The Pentagram: A History

No symbol in popular occultism has been claimed by more mutually hostile owners. The pentagram has served as a Pythagorean badge of brotherhood, a medieval Christian emblem of the five wounds of Christ, a Renaissance talisman keyed to the elements, a nineteenth-century occultist’s shorthand for the hierarchy of spirit over matter, the central working tool of a Victorian magical lodge, and finally — within about a decade of each other — both the sign of a nature religion and the deliberate provocation of a Satanic church.

Each of those owners believed they were recovering an ancient meaning. None of them were. Each assignment was new.

This page traces the symbol’s actual lineage: what sources exist, what they say, and where the breaks in the chain are.

Geometry first

Before the symbol carries any meaning, it is a shape. A pentagram is a five-pointed star drawn in a single continuous line, each stroke crossing two others, the whole enclosing a regular pentagon at the center. That inner pentagon generates its own set of crossing diagonals, which form a smaller pentagon, which generates another, infinitely inward. At every scale, the ratio of diagonal to side is φ — the golden ratio, approximately 1.618.

The geometry is not a mystical secret; it is elementary Euclidean fact. What changes across history is which communities noticed it, and what they thought it meant.

The Pythagoreans

The Pythagorean school, active from the sixth century BCE onward, made the pentagram their emblem. Pythagoreanism originated in the 6th century BCE and used the pentagram as a symbol of mutual recognition, of wellbeing, and to recognize good deeds and charity. Some sources say the Pythagoreans regarded it as a symbol of health and knowledge, and in some depictions the Greek letters for the word “health” are placed at its points. The Pythagorean name for the symbol — Hygieia — preserves that health reading directly.

Why health? The Pythagoreans were obsessed with proportion, and the golden-ratio proportions locked inside the pentagram would have seemed, to a school that believed the cosmos ran on mathematical harmony, like a diagram of right order made visible. It may also have been used by the Greeks and others generally as a symbol to ward off evil, and it has been seen in pottery of the ancient kingdom of Judaea, maybe as a mark of tax collectors.

What the Pythagoreans were not doing, so far as the historical record shows, is assigning the four elements plus spirit to the five points, treating the star as a map of the human body, or distinguishing upright from inverted orientations. Those readings come later and from different people.

Earlier still: Babylon and Judaea

The five-pointed star is older than Pythagoras. The earliest known pentagrams, found in ancient Babylon and Sumer, represented the five visible planets and were used as cosmological symbols. From around 300 to 150 BCE the pentagram stood as the symbol of Jerusalem, marked by the five Hebrew letters spelling its name.

Neither of these uses has an obvious continuous chain into the Pythagorean school or into medieval Europe; they are parallel phenomena, not a single tradition flowing through time. This matters because the rhetorical move of invoking “five thousand years of the pentagram” implies a continuous meaning across those five thousand years. The shape is old. The meanings are not continuous.

The medieval Christian pentagram

The pentagram was used in Christendom during the Middle Ages as a symbol for the five senses and of the Five Holy Wounds of Jesus Christ. It appears in church architecture, on seals, and in manuscripts. The north-facing rose of Amiens Cathedral — built in the 13th century — exhibits a pentagram-based motif.

Nothing about this usage was occult, dark, or secret. The pentagram was simply a pious emblem, one of many number-based symbols used to organize Christian devotion around groups of five.

The most elaborate medieval treatment of the symbol in English is the anonymous fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which devotes forty-six lines — more than it gives to any other single image — to the golden pentangle painted on Gawain’s scarlet shield. Gerald Morgan’s 1979 study in the Modern Language Review (74:4, pp. 769–790) is the standard scholarly analysis of the passage.

The unnamed Gawain Poet credits the symbol’s origin to King Solomon, explaining that each of the five interconnected points represents a virtue tied to a group of five: Gawain is perfect in his five senses and five fingers; faithful to the Five Holy Wounds; takes courage from the five joys of Mary, mother of Jesus; and exemplifies the five virtues of knighthood, which are generosity, friendship, chastity, chivalry, and piety.

