VI.1919.31 — Tablet: the Goat of Mendes (“the Baphomet Tablet”)

Rectangular tablet, black stone, carved in relief with a winged, goat-headed seated figure, the details picked out in gold; the arms lettered SOLVE and COAGULA; crescents at the upper left and lower right. 420 × 310 × 30 mm. English or French, c. 1860–1890.

Provenance: Order inventory of 1871 (“the Tablet of the Reconciler, very old”); the 1919 Deposit.

A black stone tablet carved in relief with a winged goat-headed figure, the arms lettered SOLVE and COAGULA, in a glass case before an exhibition wall reading Constructing Ancient Claims: A Critical History. — VI.1919.31 as presently displayed, in “Constructing Ancient Claims: A Critical History.” The case text states the Institute's position; the object, as ever, states the Order's.

Note. The iconography reproduces, in every particular, the engraving of the “Baphomet of Mendes” first published by Alphonse-Louis Constant (Éliphas Lévi) in Paris in 1856. The object is therefore no older than that date, and the inventory's “very old” is an instructive measure of the Order's reliability concerning its own possessions. The tablet is nonetheless among the finest pieces of the Deposit, and the Institute displays it as what it is: evidence of what the Victorian Order wished to be true.