I remember walking dreamily by the great walls of Tiryns as a child, while an archaeologist friend of the family quoted Homer and spoke of the twelfth century B.C. Half listening, I watched a lizard, and my eye caught a small chip of pottery beside the path. Reaching down among the stones, I pried it loose from the dirt with my fingernail. When I showed it to the archaeologist, she said it dated from the Mycenean period and told me I could keep it.
For the first time, I felt tangibly connected to the dim, unrecoverable adult past I had been wandering through. Examining the tiny fragment carefully, I noticed on its rough side a few whorls of a fingerprint fired in the clay, and I touched the potter across 3000 years. Whose finger did I touch? Why did dogs bark while the wheel turned and the smell of wet clay mixed with the scent of olives and smoke from the fires? Where is that tiny potsherd now?
Last summer, I felt a similar connection to the past, standing on the second floor of the Etruscan Museum in Volterra, in the Metal Hills of western Tuscany, gazing at a small bronze pentacle dating from the fifth or sixth century B.C.
The Etruscans were a mysterious people. Their language was not Indo-European, and while some scholars guess they arrived in Italy around the ninth century B.C., by way of Egypt, others suspect their ancestors settled in Italy far earlier and their civilization evolved gradually, influenced by trade throughout the Mediterranean. In any case, the Romans looked with scorn on the immoderate joy, obvious in their artifacts, that the Etruscans took in eating, drinking and fucking. But after conquering the Etruscans and embracing their vices, the Romans never did succeed in capturing that joy.
Volterra was the northernmost of the great Etruscan cities, but the contents of the Etruscan Museum there show how much commerce was going on with the Greek colonies of southern Italy, also known as Magna Graecia. The museum has so many Greek objects, and so much Greek influence is apparent in its Etruscan objects, that you can see why archaeologists call the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. the Hellenizing period of Etruscan culture. Standing in front of the familiar little five-pointed star, I saw what I took to be Greek letters inscribed in its points, and I thought of the Pythagoreans in southern Italy. I had read that they revered the pentacle as a symbol of health and used it as a badge whereby they recognized each other.
When I got home, I thought I'd look into the connection between Pythagoras and the pentacle a little more deeply. You know Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician who discovered that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Years ago, I read about the Pythagoreans and the pentagram in a book on the golden section, The Divine Proportion, by Herbert E. Huntley.
In case you're not familiar with the golden section, it is a proportion regarded by the ancient Greeks as particularly aesthetically pleasing. Phidias used it in his sculpture, and the Parthenon was designed around it. Briefly, it is that proportion phi where phi is to 1 as (phi + 1) is to phi. In other words, phi=(phi+1)/phi. Solving for phi yields a proportion of approximately 1.618 to 1. If you contemplate the diagram following, you will see that almost any two different lengths you choose in a pentagram reveal the golden section in one way or another.
This was some of the intriguing background that drew me to the history of the pentagram. I wondered how the Greeks and Romans used it, and how it came to be so important a part of European magickal symbolism. Contrary to my beliefs, in sorting through what evidence I could find, I discovered that the pentagram probably had little to do with Pythagoras, who was probably not a mathematician. But the pentagram does trace an interesting path through the history of magick.
Magick has a history of secrets. Intellectual magicians often conceal their knowledge for the sake of power, while on a folk level repressed religious practices must be hidden from hostile neighbors. In Western Europe, the combination of local, grass-roots persecution and the institutionalized brutality of the Christian churches has meant that traces of folk magick have tended to surface only in times of intellectual and spiritual ferment.
And yet, particularly in the countryside, where things change little from generation to generation, old beliefs can be more durable than monuments of stone. When Charles Godfrey Leland, a pioneering folklorist and friend of Mark Twain, gathered secret folk practices among the farmers of Tuscany 100 years ago, he found the Etruscan gods still being honored by name. Leland's Etruscan Magic and Occult Remedies is wonderful not only for its detailed descriptions of nineteenth century Italian folk paganism, but also because it reveals the origin of those pagan practices in Etruscan religion.
The uses and significance of the pentagram in ancient times, however, is one of those secrets on which ancient writers shed almost no light. From the archaeological record, we do know that pentagrams were being used in very early times, because they appeared on pottery, coins and other artifacts.
The earliest use of the pentagram that I know of is the Sumerian cuneiform "UB" character of the Uruk IV period in Babylon, about 3000 B.C. Cornelia de Vogel concludes, in Appendix A of her Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism, that although we don't know exactly what this sign meant, it probably referred to planets and cosmic powers.
