Pentagram

The pentagram is a five-pointed star drawn as a single unbroken line. Enclosed within a circle it forms the pentacle, and in modern Pagan usage its five points are read as the four classical elements, earth, air, fire and water, crowned at the top by spirit. Drawn with a single point uppermost it is the ordinary orientation of the emblem, and it appears on altars, tools and jewellery as a sign of the tradition and a focus in ritual. The figure is far older than the religions that now use it, appearing in ancient and medieval contexts, but its reading as the elements and spirit belongs to the modern revival.

The pentagram's age is easy to overstate precisely because it is so simple to construct with only a straightedge and compass, and cultures with no contact used it independently: it marked Sumerian and Babylonian administrative texts as a symbol for the four directions plus the centre, appears on Greek pottery, and was linked by later Pythagorean tradition to health and to the golden ratio embedded in its proportions, though the specific claim that Pythagoreans used it as a secret recognition sign rests on late and unreliable sources rather than contemporary evidence. Medieval and early modern ceremonial magic, including texts in the wider Solomonic tradition, used the pentagram as a protective seal inscribed on the magician's implements, a use that predates and is largely unconnected to its later occult and Pagan revival associations. The five points read as earth, air, fire, water and spirit belongs specifically to nineteenth-century ceremonial magic and the Golden Dawn, which formalised elemental correspondences later Wiccan practice inherited.

The pentagram is the principal emblem of Wicca and modern witchcraft, adopted through the mid-twentieth-century revival associated with Gerald Gardner and the traditions that followed him. Worn point-up, it identifies the wearer with the religion much as a cross or a star identifies members of other faiths. It is often confused, in popular culture, with the inverted point-down star used by the Church of Satan and other groups from the 1960s onward; the two are distinct in orientation and in meaning, and the association of the point-up pentagram with harm is a modern misunderstanding rather than a feature of the Wiccan symbol. In practice the pentacle, the pentagram within a circle, also serves as a ritual tool representing the element of earth.

The Church of Satan's adoption of the inverted, point-down pentagram enclosing a goat's head, the Sigil of Baphomet, dates to Anton LaVey's founding of the organisation in 1966 and to earlier nineteenth-century occult illustration linking an inverted star with a goat-headed figure, a lineage entirely separate from Gerald Gardner's mid-century Wiccan revival, which used the point-up pentagram without any inverted counterpart in its original ritual material. The conflation of the two in popular culture, treating any pentagram as satanic regardless of orientation, has generated real friction for Wiccan and Pagan practitioners, including a documented case of the point-up pentagram being challenged as a permitted symbol on grave markers in United States veterans' cemeteries before the Department of Veterans Affairs approved it in 2007 alongside other recognised faith emblems.