The Pentagram : TheFive Points, Five Thousand Years

The Pentagram

The Pentagram :A Five Thousand Year History

Five Points, Five Thousand Years

The pentagram is the oldest star we own. It has meant health, truth, Christ, the cosmos and the Devil. The symbol never changed. We did.

A star with a reputation

Look around. The pentagram is everywhere, and nobody flinches. It sits on the flags of more than fifty nations. It marks the rank of a general and the badge of a sheriff. It crowns the Christmas tree in a Christian home. Children draw it without lifting the pen, pleased with the trick.

Then someone chalks one on a wall, and the room empties.

Same five lines. Same single unbroken stroke. The difference lives entirely in the head of the person looking. That is the strange thing about the pentagram. It is a mirror dressed as a star. Whatever an age fears or worships, it pours into those five points and then swears the result is ancient.

Most of what people “know” about the pentagram is wrong, or young, or both. The good news is that the real story is better. It runs five thousand years and crosses nearly every civilisation that ever picked up a stylus. Let us walk it.

Born in the mud

The oldest pentagrams we have were pressed into wet clay. Sumerian potters and scribes at Ur and Uruk were drawing the five pointed star by around 3500 BCE.^[1] This was not magic. It was admin.

In the proto cuneiform script the star worked as a logogram, a whole idea squeezed into a shape. Scholars read it as the sign UB, carrying the senses of corner, angle, region. It turns up on inventories and accounts, as ordinary as a tally mark.^[2] The first people to draw the pentagram used it to count grain and label corners. They did not worship it. They filed it.

Mesopotamia, though, rarely kept the practical and the cosmic apart for long. The same star attached itself to Ishtar, queen of heaven, and to Marduk.^[3] There is a reason. Watch the planet Venus across eight years and her wanderings against the stars trace five points, a near perfect pentagram drawn in slow motion.^[4] The Sumerians watched the sky with terrifying patience. It is hard not to suspect they noticed.

The symbol was not theirs alone. Flinders Petrie found it scratched on predynastic Egyptian pottery. Five thousand years ago, a world away and with no possible contact, potters of the Liangzhu culture in China carved a pentagram into the base of a ceramic plate.^[5] The shape kept arriving, on its own, wherever people looked hard at flowers, starfish and the night.

There is a clue in that. The pentagram hides the golden ratio in its bones; its crossing lines divide one another at roughly 1.618, the same proportion that runs through a five petalled flower and a sea star.^[6] Nature draws in fives. Humans noticed. The star is less an invention than a discovery.

The Greeks make it holy

The pentagram became charged when the Greeks got hold of it. By the sixth century BCE the followers of Pythagoras had taken it as a secret sign, a way for one member of the brotherhood to know another.^[7] They called it the pentalpha, seeing five letter As locked together, and they prized it for a reason no mystic could fake. They could prove it was beautiful.

The Pythagoreans were drunk on number. To them the star’s golden proportions were evidence that the universe was built on ratio and harmony, and that the human mind could perceive that order directly. Around its points they wrote the word hugieia. It means health, soundness, wholeness.^[8] It is the root of our word hygiene. The oldest “occult” meaning of the pentagram is, of all things, public sanitation.

By around 300 to 150 BCE the same star served as the official seal of Jerusalem, its points marked with the Hebrew letters of the city’s name.^[9] The symbol had become a passport. It said: you are among friends, and the world makes sense.

The most Christian star in England

Here is the part that tends to detonate dinner parties. For most of the last two thousand years, the pentagram was a Christian symbol.

The early Church read the five points as the five wounds of Christ, or as the five senses. It was protective, devotional, and cleansing. The medieval mind, which loved to find God in arithmetic, treated five as a number of incorruptibility.^[10].

The high point of all this is a poem. In the late fourteenth century an anonymous English genius wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and gave his hero a shield. On it, in pure gold, a pentagram. The poet stops the whole story to explain it. The star, he says, was devised by King Solomon as a token of truth. He calls it the “endless knot,” because the line crosses itself and never stops. Each point carries a fivefold virtue: the five senses, the five fingers, the five wounds of Christ, the five joys of Mary, and five moral virtues a knight should own.^[11].

Read that again. The most famous pentagram in English literature is a badge of Christian virtue, worn by a good man on his way to keep a promise that may cost him his head. No goats. No Devil. Just faith rendered as geometry.