There is no evidence that the ancient Egyptians used the pentagram, contrary to what you may have heard. De Vogel points out that their five-pointed tomb decorations were stylized starfish, not pentagrams, and the hieroglyph for the human frame was a similar five-pointed stick figure. If the Egyptians really proportioned the Great Pyramid on the golden section, as D'Arcy Thompson argued from a passing comment of Herodotus, they would certainly have known the pentagram, but what we know of Egyptian mathematics makes Thompson's theory seem unlikely. In The Power of Limits, György Doczi illustrates how the Great Pyramid's design could easily have been based on a much simpler 5:3 proportion.
Starting around the fifth century B.C., pentagrams began to appear on Greek and Jewish artifacts. An Attic amphora in the Munich Museum shows a pentagram decorating a warrior's shield, suggesting that the pentagram had apotropaic, or protective, significance. Pentagrams also appeared on Jewish pottery from Jerusalem and the coastal area of Palestine, on a variety of Greek coins from Melos and southern Italy, and on an alabaster disc in the Basel Museum dating from Alexandrian times. In many of these instances, a letter was inscribed at each of the five points of the star. In the Greek instances, these letters, Psi, Gamma, Iota, Theta, Alpha, spelled ygieia, Hygieia, the name of a goddess and the word for health. Apparently, these pentagrams were thought to promote health by warding against disease and death.
Later, following the Greek example, pentagrams appeared on a variety of Roman, Gallic and even British coins, according to de Vogel and Dr. Jan Schouten's The Pentagram as a Medical Symbol. On several of the Roman coins, the pentagram seems to have been used as a builder's symbol.
The question is, in what way were these early uses of the pentagram associated with Pythagoras and the mysterious Pythagorean Brotherhood?
If you're interested in Pythagoras, you can read a great many details of his life written by ancient authors. You can discover that he was born on the island of Samos around 580 B.C., that his father was Mnesarchus and his wife was Theano, that he studied under Thales, that he traveled to Egypt, that he learned from Phoenicians, Chaldeans, Jews, Arabs, Brahmans, Persian Magi and even from the Druids of Gaul. Heracleitus called him "of all men, the most assiduous inquirer." He was the father of numerology. He was a religious leader, a political tyrant, an ascetic. He taught metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls), much to Molly Bloom's delight. He wouldn't eat beans (scholars explain this as an early case of "beans, beans, good for the heart…") or even walk through a field of bean plants in flower. He was reputed to be the Hyperborean Apollo; he had a golden thigh; he was a successful Olympic coach. Above all, he founded the Pythagorean Brotherhood, a great secret society that flourished for who knows how long.
All these facts about Pythagoras, however, turn out to have been written down centuries after he died. If you're really interested in Pythagoras, you must become a philologist and undertake the arduous process of meticulously comparing, collating, sifting and analyzing each nuance of the surviving sources, to figure out what details you can trust.
One of the most thorough investigators of this subject has been Walter Burkert, in Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism. Layer by layer, Burkert stripped away the later additions, the borrowings, the inconsistencies, the unrelated Platonic polemics, and as he did so, a clear picture of the historical person gradually disappeared. In Burkert's words:
"The figure of Pythagoras fades into the mist, and all the much-discussed Pythagoreanism of the fifth century becomes a mirage.... Pythagoreanism is thus reduced to an impalpable will-o'-the-wisp, which existed everywhere and nowhere.... Considering [the biographical and historical sources]…, one is tempted to say that there is not a single detail in the life of Pythagoras that stands uncontradicted." Even the Pythagorean Theorem that we were all taught in school very likely comes from Babylon or India, where it was known for centuries before Pythagoras.
The evaporation of hard facts leaves behind a fascinating and evocative image of Pythagoras. Take, for example, the theory of metempsychosis, the idea that the soul progresses from body to body through a series of lives, perhaps including animal and plant lives. Burkert observes that Pythagoras could not have borrowed this idea from the Egyptians, as Herodotus asserted, but agrees with Herodotus that the metempsychosis taught by Pythagoras helped create the Orphic tradition, associated with Dionysus and his son Orpheus. This connection of the "Hyperborean Apollo" to Orpheus flies in the face of my unexamined assumption that a Hegelian dialectic existed in Greek spirituality. Burkert explains:
"Thus the oldest sources show Pythagoras, unlike Orpheus, as a tangible personality of the historical period, but their doctrines as connected or even identical. There is no support in these sources for the modern attempts to discern a difference in doctrine between Orphism and early Pythagoreanism. It is only too easy for modern notions to intrude. If one believes, with Nietzsche, in a primal opposition of 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian,' then Pythagoras and Orphism must stand in the same polar relationship; and if, under the influence of later evidence, one regards the philosophy of number and the foundation of exact science as the essential ingredient of Pythagoreanism, the antithesis of Apollonian rationality and Dionysian mysticism fits in very nicely. We must bear in mind, however, that as the Greeks thought of them, Apollo and Dionysus were brothers."
