Pentagram Symbol

The pentagram (⛤, U+26E4) is a five-pointed star drawn in a single unbroken line. Point-up, it is a sacred symbol in Wicca and modern Paganism, standing for the five classical elements. Point-down — the inverted pentagram (⛧, U+26E7) — it is best known as the basis of the Church of Satan's official sigil, an association that is not ancient but traces to a specific, dateable choice in 1966. The same star, used by two different organized communities for genuinely different purposes.

For Wiccans and modern Pagans, the point-up pentagram is a living religious symbol, no less serious than the Om in Hinduism or the Khanda in Sikhism. In these traditions the five points stand for the five classical elements — air, fire, water, earth, and a fifth, spirit, placed at the top to represent the divine self that transcends and unifies the other four. Enclosed in a circle it becomes the pentacle, and it appears on altars, in jewelry, and in ritual, where it is used for protection and in rites of invocation and banishing.

The point-down pentagram's link to Satanism is much more recent, and it can be dated precisely. In 1966 the Church of Satan, founded by Anton LaVey, adopted an inverted, point-down pentagram with a goat's head inscribed inside it — the design known as the Sigil of Baphomet — as its official, later copyrighted, emblem. The orientation was not arbitrary: a goat's head fits naturally into a downward-pointing star, with two points reading as horns and the lowest point as the chin and beard. That deliberate 20th-century branding choice, more than any ancient lore, is why the inverted pentagram now reads as Satanic to most people.

Even the underlying idea that orientation carries a moral charge — point-up for spirit over matter, point-down for matter over spirit — is a relatively modern invention rather than an inherited folk belief. It took shape in the 19th-century European occult revival, among ceremonial-magic movements such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and only later hardened into the popular shorthand of a "good" star versus an "evil" one. For most of its long history across cultures, the five-pointed star carried no single fixed meaning of this kind at all.

Wiccans and Pagans actively push back on the conflation with Satanism, and it is a documented position rather than an assumption — sources in these communities state plainly that the pentagram "is not Satanic," and have repeated the point in response to persistent misconceptions. There is also a genuinely surprising wrinkle: in some Wiccan initiatory traditions the reversed, point-down pentagram is used legitimately as a second-degree initiation symbol, entirely within Wicca and with no connection to Satanism. Even the point-down orientation, in other words, is not universally ceded to a single meaning.

The honest summary is that this is one star used by two different organized communities, in two orientations, for genuinely different purposes — with the Wiccan and Pagan use being the older of the two, and the Satanic association arising from a specific, documented decision in 1966. Unicode encodes the star itself but not the drawn extras: ⛤ (U+26E4) is the plain point-up pentagram and ⛧ (U+26E7) the inverted one, but the encircled pentacle, and the goat's-head Sigil of Baphomet, are illustrations rather than single characters you can paste.