SHOW LINKS

• ILLUMINATED BREW WORKS
• From The Birthplace of the Illuminati, Matthew Vickery, BBC, 2017: It was on 1 May 1776 that Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt, founded the Order of the Illuminati, a secret organisation formed to oppose religious influence on society and the abuse of power by the state by fostering a safe space for critique, debate and free speech. Inspired by the Freemasons and French Enlightenment philosophers, Weishaupt believed that society should no longer be dictated by religious virtues; instead he wanted to create a state of liberty and moral equality where knowledge was not restricted by religious prejudices. However religious and political conservatism ruled in Ingolstadt at that time, and subject matter taught at the Jesuit-controlled university where Weishaupt lectured was strictly monitored. After initially handpicking his five most talented law students to join, the network rapidly expanded, its members disseminating Weishaupt’s goals of enlightenment with radical teachings, while at the same time creating an elaborate network of informants who reported on the behaviour of state and religious figures in an effort to build up a wealth of information that the Illuminati could potentially exploit in their teachings. With the help of prominent German diplomat Baron Adolf Franz Friedrich, Freiherr von Knigge – who helped recruit Freemason lodges to the Illuminati cause – the clandestine group grew to more than 2,000 members throughout Bavaria, France, Hungary, Italy and Poland, among other places.“Weishaupt was in many ways a revolutionary,” journalist Michael Klarner continued. “He liked the idea of teaching people to be better human beings. He wanted to change society, he was dreaming of a better world, of a better government. He started the Illuminati with the idea that everything known to human kind should be taught – something that was not allowed here at the university.” The organisation didn’t evade the establishment for long, however. Just a decade after its creation, the secret society was infiltrated by Bavarian authorities after its radical anti-state writings were intercepted by government authorities. The Illuminati was shut down and Weishaupt was banished from Ingolstadt to live the rest of his life in the German city of Gotha, 300km to the north. Yet the idea of a secret society revolting against the state has captured imaginations ever since, encapsulated in conspiracy theories cooked up by those who believe the Illuminati was never actually disbanded – a claim that has been widely debunked by historians. Even still, conspiracy theorists say that the organisation has been covertly working behind the scenes to subvert authority. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20171127-the-birthplace-of-the-illuminati 

• From On Materialism And Idealism: Collected Works of Adam Weishaupt:  All other things being equal, I am inclined to prefer a system that presents god and Nature as greater and more wonderful. This system assumes that species, classes, and natural kingdoms are real and have their basis in Nature herself. And yet I believe that, as such, there are only individuals, and not species, genera or classes, which are only the creations of man’s inability to think of everything individually, which has forced him to take certain matching characteristics in objects and then to divide and classify them accordingly. Thus, if a hierarchy (which has been invented) were to arise from this explanation then every being would have to run through and become not the classes but all the individual instances then I should have to become everything, and everyone else would have to too! What confusion, what a useless and never-ending repetition of the same old thing! Should we have to go round and round forever in an eternal circle? I too postulate a hierarchy in Nature: the law of continuity demands it. However, I believe it manifests differently. I believe that every being walks its own individual path and develops in its own way according to the circumstances in which it finds itself and which are unique to it alone. This development of each individual being then takes hold as a part of the development of the whole. It is only the law by which this happens that has yet to be discovered. This progression of entities is a more wonderful and diverse idea than we find in the system discussed above, where everything stays within the general region of those forms that we already know: no other, more far-reaching and better ones are surmised. I have proved above that all these configurations and forms of things, even these classes in the realm of Nature, are only for these senses. We continuously carry over this transitory world-form to another entirely different one. In our thoughts we dwell unceasingly among these configurations. In this system Nature seems too poor, too uniform, and yet her law is the greatest diversity in the greatest possible unity. The more a system expresses and demonstrates this property of Nature, the closer it comes to the truth. It is precisely this stronger impression of the new life that enables us to understand why at present we can no longer remember anything about the state preceding our present human life, even if we have gained so much precisely through this prior state that, through the use of our faculty of understanding (perhaps acquired for the first time during this stage) and through the ability there acquired to draw analogical conclusions, we can make very confident inferences about this previous state, even if its type and mode, along with its precise nature, are obscured by the more powerful effect

