from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baphomet

A Baphomet is an idol or image. Variously, it has been described as: an idol with a human skull, a head with two faces, a cat idol and a bearded head. The word's questionable etymology is discussed below.

During the suppression of the Knights Templar it was claimed by the Inquisition that the knights used a Baphomet as part of their initiation ceremonies. This, among other assertions, sealed their Order as heretical.

A much more recent and well known depiction shows Baphomet in the form of a winged humanoid goat with a pair of breasts and a torch on his head between his horns. This image comes from Eliphas Lévi's 1854 Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (in English known as Transcendental Magic). Lévi's depiction, for all its fame, is not particularly authentic to the historical description from the Templar trials, although it is not unlike gargoyles found on several Templar-built churches— or Viollet-le-Duc's vivid gargoyles added to Notre Dame de Paris about the same time as Lévi's illustration.

Baphomet, as Lévi's illustration suggests, has occasionally been misunderstood as a synonym of Satan or a demon, a member of the hierarchy of Hell. Baphomet appears in that guise as a character in James Blish's The Day After Judgment. Jack Chick claims that he is a demon worshipped by Freemasons, a claim that apparently originated with the Taxil hoax. The head of Lévi's Baphomet was inscribed with a pentagram which is a symbol occasionally adopted by Wiccans and other students of the Occult. A goat head inscribed within an inverted pentagram, the upper points filled by the horns, the side points by the ears, and the bottom by the bearded chin, is a symbol occasionally adopted by Satanists and other followers of a Left-Hand Path. The head, horns and torch together take the form of a Fleur de lys.

A different interpretation of Baphomet is given by the Satanic group the Order of Nine Angles. According to the ONA, Baphomet is female, and is depicted as a beautiful mature women, naked from the waist up, who holds in her hand the severed head of a bearded man. "The name of Baphomet is regarded by Traditional Satanists as meaning "the mistress (or mother) of blood" - the (Satanic) Mistress who sometimes washes in the blood of her foes and whose hands are thereby stained. (See ‘The Ceremony of Recalling’.)" [1] (http://camlad9.tripod.com/baphomet1.html)