“How little the philosophy of the old secret doctrine was understood, is illustrated in the atrocious persecutions of the Templars by the Church, and in the accusation of their worshipping the Devil under the shape of the goat – Baphomet! Without going into the old Masonic mysteries, there is not a Mason – of those we mean who do know something – but has an idea of the true relation that Baphomet bore to Azaze, the scapegoat of the wilderness, whose character and meaning are entirely perverted in the Christian translations. “This terrible and venerable name of God”, says Lanci, librarian to the Vatican, “through the pen of biblical glossers, has been a devil, a mountain, a wilderness, and a he-goat.” In Mackenzie’s Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia, the author very correctly remarks that “this word should be divided into Azaz and El”, for “it signifies God of Victory, but is here used in the sense of author of Death, in contrast to Jehovah, the author of Life; the latter received a dead goat as an offering.”
The Hindu Trinity is composed of three personages, which are convertible into one. The Trimurti is one, and in its abstraction indivisible, and yet we see a metaphysical division taking place from the first, and while Brahma, though collectively representing the three, remains behind the scenes, Vishnu is the Life-Giver, the Creator, and the Preserver, and Siva is the Destroyer, and the Death-giving deity.
“Death to the Life-Giver, life to the Death-dealer. The symbolical antithesis is grand and beautiful”, says Gliddon. “Deus est Daemon inversus” of the kabalists now becomes clear. It is but the intense and cruel desire to crush out the last vestige of the old philosophies by perverting their meaning, for fear that their own dogmas should not be rightly fathered on them, which impels the Catholic Church to carry on such a systematic persecution in regard to Gnostics, Kabalists, and even the comparatively innocent Masons.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 