A Transgender Devil No More: The hyper-masculinization of the Baphomet in contemporary occulture and television

This paper examines the cisnormative passage that the representations of Baphomet go through, from a dually-sexed, androgynous, anthropomorphic goat-person drawn by Éliphas Lévi to a rebellious figure connected to Satan/Lucifer with his breasts intentionally removed by the Satanic Temple. This removal, an intentional action of censorship, is then mimicked in popular television and popular culture. The removal of the breasts of the Baphomet by TST demonstrates a rejection of gender variance, an embrace of the masculine cisgender body, and a production of gender complementarity. Challenging historians of the devil like Jeffrey Burton Russell, this paper disrupts this expected outcome of Satanic figures as usually male (and occasionally female), and instead reintroduces the historically genderfucked Baphomet figure. This paper concludes by thinking through how the erasure of gender variance in the archives by contemporary Satanists provides an opportunity for Evangelical religious communities to claim sole ownership of a trans Baphomet.