• From Freemasonry in Colonial America, Mark Tabbert, George Washington’s Mt Vernon, 2020: Freemasonry was a phenomenon that was growing in the 1680s through 1720s. The fraternity early on attracted high aristocracy and even members of the royal family, so that just attracted more and more men who might want to join. For somebody like Washington, who is on the edge of the frontier but comes from a well to do family, this is one more means for him to gain entrance into society. When he joined when he was 19 years old,  he presumed at some point in his life he would go to England, socialize in London, and potentially be received in court. The first Masonic book published in the colonies was Benjamin Franklin’s reprint of Anderson’s Mason’s constitution in 1733, and Franklin sent copies of that book to Boston where his family is from and also down to the Carolinas for sale. We also know there were Masonic orations and sermons being published in the colonies in the 1740s and 50s, and the secret work of Freemasonry, the rituals, were being exposed in the 1720s in newspapers. We don’t know exactly what ritual Washington received when he joined in 1752, but there were exposures of rituals in 1760 that were probably very close. The men who supported Freemasonry tended to believe in self-determination, freedom of the press, freedom of religion–very radical ideas in continental Europe. And then the French Revolution, of course, went from relatively peaceful into the Reign of Terror, the rise of Napoleon, and the destruction of the Catholic Church in France, the destruction of monasteries and the slaughter which horrifies Europe to this day. One book by a Scotsman called John Robinson called The Proof of Conspiracies in 1797 allays all these shocking revolutionary things at the feet of the Illuminati, which had attempted to infiltrate Freemasonry. Umberto Eco wrote that  in the absence of a supreme being that you believe is governing the universe and has a plan, when something strange happens human beings chalk it up to some sort of conspiracy, be it a revolution or an assassination or a stock market crash–you name it, we find a conspiracy, and in America because of this history the conspiracies are usually the Illuminati or the Freemasons. https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/freemasonry/freemasonry-in-colonial-america 

• From Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy, Mike Jay, Public Domain Review, 2014: John Robison was a man with a solid and long-established reputation in the British scientific establishment, a Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University for over twenty years, an authority on mathematics and optics and a senior scientific contributor on the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to which he would contribute over a thousand pages of articles. Yet by the end of the year his professional reputation had been eclipsed by a sensationalist book that vastly outsold anything he had previously written: Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, which launched the enduring theory that a vast conspiracy masterminded by a covert Masonic cell known as the Illuminati was subverting all the cherished institutions of the civilised world. The first edition of Proofs of a Conspiracy sold out within days; Robison had hit a nerve by offering an answer to the great questions of the day: what had caused the French Revolution, and what had driven its bloody and tumultuous progress? The power of Robison’s revelation was that it identified within the buzzing confusion of conspiracies a single antagonist and epic struggle between good and evil. The Illuminati became a lightning-rod for the deep anxieties of church and monarchy. 

• Politics had also thrown a long shadow across Robison’s professional life: The physical sciences were in the grip of another evolution after Antoine Lavoisier’s discovery of oxygen, from which he had been able to establish new theories of combustion and to begin the process of reducing all material substances to a basic table of elements. Lavoisier split British chemistry: some recognised that his brilliant experiments had transformed the science of matter, but for others his new and foreign terminology was an arrogant attempt to wipe away the accumulated wisdom of the ages and to eliminate the role of god. Robison had never accepted the French theories, and by 1797 had worked the new chemistry deep into his Illuminati plot. For him, Lavoisier was a master Illuminist, working in concert with Masonic lodges to spread the doctrine of materialism and the new atheist world order where occult priestesses ritually burned the texts of the old chemistry. 

