Pentagrams and Pentacles

Hello Arachnids!

    Today’s blog post is a short discussion about pentagrams and pentacles. What are they and why these symbols seem to have developed an unfavorable reputation? I’ll be adding some pentacle related items on my shop this month, but before I do, I’d like to unpack and dispel some of the fear centered around them.

    Simply, a pentagram is five straight lines that form star. A pentacle adds a circle around that star. Looking into it a little deeper, the five points of the star represent 5 elements: Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Spirit. There’s nothing evil about that.

    I have always viewed pentagrams and pentacles as protective sigils. They are meant to represent balance and protection and it’s a shame this symbol has been used to cause so much fear and hate when it’s intended to do the opposite. Which way the pentagram or pentacle is facing doesn’t matter either. There is no true context in which this symbol is meant to represent anything evil. Mat Auryn’s ‘Psychic Witch’ has a great section on the pentagram and practical occult usage followed by some elemental exercises if you’re interested in some further reading.

    So, let’s discuss why the pentagram and pentacle has been seen as a symbol of evil. The media. Pentacles are often used in horror or tied to deranged serial killers. The symbol of the pentacle has been tainted by the media either ignorant of its true meaning or despite it. This gives way for people who are committing acts of evil to misuse this symbol and further amplifying the idea of ‘Satanic panic’ surrounding the pentacle. Up until now I haven’t used any reference to Satanism when referring to the misuse of the pentacle and pentagram because there is no connection. It’s true that Satanism has taken the already existing pentacle and pentagram and applied their own symbolism to it, i.e, applying the goat head to the star, but this doesn’t suddenly make the symbol evil. People who have been uneducated in the occult have strung the two together for representation of evil when, in reality, neither of them correlate to acts of evil we see through media or individuals. Atheistic and Traditional Satanism share the same core value of self-betterment, not violence and evil. This leads into a deeper discussion about misconceptions of Satanism but that’s something I’d like to leave for another blog post. 

    To equate pentacles being evil due to its connection to Satanism is completely wrong on both accounts and it’s annoying at best the way some media portrays the occult. Often practitioners, symbols and traditions are demonized based solely on a lack of knowledge. There seems to be a need to have a bad guy, an adversary, which can cause misconceptions to be created about almost anything and when people are too scared to look deeper into these misconceptions it can be easily picked up and spread through multiple forms of media. However, I think I should note that it’s not just forms of media like horror movies that have portrayed a sinister or edgy view of pentacles and pentagrams. We can see this happen in stores on some clothing and accessories. A capitalist way of being contrarian to social norms will take these mis conceptualized views of symbols like the pentacle, slap it on a tee shirt, relate it to a belief it has nothing to do with and say that’s their way of saying “fuck you” to the “man”.

    On the other side of this analogy, we do see more forms of media and retail attempting to normalize occult practices, which is nice to see when it’s not spreading misinformation on the opposite end, by the way of ‘love and light’. What occultists like myself really strive for is truth and the truth about pentagrams and pentacles is that they have never been a symbol of evil. These symbols are ones of protection and the elements. With witchcraft and the occult becoming more accessible and popular, we are starting to see less demonization for practitioners, symbols and beliefs within the occult, but there is still a long way to go in destigmatizing non-Abrahamic practices as evil.

    What I’ve discussed in this blog post only scratches the surface for a lot of separate topics, but they all have the common theme of misconception. I want to revisit and go deeper into these topics, but for now I’ll reiterate for the last time that Pentagrams and Pentacles are symbols of balance and protection. They are meant to invoke the elements to protect you and will do absolutely nothing, especially nothing sinister, to a non-practitioner who comes across one.

Psychic Witch – Mat Auryn
(p153-155)

http://cityofgroveok.gov/building/page/pentacle-wiccan