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Singer_of_the_Song 03-19-07, 05:17 PM

Now that I've caught your attention with that title, I discovered something the other day that made me laugh out loud and come up with a fun idea for a great conspiracy in D&D. Basically, according to several scholars, Baphomet = Pistis Sophia. Explanation: The medieval chivalric order of the Knights Templar was founded to protect Christian pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land (mostly modern Israel & Syria) after the European conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. In the beginning, the Knights Templar battled the Muslim inhabitants of the region with great vigor. After a while, however, in some areas the Knights Templar settled down, learned Arabic, and began to interact heavily with the local populace. They sent delegations to various Muslim princes, and at the same time started to establish strongholds back in Europe. The Templars grew extremely rich through trade and gifts from the European nobility. There are many contemporaneous accounts of the Knights Templar fraternizing with the Muslim "enemy". Several Muslim chroniclers refer to certain Templars as friends, and there are complaints by non-Templar European Christians that the Templars allowed Muslims to say their daily prayers within Templar-held structures. In at least one instance the Templars protected a Muslim from belligerent Europeans. The Templars held all their meetings in secret, and zealously guarded the make-up and certain activities of their order. Because of their wealth and power, many other Europeans began to envy and fear them, and many rumors began to swirl about the order. To this day the rumors have not been entirely confirmed or debunked by scholars. One such rumor held that the Templars worshipped a disembodied head. Some accounts say that the head appeared like that of a poised, intelligent woman. Others hold it was like that of a bearded man. The darkest accounts say it had three fused faces and was made of dessicated human flesh. Supposedly, the head was known as Baphomet (some scholars believe Baphomet is a corruption of Mohammed). Other rumors held that the Templars had converted to another faith: commonly Islam, sometimes Judaism, and sometimes Gnosticism. What is known, however, is that the Templars often coded documents to keep information away from the prying eyes of other European knights and nobles. Often, the Templars encoded their messages in Hebrew gibberish; that is, nonsensical documents using the Hebrew alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet used at the time (I don't know if it is the same as modern Hebrew, but I would venture yes because the language is so old) had 22 letters. If one lines up the alphabet in two vertical columns of 11 (letters 1-11 in column A and letters 12-22 in column B) some scholars believe one can crack the Templar's code and decipher their documents. All one has to do is cross-reference the letters and replace the starting letter with the appropriate one in the second column. From there, one translates the obtained Hebrew letters into Greek. The Greek translation will make sense, and will be of course what the Templars were telling each other. One such scholar translater several Templar documents, and noted that Baphomet translates as Sofia. Sofia/Sophia is the Greek term for wisdom, and is a concept in Gnosticism related to the emanations of God and the demiurge. Some scholars view this as evidence the Templars were, in secret, Gnostics, carrying on Gnosticism after it had been banned several hundred years earlier by the Church. They think that the Templars may have converted to Gnosticism via exposure to "Eastern knowledge" obtained through their Muslim and/or Jewish friends. In turn, the concept of Sophia is related to the Gnostic text, Pistis Sophia which was, of course, the inspiration/an object of homage for the ruler of Solania of the same name. Therefore, Baphomet and Pistis Sophia are one and the same. It is unknown to what depths or heights this conspiracy extends, but currently a being rules both a part of the Abyss and a part of Celestia. I think it is a cool and fun idea for a major CE and a major LG entity, polar opposites, to be in fact two faces of the same being. Anyways, I just thought this was fun, maybe an inspiration for a cool campaign, and something I wanted to share. :)