• In an overheated political milieu where accusations of treason were hurled from both sides, Proofs of a Conspiracy was seized on eagerly by the Federalists as evidence of the hidden agenda that lurked behind fine-sounding slogans such as democracy, the abolition of slavery, and the rights of man, and Jefferson was publicly accused of being a secret member of Weishaupt’s Order. But such charges were never substantiated; the ‘Illuminati Scare’ petered out and the Federalists lost power, never to regain it. Yet the episode had touched a nerve deep within the American political mindset; the doyenne of modern conspiracy theory, 20th century British author Nesta Webster, swallowed this theory whole, but then came to believe the Illuminati were a smokescreen: the true conspirators were the ‘Jewish peril’ whose agenda had, she believed, been accurately exposed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/darkness-over-all-john-robison-and-the-birth-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy/ 

• From Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy: The Recurrent Aesthetics of the American Illuminati, Gordon Fraser, Journal of American Studies, 2018: United States democracy has long been characterized by fantasies of totalizing, all-powerful enemies, of sexual subjection, and of inescapable racial violence. The particular politics of such fantasies are historically specific, and yet their aesthetics are surprisingly recurrent. In the 1790s, as anti-Illuminati writers began to feel increasing pressure to substantiate their claims, they more fully articulated the specific racial dangers faced by the new United States. During this period, countersubversive writers speculated about whether the “sooty sons of Africa” would collaborate with foreign subversives against the United States. That a conspiracy theory in the United States quickly transformed into a narrative of racial paranoia should be relatively unsurprising: The crisis emerged, after all, in a representational economy already structured by the subjection of black people. When William Brown suggested that French revolutionaries would join self-emancipated black men in “the impure and shocking death-dance of Africa,” he was (perhaps inadvertently) calling attention to an economy in which white men operated at the center of power and discourse; Brown’s promise that the prerogatives of white American men would be upended in favor of black men and foreigners traded in fear, just like Brown’s promise that black men would let loose their “demonic lust” upon white “virgins” likewise allowed readers and listeners to indulge in a fantasy of racial humiliation. 

• The fantasies of racial subjection enabled by the Illuminati crisis in the United States were unlike anything seen during the same paranoid crisis in Europe. The sexuality of black men would be instrumental to the desires of foreign revolutionaries, they imagined, just as the sexual subjection of black women [by whites] would prefigure the sexual subjection of white women. For these counterconspiratorial fantasists at the intersections of whiteness and masculinity, the sadomasochistic fantasies of racialization provided critical aesthetic terrain upon which to organize themselves in relation with the larger world. The Illuminati, recall, were of a piece with the Enlightenment-era project that produced US democracy in the first place. Adam Weishaupt’s intellectual society embodied the “Spirit of 76 ” just as readily as did the Sons of Liberty. To these writers, black and foreign bodies were at once an ongoing threat to political cohesion and an object of aesthetic desire that could be consumed. While many of the counterconspiratorial writers of the Illuminati crisis favored the abolition of slavery, they were nonetheless implicated in an economy that trafficked in the subjection of black bodies.

