. One family, one generation, three answers to the question of who they would be inside the Habsburg order.
Hammer married into the converted branch. So the picture, assembled, is this: a career intelligence-adjacent diplomat in Metternich’s Vienna, newly funded by a converted banking family, publishes the blackest accusation in European history against a dissolved order of bankers, in a form that strikes at the Freemasonry of his own day. A man with his access could examine collections, church records, and imperial holdings no ordinary scholar would ever touch, which is a reason to take his catalog seriously. A man embedded that deeply in restoration politics also lived among people with interests, and the question of whose interests the treatise served is a question of loyalty I have not yet resolved. I am tracing his correspondence, his sources, and the money. This essay is the opening entry in that file, not its conclusion.
Propaganda or True?
The case against Hammer-Purgstall is real. I am still actively investigating his background and reliability as a source, much like A.E. Waite. His scholarship had enemies before the treatise ever appeared; the Prussian orientalist Heinrich Friedrich von Diez devoted an entire volume to attacking his competence. Later historians, Peter Partner’s The Murdered Magicians being the standard treatment, filed the treatise under myth-making rather than history. The provenance of the artifacts is the soft spot: some may be genuine medieval objects with no demonstrable Templar connection, some may be products of a later esoteric revival, some may be outright forgeries. A few critics went further and accused Hammer-Purgstall of inventing the pictures himself, an extraordinary charge against a scholar of his standing, made, in most cases, by people who had never opened his book.
Here is what almost nobody knows, because almost nobody has looked. Twyman tracked two of the artifacts to the back catalog of the British Museum, where they sit off display. One corresponds to an illustration in the treatise. The other corresponds to an object Hammer-Purgstall described but never illustrated, which is its own quiet argument: a forger of pictures does not leave behind a matching object he never drew. Twyman paid out of pocket to have both coffers professionally photographed from every angle, the first complete photographic record ever made of them, published in Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled with Alexander Rivera.
So the honest position, the same one the archaeologists of Carthage are forced into, is to hold the tension. The artifacts may be forgeries, and Hammer-Purgstall may have been a brilliant man seduced by a pattern, or worse, a brilliant man serving one. The artifacts may be authentic objects of some other cult, wrongly pinned to the Templars. Or the most decorated orientalist of his age may have been right, and the evidence was dismissed by reputation, scattered by neglect, and locked in drawers nobody will open.
I am not going to resolve that for you, because on the present state of the evidence nobody honestly can. Each answer is terrible in its own way. If the charge was propaganda, then the most effective weapon ever deployed against a banking institution was a story about the ritual abuse of children, invented by a state, certified by torture, and successful beyond Philip’s dreams. If the charge was true, then a multinational order holding the deposits and secrets of kings ran a hidden religion with children on its altars, and Christendom buried the evidence twice, once in 1314 and once in 1818.
The two answers are not mutually exclusive across history, and that is the part nobody wants to admit, because living in the gray zone is scary.
Nevertheless, that is where I spend most of my time and investigation and will continue because truth is greater than sides.
So here is my commitment, plainly stated. I am going deeper into Baphomet than I have gone before, deeper than my own book went, deeper than any researcher has managed with this material. The treatise has never been fully reckoned with. The artifacts have never been tested. Hammer-Purgstall’s correspondence and sources have never been traced by anyone asking the questions I am asking. Doing this properly means archives in Vienna and London, rare volumes that exist in a handful of libraries, and scanning trips that take time and cost money. Every document I recover goes into the working archive, and every finding publishes here first. Paid subscribers are not buying a newsletter. They are funding the investigation and receiving its evidence as it surfaces. If you want the bottom of this, this is how we reach it together.
The Question Under the Question
Why do banking power and accusations of crimes against children keep arriving in the same file?
Consider what an institution like the Temple actually held. Not just money. Deposits create records, debts create leverage, and an order whose houses received the confessions, fortunes, and heirs of the powerful was a compromise engine whether or not any idol ever stood in its chapels. A state confronting such an institution has exactly two options: control it or destroy it. The accusation, true or false, is how you destroy it. The membership, true or false, is how you control it. Five centuries later, an insider married into Viennese finance and embedded in the empire’s intelligence world reopened the case, and the scholarly establishment responded by making his evidence unreadable for two hundred years.
