New to the Craft

Symbolism of the Pentagram

Symbols have held a special place with humankind across all cultures and ages.  Our brains are wired for language, itself a symbolic system substituting words for objects and concepts we know from experience.  The object you are sitting on is not inherently a “chair” anymore than it is a “chaise” or “silla”.  The individual words are arbitrary, but they serve the important purpose of allowing people to reference the same idea without constantly having to point to it in the physical world.  Imagine trying to have a conversation where the only things you can allude to are “this” or “that”!  Language allows us to advance from the concrete to the abstract – to ideas that transcend the physical world and speak to the interior human experience.  Herein lays the true power of symbols in any religion as tools which can represent that which is both intangible and universal.

Geometric figures are some of the most common symbols found in spiritual symbology.  Wicca adopted one of these early on and is now commonly associated in popular thought with the pentagram.

In the ancient world the five points of the pentagram were determined to represent the five classical elements of fire, water, air, earth, and spirit, thus symbolizing the whole of the cosmos as shown by its constituent parts.  This meaning was kept by magical practitioners down the ages and explains its presence in Wicca today.  The specific orientation of the elements and the points were most likely adopted from ceremonial magicians.  Eliphas Levi, a 19th century writer and magician, determined that the upright pentagram should be used to symbolize spirit as ruling over the other four elements (or matter).  Conversely the pentagram with spirit below would indicate matter ruling over spirit, which Levi considered evil.  These ideas became popular, and the downward facing pentagram is commonly taboo today because of them.  Yet it is important to remember that any symbol’s meaning is somewhat arbitrary.  Evil is not intrinsic to a pentagram with its point down anymore than it is to a fylfot cross (twisted by the Nazis into its swastika but actually an ancient symbol of the sun).  History and our experience can taint certain images by association, but any group or solitary must ultimately define a symbol by what is meaningful to them.

The pentagram is also significant in magic based on its proportions.  Each line exhibits what is known as the golden ratio, or phi, where it intersects with the others.  The ratio of the longer segment to the shorter segment is a constant 1.6180339887.  This ratio corresponds with the famed Fibonacci sequence and select occurrences in nature such as shell spirals and certain plant branching patterns.  It has been intentionally incorporated into works of art by painters and architects based on its aesthetic appeal.  Some claim that Da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man exhibits these proportions.  Phi also connects the pentagram with the goddess of perfect beauty, Venus.  For Wiccans, it can symbolize the Goddess in this aspect, and for all practitioners it serves as a fitting symbol of idealized power defining the quarters of the magical circle.

Journal for the Month of September:

Since Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol came out recently I couldn’t get the topic of symbols out of my head.  There’s an extremely sadistic and messed-up bad guy this time around who is a practitioner of black magic.  The balance to that negative stereotype is a discussion of Noetic theory, which amounts to a scientific inquiry into the extraordinary powers of the mind.  The main protagonists promote the concept that the ancients knew how to harness the mind through intention and focus to perform magic and miracles, abilities we are only “re”-discovering in the modern age.  Wicca even gets a one-line mention in the book, woohoo!  It was a good read, although not my favorite of Brown’s books, and without giving anything away I was slightly annoyed at the ending – rather anti-climactic in my opinion.

A happy Celtic New Years to all at this approaching Samhain!!!

Until next month, blessed be! )O(