pentagrammon

Pentágrammon is Greek, from penta (five) and gramma (letter, line). The five-pointed star drawn with five straight lines, each intersecting two others, was a geometric curiosity before it was anything else. The Pythagoreans of the fifth century BCE adopted the pentagram as their symbol — it represented health (hygieia) and the mathematical harmony of the golden ratio, which appears in the star's proportions. They drew it in the sand as a greeting to fellow initiates.

The pentagram entered Christian symbolism in the medieval period as a positive symbol. The five points represented the five wounds of Christ. Sir Gawain, in the fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, bears a pentagram on his shield as a symbol of Christian virtue. The five points represented five groups of five virtues. The pentagram was protective, not demonic.

The inversion came in the nineteenth century. Éliphas Lévi, a French occultist, declared in 1855 that a pentagram drawn with one point upward represented good, while a pentagram with two points upward (inverted) represented evil — specifically, the head of Baphomet, the goat-headed figure. This distinction, invented by Lévi, became doctrine in Western occultism and eventually in popular culture. The Church of Satan adopted the inverted pentagram as its symbol in 1966.

The pentagram now carries two contradictory associations. In Wicca and neopaganism, the upward-pointing pentagram is a positive symbol of the five elements (earth, air, fire, water, spirit). In popular culture, any pentagram — upright or inverted — suggests the demonic, the occult, the dangerous. The Pythagorean health symbol and the horror-movie demon symbol are the same geometric figure, separated by context and a few centuries of reinterpretation.