Also called pentacle, pentangle, pentalpha, five-pointed star
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.
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Take care: If you use incense or burn a design into wood, work in a ventilated space and keep flames away from paper. Wearing the symbol can draw misunderstanding in some workplaces or schools; it is a protected religious symbol for Wiccans and Pagans.
The followers of Pythagoras used the pentagram as a sign of health, sometimes writing the letters of the Greek word hugieia at its points, and used it to recognize each other. They prized it for its geometry, full of the golden ratio.
In the Middle English poem, Gawain's shield bears a gold pentangle, explained as the five wounds of Christ, the five joys of Mary, the five senses and five virtues. It is an endless knot of Christian virtue, showing that the star was a holy sign to medieval Christians.
Wiccans place a flat disc engraved with a pentagram on the altar and wear the circled star as a sign of faith. In 2007 the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs added the pentacle to its approved emblems for veterans' headstones after a legal campaign.
Pentagrams appear on Sumerian pottery from Ur around 3500 BCE. The Pythagoreans of Greece made it a symbol of health, and early Christians read it as the five wounds of Christ; the poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight explained it at length in the late 1300s. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533), linked its points to the elements and printed human figures inside a star, helping to make it the magician's sign.
In the 19th century Éliphas Lévi taught that the upright star meant spirit governing the elements, while the inverted star was the sign of evil, drawing a goat's head inside it. The Golden Dawn built rituals around it and the Church of Satan later adopted the inverted goat image. Gerald Gardner's Wicca took the upright pentacle as its altar tool, and it is now the most recognized sign of modern witchcraft. The words pentagram and pentacle are often used interchangeably.
A knot of three interlaced arcs, common in early medieval Irish and Anglo-Saxon art such as the Book of Kells, later read as a symbol of the Christian Trinity and today worn as a Celtic and Pagan sign of threefold protection and unity.
A ring of salt poured on the floor around a person or a working space to mark a protected area that harmful influences cannot cross, drawing on the much older magic circle of ritual magic.
The legendary signet ring of King Solomon, said to give him command over demons, and the star symbol (a hexagram or a pentagram) later used for it on amulets across Jewish, Christian and Islamic magic.
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