Burkert looks for the origin of metempsychosis far afield, in Iran and India, and in the shamanistic tradition stretching back into Neolithic times. He traces a connection between Pythagoras and the cult of Demeter, and in particular the Eleusinian mysteries. With regard to beans, for example, reputedly of such importance to the Pythagoreans, he quotes Pausanias' elusive comment that "Demeter… gave mankind all the products of the earth, with the exception of beans; and 'whoever has witnessed an initiation at Eleusis or read the so-called Orphic writings, knows what I mean.'"
For Burkert, what Pythagoras loses as a historical figure, he more than gains back as a legendary mystical leader:
"For this is the picture of Pythagoras that emerges from the study of the most ancient testimony, not influenced by Plato. He is the hierophant of Great Mother mysteries with an Anatolian stamp, and has a new doctrine, probably influenced by Indo-Iranian sources, of immortality and of the triumph over death through successive rebirths. Epimenides and Empedocles were similar 'shamans,' but the special character of Pythagoras' activity is seen above all in one fact - the continued existence of [the Pythagoreans]."
Reading Burkert drove home to me again that most of what I know is likely wrong. But what about my little pentacle in the Etruscan Museum? Burkert did feel that both the pentagram and the dodecahedron (a regular solid having 12 equal pentagonal faces) may have been used as symbols of recognition among the Pythagoreans. But, although the pentagram was in circulation around the Mediterranean in Pythagoras' day, especially in southern Italy, de Vogel argues convincingly that it did not originate with Pythagoreans. Beyond its apparent warding significance, often to promote health, we know very little about the meaning it held for Mediterraneans of the day. After the publication of Euclid's Elements around 300 B.C., Platonists in particular must have invested the pentagram with the mystical associations of the golden section, but in general, its early use and significance remains pretty hazy.
The main link between this mysterious pentagram of classical times and the one we know today is provided by a group of mystical Neo-Platonists of the late Roman period, including Iamblichus, who called themselves Pythagoreans and who were very interested in magick.
The one ancient source that actually identifies the pentagram as a badge of recognition among the Pythagoreans is a brief essay, A Slip of the Tongue in Greeting, written by the satirist Lucian of Samosata (120-180 A.D.), apparently to show off to a patron his refinement and erudition about forms of address. Lucian observed that the Pythagoreans always begin serious letters to each other with the salutation "Health to you" and noted in passing, "Indeed the Pentagram, the triple intersecting triangle which they used as a symbol of their sect, they called 'Health.'"
It seems foolish to put a lot of weight on so casual a comment made in the second century A.D., by a writer who avowedly despised philosophy and mysticism, about a secret society that may or may not have existed seven centuries earlier. Lucian's information undoubtedly came from Neo-Platonic Pythagoreans of his time, but it tells us nothing about how or when their tradition arose. In the Renaissance, however, as I note later, this passing remark was taken very seriously.
The Neo-Pythagoreans of the late Roman era, to whom Lucian's comment probably applies, were living in an age of tremendous magickal creativity. The Roman empire had become a melting pot of Mediterranean civilization, brought to a boil by political and cultural upheavals. Jewish magick was particularly respected (witness the success of a peculiar messianic death cult), but Jewish magicians were borrowing from other traditions, including the Neo-Pythagoreans, as unrestrainedly as other traditions were borrowing from them. Erwin R. Goodenough gives a fascinating overview of how ceremonial magick developed during that period as a syncretic blending of Jewish, Greek, Arabic, Coptic, Gnostic and Byzantine lore in Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period.
After the disintegration of the Roman empire, a period of repression followed, as Christianity became dominant and Europe sank into feudalism. People continued to find magick enchanting, but the state church increasingly condemned it as heresy and in many cases persecuted it. Even magick's orthodox Christian opponents in the Middle Ages seemed reluctant to mention anything specific, because the admission of too much knowledge was dangerous. In those days, it was quite easy to conjure flesh-and-blood devils of the human sort to torture people mercilessly and burn them to a horrible death.