The same shape was a working charm across Europe. In German folklore it was the Drudenfuss, drawn on thresholds to keep evil out, not in. Goethe knew this. In Faust, Mephistopheles is trapped in a room because a pentagram lies across the door, and can leave only because one corner was drawn badly.^[12] The star kept the Devil out. We have since hired it as his doorman.

The man in the star

The Renaissance gave the pentagram a body. In 1533 the German polymath Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa published his great work on occult philosophy and drew a naked man spread inside a pentagram, head at the top point, limbs reaching the other four.^[13] It is the Vitruvian idea in a single elegant shape. Man as microcosm. The body as a small model of the whole universe, held in the perfect figure.

It is worth heading off a confusion here, because it is the very kind this essay exists to dismantle. The man most people picture inside a star is not Agrippa’s. It is Leonardo’s, and he drew it around 1490, some forty years earlier. But Leonardo never drew a pentagram. His Vitruvian Man stands inside a circle and a square, and nothing else.^[14] The geometry comes straight from Vitruvius, the Roman architect, who a century before Christ held that the ideal body fits both figures: arms and legs spread to touch the circle, arms level and legs together to fill the square. No five pointed star anywhere in it.

The man inside a pentagram is Agrippa’s move, a generation later. People merge the two without noticing. They assume the Vitruvian Man is a pentagram, or that Leonardo smuggled the golden ratio and a secret star into it. He did not. His own notes work in plain whole numbers, and careful measurement of the drawing puts its key ratio nearer 0.61 than the golden 0.618.^[15] The hidden star is mostly a modern fancy, grown fat in the Da Vinci Code years and reluctant to leave. Leonardo and Agrippa drink from the same well: man as microcosm, the body as a small map of the cosmos. Leonardo drew that conviction as a circle and a square. Agrippa drew it as a star, helped by the plain fact that a spread body has five points, a head and four limbs. Leonardo is the pentagram’s cousin, not a member of the family. The star is Agrippa’s. The circle and the square are Leonardo’s.

Agrippa’s star is also where the figure quietly swallows the four elements and a fifth. Earth, water, air, fire, and at the crown, spirit. Spirit above matter.^[16] The pentagram now told a story about what a person is: an animal with something divine at the top, ideally in charge. It was still, overwhelmingly, a symbol of order.

Then came a Frenchman with a pen and a taste for drama.

The inversion

Almost everything modern people believe about the pentagram comes from one man, and he is not ancient. He is Victorian.

Éliphas Lévi was a trainee priest turned occultist. Between 1854 and 1856 he published Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, later translated as Transcendental Magic.^[17] In it he did something that would echo for the next century and a half. He moralised the star’s orientation.

One point up, Lévi wrote, the pentagram is the sign of the Saviour, of spirit ruling matter. Turn it over, two points up, and you have the goat of Mendes, the sign of evil, of matter smothering spirit. In the upended star, he saw the horns, ears and beard of a beast.^[18] The good star and the dark star are separated by a hundred and eighty degrees of rotation.

This is the hinge of the whole history. Before Lévi, the direction of the pentagram was largely indifferent. Medieval and Renaissance artists drew it either way without panic. Agrippa printed both.^[19] After Lévi, the inverted star carried a verdict.

It is worth pausing on the irony. Lévi did not believe in a literal Devil. He was a theorist of balance, of the “equilibrium of opposites.” His famous Baphomet, the winged goat with a torch between its horns, was meant as a symbol of reconciled contradictions, not an idol.^[20] He built a metaphor. The world took delivery of a monster.

How to manufacture a Devil

The goat’s head inside the inverted star, the image now stamped on a thousand album covers, has a paper trail. It is one of the better documented “ancient evils” in history, because its owners keep good records.

Lévi’s books contained no such drawing. The first printed engraving of a goat’s face inside an inverted pentagram appears in 1897, in La Clef de la Magie Noire by the French occultist Stanislas de Guaita. His version added the names Samael and Lilith and ringed the star with the word Leviathan in Hebrew. De Guaita’s assistant, the Freemason and tarot artist Oswald Wirth, refined the picture and printed his own versions.^[21].

In 1961 a French film historian, Maurice Bessy, reprinted the de Guaita design in a picture book on magic, translated into English in 1964 as A Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural. The image even rode on the cover. Nowhere in the book was it called the Sigil of Baphomet, or treated as anyone’s living emblem.^[22].

Then a showman found the book. Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966, leafed through Bessy, and decided this particular goat was the one. He cleaned up the lines, sharpened the eye, and put it on the cover of The Satanic Bible in 1969, the first time in print, for a mass audience, that the design was named the symbol of Baphomet. The Church later trademarked it.^[23].

