Pentagram

The pentagram is a five-pointed star that can be drawn without lifting the pen. It is one of the oldest geometric symbols in the human record, and every civilization that has used it has decided it means something different.

The earliest known examples come from Sumerian cuneiform tablets at Uruk, dated to around 3000 BC. In that context the symbol carried no mystical weight. It appears on administrative documents, possibly as a logogram or a schematic marker for the corners of enclosed spaces. The Sumerians used it. They did not worship it.

The Greek sign of health

The Pythagoreans, six centuries before Christ, turned the pentagram into something charged. They used it as a badge of mutual recognition, a way members of the school identified each other. They called it the sign of hygieia, health, and mapped the five Greek letters Υ-Γ-Ι-Ε-Ι-Α onto its five points.

The mathematical fascination was real. Every line of the pentagram is divided by the intersecting lines in the golden ratio, phi, approximately 1.618. The Pythagoreans saw this as proof that the shape encoded a fundamental harmony of the cosmos. For them it was geometry with a pulse, a diagram that proved the universe was built on number.

Five wounds and five virtues

Medieval Christianity absorbed the pentagram without anxiety. The five points mapped onto the five wounds of Christ: two hands, two feet, the side pierced by the lance. In the late fourteenth-century English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the hero carries a pentangle on his shield as a symbol of five sets of five virtues: the five senses, the five fingers, the five wounds, the five joys of Mary, and the five knightly virtues of franchise, fellowship, cleanness, courtesy, and pity.

There is nothing dark about Gawain’s pentangle. The poet calls it “the endless knot” and spends thirty-five lines explaining its Christian meaning. For the better part of a thousand years, the pentagram was a symbol of protection and wholeness.

Agrippa’s figure and Lévi’s goat

The turn came in two stages. In 1533, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa published De Occulta Philosophia with an illustration showing a human figure inscribed inside a pentagram, arms and legs extended to the five points, head at the top. The image echoed Vitruvius and Leonardo. Agrippa was mapping the microcosm onto the macrocosm: the human body as the measure of the cosmos, contained within the perfect geometric form.

Three centuries later, Éliphas Lévi redrew the pentagram and changed its meaning. In his 1856 Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Lévi presented two pentagrams side by side. The upright version, with one point up, represented the microcosm, spirit ascending over matter. The inverted version, with two points up, represented the Sabbatic Goat, matter dominating spirit. He drew a goat’s head inside the inverted star, horns at the upper points, ears at the side points, beard at the bottom.

Before Lévi, no consistent tradition assigned moral polarity to the pentagram’s orientation. After Lévi, the inverted pentagram became permanently associated with the diabolical in Western occultism. He created a binary that the symbol had not carried for its first four thousand years.

LaVey and after

In 1966, Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco and placed the inverted pentagram with a goat’s head at the center of his iconography. He called it the Sigil of Baphomet. The design drew directly from Lévi, with the addition of Hebrew letters spelling Leviathan around the outer circle. In 1969 it appeared on the cover of The Satanic Bible.

The adoption was deliberate provocation, and it worked. The inverted pentagram became the most recognizable symbol of Satanism in popular culture, which in turn made the upright pentagram suspect by association. Wiccans and other modern pagans spent decades explaining that their upright pentacle was a different symbol with a different meaning.

The geometry never changed. The five-pointed star drawn in one continuous line is the same shape it was in Uruk five thousand years ago. What changed, every few centuries, was the story people told about it.

Related reading

• Sigil of Baphomet. The inverted pentagram with a goat’s head, adopted by LaVey from Lévi’s 1856 illustration.
• Seal of Solomon. The hexagram’s parallel career as a binding symbol, from the Testament of Solomon to the Star of David.
• The Freemason Origin Myth. The lodge tradition that absorbed many of the same occult symbols the pentagram traveled through.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Sumerian cuneiform tablets from Uruk, c. 3000 BCE — earliest known pentagram markings
• Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia (1533) — the Vitruvian pentagram with a human figure inscribed
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1375–1400) — pentangle as five-fold Christian virtue symbol
• Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1856) — inverted pentagram as symbol of the goat
• Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible (1969) — adoption of the Sigil of Baphomet