This real physical danger from the Church helps to account for how seldom pentagrams turn up on medieval artifacts. What has survived from the Middle Ages is a group of important ceremonial magick texts that claim to derive from King Solomon. Lynn Thorndike described these manuscripts in his History of Magic and Experimental Science, Chapter 49, and Arthur Edward Waite condensed a good part of them into his Book of Ceremonial Magic.
Solomonic texts gave great importance to the pentagram, under the name "Solomon's seal." Gershom Scholem writes, "In Arabic magick, the 'seal of Solomon' was widely used, but at first its use in Jewish circles was restricted to relatively rare cases. Even then, the hexagram and pentagram were easily interchangeable and the name was applied to both figures." Scholem notes that Byzantine tradition as early as the sixth century identified Solomon's seal particularly with the hexagram, later known as the shield or star of David.
In the West, however, Solomon's seal was almost a pentagram. Latin versions of Solomonic texts, for example, used the word "pentaculum" to refer to all the various circular devices associated with Solomon's seal, even though most of them do not actually contain a pentagram. This usage is usually reflected in English translation by the word "pentacle" or "pantacle," as for example in the Clavicula Salomonis translated and published by S. Lidell MacGregor Mathers in 1889 as The Key of Solomon the King.
One of the most interesting things that I discovered in the course of my investigations is that the pentagram of Solomon's seal, at least in the West, probably derived directly from the Neo-Pythagorean pentagram symbolizing health. The Latin phrase commonly translated as "seal of Solomon" is actually "salus Salomonis," or literally "health of Solomon." The word salus, meaning health and corresponding to the Greek ygieia, was specifically used in the Neo-Pythagorean tradition to signify a pentagram. I suspect that the alliterative similarity of salus and Salomon played a part in transforming "salus Pythagorae" to "salus Salomonis."
As a legendary spiritual figure, Solomon could easily be associated with the Pythagoras of the Neo-Platonists. On Jewish amulets of the late Roman period, where he appeared as a horseman spearing a prostrate female figure, perhaps Lilith, he symbolized ascetic spirituality overcoming the corporeal world, and patriarchal victory over the Mother Goddess. Neo-Platonists assigned Pythagoras a comparable ascetic and anti-feminine role. Solomon was also considered a master of warding, according to Goodenough, which made the pentagram, an ancient warding sign, perfectly appropriate to him.
The first English mention of a pentagram appears quite unexpectedly around 1380, when the anonymous author of Gawain and the Grene Knight gave Gawain, traditionally the Celtic sun-hero, a shield "that was bright red with a pentangle of pure gold color painted on it." Almost 50 lines are devoted to this hitherto unknown heraldic device. Interestingly, the pentagram is immediately identified as Solomon's: "It is a sign that Solomon set once/ To betoken truth, by the title that it has,/ For it is a figure with five points,/ And each line overlaps and locks in another,/ And everywhere it is endless, and the English all call it,/ I hear, the Endless Knot." The author invokes in the pentacle the five wits, the five fingers, the five wounds of Christ, the five pure joys of Heaven's queen with her child and the five virtues generosity, fellowship, purity, courtesy and mercy.
The origin of this Solomonic pentagram has puzzled scholars for some time. Henry Lyttleton Savage, in The GAWAIN-Poet, suggests quite plausibly that the short-lived French Order of the Star was a source for this symbol, and in company with Tolkien and others, he notes that Freemasons honor the pentagram as Solomon's seal. Looming behind both the Order of the Star and the Masons, however, stands the Order of the Temple of Solomon, the Knights Templar, founded in 1119 and suppressed by Phillip the Fair of France and Pope Clement V between 1307 and 1314. Founded to rebuild the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, the Templars regarded Solomon's seal as an emblem of their order, both in its Western pentagram form and in its Eastern hexagram form. John J. Robinson in his book Born in Blood convincingly argues that the powerful organization of the Templars went underground, particularly in England and Scotland, to form what became over time the society of Freemasons. As Freemasons, they did more than anyone else over the centuries to make the pentagram a familiar symbol.
After the year 1500, in spite of the Church's continued condemnation of magick in general and the various Solomonic works in particular, pentagrams and books about magick suddenly proliferated. Renaissance humanism, the printing press and the Reformation all contributed to this change.