• • From Raising the Devil, Bill Ellis, 2000: Anti-Semitism did not strike as deeply into American culture as it did in Europe. Likewise, anti-Masonic rumors were not especially prevalent or influential during the early part of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, scattered allusions to the Illuminati myth appeared with the American Communist Scare. In 1953, at the depth of the McCarthy investigations, government agencies such as the California State Senate Committee on Education were learning that “So-called modern communism is apparently the same hypocritical and deadly world conspiracy to destroy civilization that was founded by the secret order of the Illuminati in Bavaria on May 1, 1776,” according to a presentation by conspiracy writer Jordan Maxwell. The most influential source in creating the American Illuminati demonology was Canadian William Guy Carr. Like his predecessors, Carr argued that the Illuminati were only the most recent agents in a cosmic struggle originating with Satan’s rebellion. Jesus Christ was incarnated, according to Carr’s theological vision, to denounce the money-lenders and false priests as the Illuminati. In a remarkable argumentative twist, he argues that the Illuminati managed Jesus’ execution so that the Jewish people would appear to have been responsible for his death. This led to persecution, which in turn allowed the Illuminati to “use the hate, engendered amongst the Jewish people as the result of persecution to further their secret totalitarian ambitions.” According to Carr’s scenario, the Illuminati were founded not by Weishaupt but by a group of rabbis and high priests according to “inspirations given by Lucifer.” The conspiracy thus founded was controlled by a “Supreme Council” of specialists in Jewish doctrine, rites, and ceremony. Asked how he came to know such secrets, Carr explained that much of this information was included in documents being carried by an IIluminati courier in 1785. A bolt of lightning, directed by God Himself, struck the courier dead, and the documents he carried fell into the hands of the Bavarian government. Many of these developed Carr’s Anglophile distrust of United States politics, which he saw as irretrievably contaminated by Illuminati influences. Abraham Lincoln, for example, was assassinated to prevent financial reforms he had planned, and while John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger, the Rothschilds had given the orders. 

• LaVey called his Church of Satan operation mainly “showmanship .. . nine parts outrage and one part social respectability” that allowed participants to channel their “demons” into “a ritualized hatred that finally absorbs the hate itself, rather than turning it loose in such meaningless, antisocial outbursts as the Tate massacre.” As for his religion, he called it “just Ayn Rand’s philosophy, with ceremony and ritual added,” and he actually looked forward to the arrival of a “benign police state.” But the sex-and-ritual-murder pattern had now been set in the California media after the Mansion Family killings, and it would henceforth be difficult for any non-standard religion to detach itself from that reputation. Other conspiracy elements were quickly added on. The September 1970 issue of American Opinion, the publication of the right-wing John Birch Society, featured a lengthy article referencing Crowley, Manson, LaVey, Roman Polanski, all demonstrating that Satanism, “next to Communism, has become the fastest growing criminal menace of our time.” The article, using a variety of popular sources, traces occult movements through Weishaupt’s Bavarian Illuminati, the members of which, he claims on the strength of 1790s pamphlets, drank human blood, worshipped Satan, and conducted the Black Mass on an altar of human skeletons. The article concluded with an interview with an unusually cooperative “radical socialist” LaVey, who was happy to inscribe a copy of The Satanic Bible for a member of the John Birch Society and show him his extensive library of titles by “identified Communists.” Yes, Weishaupt was indeed “a practicing Satanist,’ LaVey proudly confirmed, and the Illuminati were “quite a powerful force for evil.”