The poet calls it the “endless knot” because the single-line star has no beginning or end, connecting this to the Christian idea of Alpha and Omega. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the narrator employs the pentangle to illustrate the central conflict within the story, which is Gawain’s inner fight, rather than his ordeal with the Green Knight. The symbol, for this poet, is an explicitly Christian reading of mathematical form. There is no paganism here, no occult significance, no diabolism.

Renaissance magic: Agrippa and the human body

The reading that most modern practitioners actually inherit — without knowing its provenance — comes from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia, published in its complete form in Cologne in 1533. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and others perpetuated the popularity of the pentagram as a magic symbol, attributing the five Neoplatonic elements to the five points, in typical Renaissance fashion.

Agrippa also tied the star to the proportions of the human body. Two diagrams from Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia demonstrate the proportion, measure, and harmony of human bodies; the first demonstrates their pentagrammatical harmonies. The five points correspond to head, two outstretched hands, and two feet, placing the figure of humanity inside the star as a microcosm of the cosmos. This is the tradition that later illustrators captured by superimposing the Vitruvian human form on the five-pointed star.

De Occulta Philosophia was finally published in 1533, and reactions among Agrippa’s contemporaries ranged from admiration to alarm. Renaissance scholars and occultists welcomed the treatise as a treasure-trove of hidden knowledge; it was recognized as the most learned and comprehensive exposition of magic available. By contrast, religious authorities viewed the book with suspicion. The Catholic Church was quick to place Agrippa’s writings on the Index of Prohibited Books, by 1546–1550. Condemnation does not erase influence; it often amplifies it. The five-element reading of the pentagram that appears in modern Wicca runs through Agrippa, whatever its practitioners may believe about its ultimate antiquity.

Éliphas Lévi and the invention of the inversion

The single most consequential moment in the modern history of the pentagram is a passage in Éliphas Lévi’s Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, published in two volumes in Paris in 1855 and 1856.

Alphonse Louis Constant (1810–1875), who wrote under the pseudonym Éliphas Lévi — a Hebrew rendering of his first and middle names — was the most influential occultist of the 19th century. In 1855–56 Lévi published his masterwork, Dogme et rituel de la haute magie, which would, along with his other great work, Histoire de la magie (1860), become the key text of the French occult revival of the late nineteenth century. It was really the translations of these two works by the occultist A.E. Waite — Dogme et rituel as Transcendental Magic, published in 1896 — that established Lévi’s name in the English-speaking world.

Lévi’s treatment of the pentagram in Transcendental Magic is the single most influential text in the modern history of the symbol. He introduced the distinction that has dominated occult pentagram symbolism ever since: the upright pentagram, with one point directed upward, represents the magical figure of humanity, the microcosm, with spirit (the topmost point) ruling over the four material elements. The inverted star reverses this: matter triumphs over spirit. In his own words, translated by Waite, the pentagram “according to the direction of its points” represents either “order or confusion, the Divine Lamb of Ormuz and St. John, or the accursed goat of Mendes.”

It is worth pausing on how novel this was. No medieval Christian source treats the pentagram’s orientation as meaningful. The Gawain-poet does not specify which way up the star points on Gawain’s shield. Agrippa does not distinguish upright from inverted. Lévi created this distinction, in 1855, out of his own synthesizing imagination — and it became, within a generation, received wisdom.

A further confusion surrounds Lévi’s famous Baphomet illustration, published in the same work. Lévi’s illustration of Baphomet conveyed complex symbolic meaning rather than literal or sensationalist interpretation. The figure’s androgyny, wings, raised torch, pentagram, and the inscription Solve et Coagula communicated the reconciliation of dualities: masculine and feminine, spirit and matter, light and darkness. The pentagram on Baphomet’s forehead points upward — the positive sign in Lévi’s own system, representing spirit over matter. The image functioned as an allegorical map for understanding balance in nature and consciousness, demonstrating Lévi’s commitment to symbolism as a vehicle for philosophical insight. Baphomet became a focal point for later occult movements, but within Lévi’s original work, the figure served primarily as a visual synthesis of metaphysical principles.