Beginning in the early 1400s, humanist scholars in many parts of Europe began learning Greek and Hebrew, traveling to the East to collect old manuscripts and studying, translating and publishing the works of classical writers. In 1471, Marsilio Ficino, the famous Florentine Neo-Platonist, translated and published the Corpus Hermeticum. This tremendously popular work identified Orpheus and Pythagoras as successors to the mystical Egyptian, Hermes Trismegistus, and depicted them almost as pre-Christian saints (for background, see Wayne Schumaker's The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance).
In 1486, Ficino's student Giovanni Pico della Mirandola submitted his famous 900 theses to the Church, in which he defended the study of magick and the Kabbalah. While the Church never accepted such free-spirited eclecticism, neither was it able to prevent Pico's work from achieving enormous popularity and influence. Pico helped to legitimize magick as both a philosophical and a spiritual field of inquiry. Inspired by him, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim wrote the well-known De occulta philosophia around 1510 and published it in 1531. Thanks to the printing press, such works as this became far more widely and cheaply available than had ever been possible before, and far more difficult to suppress.
Meanwhile, as magick was becoming a more public (if still very risky) field of inquiry, Lucian, of all writers, was becoming popular again. His collected works were first printed in 1496 in Florence and were reprinted in the original Greek and in translation many times during the sixteenth century. Lucian's A Slip of the Tongue in Greeting, the little essay that the Pythagorean pentagram, is so minor its history is hard to trace, but it was widely known and published by the end of the fifteenth century.
The influence of Slip of the Tongue appears in a significantly distorted manner in Agrippa's De occulta philosophia, where a pentagram is pictured inscribed on a signet of the Syrian king, Antiochus Soter, together with the word ygieia. To understand this entry, you must realize that while discoursing tediously about salutations in Slip of the Tongue, Lucian also told the following brief anecdote about Antiochus:
"When Antiochus Soter was about to engage the Galatians, he dreamed he saw Alexander standing by him, who told him to give the army the password 'Health' before the battle, and under that word he won his amazing victory."
It seems that Agrippa combined this anecdote with Lucian's earlier comment that the pentagram was the symbol of health to yield the idea that Antiochus was victorious over the Gauls under a pentagram symbol given to him by Alexander in a dream. Interestingly enough, however, Agrippa makes no mention whatsoever of either Pythagoras or Solomon in connection with the pentagram.
As one of the great Renaissance students of magick, Agrippa was certainly familiar with the Solomonic tradition, so it is safe to assume that the Inquisition's continuing prosecution of that tradition was what prevented him from identifying the pentagram as Solomon's seal. In this light, it seems Agrippa assigned the pentagram to so harmless and little-known an ancient as Antiochus Soter as a premeditated strategy for allowing an important symbol to be published safely.
If so, the strategy was successful. Around 1520, according to Schouten in The Pentagram as a Medical Symbol, the German physician Johannes Heyl was able to become a printer under the name of Antiochus Soter, with a downward-pointing pentagram as his printer's mark. Later, Giovanni Pierio Valeriano Bolzani's Hieroglyphica, a popular encyclopedia of symbols published in 1556 and often reprinted thereafter, elaborated Agrippa's story of Antiochus and explicitly cited Lucian's Slip of the Tongue. Vincenzo Cartari's Images of the Ancient Gods, published in Venice in 1571, also depicted a health pentagram with the same story. None of these works mention any Pythagorean connection.
From then on, the pentagram was propagated ever more widely. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was used openly as a medical symbol. By the eighteenth century, those interested in ceremonial magick were able to publish grimoires loosely based on the old Solomonic texts, and from these grimoires much of modern ceremonial magick has derived. At the same time, owing in part to the Masons' efforts, pentagrams began to appear on flags and in other public contexts too. We are now so used to seeing five-pointed stars everywhere that we seldom think of their significance.
I have traced a tenuous line starting around 3000 B.C., passing through pentagrams on Jewish ceramics and Greek coins in the fifth century B.C., through Roman coins, through the Neo-Pythagorean magicians of the late Roman era, through the Solomonic tradition that supplied the main medieval texts of ceremonial magick, through the Knights Templar and the Masons, through the Renaissance on down toward us today. As always, though, what we don't know is undoubtedly more important than what we do.
Even so, I hope I have given you a sense that the modern pentacle really does stand as a valid symbol of a magickal heritage stretching back unbroken in Europe at least to late Roman times, and perhaps along lost paths back to Pythagoras and into prehistory. It may be that lion and lizard now keep those courts, but a scent of roses lingers still around the shattered vases of antiquity.
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