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Pentagrams, The Lost Years

  • Writer: Caitlin Willis
    Caitlin Willis
  • May 20, 2021
  • 3 min read

Buckle up kids, this is a fun one.


Pentagrams have been round for a long time, ancient Greek and Babylonian symbols adopted as a symbol of faith by the Wiccans. It’s like their version of a Christian’s cross. There are magic associations with the symbol, modern pagans using it to identify and create their pentacle. The pentagram itself is referring to the star, the pentacle to the star within the circle.


From around 300- 150BC the pentagram stood as the symbol to Jerusalem, marked by the 5 Hebrew letters spelling its name. The word Pentemychos (meaning five corners or five recesses) was the title of the cosmogony of Pherecydes of Syros. Here the five corners are where the seeds of the Chronos are placed within the Earth for the cosmos to appear. Chronos was the Titan that ruled time, or the personification of time in literature.


A group of pentacles from the Hebrew manuscript, Key of Solomon, (BL Oriental 14759, fol. 35a)

It makes me laugh because the pentagram was actually used by the Christians as a symbol for the five sense or the five wounds of Christ after his crucifixion. In the middle ages it was also referenced in Arthurian literature, especially in a poem called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight where he had the pentagram on his shield.


The pentagram, or five-point star, can be seen pointing downward in the 13th century Amiens Cathedral. A glass window proudly displaying the star. Romanticism in the mid 19th century saw occultists further deconstructing possible meanings of the symbol, claiming it depicted spirit over the four elements yet as soon as it was pointing downward it was evil.


The German poet Johann Wolfgang van Goethe referenced the symbol and its place in German folklore in his prose Faust (1808) where it prevented the demon Mephistopheles from leaving a room but not entering as it was imperfectly drawn.



In the late 90s the United States tried to have the symbol banned from schools, claiming it was satanic and linked to the devil. This claim comes from the Renaissance and middle ages where we can see the small whispers of the upside-down pentagram being evil and allowing the devil to have power over the senses.


A lot of pop culture references to a pentagram can be linked to TV shows like Supernatural where the characters used the symbol to trap demons and prevent possession. It was gratuitously used, circled by a ring of flames. The Supernatural Wiki claims that the pentagram hailed form the Seal of Solomon (the six point star), many varieties of pentacles can be found in grimoires of Solomonic magic and have been carried onto neopagan traditions.



Horror and fantasy genres make liberal use of the symbol, possession and occult films using it with a kind of ominous dread, metal bands using it to reference Satan.


I think that a symbol from Hebrew philosophers and King Solomon has had an interesting life, spread through good and bad representation. There is a certain irony of it being a Christian symbol many years ago and the American panic that it caused not even thirty years ago. We can see this same reaction with many things that old Christians used or believed in. the satanic panic of the middle ages really fucked a lot of things up; misogyny and male anxiety really need to get a grip.


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