

Contrary to claims made against the Church by detractors, LaVey never claimed to have created this particular symbol. When he chose to turn his magic circle, the Order of the Trapezoid, into the Church of Satan, he decided that the symbol was the one which most fully embodied the principles which were the bedrock of the Satanic church. This symbol was later used in Maurice Bessy's book A Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural, with the words " Samael" and " Lilith" removed.ĭuring his years of research into the "black arts", LaVey had come across this book and added it to his collection. Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan based his “Sigil of Baphomet” on this image.

The upper Pentacle includes The concept of an inverted pentagram being a representation of evil and an upright pentagram symbolizing holiness originated with the 19th-century French occultist Eliphas Lévi. The lower four points represented the four elements of the material world, while the uppermost point represented spirit ruling over matter. The Pentagrammaton is an esoteric version of the Hebrew name of Jesus, Yeshua, (ישוע) by adding the letter shin (ש) in the middle of the Tetragrammaton divine name Yod-He-Vav-He, (יהוה). In the book, de Guaita also showed an upright pentagram with the Pentagrammaton (יהשוה) at the vertices of the pentagram.

With the pentagram inverted, matter is ruling over spirit, a condition associated with evil. The original goat pentagram containing the Hebrew letters at the five points of the pentagram spelling out Leviathan (לויתן), the ancient serpent from the biblical Chaoskampf, first appeared in the book La Clef de la Magie Noire by French occultist Stanislas de Guaita, in 1897. The familiar goat's head inside an inverted pentagram did not become the foremost symbol of Satanism until the founding of the Church of Satan in 1966. The Church describes the symbol as the ".preeminent visual distillation of the iconoclastic philosophy of Satanism." The sigil has been called a "material pentagram" representational of carnality and earthy principles. The Sigil of Baphomet is the official insignia of the Church of Satan, first appearing on the cover of The Satanic Mass album in 1968, and adorning the cover of The Satanic Bible the following year.
