The Meaning of the Pentagram and Pentacle
The five-pointed star appears across millennia of human visual culture: in the pottery of ancient Mesopotamia, in the iconography of Pythagorean Greece, in early Christian symbolism, in Islamic geometric ornament, in the seal-craft of medieval European grimoires, and in the working vocabulary of the modern Western esoteric tradition. The pentagram is the five-pointed star, drawn with a single continuous line. The pentacle is the pentagram enclosed within a circle. The distinction is not pedantic: in the ceremonial-magic tradition the two figures carry different meanings and different uses, and the modern Wiccan pentacle is a different object again from the Golden Dawn wax or metal disk that bears the same name. This article is a tour of the symbol’s history, its uses in the Western esoteric tradition, and the misreadings that have grown up around it in the popular imagination (Harpur 2002; Michell 1988).
Pythagorean Origins
Greek sources treat the pentagram as the pentalpha — the figure composed of five interlocking alphas — and ascribe it to the Pythagorean school of the sixth century BCE. The Pythagoreans recognised that the diagonals of a regular pentagon intersect in the golden ratio, a property that gives the pentagram its distinctive nested-star geometry. The pentalpha is securely attested as a Pythagorean emblem of health (hygeia). The figure appears in the Greek magical papyri of the Roman imperial period, in the Chaldaean Oracles, and in the cosmological diagrams of late-antique Hermeticism, where it stood for the microcosm and for the five classical elements. The vocabulary of “five points, five elements” that dominates modern occult uses is the direct descendant of this late-antique cosmological diagram.
The name divina proportio, sometimes used to describe the pentagram’s golden-ratio property, is the Italian Renaissance mathematician Luca Pacioli’s term, coined in his 1509 treatise De Divina Proportione. Euclid, in Elements Book VI, definition 3, calls the ratio itself the “extreme and mean ratio”; the phrase “divine proportion” is Pacioli’s coinage, and attributing it to the Greeks is a common anachronism.
The Golden Dawn System
The most systematic modern treatment of the pentagram is the ceremonial-magic system of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888. The Golden Dawn inherited the Pythagorean microcosmic pentagram and built an elaborate correspondence table around it: the uppermost point is associated with the element of Spirit (Kether in the Kabbalistic scheme), and the four lower points with Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. The four Hebrew letters of the divine name YHVH — the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name Yod, He, Vav, He — are mapped to the four lower points, with the apex representing the letter Yod doubled.
Two of the order’s foundational daily rituals grew out of this diagram. The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP) is a brief ceremonial in which the practitioner traces the active Earth Pentagram at the four cardinal directions, vibrates the divine names, and visualises the corresponding element. The Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram (LIRP) uses the same figure to draw the elements into the ritual space. The traced figure is always drawn as a single continuous line, starting at the lower left, ascending to the apex, descending to the lower right, returning across the base to the lower left, and rising to the upper right, closing back to the starting point. The Israel Regardie edition of The Golden Dawn (1937–1940, sixth edition 1989) is the standard source for these rituals.
In the Golden Dawn usage, the Earth Pentagram is drawn with a single point at the top. The Spirit Pentagram is drawn with two points at the top and one at the bottom. Each direction has its own starting and finishing stroke, and a small mistake in the direction of the stroke is treated as a serious ceremonial error.
Pentagram and Pentacle
The pentagram is the star; the pentacle is the star within a circle. The Golden Dawn’s pentacle is a flat disk of wax, wood, or metal on which the pentagram is engraved, and it is one of the four elemental implements of the order’s ritual grade, along with the wand, the cup, and the dagger. The disk carries correspondences of its own: the circle is the whole, the cosmos, the divine; the star is the human being, the microcosm. The pentacle as a flat ritual object is distinct from the modern Wiccan pentacle, which is the same figure (a pentagram inscribed within a circle) but used as the principal symbol of the religion, worn on a chain or set upon the altar. The Wiccan pentacle is most often drawn in the Earth orientation, with a single point at the top; the figure is sometimes traced in the air as part of the casting of the Wiccan circle. The two traditions agree on the geometry and differ on the ritual context.
Inverted Pentagram and the Sigil of Baphomet
The pentagram, drawn with a single point at the top, is associated in modern Western esotericism with the microcosm and with the figure of the human being in harmony with the elements. The inverted pentagram, drawn with two points at the top and one at the bottom, carries a different set of associations.
The most famous image that places the inverted pentagram at the centre of occult iconography is the drawing of Baphomet by the French occultist Éliphas Lévi (1810–1875), published in his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Paris, 1854–1856). Lévi’s drawing — the “Sabbatic Goat” — shows a winged androgynous figure seated upon a cube, with a torch of knowledge between the horns and an inverted pentagram on the forehead. For Lévi, Baphomet was a symbol of initiation. Lévi himself was not a Satanist; he was a Catholic mystical socialist who took the goat of Mendes as a kabbalistic rebus for the absolute. The 1897 attribution sometimes given in popular writing, to a Louis-Léon Le Febvre, appears to be a confusion with Stanislas de Guaïta’s La Clef de la Magie Noire (1897); the more careful modern scholarship treats Lévi’s 1854–1856 drawing as the canonical source.
The Church of Satan, founded in San Francisco on Walpurgis Night (30 April) 1966 by Anton LaVey, adopted Lévi’s drawing as its official sigil. The symbol has since acquired meanings well beyond either Lévi’s or LaVey’s original intent.
Common Misconceptions
Two widespread confusions are worth correcting here.
The first is the claim, sometimes found in popular media, that the Nazi regime used the pentagram in its official iconography. It did not. The Nazi party emblem was the Hakenkreuz, a swastika: a four-armed cross with no geometric or symbolic relationship to the five-pointed star. The two figures are routinely conflated by people who do not look closely.
The second confusion is the claim that the pentagram contains the five Platonic solids. The five Platonic solids are not inscribed in the pentagram; they are derived, in the Western esoteric tradition, from the Flower of Life and Metatron’s Cube, not from the five-pointed star. The pentagram does contain the golden ratio in its diagonal-to-side proportion.
Practical Notes
The pentagram and the pentacle are widely worn as jewelry, displayed as wall art, used as altar pieces, and drawn in ritual. A pentacle pendant in silver, with the single point at the top, is a common form. The drawing of the pentagram in ritual magic is treated as a serious magical operation.