Hello

I just wonder why pentagrams are always associated with mysticism, or often, black magic or evil. What's so special with that star inside circle thing?

I was wondering the same thing myself...why is the star-inside-of-the-circle considered to be evil? Or associated with Black Magic? Some people refer to that symbol as a 'hex,' too...

its a sign of the devil, im pretty sure its considered a summoning circle?

Only when the pentagram is used upside down, is it associated with black magic.

This is a pentacle as it is supposed to be:


http://www.religioustolerance.org/wicca.gif




*link* (http://www.religioustolerance.org/wic_pent.htm)

The Pentagram has MANY mystical connotations, including the five wounds of Christ, geometric representation of the ram/goat's head, truncation of the Star of David (which has six points), and the five elements (including the void, or darkness, from which all elements decend). It also has associations with the Lunar calendar.

Geometrically, it's an extremely powerful symbol, in either of its two common representations...Five and Three are both power numbers, which can be found several times and expanded upon infinitely in the Pentagram, and it's one of few recurring shapes or designs that contains both harmony and symmetry.

Whoops, so I think I've been badly infested with animes and games...... there they often represent evil wth pentagram (pentacles are less popular....)

http://www.churchofsatan.com/Graphics/CSPosterG.jpg

http://www.churchofsatan.com

Scary.

Now, that greatly explains why pentacle gets its bad name....

As an extra (and possibly out of topic) question, what gave goat such a bad reputation? Is it just because goats have something mimicing mephisto (the beard)?

Good question.

A lot of Celtic druids were credited with the ability to transform into various animals (including goats). It's possible (or even likely) that arcaic/folk representations of these beliefs and imagery were considered heathenistic and evil by colonizing English, and attributed to devil-worship.

I suppose the reason is EXACTLY as rational as the reason why the number 666 is suposed to symbolize the devil. :rolleyes:

Hans

You mean goat often 'appears' in Bible? I exactly remember that the New Testament wrote 666 as a devilish number, what about goat?

and it's one of few recurring shapes or designs that contains both harmony and symmetry.

Looking at the Vitruvian Man I have to say that da Vinci would most definitely agree with you here.

Originally posted by Circe
Looking at the Vitruvian Man I have to say that da Vinci would most definitely agree with you here.

Circe, I've read some of your posts other than on the religion forum, and you appear to have a vast knowledge of areas in which I am interested. As for the pentagram, have you read anything about Rennes-le-Chateau in France or the mystery that goes with it. What about the cathedrals built in France in the shape of a pentagram? This is a mystery I've been following for a number of years. Also, I liked your post about the different names of Isis. Intriguing! Also, I apologize for any ugly posts I might have replied to you on the religion forum. The forum turned into a barroom brawl, and I purposefully helped to trigger that. That's not the message I intended to give but one more of spirituality than religion. They're still going at it, but I feel the need to escape from it, so I'm reading these other forums. Peace!

cathedral built in shape of pentagram? Odd.... but may be amusing........ Does anyone has the picture of it?

Originally posted by curioucity
cathedral built in shape of pentagram? Odd.... but may be amusing........ Does anyone has the picture of it?

You may be able to find it under "cathedrals in France," "Rennes-le-Chateau sacred geometry," for example. These cathedrals were supposedly built directly upon the sites of pagan worship centers. I believe Scotland also has a sacred pentagram geometry in the far northeast area.

The 5-pointed star inside a pentagon was an important symbol of the Pythagoreans in early Greece, because some of the line-segments in that figure were in a ratio equal to the golden ratio.

They were mathematicians, and had never heard of devil-worship.

As for why later many seemed to associate it with devil-worship, who knows. But human nature in those days seemed to tend toward finding devil-worship nearly everywhere.

Walker's explanation of how the invading English identified paganism as satanism sounded very plausible.

Mike Ossipoff

Wow, it surprises me that pentagram has existed for that long. As for your explanation, what do you mean by golden ratio?

The golden ratio, also called the golden mean and the golden section is a ratio that occurs in nature, and is considered especially aesthetically pleasing. It's the ratio of B to A if:

A/B = (A+B)/A

So A is to B as (A+B) is to A.

For simplicity, we might as well let B be 1:

A = (A + 1)/A

or A^2 - A -1 = 0

Solving that (by the quadratic equation) for A, gives

A = 1.618...

Taking the reciprocal of that (dividing 1 by it) gives .618...

(It's a curious fact that the goden ratio's reciprocal, 1.618..., is the same number that one gets by adding one to the golden ratio).

That's the golden ratio. It's called the golden section or mean because it often divides a line into 2 parts, A & B.

