Baphomet is a figure rooted in the occult and Western esoteric traditions. The name first emerged in the 14th century during the Trials of the Knights Templar, when the order was accused of heresy for worshipping Baphomet as a demonic idol. Baphomet was reimagined by 19th century occultists amidst renewed debate over the suppression of the Templars.

The modern popular image of Baphomet was established by Éliphas Lévi in his 1856 work Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie. His Sabbatic Goat illustration depicts a winged, androgynous human-goat hybrid, a deliberate synthesis of binary opposites designed to represent the concept of perfect equilibrium. This Baphomet is a recurring symbol of occultism, widely adapted to represent the reconciliation of opposites, esoteric knowledge, and the summation of the universe.

The name Baphomet appeared in July 1098 in a letter about the siege of Antioch by the French Crusader Anselm of Ribemont:

Sequenti die aurora apparente, altis vocibus Baphometh invocaverunt; et nos Deum nostrum in cordibus nostris deprecantes, impetum facientes in eos, de muris civitatis omnes expulimus.

As the next day dawned, they [i.e. the inhabitants of Antioch] called loudly upon Baphometh; and we prayed silently in our hearts to God, then we attacked and forced all of them outside the city walls.

Raymond of Aguilers, a chronicler of the First Crusade, reports that the troubadours used the term Bafomet for Muhammad, and Bafumaria for a mosque. The name Bafometz later appeared around 1195 in the Provençal poems Senhors, per los nostres peccatz by the troubadour Gavaudan. Around 1250, a Provençal poem by Austorc d'Aorlhac bewailing the defeat of the Seventh Crusade again uses the name Bafomet for Muhammad. De Bafomet is also the title of one of four surviving chapters of an Occitan translation of Ramon Llull's earliest known work, the Libre de la doctrina pueril.

Baphomet was allegedly worshipped as a deity by the medieval order of the Knights Templar. King Philip IV of France had many French Templars simultaneously arrested, and then tortured into confessions in October 1307. The name Baphomet appeared in trial transcripts for the Inquisition of the Knights Templar that same year. Over 100 different charges had been leveled against the Templars, including heresy, homosexual relations, spitting and urinating on the cross, and sodomy. Most of them were dubious, as they were the same charges that were leveled against the Cathars and many of King Philip's enemies; he had earlier kidnapped Pope Boniface VIII and charged him with nearly identical offenses. Yet Malcolm Barber observes that historians "find it difficult to accept that an affair of such enormity rests upon total fabrication". The "Chinon Parchment suggests that the Templars did indeed spit on the cross", says Sean Martin, and that these acts were intended to simulate the kind of humiliation and torture that a Crusader might be subjected to if captured by the Saracens, where they were taught how to commit apostasy "with the mind only and not with the heart". Similarly, Michael Haag suggests that the simulated worship of Baphomet did indeed form part of a Templar initiation rite:

The indictment (acte d'accusation) published by the court of Rome set forth ... "that in all the provinces they had idols, that is to say, heads, some of which had three faces, others but one; sometimes, it was a human skull ... That in their assemblies, and especially in their grand chapters, they worshipped the idol as a god, as their saviour, saying that this head could save them, that it bestowed on the order all its wealth, made the trees flower, and the plants of the earth to sprout forth."