The Baphomet: what Lévi said he was drawing
Éliphas Lévi made the most famous image of Satan in the world, signed it, and then explained sign by sign that it was a diagram of balance. The first thing he points out is which way the star on its forehead is pointing.
A goat-headed figure sits on a globe. It has a woman's breasts, feathered wings, a scaled belly, a torch burning between its horns, and a caduceus where its sex would be. One arm points up, the other down, and they are lettered SOLVE and COAGULA. This is the picture almost every modern image of the devil descends from.
Éliphas Lévi drew it for the frontispiece of his own book in 1856 and signed it at the foot. He then wrote two pages taking it apart sign by sign, and the two pages say, repeatedly and in several ways, that it is not what you think it is.
He starts with the star
Le bouc qui est représenté dans notre frontispice porte sur le front le signe du pentagramme, la pointe en haut, ce qui suffit pour en faire un symbole de lumière.
Éliphas Lévi, 1856. The goat represented in our frontispiece bears on its forehead the sign of the pentagram, point upward, which is enough to make it a symbol of light.
That is the first thing he tells you about the figure, and it is a correction issued before anyone has had time to misread it. He has already defined the difference elsewhere in the same book.
The pentagram with two points in the ascendant represents Satan as the goat of the Sabbath; when one point is in the ascendant, it is the sign of the Saviour.
Lévi, in Waite's English, 1896, the Ritual, chapter V
So the direction of a five-pointed star is not decoration in his system. It is the whole of the sign. His goat wears it point up, which by his own definition puts it on the opposite side of the line from the thing everyone takes it for.
The hands
Il fait des deux mains le signe de l'occultisme, et montre en haut la lune blanche de Chesed, et en bas la lune noire de Géburah. Ce signe exprime le parfait accord de la miséricorde avec la justice.
Lévi, 1856. He makes the sign of occultism with both hands, pointing above to the white moon of Chesed and below to the black moon of Geburah. This sign expresses the perfect accord of mercy with justice.
Chesed and Geburah are two of the ten sephiroth of the Kabbalah, mercy and severity. Lévi paints them as a bright moon and a dark one and has the figure hold both at once, one hand to each. The arms are lettered SOLVE and COAGULA, dissolve and bind, the two motions of the alchemists' work, and he says where he got the pair of arms.
L'un de ses bras est féminin, l'autre masculin, comme dans l'androgyne de Khunrath dont nous avons dû réunir les attributs à ceux de notre bouc, puisque c'est un seul et même symbole.
Lévi, 1856. One of its arms is feminine, the other masculine, as in the androgyne of Khunrath, whose attributes we had to combine with those of our goat, since it is one and the same symbol.
Khunrath's androgyne is in this archive too, engraved two and a half centuries earlier. Lévi is not inventing a devil. He is assembling a composite out of things he has read, and he names his sources while he does it.
The body is a diagram
Le ventre couvert d'écailles c'est l'eau; le cercle qui est au-dessus, c'est l'atmosphère; les plumes qui viennent ensuite sont l'emblème du volatile; puis l'humanité est représentée par les deux mamelles et les bras androgynes de ce sphinx des sciences occultes.
Lévi, 1856. The scaled belly is water; the circle above it is the atmosphere; the feathers that come next are the emblem of the volatile; then humanity is represented by the two breasts and the androgyne arms of this sphinx of the occult sciences.
Read from the bottom up, the body is a ladder of the elements with humanity at the top. The torch between the horns is the same argument once more.
Le flambeau de l'intelligence qui brille entre ses cornes, est la lumière magique de l'équilibre universel: c'est aussi la figure de l'âme élevée au-dessus de la matière, bien que tenant à la matière même, comme la flamme tient au flambeau.
Lévi, 1856. The torch of intelligence burning between its horns is the magical light of universal equilibrium; it is also the figure of the soul raised above matter while still holding to matter, as the flame holds to the torch.
And then he says it outright
The dread Baphomet henceforth, like all monstrous idols, enigmas of antique science and its dreams, is only an innocent and even pious hieroglyph.
Lévi, in Waite's English, 1896
Innocent and even pious. That is the author of the image, in the book the image was drawn for, describing his own work.
What that does not settle
It does not make later uses of the figure wrong on their own terms. People took the picture and meant something else by it, and what they meant is a real fact about the picture's life. What Lévi's pages settle is narrower: whoever is claiming that this image was drawn as an image of Satan is contradicted by the man who drew it, in print, on the page facing it.
And there is one more thing worth noticing about the goat's head, because it is the part that does the most work in the modern reading, and Lévi explains that too.
The hideous head of the animal expresses horror of sin, for which the material agent, alone responsible, must alone and for ever bear the penalty.
Lévi, in Waite's English, 1896
The head is ugly on purpose, and what it is ugly about is sin. It is a warning, not a portrait. Every element of this figure is arguing for balance, and it has been read for a hundred and seventy years as an argument for its opposite, largely by people who never turned the page.