As I was saying, the golden ratio occurs in nature, where shapes are recursively repeated, as in the growth of the chambered nautilus shell.

When placing an object on a table, it's often considered most aesthetic to place it so that its distances in the 2 dimensions are the golden sections of the table's dimensions. In such
ways, the golden section is considred aesthetically pleasing.

As for how the golden ratio or golden section occurs in the pentagram, I'm not geometer enough to be qualifed to say.

But the pentagram has definitely gotten an unfair rap. Because of the golden ratio, people considered the pentagram interesting and significant. And there were others, in the centuries after the middle ages, who wanted to find devil-worship in anything that someone else considered significant.

Mike Ossipoff


Mike Ossipoff

I'd like to clarify a few things in my posting about the golden ratio:

When I said that for simplicity we could let B be 1, that's justified because, whatever length B is, we can define that length as one unit of measure. Then we just have one variable, A, to solve for.

When I said "solving (by the quadratic equation)", I meant to say "solving (by the quadratic formula)".

The quadratic formula solves all quadratic equations. All quadratic equations have an exact solution (though it isn't always in real numbers), and that solution can always be gotten by the quadratic formula.

What I meant by 1.618... is a number with a decimal fraction that starts out like that, but continues on with more digits. It's an
"irrational number", and so the decimal fraction doesn't repeat and has infinitely many digits. Square rootes, cube roots, trig functions, etc., are typically irrational numbers.

The reason I said to take that number's reciprocal was: At the outset I said that the golden section is B/A, where B and A are related as I described. Since I said to choose the unit of measure so that B = 1, A = A/B. So then, since I had an answer for A, or A/B, and I wanted B/A, that's why I said to take the reciprocal.

I should say that the exact expression of what the quadratic formula gives is (where "sqr" means "square root of":

(1 + sqr(5))/2

The reciprocal of that expression evaluates to the golden mean, which is about .618... Again, that's a nonrepeating decimal fraction with infinitely many digits, an irrational number. They're called "irrational" because they can't be expressed as a ratio of whole numbers.

Since I mentioned the quadratic formula, maybe I should state it here:

The general quadratic equation is: Ax^2 + Bx + C = 0.

Where "sqr" means "square root of", and +/- means plus or minus, the quadratic formula says:

x = (-B +/- sqr(B^2-4AC))/2A

That formula is derived by "completing the square":

A quadratic expression can be gotten by squaring a binomial like Ax + B. You get (AX)^2 + 2AxB + B^2. Any quadratic expression can be made into something of that form by adding something to its constant term. So that something is added there, and of course to the other side of the equation too (One is starting with the equation Ax^2 + Bx + C = 0), and then the square root of each side is taken. The resulting linear equation is easily solved for x. In that way the quadratic formula is derived.

I say all this because I feel that I shouldn't leave unexplained statements. I'd write out the derivation of the quadratic formula by completing the square, but that would probably be adding too much explanation and lengthening this post too much.

I may have glossed over the psychology of the pentagram too dismissively. Notice that the star has a rather attention-getting appearance, especially inside a more prosaic figure like a circle or polygon. Someone could say that its explosive or radiant appearance suggests energy, strength, power, etc. Maybe the radiance reminded someone of the Lucifer account, and suggested the notion of people seeking strength in the wrong place, etc.

I don't know much about paganism, and I don't even know if pagans really used the pentagram. I didn't know that it was often represented with a circle instead of a pentagon.

Since this thread has been about how the pentagram got its bad connotation, that sounds more like psychology than parapsychology. Does sciforums have a psychology forum? That's more where this thread fits best.

Mike Ossipoff

Thanks a lot for the info..... though actually I'm going to need great time to fully understand that (cuz this is new to me).

Curioucity,

Do a websearch on "the golden ratio in art" and take a look at paintings in which this principle was employed. Might be easier to understand what this is all about.;)

A second..... you suddenly remind me of something important! Thanks, Thanks Thanks!
I remember I have known this thing! I read in a book about this:
Assume you make a rectangle. The length of one side of it is 1.blah blah blah (that's what I forgot, but presumably that number) times the length of the other side. Now, if you try to divide the rectangle into a square and a smaller rectangle, the side-to-side ratio of the new rectangle is exactly similar to the original rectangle. Is that? If I'm not mistaken, this rectangle can be drawn in such a way with a.. er.... (what do you call that math device to draw circles) whatever...... right?

Yes, the golden proportion can be constructed with compass and straightedge, the geometric purist's constructing tools.

