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Japanese The pentagram is not a Christian symbol today, and the Bible never mentions it, but a medieval Christian poet did once give it a Christian meaning. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an English poem copied in the late 1300s, the five-pointed star on Gawain’s shield stands, among other things, for the five wounds of Christ. Its occult meaning came only later.
A pentagram is a five-pointed star drawn with five straight lines that cross one another, or as the Gawain poet puts it, “each line overlaps the other.” Set it inside a circle and it is a pentacle. The solid star on a Christmas tree is something else again.
The star Scripture asks us to look for, though, is a person. At the very end of the Bible, Jesus says, “I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star” (Revelation 22:16).
Is the pentagram in the Bible?
The Bible never describes a five-pointed star or any sign drawn in that shape, though there are many stars in it, and it speaks of them with wonder. God “telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names” (Psalm 147:4), and at creation “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (Job 38:7).
It also has one great star of promise. Balaam, a prophet hired to curse Israel, blessed it instead (Numbers 23:11) and saw that “there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel” (Numbers 24:17). Centuries later the wise men came to Jerusalem asking, “Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him” (Matthew 2:2), and when the star led them on, “they rejoiced with exceeding great joy” (Matthew 2:10). The Star of Bethlehem is the star most Christians have in mind when they hang one at Christmas.
Scripture warns us about the stars, too. Israel was told not to look up at “the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven,” and be “driven to worship them, and serve them” (Deuteronomy 4:19). “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1), and they were never meant to be served in his place.
Where does the pentagram come from?
Christians did not invent the pentagram. Lucian, a Syrian who wrote in Greek in the second century, tells how the followers of Pythagoras began their letters to one another by wishing each other health, and he adds: “The Pentagram … that interlaced triple triangle which served them as a sort of password, they called by the name Health.” For them the star was a sign of well-being, with nothing dark about it. Lucian does not say how old the custom was.
You may read that the first Christians used the pentagram as a sign of Christ, but such claims usually come without a source, and when we looked for evidence we found none we could trust. The first clear Christian use of the pentagram comes much later.
Did Christians ever use the pentagram?
They did, and the best witness is a poem. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, before Gawain rides out on his quest, his shield is brought to him, red with a gold pentangle painted on it, and the poet stops the story to explain it. In Jessie Weston’s translation he calls it “a sign that Solomon set ere-while, as betokening truth,” though the Bible says nothing of King Solomon having such a sign. It is a figure with five points whose lines run into one another, so that “nowhere hath it beginning or end, so that in English it is called ‘the endless knot.’”
Then he gives its meaning, five times five. Gawain was faultless in his five senses, and his five fingers never failed him, “and all his trust upon earth was in the five wounds that Christ bare on the cross, as the Creed tells.” His strength came from “the five joys which the Queen of Heaven had of her Child,” and on one half of his shield was painted an image of Mary. The fifth five were his virtues: frankness, fellowship, purity, courtesy, and “compassion that surpasses all.”
The five wounds are the wounds the risen Jesus showed his friends: his two hands and his two feet, “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself” (Luke 24:39), and his side, which Thomas was invited to touch: “Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing” (John 20:27). For the poet, the star gathered up a knight’s whole faith: his trust in Christ’s wounds, his love for Christ’s mother, and the virtues he owed them.
How did the pentagram become an occult symbol?
Much of the pentagram’s occult meaning goes back to the French occultist Éliphas Lévi, whose books on “high magic” appeared in 1855 and 1856. Lévi gave the star two meanings, depending on which way it pointed. “The pentagram with two points in the ascendant represents Satan as the goat of the Sabbath; when one point is in the ascendant, it is the sign of the Saviour,” he wrote, and he even claimed the star of the wise men for magic.
Others took up his idea. The Church of Satan, founded in 1966, tells how it came by its own emblem, the Sigil of Baphomet, an inverted pentagram around a goat’s head. As far as the church knows, the sigil was first printed in an occult book of 1897 and later copied into a picture history of magic, where its founder, Anton LaVey, found it.
Wiccans, who belong to a different faith, give the star a different meaning. In Paganism, says a guide for British religious education, “the pentagram is used by Wiccans and other Witchcraft religions,” and “lots of people see the five points of the pentagram as representing Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit.” Pagans often wear the pentacle “to announce their identity,” and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs lists “Wicca (Pentacle)” among the emblems of belief it will engrave on a veteran’s headstone.
So the same five lines have carried very different meanings: health for the Pythagoreans, truth and Christ’s wounds for a medieval poet, magic for Lévi, and faith for Wiccans today. The upside-down cross has a similar history, a shape that stays the same while its meaning depends on who uses it.
Should Christians use or wear a pentagram?
We know of no church that teaches about the shape itself; what the churches teach about is the practice of magic. Scripture forbids anyone who “useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch” (Deuteronomy 18:10). When the new believers in Ephesus turned to Christ, “many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men” (Acts 19:19). The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls practices of magic, by which people try “to tame occult powers,” “gravely contrary to the virtue of religion,” and adds: “Wearing charms is also reprehensible.”
A star drawn on paper has no power, and Paul says as much of the idols of his day: “we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is none other God but one” (1 Corinthians 8:4). But he also asks us to think of the people who see what we do: “Give none offence, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the church of God” (1 Corinthians 10:32). Many people today read a pentagram as a sign of Wicca or the occult, so a Christian who wears one will often be misunderstood. We have the cross to wear instead, and at Christmas the star of Bethlehem.
The stars are lovely, and so is a symbol well chosen, but the one we follow is a person. Peter tells us to hold to God’s word of prophecy “as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts” (2 Peter 1:19).
