Also called barn stars, schtanne, Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs, hex sign meanings
Round, brightly painted star and rosette designs on the barns of southeastern Pennsylvania. Whether they were ever meant as magic is a real scholarly debate: the name hex sign only appeared in the 1920s, and many historians see the old barn stars as decoration and pride.
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Take care: Use a stable ladder and a helper when hanging a sign high on a building. Use exterior paint outdoors and let it cure before hanging.
Large geometric stars painted directly on barn fronts appear from around 1830, once paint became affordable. Locals simply called them stars. Patrick Donmoyer of Kutztown University's Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center argues they belonged to farm life and pride, not to warding off the supernatural.
Small goose-foot-shaped marks called hexefoos, witch's foot, were scratched on barn doors for protection. When the New England writer Wallace Nutting visited in 1924 he blended these with the big painted stars, and the name hex sign stuck to the stars from then on.
Jacob Zook of Paradise, Pennsylvania, said he originated the mountable round sign in 1942 for tourists on the Lincoln Highway. Johnny Ott painted signs with distelfinks and tulips from the 1950s, and Zook mass-produced the designs, attaching a meaning card to each one.
Barn stars grew up among Pennsylvania German farmers in Berks, Lehigh, Lancaster and neighboring counties. Before the 1830s most barns were unpainted because paint was costly. As paint spread, farmers decorated barn fronts with six-, eight- and twelve-point stars and rosettes, which they called schtanne, stars. Painters such as Milton Hill, who started in 1902 at fourteen, kept the craft alive in families. Scholars disagree on meaning: one school sees talismanic intent, the other pure decoration, and neither claims strong magic.
The phrase hex sign is younger than the signs. In 1924 Wallace Nutting's book Pennsylvania Beautiful linked the stars to witchcraft, apparently mixing them up with small protective hexefoos marks on barn doors. The label caught on, and from 1942 Jacob Zook and later Johnny Ott sold mountable signs with printed meanings to tourists. Don Yoder and Thomas Graves's 2000 study and Patrick Donmoyer's 2013 book both untangle these threads. The Amish, often assumed to make them, do not use hex signs.
A tree or post hung with glass bottles, traditionally cobalt blue, set in a yard in the American South so that wandering or harmful spirits are drawn into the bottles, trapped, and burned away by morning sun.
The pentagram is a five-pointed star drawn in one unbroken line; a pentacle is that star set inside a circle, or, in ritual magic and Wicca, a disc engraved with it. Used for thousands of years for health, protection and the five elements, it only gained its sinister reputation in the 19th century.
Compass-drawn flowers, interlaced lines and Marian VV marks scratched near doors, windows and hearths to block evil from entering a building.
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