Pentagram

The pentangle on Gawain’s shield

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight survives in a single manuscript of the Cotton collection, written at the end of the 14th century. When Gawain is armed for his journey, his shield is bright red with the pentangle painted on it in gold, and the poet stops the story to explain why. In Jessie L. Weston’s prose translation it is “a sign that Solomon set ere-while, as betokening truth”, a figure whose lines overlap each other so that “in English it is called "the endless knot."” Each of its points stands for a set of five: Gawain was faultless in his five senses, his five fingers never failed him, he trusted in the five wounds of Christ and drew his strength from the five joys of Mary, and he kept five virtues, frankness, fellowship, purity, courtesy and compassion. The fives are linked one in another, the poet says, so that they have no end. Weston knew of no other romance that gives Gawain the pentangle.

Agrippa’s man in the star

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), whom his modern editor Joseph Peterson calls the most influential writer of Renaissance esoterica, wrote his three books Of Occult Philosophy in 1509 and 1510. Among geometric figures, he says, the pentangle “hath a very great command over evil spirits” by the virtue of the number five. In his chapter on the proportions of the human body a man stands in a circle drawn round the centre of his belly, the crown of his head, his fingertips and his spread feet touching the rim, and the circle divided into five equal parts makes “a perfect Pentagon”. Lévi sent his own readers to Agrippa for the picture: “when a man is represented in the star of the pentagram, as may be seen in the " Occult Philosophy" of Agrippa”.

What does an upside-down pentagram mean?

For Éliphas Lévi it meant Satan. In his Dogme et rituel de la haute magie of 1855–56, which A. E. Waite translated as Transcendental Magic, the pentagram is the figure of the human body, four limbs and a single point for the head, and the direction of its points makes it a sign of order or of confusion: “The pentagram with two points in the ascendant represents Satan as the goat of the Sabbath; when one point is in the ascendant, it is the sign of the Saviour.” A human figure head downwards, he went on, naturally represents a demon. He also wrote that the old magicians traced the pentagram on their doorsteps, and that the way its points were turned decided whether it drove evil spirits away or held them in. Goethe put the same idea on the stage: in Faust, Mephistopheles cannot leave Faust’s study because a pentagram is drawn on the threshold, and he got in only because “the drawing’s not completed. The outer angle, you may see, Is open left”. The point-up star is the one Lévi drew on the brow of his Baphomet.

According to the Church of Satan’s own history of its sigil, the first printed picture of a goat’s face inside a five-pointed star is an engraving in Stanislas de Guaita’s La Clef de la Magie Noire of 1897. The church says that before its founding in 1966 Satanism was usually shown by inverted crosses, not by this image, and that the “inverse pentagram invoking the head of the sabbatic goat” passed from one occultist to the next for more than a century until Anton LaVey “embraced it”. Its sigil, a goat’s head in a pentagram with two points up, ringed by the Hebrew letters of the name Leviathan, is described on the Baphomet page.

The Wiccan pentacle

Circle Sanctuary, of Barneveld, Wisconsin, calls the pentacle the “symbol of the Wiccan religion”. In its own tradition, Circle Craft, a pentacle is one of the tools of ritual, and most practitioners wear consecrated jewellery such as a pentacle. Reporting for the Associated Press in April 2007, Scott Bauer described the pentacle as a five-pointed star inside a circle, whose five points stand for earth, air, fire, water and spirit. That month the US Department of Veterans Affairs settled a lawsuit in which Americans United for Separation of Church and State represented Wiccan plaintiffs, among them Selena Fox, a high priestess with Circle Sanctuary, and added the pentacle to its list of emblems of belief allowed on government headstones and markers for veterans, where it is number 37, “Wicca (Pentacle)”. The campaign had taken nearly a decade, and Circle Sanctuary now counts more than 200 VA-issued markers with the pentacle in cemeteries across the United States.

Pentagram or pentacle?

The two words have not always meant different things. For Lévi a pantacle, as he spelled it, was any sign that sums up a magical doctrine, “the signature of a spirit”, and each magician should have his own. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 calls the five-pointed star itself a pentacle. The tarot suit of pentacles began as coins: A. E. Waite wrote, in his notes on the Ace of Pentacles, that in many old packs the suit “stood for current coin, money, deniers”. In Wicca, as the Associated Press put it in 2007, the pentacle is the five-pointed star inside a circle.

Is the Star of David a pentagram?

No. The Star of David is a hexagram, a six-pointed star made of two triangles, and the pentagram has five points. The two have often been confused all the same. Scholem found them side by side in antiquity and in medieval notaries’ signs, and wrote that in magic “the hexagram and pentagram were easily interchangeable”, the name seal of Solomon being given to both. The Jewish Encyclopedia gives that name to the pentagram, and records that in 1354 Charles IV prescribed for the Jews of Prague a red flag bearing both David’s shield and Solomon’s seal.