The visual conflation of Baphomet with evil, and of the inverted pentagram with Satanism, came from later readers stripping the image from its context — and from Stanislas de Guaita’s La Clef de la Magie Noire in 1897, which placed a goat’s head inside an inverted pentagram, surrounded by Hebrew letters spelling Leviathan. This depiction of an inverted pentagram with a goat’s head, paired with five Hebrew letters at the pentagram points, first appeared in the 1897 book La Clef de la Magie Noire by French occultist Stanislas de Guaita. That is the image Anton LaVey later adapted. Lévi’s own Baphomet has an upright star.

The Golden Dawn and the ritual pentagram

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London around 1888 and associated with William Wynn Westcott and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, took Lévi’s framework as a starting point and built a complete ceremonial architecture around the pentagram. In this spirit, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn developed the use of the pentagram in the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP), which is used by those who practice Golden Dawn-type ritual magic.

The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram is a ceremonial magic ritual devised and used by the original order of the Golden Dawn that has become a mainstay in modern occultism. This ritual is considered by many to be a basic preliminary to any other magical work, so much that it was the only ritual, besides initiation rituals, taught to members of the Golden Dawn before they advanced to the Inner Order.

The ritual involves tracing pentagrams in each of the four cardinal directions while vibrating Hebrew divine names and invoking the archangels Raphael, Michael, Gabriel, and Auriel as guardians. The banishing ritual is perceived as banishing any chaotic or impure forms of the elements from the magician’s circle by tracing the pentagrams in the air and by the power of certain divine names. The invoking and banishing forms of the ritual — tracing the star from different starting points — encode the Lévi-derived distinction between drawing energy in and dismissing it.

Aleister Crowley made use of the pentagram in his system of Thelema. Crowley contradicted his old comrades in the Golden Dawn, who, following Lévi, considered the inverted orientation evil and associated it with the triumph of matter over spirit. In this way, the Golden Dawn pentagram practice became the common substrate of twentieth-century Western occultism, passed down through every subsequent lineage of ceremonial magic.

Gerald Gardner, Wicca, and the pentacle

When Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today in 1954 and The Meaning of Witchcraft in 1959, the pentagram entered Wicca as its primary emblem — but with a semantic shift. Gardner’s writing treated “pentagram” and “pentacle” as effectively synonymous, writing that “In this position, the human body resembles the figure of the Pentacle, or Pentagram,” making the two symbols synonyms of one another, when they are not. This conflation stuck. In modern Wiccan usage, the pentacle is the star enclosed in a circle, and the term implies the upright orientation almost by default.

In contemporary paganism and Wicca, the five points of an upright pentagram typically represent the four classical elements — earth, air, fire, and water — with spirit as the fifth and uppermost point. This reading of elemental balance was developed in the twentieth century but draws on much older ideas about the fundamental forces of nature. The older ideas in question run through Agrippa and the Golden Dawn, not through any pre-Christian source.

Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon (1999) is the essential corrective for anyone who wants to know which Wiccan practices are genuinely old and which are modern constructions. The correspondence assignments that structure Wiccan pentagram work — spirit at the top, the four elements at the remaining points — trace back to Agrippa via the Golden Dawn, not to pre-Christian paganism.

In the 1940s the pentagram appeared again in its inverted form in the hands of Gerald Gardner, who adopted the symbol as the sigil of second-degree initiation in the newly emerged Neo-Pagan movement of witchcraft later to become known as Wicca, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that the pentagram again began to appear as an amulet to be worn. Gardner’s use of the inverted star for second-degree initiation — understood as the Horned God’s two-pointed crown, not as diabolism — is a detail practitioners in other Wiccan lineages often do not know, and it shows how the same orientation carries entirely different freight depending on context.

Anton LaVey and the Sigil of Baphomet

While the eponymous Baphomet had been depicted as a goat-headed figure since at least 1856, the goat’s head inside an inverted pentagram was largely popularized by the modern Church of Satan, founded in 1966. Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, acquired an earlier pictorial history of magic during his research into the “black arts.” LaVey adapted the symbol from that book, with certain inscriptions removed.

The Church adopted the Sigil of Baphomet as their official insignia, describing the symbol as the “preeminent visual distillation of the iconoclastic philosophy of Satanism.” As influenced by Lévi, an inverted pentagram represents materiality, while an upright pentagram accordingly symbolizes holiness.