• • From The Illuminatus Saga Stumbles Along, Robert Anton Wilson, 2007: Bob Shea and I began the Illuminatus series in 1969, inspired directly by our work as co-editors of The Playboy Fo­rum. The Forum deals with civil liberties, the rights of the individual, and abuses of government power. Natu­rally, in addition to a great many intelli­gent letters from people justifiably indignant about real cases of unconstitu­tional behavior by judges and legisla­tors, the Forum – especially in those days – received a lot of paranoid rantings from people imagining baroque conspiracies. One day, either Shea or I­ – we don’t remember which-asked whimsically, “Suppose all these nuts are right, and every single conspiracy they complain about really exists?” Thus, the Illuminatus saga was born. The idea was simple-a novel, perched midway between satire and melodrama, and also delicately balancing between “proving” the case for multiple con­spiracies and undermining the “proof.” Of course, if Shea andI  had any real sense of the market we would have real­ized that such a deliberately ambiguous work was not going to have immediate commercial appeal. But once we got started, the writing was so much fun we simply forgot about it. We had created an unsolved (perhaps unsolvable) mystery that was not merely puzzling like Agatha Christie but dumb­founding, flabbergasting, and more than a bit unnerving. The commercial results were not quite as bad as you might expect. It took over five years to get such a weird book pub­lished, true-and the refrain “I can’t understand that dammed thing” was heard from Senior Editors, but when it finally got into print, in 1975, the tril­ogy received almost uniformly good re­views everywhere. We even earned fairly decent royalties the first year In-jokes referring to the trilogy creep into other novels, movies and music videos. We have created some kind of “underground classic.” We were writing for neo-pagans, witches, Futurists, space colony advo­cates, longevity and vitamin freaks, and a lot of psy­chologists, psychiatrists, radical M.D.s, and other professionals concerned with the illnesses of our nation. There are also a lot of people who don’t want the Feds taking their dope away, and an assort­ment of anti-IRS cranks. As far as I can make out, the one bond uniting all these diverse groups-and separating them from others with simi­lar convictions-is a deep conviction that the government lies a lot, combined with a refusal to buy into any orthodox school of radical analysis. That is, they believe that any Ideology which claims to explain “what is really going on behind the lies” is just guess-work, and they feel that the jokes, insane exag­gerations and surrealistic twists of Illuminatus are about as plausible, and about as implausible, as the sober, seri­ous, and totally humorless critiques of the New Left, the New Age or any other organized Counter-Culture. I don’t know that this is the best path for a writer, but it seems to be the only possible path for me. The books have a sales chart that goes up, and goes down, and goes up and down, but eventually finds a loyal audience.

• From How Did He Get So Famous? Illuminati and the Pop Star, ELISSA R. HENKEN, University of Georgia, 2013: In Spring of 2012, two UCLA students of film and design told me that, according to at least one of their friends and to lots of messages on electronic media, the singer/actress Jennifer Hudson had made a deal with the Illuminati, including the 2008 murder of her family, in exchange for fame and weight loss. Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Rihanna, Eminem, Lady Gaga, and many, many others all reportedly joined the Illuminati, and the signs are to be found in their gestures, their lyrics, and their clothing as well as in their rapid rise to fame. Uncertain how much their location in Los Angeles and their interest in film and music (one is a deejay) might have affected their awareness of these legends, I asked my own students in Georgia what they had heard. Perhaps a quarter of each class had learned about it aurally; far more had seen something about it on the internet. The Illuminati are popularly understood in this context to be a secret society engaged in a conspiracy to control world affairs and create the New World Order, which itself is understood to entail replacing the established Christian order of Western nations with “an atheistic, socialist, global government.” Most of the related folklore takes the form of rumors—simply stating that some particular star is a member of the Illuminati. One claim making the electronic rounds is that Whitney Houston had to die in order that Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s daughter Blue Ivy, a true Illuminata, might live. Most people with whom I have discussed this intersection of the Illuminati and pop stars have immediately made a connection to Robert Johnson and his Faustian bargain with the devil at the crossroads. The preponderance of black artists said to owe their success to the Illuminati suggests some doubt that black artists—men or women— could achieve such success on their own, but there is not enough demographic material on those who either purvey or respond to that material to make any definitive or overarching statements about the racial undertones of these legends. Marc Lamont Hill, a journalist and scholar of African American studies, with a particular interest in hip-hop culture, points out that, “By accepting conspiracy theories as true, we can make sense of other people’s success without having to accept our own shortcomings.” Lack of talent, no matter the artist’s or the narrator’s race, is certainly one of a variety of themes behind these rumors. One white student reported that when she first noticed Justin Bieber—she kept hearing one song over and over—she asked classmates about him and was told that he was Illuminati.

