The following history of the pentagram is presented by kind permission of its author - 'Mr Lionel Pepper', to whom I extend my personal thanks.

Part 1 - " In The Beginning "

In the foundation of Hermeticism, in hidden societies of craftsmen and scholarly men, away from the eyes of the Church and its paranoia, the proto-science of alchemy developed along with its occult philosophy and cryptical symbolism.  Graphical and geometric symbolism became very important and the period of the Renaissance emerged.

The concept of the microcosmic world of Man as analogous to the macrocosm, the greater universe of spirit and elemental matter became a part of traditional western occult teaching, as it had long been in eastern philosophies.  "As above, so below".  The pentagram, the 'Star of the Microcosm', symbolised Man within the macrocosm, representing in analogy the Macrocosmic universe.

 The upright pentagram bears some resemblance to the shape of man with his legs and arms outstretched.  In Tycho Brahe's Calendarium Naturale Magicum Perpetuum (1582) occurs a pentagram with human body imposed and the Hebrew for YHSVH associated with the elements.  An illustration attributed to Brae's contemporary Agrippa (Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim) is of similar proportion and shows the five planets and the moon at the centre point - the genitalia.  Other illustrations of the period by Robert Fludd and Leonardo da Vinci show geometric relationships of man to the universe.  Later, the pentagram came to be symbolic of the relationship of the head to the four limbs and hence of the pure concentrated essence of anything (or the spirit) to the four traditional elements of matter - earth, water, air and fire - spirit is The Quintessence.

 In Freemasonry, Man as Microprosopus was and is associated with the five-pointed Pentalpha.  The symbol was used, interlaced and upright for the sitting Master of the Lodge.  The geometric properties and structure of the Endless Knot were appreciated and symbolically incorporated into the 72-degree angle of the compasses - the Masonic emblem of virtue and duty.  The origins of freemasonry are lost in the depths of history, obscured by the traditional 'craft'-secrecy of the order, but there are signs throughout history of the associations of craftsmanship and ritual and symbolism that have remained known only to a few, and the history of the pentagram has remained occluded in the same kind of mystery.  The women’s' branch of freemasonry uses the five pointed 'Eastern Star' as its emblem.  Each point commemorates a heroine of biblical lore.

No known graphical illustration associating the pentagram with evil appears until the nineteenth century.  Eliphaz Levi (actually the pen name of Alphonse Louis Constant, a defrocked French Catholic abbé) illustrates the upright pentagram of microcosmic man beside an inverted pentagram with the goat's head of Baphomet.  It is this illustration and juxtaposition that has led to the concept of different orientations of the pentagram being 'good' and 'evil'.

 Against the rationalism of the 18th century came a reaction in the 19th century with the growth of a new mysticism owing much to the Holy Kabbalah, the ancient oral tradition of Judaism relating the cosmogony of God and the universe and the moral and occult truths of their relationship to Man.  It is not so much a religion as a system of understanding based upon symbolism and the numerical and alphabetical interrelationships of words and concepts - the Gematria.

Eliphas Levi was a profound expositor of the Kabbalah and was instrumental in opening the way for the rise of the Victorian lodges of western mystery tradition - the Order Temporale Orientalis (O.T.O.), the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (G.D.), the Theosophical Society, the Rosicrucian’s (Fellowship of the Rosy Cross), and several others, even the modern lodges and traditions of speculative freemasonry.  Levi was also instrumental in taking the tarot from being a gipsy fortune-telling device to a powerful set of symbolic images relating closely to the Kabbalah (or as it is now called in the west, to distinguish it's development from the original Judaic form - Qabalah).  It was Levi who designed upon the form of the pentagram such associative inscriptions as in the Pentacle of the Tetragrammaton and he who renamed the suit of 'coins' as 'pentacles'.

The workings of ritual magick in the orders took the symbolism of the pentagram and it's elemental attributes, along with those of the hexagram and incorporated them as ritual flourishing or signing of the athame (ritual knife) to symbolise invoking or banishing in respect to elemental associations.  The Golden Dawn did much to advance and disseminate the roots of modern hermetic Qabalah around the world in its time of strength (from 1888 to around the start of the First World War), and through the writings and work of a number of its adepts and adherents, notably Aleister Crowley, have come some of the most important ideas of today's Qabalist philosophy and magick.  Aleister Crowley also had association with the remaining traces of the old pre-Reformation 'hereditary' witches, notably through Old George Pickingill and with Gerald Gardner, generally considered the founder of modern witchcraft.

In the 1940's Gerald Gardner adopted the pentagram with two points upward as the sigil of second-degree initiation in the newly emergent, neo-pagan rituals of witchcraft, later to become known as Wicca.  The one-point upward pentagram together with the upright triangle symbolised third degree initiation.  (A point downward triangle is the symbol of First Degree Initiates).  The pentagram was also inscribed on the altar pentacle, it's points symbolising the three aspects of the Goddess plus the two aspects of the God in a special form of Gardnerian Pentacle.  The writings of Gerald Gardner, an initiate of old Dorothy Clutterbuck, and of his associate Doreen Valiente, brought the long-withered stem of witchcraft - the Old Religion - out into bloom once more, after centuries of occlusion, with the caution that the general misrepresentation of it's former nature had made wise, and the new religion of Wicca was born.

 It was not until the late 1960's that the pentagram again became an amuletic symbol to be worn.  Co-incidentally with the rise of popular interest in witchcraft and Wicca and the publication of many books (including several novels) on the subject, there was a reaction to the Church.  In it's extreme, one aspect of that reaction was in the establishment of the satanic cult - The Church of Satan - by Anton LaVay.  For it's emblem, this cult adopted the inverted pentagram after the Baphomet image of Eliphas Levi.  The reaction of the Christian church was to condemn as 'evil' all that took the pentalpha as a symbol and even to condemn the symbol itself, much as had been the post-war attitude to the swastika.

The distinction between the point-upwards and point-downwards pentagram forms became accentuated in the minds of pagans and led to the concepts of 'white'-witchcraft and 'black'.  Those who took on board the strong personal ethical code of Wicca - the Wiccan Rede of "An it harm none, do what you will" did not wish to be tarred with the same brush as the Satanists who's philosophy is one of the domination of the spirit by the physical body - the priority of matter and physical existence.  Hence, despite the use and the different meaning of the inverted pentagram as a symbol of Gardnerian initiation, other wiccans, notably in the USA where the fundamentalist Christians are particularly aggressive to those who do not share their beliefs, are against any usage of the symbol.  It is sad to say that even the use of the 'upright' pentagram gives rise to social discrimination against pagans in some communities.  Otherwise, the pentagram or pentacle has become firmly established as a common neo-pagan and Wiccan symbol, acquiring many aspects of mystique and associations that are today often considered to be ancient folklore!

The antiquity of the pentagram is certain; its meanings and associations have evolved and richened throughout its history.  It's use within modern neo-paganism as a group symbol is as important as the cross has been in the history of Christianity and it is in the ubiquity and the attributed meanings of the symbol that it's potency lies rather than in it's antiquity.  From the Earth-aware attitudes and respect of life of modern pagans has already come the movement towards protecting and conserving the ecology and resources of our planet.  Perhaps they will see the dawn of a real new age of hope or perhaps just the end of an age of humanity.

 http://www.controverscial.com/Pentagram%20-%20Pentacle.htm