Notes to "Iron Pentacle"

What can I say about pentacles? Well, clearly, they are an important part of occult lore. The five-pointed star shape is the simplest star that can drawn: there are no one, two, three, or four-pointed stars that can be made with a corresponding number of lines (that is, you can draw four pointed star, but it takes eight not four lines to do it). You can not make an even-number-pointed star without taking your pencil off the page or changing directions more times than the number of points. Odd-number-pointed stars with more than five points are not unique: there are always (n - 3)/2 different stars that can be made depending on how many points you skip on each step. Thus, the five-pointed star is the one I would use to cover pages when I doodled as a child.

The five-pointed star in a circle is a symbol of protection. Sorcerers are imagined to work in a pentacle, and summon demons into another pentacle. Thus, a pentacle is seen as a way to both protect the practitioner and to contain the forces that she invokes. In the Craft, pentacles are seen as a way to create a sacred space for ritual work.

As a symbol, the points of the pentacle are often ascribed different meanings. The most common of these is the Golden Dawn’s Earth, Air, Water, Fire and Spirit with Spirit on the top point and Earth to the lower left and the rest following the pentacle pattern around.

Wiccans like to distinguish themselves, in general, I think, from Satanists by saying that the upward pointing pentacle represents good, and the downward pointing pentacle (used by Satanists) represents evil. Fine. Except "good" and "evil" are not particularly relevant in a religion which is trenchantly opposed to any kind of moral absolutism. The point is that witches do not like sharing the pentacle symbol with Satanists at all because it confuses the heck out of the population as whole. On the other hand, can a liberal Christian tell a member of Operation Rescue that they can’t use the cross as a symbol? The fact is that in any religion particular groups commonly share symbols and lore with other groups that they would rather not be associated with.

The inverted or downward pointing pentacle does have a different meaning in traditional lore. The downward pointed pentacle is seen as the face of a goat with two horns and a goatee (what the side flanges are then, I don’t know). The goat represents hearty male sexual appetite, and, in a society that seldom honors that concept, the symbol can be frightening.