The image, meanwhile, escaped. When Éliphas Lévi drew his famous goat-headed Baphomet in 1854, the figure that now stands for occultism itself, he pointed his readers to recently discovered monuments as proof of the Templar idol. Those monuments were Hammer-Purgstall’s plates. The exoteric world buried the book but the esoteric one built the modern image of the devil’s god from its illustrations.
Hammer-Purgstall derived Mete from Metis, and Metis carries a story. She was the first wife of Zeus, and when she became pregnant, Zeus swallowed her whole, because a prophecy said her child would one day replace him. The king of the gods consumed the mother to forestall the child. His father Kronos, whom the Romans called Saturn, had done the same thing a generation earlier, devouring his own children at birth to keep his throne. Behind the strange bearded goddess on the coffers, behind the accusation that destroyed a bank, behind every version of this story, stands the same figure: the old power that eats the young rather than be replaced by them.
I have already followed it all the way down. The piece is called Jeffrey Epstein and the God Who Eats Children, and it traces this accusation past the Templars, past the trial records, to where it began: a bronze idol with a furnace for a belly, Saturn devouring his sons, a valley south of Jerusalem whose name became our word for hell, and the reason the newly released Epstein files read like something archaeologists have seen before. The first half, from the Valley of Hinnom to the modern day, is free to read. The second half, the half that names the feeders, is for paid subscribers.
Jeffrey Epstein and the God Who Eats Children
The history of sacrifice is often told as a story of religious progress: the raw offering becomes refined, the slaughtered animal becomes symbolic food, blood becomes wine, flesh becomes bread, and the altar grows less visibly violent with each theological transformation. There is truth in that telling. Beneath it, however, sits a darker question. What was being replaced? What stood at the beginning of the chain, before the bull and the ram and the lamb, before bread and wine?
The oldest and most terrible answer is the child.
More on the occult Epstein here:
The Arms Race for the Holy Grail
The Pythagoreans drowned a man for leaking a mathematical truth. The Freemasons encoded geometry into a global fraternal order. Peter Thiel is funding the quest to defeat death. Jeffrey Epstein called it 'harvesting.' The UFO community calls it 'free energy.' Physicists call it entropy. These are
Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The Midnight Academy podcast and the author of five books, including Baphomet Revealed and Evil Archaeology. Her forthcoming book is Codex Machina: How AI Is Decoding Ancient Civilizations, Technologies, and Lost Languages in Our Search for Meaning. Find her at drheatherlynn.com.
Subscribe to The Midnight Academy: https://www.youtube.com/@DrHeatherLynn
Sources and Further Reading
Barber, Malcolm. The Trial of the Templars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Crowley, Aleister. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. London: Mandrake Press, 1929.
Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph von. “Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum.” Fundgruben des Orients 6. Vienna, 1818. English translation commissioned and published by Tracy R. Twyman, 2018.
Lévi, Éliphas. Dogme et rituel de la haute magie. 2 vols. Paris: Germer Baillière, 1854–1856.
Lynn, Heather. Baphomet Revealed: The Mystery of the Mysteries. New Page Books, 2024.
Partner, Peter. The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Twyman, Tracy R., and Alexander Rivera. Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled. 2015.
Wright, Thomas. The Worship of the Generative Powers During the Middle Ages of Western Europe. London, 1866.
Yes, the practices of extracting life force, and opening up portals to the astral realm, for wealth and power, are ancient. The current system of offering, intitiation, ritual and sacrifice has grown to the extent to which almost all of planet earth is captured, success and power in this realm requires selling your soul, participating in the rituals and initiations. It would blow your hair back as a sentient soulful empath to recognize the pervasiveness of evil in this realm, and the shredding of the veil to the evil in the astral realm, and the recycling of souls through this extraction model. Some are waking up to it after reading the Epstein files, the adrenochrome, the jerky, the horrors of the order. With the emergence of AI, the digital baphomet, it is more urgent than ever to bring these truths into the light of day, before the extraction loop is closed and the few remaining remnants who wish to remain in relationship with the obsolute divinity, as a divine causal sentient soul traversing the terrestrial realm, with full divine life force in a body, not to be extracted by evil.
That is my dream and the original collective dream before it was hijacked. Thank you for your work. May your life force be strong and contained as you expose the pits of hell for all to see.
May Almighty God bless you & protect you as you delve even farther into that murky abyss.