EsoteriaA library of sacred & hidden knowledge
Liber XXIV · Satanism

Liber XXIV · Satanism

The Satanic Temple's Baphomet Statue: Detroit 2015 and After

The Satanic Temple's bronze Baphomet statue: the Oklahoma Ten Commandments dispute, the 2015 Detroit unveiling, its roots in Lévi and the Arkansas campaign.

7 min read 1,648 words Updated

The Satanic Temple's Baphomet statue is a bronze monument, roughly 2.6 metres (8.5 feet) tall, depicting the winged, goat-headed figure of Baphomet seated on a throne with two children looking up at it. The Temple commissioned it in 2014 as a proposed addition to the grounds of the Oklahoma State Capitol, where a privately funded Ten Commandments monument stood, and unveiled it before several hundred people in Detroit on 25 July 2015. Never installed on public land, the statue became the best-known image of a new, non-theistic and politically active Satanism and a lasting test case in American debates over religion in public spaces.

The Oklahoma Ten Commandments Dispute§

In 2009 the Oklahoma legislature authorised a monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the State Capitol in Oklahoma City, to be paid for with private donations. Sponsored by a state representative, the granite tablet was installed in November 2012. The American Civil Liberties Union sued, arguing that it breached the state constitution's ban on using public property to support any religion.

The monument also drew a different kind of response. If the Capitol grounds were open to one religious monument, several groups argued, they must be open to others. Hindu, humanist and parody religious organisations submitted proposals, and in December 2013 the recently founded Satanic Temple announced that it too would offer a monument. The Temple had been established in 2013 by two activists using the names Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry, and had already attracted attention with a satirical rally in Florida. Unlike the Church of Satan, which avoided political campaigns, it used Satanic imagery deliberately to challenge what it saw as religious privilege in public life.

Designing the Baphomet Monument§

In January 2014 the Temple released a design and began crowdfunding. The sculptor Mark Porter modelled the figure in clay and the finished work was cast in bronze, weighing roughly a tonne; the total cost was reported at about 100,000 US dollars. The model was Baphomet as drawn by the French occultist Éliphas Lévi: a winged, goat-headed figure with a pentagram on its brow, one hand raised and one lowered, seated in a meditative posture.

Porter and the Temple made two significant changes. They added a boy and a girl gazing up at the figure with apparent trust, which the Temple said expressed Baphomet as a guardian and teacher rather than a menace, and they gave the figure a masculine torso rather than the female breasts of Lévi's deliberately androgynous design, a departure several commentators noted. The Temple also described the statue as interactive: its lap could serve as a seat for visitors, in the manner of a public sculpture. Supporters saw the composition as dignified and humane; opponents saw a mockery of Christianity placed alongside children.

The Temple's own statements framed the figure in terms of its Seven Tenets, which emphasise compassion, justice, bodily autonomy, scientific reasoning and the acknowledgement of fallibility. In this reading Baphomet stands for reconciliation of opposites and for the questioning of arbitrary authority, values the Temple associates with the literary Satan of the Romantic poets rather than with a supernatural being.

The Unveiling in Detroit, July 2015§

On 30 June 2015 the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled, by seven votes to two, that the Ten Commandments monument violated the state constitution and had to be removed. It was taken down in October. With Oklahoma no longer an option, the Temple decided to unveil the statue elsewhere, and its Detroit chapter organised the event.

The unveiling took place on the night of 25 July 2015 in an industrial building in Detroit, whose location was disclosed to ticket holders only shortly beforehand after an earlier venue withdrew. Several hundred people attended. Christian groups and some local clergy held protests and prayer vigils in the city, and the event received wide national and international coverage. For many observers it was the first time they had heard of a Satanic organisation that described itself as atheistic and campaigned on civil liberties.