Sit with that timeline. The world’s premier symbol of cosmic evil was popularised by a Victorian metaphysician, drawn by a feuding Rosicrucian, reprinted by a film buff, adopted by a carnival magician in 1960s San Francisco, and is now protected by trademark law. The Devil, it turns out, has a registered logo and an attorney.

By the Church of Satan’s own account, the men who built the symbol’s reputation mostly did not believe in it. They were ceremonial magicians who invented an imaginary cabal of wicked sorcerers, so that they might look respectable by comparison.^[24] They conjured a bogeyman to flee from. LaVey simply picked it up and wore it.

The reclaimed star

While one new religion was claiming the inverted star, another was claiming the upright one. And it, too, was new.

Modern Wicca took shape in the 1940s and 1950s, largely through Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant with a love of folklore and a gift for ceremony. He said he had been initiated into a surviving witch cult. Historians mostly see a fresh religion, stitched together from ceremonial magic, folklore and Victorian occultism, dressed in archaic language to feel old.^[25].

In Gardner’s system the pentacle, a disc bearing a pentagram, became one of the witch’s working tools, an emblem of earth, used to consecrate and to focus. The upright star, point to the heavens, stood for spirit presiding over the four elements: the old Renaissance idea, given a new home. In some traditions the inverted star marked a witch’s second degree of initiation, a meaning that predated LaVey entirely and had nothing to do with him.^[26].

So when a modern pagan tells you the pentagram is an ancient symbol of their faith, they are half right and half hopeful. The shape is ancient. Its use as the badge of Wicca is younger than the ballpoint pen. Tradition, here as so often, is a thing we build and then call inherited.

The panic that finished the job

The popular conviction that a pentagram means evil is not medieval. It is about forty years old, and it was televised.

In 1980 a Canadian psychiatrist and his patient published Michelle Remembers, a lurid memoir of supposed satanic abuse “recovered” under therapy and later thoroughly discredited. It lit a fuse. Through the 1980s a moral panic spread across North America and beyond: secret satanic cults in daycare centres, backwards messages in records, and the ruin of children by a role playing game called Dungeons and Dragons.^[27].

The pentagram became the panic’s favourite clue. When the serial killer Richard Ramirez was arrested in 1985 he displayed a pentagram on his palm and shouted for Satan in court, and the press did the rest. Heavy metal stood trial by association. Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center hauled lyrics before the United States Senate. In 1988 a Geraldo Rivera prime time special on devil worship pulled enormous ratings and taught a generation that the five pointed star was a confession.^[28].

The charges were almost entirely false. No vast satanic network was ever found. But moral panics do not need evidence. They need a shape to point at. The pentagram, ancient and silent, took the blame for crimes that never happened, and the stain stuck.

The mirror at the end

Five thousand years. A tally mark for grain. A planet’s slow dance. A Greek password for health. The seal of a holy city. The wounds of Christ on a knight’s shield. A charm against demons over a German door. Man as a small universe. Then, in a Victorian eyeblink, the badge of the Devil himself.

The symbol did all of this without changing by a single line. It is exactly the figure a child draws without lifting the pen. The meanings were never in the star. They were always in us. We are the ones who keep deciding what to fear.

That is the real lesson of the pentagram, and it is not a comfortable one. A symbol is an empty cup. Whatever the age is full of, order or terror, faith or suspicion, is what it pours in, before swearing the cup was always that colour.

So the next time you see the five pointed star and feel something, reverence, unease, a small reflexive shiver, stop. Ask whose meaning you are feeling. A Sumerian clerk’s? Pythagoras’s? A medieval poet’s? Or a television producer in 1988, chasing ratings?

The star will not tell you. It never does. It only reflects.

Draw your own.

Alan |\

A note on sources

Citations are given in the footnotes and gathered in the references below. The principal documentary thread for the modern “satanic” pentagram — from Éliphas Lévi through Stanislas de Guaita, Oswald Wirth and Maurice Bessy to Anton LaVey — is set out, with admirable candour, by the Church of Satan itself. The archaeological and Pythagorean material draws on standard reference summaries; the literary reading rests on the text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and the account of the 1980s panic follows mainstream histories of that episode.

