Pentagram

The five-pointed star drawn in one line, a sign of protection for thousands of years and no sign of evil.

A pentagram is a star with five points, drawn in a single unbroken line. The name is Greek and means "five lines".

The sign is very old. It turns up on clay tablets in Mesopotamia. The followers of Pythagoras are said to have used it as their sign of recognition and of health. Medieval Christians saw in it the five wounds of Christ, and in the English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, of the fourteenth century, the hero carries it on his shield as the sign of a faultless knight. In the German lands it was drawn on doors and cradles to keep harmful spirits out, and in Goethe's Faust such a star on the threshold holds the devil captive in the study.

In modern witchcraft the five points stand for the four elements and spirit, with spirit at the top. Set in a circle, the star becomes the pentacle.

The idea that the pentagram is a sign of evil is young. In the 1850s the French occultist Éliphas Lévi declared that the star with one point upwards meant good and the star with two points upwards evil. In 1966 the Church of Satan in California took the reversed star, with a goat's head drawn into it, as its emblem, and horror films did the rest. For witches the reversed star carries no such meaning; in some lines of Wicca it marks a degree of initiation.

Related: pentacle, the four elements.