Baphomet Before the Satanic Temple§

The Temple chose a figure with a long and complicated history. The name first appears in the trials of the Knights Templar between 1307 and 1312, when some knights, under pressure and often torture, confessed to venerating an idol or head called Baphomet. Most historians regard the word as an Old French corruption of "Mahomet" and the charges as fabricated by the French crown; see our guide to Templar legends. In the nineteenth century writers such as the Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall revived the name as evidence of secret Gnostic rites.

Lévi gave Baphomet its modern form in Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854–1856). His "Sabbatic Goat" was not a devil but a hieroglyph of the Absolute and of the balance of opposites: male and female, light and dark, the words solve and coagula on its arms. Later occultists kept the image: Aleister Crowley took Baphomet as his name within the Ordo Templi Orientis, while the anti-Masonic hoaxes of Léo Taxil in the 1890s turned it into an emblem of imagined devil worship. The Church of Satan's Sigil of Baphomet, a goat's head within an inverted pentagram adopted in the 1960s, adapted an illustration from Stanislas de Guaita's 1897 book on black magic. The Satanic Temple's statue thus draws on Lévi's esoteric meaning and the popular association of the goat with Satan at once.

Arkansas, Salem and Later Displays§

The statue's next campaign was in Arkansas. In 2015 the state legislature passed an act authorising a privately funded Ten Commandments monument at the State Capitol in Little Rock. It was installed in June 2017 and destroyed within a day by a man who drove his car into it; the same man had damaged the Oklahoma monument in 2014. A replacement was installed in 2018. The Satanic Temple applied to place the Baphomet nearby and, in August 2018, brought the statue to a rally outside the Capitol. The Temple and other plaintiffs challenged the monument in federal court, and the litigation continued for years.

Between campaigns the statue has generally been kept at the Temple's headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts, where it is a visitor attraction. It features prominently in Penny Lane's documentary Hail Satan? (2019). Smaller Satanic Temple holiday displays have since appeared in state capitols alongside Christmas nativity scenes; one, a ram-headed figure placed in the Iowa State Capitol in December 2023, was destroyed by a visitor who was later prosecuted. In 2019 the Temple was recognised by the US Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt church, a status it has used in further arguments for equal treatment.

What the Statue Means: Satire, Religion and Pluralism§

Critics have often called the Baphomet project a stunt, and the Temple has never hidden its use of provocation. Scholars of religion, however, have taken it seriously. Joseph P. Laycock argues that the Temple is a genuine religious movement that uses Satan as a symbol of rebellion and solidarity, and that campaigns like the Baphomet monument expose how American law and public culture define "religion." Others read the statue in the tradition of Romantic Satanism traced by historians such as Ruben van Luijk and Per Faxneld, in which Satan represents freedom, knowledge and resistance to tyranny.

For opponents, a monument to Baphomet beside the Ten Commandments was an insult to the faith of most citizens. For the Temple, the point was that the state should endorse neither. Either way, the statue has outlasted the controversy that produced it, and it now belongs to the history of Satanism surveyed in our article What Is Satanism?, standing at a considerable distance from the fears of the Satanic Panic a generation earlier.

Frequently asked questions§

Where is the Satanic Temple's Baphomet statue now?§

When not taken to rallies or exhibitions, it has generally been kept at the Satanic Temple's headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts. It has never been permanently installed on public land.

Why did the Satanic Temple make a Baphomet statue?§

It was offered as a monument for the Oklahoma State Capitol after a Ten Commandments monument was placed there in 2012. The Temple argued that if one religion's monument was allowed on public property, others must be allowed too, and that the better course was to allow none.

Do members of the Satanic Temple worship Baphomet?§

No. The Satanic Temple describes itself as non-theistic. It treats Satan and Baphomet as symbols of rebellion, reason and compassion rather than as beings to be worshipped.

Is the statue based on Éliphas Lévi's Baphomet?§

Yes. Its posture, wings, goat's head and pentagram follow Lévi's 1856 illustration, though the sculptor added two children and gave the figure a masculine rather than androgynous torso.

Sources and further reading§