References

“Baphomet.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baphomet

Church of Satan. “The History of the Origin of the Sigil of Baphomet and its Use in the Church of Satan.” churchofsatan.com/history-sigil-of-baphomet

Crazy Alchemist. “The Pentagram: Five Thousand Years of Light Before the Darkness.” crazyalchemist.com

“Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_et_Rituel_de_la_Haute_Magie

GoldenNumber.net. “The Golden Ratio in the Art of Da Vinci.” goldennumber.net

Haeretico. “The Pentagram: From Sacred Geometry to Misunderstood Symbol.” haeretico.com

Hektoen International. “Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.” hekint.org

History.com. “What Sparked the Satanic Panic of the 1980s?” history.com

Ida, Takashi. “‘Vitruvian Man’ by Leonardo da Vinci and the Golden Ratio.” takashiida.net

LearnReligions. “Deciphering Eliphas Levi’s Baphomet: The Goat of Mendes.” learnreligions.com

LitCharts. “The Pentangle — Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” litcharts.com

Mankey, Jason. “The Witch’s Toolbox: The Pentacle.” Patheos. patheos.com

Mysterium Jewellery. “The Pentagram — Symbol of What Exactly?” mysterium-jewellery.co.uk

Pardesco. “Symbolism of the Pentagram.” pardesco.com

“Pentagram.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagram

RationalWiki. “Satanic Panic.” rationalwiki.org

“Satanic panic.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic

“Sigil of Baphomet.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil_of_Baphomet

SparkNotes. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Symbols.” sparknotes.com

Thalira. “The Pentagram Symbol: Esoteric and Gnostic Meaning.” thalira.com

VH1. “6.66 Hot Points of the ‘80s Heavy Metal Satanic Panic.” vh1.com

Vitruvius. De Architectura, Book III (first century BCE).

“Vitruvian Man.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man

Western Magick. “Wiccan Symbols: Ancient Origins and Modern Meanings.” westernmagick.com

“Wicca.” Encyclopædia Britannica. britannica.com/topic/Wicca

Rational Myst

^[1]Earliest pentagrams appear on Sumerian pottery from Ur, c. 3500 BCE. “Pentagram,” Wikipedia.

^[2]In proto cuneiform the star functioned as a logogram, associated with the reading UB, carrying meanings of corner, region and direction, and appearing on administrative and accounting tablets. “The Pentagram: Five Thousand Years,” Crazy Alchemist (crazyalchemist.com).

^[3]The five pointed star served at various times as the sign of Ishtar or Marduk. “Pentagram,” Wikipedia.

^[4]Across roughly eight years the planet Venus traces an almost perfect five pointed figure against the stars. “The Pentagram – Symbol of What Exactly?” Mysterium Jewellery.

^[5]Flinders Petrie recorded the star on predynastic Egyptian pottery; pentagram motifs of similar age appear in the Liangzhu culture of China. “Pentagram,” Wikipedia.

^[6]The pentagram’s diagonals divide one another in the golden ratio (φ ≈ 1.618), a proportion also found in five petalled flowers and starfish. Thalira, “The Pentagram Symbol”; Chinese Social Sciences Net, “Chinese antiques give new insight into history of pentagram.”

^[7]Pythagoreanism originated in the sixth century BCE and used the pentagram, or pentalpha, as a sign of mutual recognition. “Pentagram,” Wikipedia.

^[8]The Pythagoreans inscribed the points with the Greek word hugieia (health, soundness, wholeness), the root of the modern word hygiene; Hygieia was also the goddess of health. Haeretico, “The Pentagram: From Sacred Geometry to Misunderstood Symbol.”

^[9]From roughly 300–150 BCE the pentagram served as the seal of Jerusalem, its points marked with the Hebrew letters of the city’s name. “Pentagram,” Wikipedia.

^[10]Early Christians read the five points as the five wounds of Christ or the five senses; the medieval mind treated the number five as a figure of incorruptibility. “Pentagram,” Wikipedia; analyses of the number five in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

^[11]In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century) the hero bears a gold pentangle, attributed to King Solomon and called the “endless knot,” its points standing for the five senses, five fingers, five wounds of Christ, five joys of Mary, and five knightly virtues. SparkNotes and LitCharts, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Symbols.”

^[12]In German folklore the protective pentagram was the Drudenfuss; Goethe’s Faust (1808) has Mephistopheles trapped by a pentagram across the threshold, able to leave only because one corner was drawn imperfectly. “Pentagram,” HandWiki / Wikipedia.

^[13]Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia (1533), illustrated a human figure inscribed within a pentagram, head and limbs reaching the five points — man as microcosm. Pardesco, “Symbolism of the Pentagram”; Crazy Alchemist, “Pentagram” (bestiary).