Checking "golden mean" websites, there was one that described a method involving the use of string, and a 1X2 rectangle.

That makes use of the fact that, when the equation that I posted is solved by the quadratic forumla, you get:

A = (1 + sqr(5))/2 , where "sqr" means "square root of".

Well, the diagonal of a 2X1 rectangle has sqr(5) as its length, because, by the Pythagorean theorem, it's: sqr(1^2 + 2^2)
= sqr(1 + 4) = sqr(5).

Since we want to add sqr(5) to 1, because that's what the formula calls for, we can do that by adding the diagonal to the short side. The author of that website shows an obvious way to do that with string.

But that can be done just as easily with compass and straightedge:

(I've indented the paragraphs because it looks neater. But it now occurs to me that format differences could make it look really lousy).


1. Use the straightedge to extend the diagonal of the rectangle
some distance out of the rectangle.

2. Place the point of the compass at the corner through which
the diagonal was extended. Open the compass so that its
pencil can be placed at the other end of the adjacent short
side. On the corner at the other end of that short side.

3. With the compass, draw an arc from that corner that the
pencil is on, up to the extension of the diagonal.

4. The line segment consisting of the diagonal extended out to
the compass arc is sqr(5) + 1, where 1 is the length of the
short side. That's because the diagonal is sqr(5).

5. Now all tha's needed is to bisect that line segment. One way to do that with compass and straightedge is to set the compass so that its point is on one end of the line segment and its pencil is on the other end of the line segment. The swing the compass in both directions so that it makes a wide arc in both directions. The arcs should extend back past the middle of the line segment.

Reverse the point and the pencil's positions, and do the same thing again. The 2 arcs will intersect at 2 points on both sides of the line segment. With the straightedge, draw a line between those 2 intersection points. That's the perpendicular bisector of the line segment.

Each half of that line segment is longer than the short edge of the rectangle by a factor equal to the golden ratio.

That compass and straightedge procedure is based on the
result (sqr(5) + 1)/2, gotten by solving the quadratic equation by the quadratic formula. I'd like a construction method that doesn't need tha algebraic calculation, a construction method based directly on A/B = (A+B)/A. Maybe there is such a construction method, but it doesn't occur to me, and I didn't find it at the websitges that I checked. That doesn't mean that some website or book won't describe such a construciton though.

Mike Ossipoff

Thank you

*rush to the closest stationery store to buy graphics tools set*

an interesting aside to the pentagon.

When you take a laser light and refract it onto a circle of glass (say a round drinking glass with a mix of soy sauce and water)

The greatest numer of even refracted relections the light can produce is Five. It forms a pentagon

really? Odd enough.....

The pentagram isnt evil, but it has been associated with witches and magic and evil people that would use magick against you and turn you into a toad or cause famine to the area, what have you.

The pentagram is associated with them because they use it. Its a field of protection, a star with a circle around it and you stay in the center. Its your protective circle to keep everything else out and keep you protected whenever you open yourself up to psychic energies.

I dont practice it, no patience, but it is pretty interesting.

The sad thing is many of the people that could be considered witches were just people that had a better gift in herbology or other gifts that were deemed to be too far removed from the christian church, and so they were to be burned for doing their evil healings. I doubt there were very many evil witches around.

Now, here's another mystic symbol I came across.
It's a circle, containing a right triangle with 3 little circles on it, plus there's some sketchy lines all inside the big circle. From what I read, it's called the mark of Samael. Explanation, please?

The Pentagram was originally associated with fertility, with Venus, because if you haven't noticed during its cycle across the sky Venus makes a perfect (or almost perfect?) pentagram. The rose has five pedals also, and as such the Evening Star was generally associated with fertility or femeninity of some sort. However at the Council of Nicea, convened by Constantine the Great in the third or fourth century, while the Bible was being assembled it was decided that women were to be inferior to men in all ways. As a result all forms of worship toward females or things related to females, like the pentagram, were to be erased from religious practice in Europe, up until today even. Witches, who were originally wisewomen or medicenwomen were burned at the stake, I believe during the late medieval era five million of them were killed over the course of one hundred years. In order for Christianity to function, it seemed, females, femeninity, and fertility had to be eradicated.

I probably butchered the information but that's what I could remember from The Da Vinci code, which I haven't finished just yet. It's really a great book, very, very informative.

Someone asked why goats have a bad name... I think it may be because of that "seperating the sheep from the goats" line in the Bible...

