The pentagram: from the Pythagoreans to Gawain and Goethe's Faust

The five-pointed star drawn in a single continuous stroke is one of humanity's oldest signs. It already appears on Mesopotamian finds of the fourth millennium BC, was adopted by the Pythagoreans, passed through medieval Christianity and reached the occultism of the nineteenth century. Its meaning has changed many times, but its form, perfectly closed upon itself, has always suggested the idea of protection without a gap.

The sign of health

The Greek writer Lucian of Samosata, in the second century, relates in a short piece on greetings that the Pythagoreans used the triple interlaced triangle, that is, the pentagram, as a sign of recognition, and called it “health”. Later some scholars wished to see in the five points the letters of the Greek word hygíeia, but this reading belongs to later periods and is not attested in ancient sources.

The pentagram's appeal for the Pythagoreans also had geometrical reasons. Its lines intersect according to the ratio that much later would be called the golden section, and the figure contains within itself a pentagon in which a new star can be inscribed, and so on to infinity. This property made it an eloquent image of harmony and of the perfection of number.

Gawain's endless knot

In late fourteenth-century England an anonymous poet composed Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the masterpieces of Arthurian literature. On the hero's shield a pentagram is painted in gold, which the poet calls the “endeles knot”, the endless knot, and describes as a sign established by Solomon. The poem devotes a long passage to explaining its meaning.

The five points stand for five groups of five perfections: the five senses, the five fingers, the five wounds of Christ, the five joys of Mary and five knightly virtues, among them generosity, courtesy and piety. The symbol thus becomes an image of the knight's moral perfection, and it is one of the most elaborate Christian interpretations of the pentagram to have come down to us.

From Faust to occultism

In German popular culture the pentagram was called the Drudenfuss, the “foot of the Drude”, a night spirit, and it was drawn on thresholds and cradles for protection. Goethe used it in the first part of Faust, published in 1808: Mephistopheles manages to enter the doctor's study because the sign on the threshold has one angle left open, but he can no longer get out.

It was the French occultist Éliphas Lévi, in the mid-nineteenth century, who codified the opposition between the pentagram with one point upwards, a symbol of man and spirit, and the inverted pentagram, associated with evil. This distinction, very widespread today, finds no support in ancient and medieval sources, where the orientation of the star had no fixed moral value.

The history of the pentagram is a history of rereadings. The same sign has meant health for the Pythagoreans, virtue for a Christian knight, protection of the home for German peasants and good or evil for the occultists. Knowing its stages allows us to recognise which meanings are genuinely ancient and which are recent inventions presented as age-old traditions.