^[14]Leonardo da Vinci, study of human proportions after Vitruvius (the “Vitruvian Man”), c. 1490, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. The figure is inscribed in a circle and a square, with no pentagram; the geometry derives from Vitruvius, De Architectura, Book III. “Vitruvian Man,” Wikipedia; Hektoen International, “Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.”

^[15]Leonardo’s own notes specify simple whole number proportions. Measurement of the drawing puts the ratio of the circle’s radius to the square’s side at about 0.606–0.609, short of the golden ratio of roughly 0.618; the popular “hidden golden ratio” reading was amplified by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003). Takashi Ida, “‘Vitruvian Man’ by Leonardo da Vinci and the Golden Ratio”; GoldenNumber.net, “The Golden Ratio in the Art of Da Vinci.”

^[16]Renaissance and later occult usage assigned the four classical elements to four points and spirit to the crown, spirit presiding over matter. Western Magick, “Wiccan Symbols.”

^[17]Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Dogme 1854, Rituel 1856), translated by A. E. Waite as Transcendental Magic (1896). “Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie,” Wikipedia.

^[18]Lévi held that with one point upward the pentagram is the sign of the Saviour, and with two points upward the sign of the goat of Mendes and of infernal evocation. Quoted (Waite translation) in Church of Satan, “The History of the Origin of the Sigil of Baphomet.”

^[19]Before the mid nineteenth century the star’s orientation carried little fixed moral weight; Agrippa himself drew both upright and inverted versions. “Pentagram,” Wikipedia.

^[20]Lévi’s Baphomet — a winged, androgynous goat headed figure bearing the words solve and coagula — was conceived as a symbol of the equilibrium of opposites, not as an object of worship. “Baphomet,” Wikipedia; LearnReligions, “Deciphering Eliphas Levi’s Baphomet.”

^[21]Lévi’s own books contained no goat in pentagram illustration. The first printed engraving of a goat’s face within an inverted pentagram appears in Stanislas de Guaita, La Clef de la Magie Noire (1897), which added the names Samael, Lilith and Leviathan; the artist Oswald Wirth later refined the image. Church of Satan, “The History of the Origin of the Sigil of Baphomet.”

^[22]Maurice Bessy reprinted the de Guaita design in Histoire en 1000 Images de la Magie (1961), translated as A Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural (1964). The image was not there named the Sigil of Baphomet. Church of Satan, “The History of the Origin of the Sigil of Baphomet.”

^[23]Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966, adopted the Bessy image, and placed a refined version on The Satanic Bible (1969) — the first mass market publication to name it the symbol of Baphomet. The Church filed for a trademark in 1981 and received it in 1983. Church of Satan, “The History of the Origin of the Sigil of Baphomet”; “Sigil of Baphomet,” Wikipedia.

^[24]By the Church of Satan’s own account, the symbol was conceived and passed along by ceremonial magicians who professed to oppose what they imagined it to represent, in effect inventing an imaginary cabal of wicked sorcerers. Church of Satan, “The History of the Origin of the Sigil of Baphomet.”

^[25]Modern Wicca took shape in the 1940s and 1950s, largely through Gerald Gardner (1884–1964); historians generally regard it as a new religious movement synthesising ceremonial magic, folklore and earlier occultism. “Wicca,” Encyclopædia Britannica; Western Magick, “Wiccan Symbols.”

^[26]In Gardner’s Witchcraft Today (1954) the pentacle is a working tool of earth; the upright pentagram represents spirit presiding over the four elements, while in some traditions the inverted pentagram marks the second degree of initiation — a meaning predating LaVey. Jason Mankey, “The Witch’s Toolbox: The Pentacle” (Patheos); Western Magick, “Wiccan Symbols.”

^[27]The 1980s panic was triggered in part by Michelle Remembers (1980), a memoir of supposed satanic abuse “recovered” under therapy and later discredited; claims spread of cult abuse in daycare centres, backwards messages in records, and danger from Dungeons and Dragons. “Satanic panic,” Wikipedia; History.com, “What Sparked the Satanic Panic of the 1980s?”

^[28]Richard Ramirez displayed a pentagram on his palm at his 1985 court appearance; the Parents Music Resource Center brought lyrics before the US Senate in 1985; a Geraldo Rivera prime time special on devil worship drew huge ratings in 1988. No vast satanic network was ever substantiated. History.com; VH1, “6.66 Hot Points of the ‘80s Heavy Metal Satanic Panic”; RationalWiki, “Satanic Panic.”

There you go ....

Until next time...