BigBlueHead, thanks for pointing that out, can someone help looking more thoroughly in the Bible about that?
And Pollux, that's a great info, thanks...... By the way, did the Salem Witch Trials have something to do with what you said?

this is quite an interesting thread :D
i hope i can help out with my little knowledge.
firstly, i'd like to show you guys a picture that takes into consideration the golden ratio and the pentagram (both topics of this thread)
let me show the image first:
http://www.intent.com/sg/pentagram_phi_proportions.gif
As you can see here, the golden ratio fits perfectly into the 5 pointed star, if placed carefully.

it creates what looks more like (to me) a fractal. fractals are interesting also, but lets save that for elsewhere. we're talking about the pentagram and its bad rep.

perhaps it is the mysterious properties that surround this pentagram. like someone posted, they used the pentagram as a sort of "force field" to stay safe when conjuring powerful energies- i've also seen sacrifices done inside of a pentagram circle... and like one of the earlier posts said- the image right-side up is not considered evil, but was actually good.

bottom line is, theres power hidden within this symbol- and thats why people attach labels to it (good/bad) but in reality it is in the eye of the beholder.

the only reason the pentagram has received a bad rap is because of Christianity. the pentagram has been a symbol of protection for many centuries, common among all sorts of old religions. but when roman politricks came up with the stories for the new testament & the bloodbath of christian crusaders occured in the middle ages, everything got thrown out of proportion, and now anything that represents a "false idol" is considered satanic. notice how BORING the bible is-- that's because anything creative is satanic. you are not supposed to create, that is what Lucifer did and was thrown out of Heaven for.

we are all satanic because satan represents that aspect of reality which had fallen from grace with God, or as Theosophists will tell you, that aspect of reality which became material, or the physical manifestation of spirit. (read up on the Merkaba myths, sacred geometry, & numerology for more detail).

think of this 666, number of the beast crap: the star of David (often referred to as the jewish star because of it's sacred geometrical patterns & connotations to jews) has six points, six sections under each point and a hexagon in the middle. so basically, christians are saying Jews are satanic. BULL-SHIT, if you ask me.

anyway, there is no big evil being with horns and hoofs that is responsible for the terrible actions of men. that is a cop out in which world rulers have provided in the form of Christianity to tote along with the bible in order to retain political dominance. christians stole the symbol of the cross from early Celtic pagan religions, not to mention Easter (Beltane), Christmas (Yule), the 12 apostles (zodiac signs) and the like. hell, i'd even doubt christ was a real person, but i've already said too much.

my point is that the pentagram is most definitely NOT evil. on the contrary it's a very positive symbol, no matter how it's displayed.

from Aleister Crowley's Magick in Theory & Practice:
"The attributes of Five are Energy and Justice." http://www.hermetic.com/crowley/aba/chap0.html

The pentacle is a symbol of wicca in it's non inverted state (one point up). I wear one on a chain around my neck as a symbol of my faith......it's often assocciated with satanism but in it's inverted state, but people get confused....

Pentacles are generally associated with Wicca, although they are a very powerful strong sign in culture.

Perhaps but what is wicca associated with, that's the problem. Anyhoo bye.

the pentacle represents the old elements:
wind
water
fire
earth
the unknown

in the center where they all convene there are believed to be all the forces of earth. and so all pagans etc. use the centre of a geographical pentacle to perform rituals

That´s really a lot of information. Only thing I can add at the moment is, the pentagram is also called "the seal of salomon" in ancient scriptures. Thanks to my stupidity I am unable to find the explanation right now. :(

If you want to know what is so meaningful about a pentagram in a circle, it is a mathematical symbol (used with the star of david) to create a 25,920 year clock (cosmic cycle).

It is used on most of the countries of the worlds flags for a reason, the 'elite' of earth understand the 'power' of this symbol because they are satanic and just know this stuff, it is ancient knowledge, kept from the masses.

See this - http://members.home.nl/oriana1/p.w.11.html

I have my own site with tons of info - www.look.bz

Sounds like the Illuminati to me...

Along with what pollux said about the pentacle being associated with Venus (planet traces the path of a pentacle every 8 years in the sky), the pentacle of Venus is said to represent the five stages of the sacred woman's life (Venus=goddess of love, beauty, feminine sexuality, fertility) The five stages, or five points are birth, menstruation, motherhood, menopause and death.

At least that's one of the theories I learned through the Da Vinci Code, as Pollux also said.

We still pay tribute to Venus and her pentacle with the Olympic games, held every four years (half of the 8 year pentacle cycle) and with the very logo of the Olympics themselves. Once a five-pointed star (pentacle), the logo evolved to five interlocking rings.

Boy,i didnt know about Golden Ratio.Thanks fellas.Keep up the good work.

bye!