This was deliberate provocation. In 1966, Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco and placed the inverted pentagram with a goat’s head at the centre of his imagery. This was a deliberate provocation, a challenge to Christian society, which is exactly what it was intended to be. The gesture depended entirely on the weight the symbol had already accumulated — it worked as provocation only because Lévi and a century of occult anxiety had made the inverted star feel dangerous.

Horror films of the following decades embedded the inverted pentagram in mainstream culture as shorthand for malevolent supernatural force. By the time the Satanic Panic of the 1980s arrived, the symbol’s dark associations had achieved the density of a folk belief, no longer traceable to Lévi or de Guaita — just known to mean evil. The dark symbolism is less than 170 years old.

What practitioners are actually working with

A practitioner picking up a pentagram today inherits a layered object. The layers, in rough chronological order:

The shape itself — a mathematical fact, present across many cultures from Babylon onward, carrying cosmological or apotropaic meaning well before any single tradition claimed it.

The Pythagorean emblem — health, mathematical perfection, brotherhood. No element correspondences, no orientation distinction. Sixth century BCE.

The Christian symbol — five wounds, five senses, Gawain’s endless knot. Pious and orthodox in its fourteenth-century context. No diabolism.

The Renaissance talisman — Agrippa’s five elements, the human body as microcosm. Published 1533. This is the layer that flows most directly into modern Wiccan usage, via the Golden Dawn.

Lévi’s inversion — the upright/inverted distinction, created in 1855. The single most influential act of symbol-making in modern occultism, but a modern act, not a recovery of antiquity.

The Golden Dawn ritual — the LBRP and its derivatives, circa 1888. This is where the pentagram became not just a symbol but a practice, drawn in the air, activated by voice and gesture, used to order space.

Wicca’s pentacle — the five elements, the enclosing circle, Gardner’s conflation of pentagram and pentacle. Mid-twentieth century. A synthesis that draws on all of the above.

LaVey’s Sigil of Baphomet — the goat in the inverted star. Runs through de Guaita (1897) back to Lévi’s textual distinction (1855), not back to any pre-Christian diabolism.

The thesis, stated plainly

There is no ancient meaning of the pentagram that all subsequent uses are corruptions or recoveries of. The symbol was available — geometrically striking, produced by a single continuous line, carrying the golden ratio in every proportion — and successive communities drafted it into service for their own purposes.

Pythagoreans saw mathematical harmony. Medieval Christians saw the five wounds of their God. Renaissance magicians saw the human body as a map of the cosmos. A nineteenth-century French occultist saw a diagram of spirit’s relation to matter. A Victorian magical lodge saw a banishing tool. A mid-century British witch saw the five elements. A counter-cultural provocateur saw a useful emblem of deliberate inversion.

Each of these readings is historically specific. Each has a traceable origin. None of them is wrong as a symbolic reading within its own tradition; all of them are wrong when presented as the original, universal, or perennial meaning of the shape.

For practitioners, this resolves one recurring confusion: the upright pentagram is not intrinsically “good” and the inverted star not intrinsically “evil.” Those valuations were assigned by Lévi in 1855, for reasons internal to his occult philosophy, and they are not older than that. A tradition may choose to work within Lévi’s framework; it should know that it is doing so. A tradition may choose to work within the Gawain-poet’s framework of five interlocking virtues, or Agrippa’s elemental model, or the Pythagorean reading of health and proportion. All of those are available. None of them is mandatory, and none of them is the symbol’s true and eternal meaning — because there is no such thing.

Reading on, from here

The Golden Dawn’s LBRP is documented in the order’s published papers and in Aleister Crowley’s Magick, Book 4 (1913). Agrippa is available in a complete English translation (Inner Traditions, 2021), which corrects errors introduced in older editions. Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon is the indispensable starting point for any serious work on modern Wicca’s actual history. Lévi’s Transcendental Magic in Waite’s 1896 translation is widely available and still readable.

Cross-references on this site: (forthcoming — elemental correspondences, the Golden Dawn in context, the history of Wiccan ritual tools.)