• • From Cultivating Ethical Gameplay Through Illuminati, Rebekah Shultz Colby & Steve Holmes, Journal of Computers & Compositions, 2022:  The card game we examine in this article, Illuminati, constructs a satire of conspiracy theories with its artwork and procedural rules as players are meant to socially form alliances or cabals (some secret) and then ruthlessly break them. While few players take the game’s satirical conspiracy ideology seriously, the rules and mechanics offer a productive case for studying player’s material ethical habits. To procedurally simulate the paranoia of conspiracy theories, the game rules have unbalanced player role mechanics that make it much easier for some players to win over others and encourage players to cheat to compensate. In our study, we interviewed players before and after a play session of Illuminati, asking the same questions for each player. Ideologically, players either did not take the game’s parody of conspiracy theories seriously or implicitly agreed with the ideology behind the parody so unproblematically that they did not reflect on the game’s ideology in the meaningful way. For instance, the player who chose to play as the Discordian Society did not take the game seriously enough to see this as an ideologically motivated decision. As Jesper Juul argues in the paper “Half-Real”, digital and non-digital games exist on a continuum between being rule-bound systems comprised of rules and game mechanics and representing a fictional world through graphics, music, and narrative. Consequently, Sicart argues that games exist in a dialectical tension between being purely rule-based systems and, because of their narrative worlds, also representing a real ideological system and interpellate players by positioning them as a particular type of subject within an ideology. Our study illustrates that the players’ process is much more complicated than the process Sicart defines and will always change depending on different play contexts, especially as they are driven by attractors such as rules or gameplay. Nevertheless, this case study of Illuminati shows how material attractors form a space for certain dispositions which over time construct ethos. Even when the rules allowing cheating for instance, players can still resist these actions, choosing actions that construct dispositions they’re more inclined toward.

The post Episode 206: There Is No Illuminati… appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

SHOW LINKS

• UNHOLY ROSARIES

• From Geometric Symbols & Divine Proportions, Douglas C. Youvan, 2024: The pentagram is one of the earliest geometric symbols used by human civilizations, with its origins traced back to Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE. In Sumerian and Babylonian cultures, the pentagram was often inscribed on clay tablets, amulets, and other artifacts. The pentagram was associated with directions and the known world, often used to represent the five regions of the earth or the five visible planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—each of which was associated with a particular god in the Sumerian pantheon. The points of the pentagram were thought to correspond to these celestial bodies, symbolizing the unity of heaven and earth in a single, harmonious design. This use of the pentagram reflects the early Mesopotamian belief in a cosmology where the earthly and the divine were inextricably linked. In Babylonian culture, which inherited much of Sumerian symbolism, the pentagram was also linked to cosmological and astrological concepts to symbolize the movements of the planets and their influence on earthly affairs. The pentagram’s five points may have been seen as a symbol of the cyclical nature of the universe, with each point representing a different phase of a celestial cycle. This interpretation aligns with the Babylonian understanding of the cosmos as an ordered system governed by divine laws.

• As Christianity began to spread in the early centuries of the Common Era, the pentagram found new meanings within the context of Christian symbolism. In early Christian art and literature, the pentagram was used to represent the five wounds of Christ—two on the hands, two on the feet, and one on the side— inflicted during his crucifixion. This association gave the pentagram a deeply sacred significance, symbolizing Christ’s sacrifice and the redemption of humanity through his suffering. In addition to representing the wounds of Christ, the pentagram was also associated with the five senses, which were seen as gifts from god that allowed humans to experience and appreciate the divine creation. The use of the pentagram in this context reflected early Christian beliefs about the sanctity of the human body and the importance of maintaining spiritual and physical purity. The pentagram was also employed as a protective symbol in early Christian communities, believed to have the power to ward off evil spirits and to protect the wearer from harm. This protective use of the pentagram may have been influenced by earlier pagan practices, where the pentagram was seen as a powerful talisman against negative forces.The pentagram’s use as a Christian symbol gradually declined as the cross became the dominant symbol of Christianity. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Douglas-Youvan/publication/383214202_Geometric_Symbols_and_Divine_Proportions_The_Pentagram_Hexagram_and_Their_Religious_Significance_Across_Cultures/links/66c28591145f4d3553663e40/Geometric-Symbols-and-Divine-Proportions-The-Pentagram-Hexagram-and-Their-Religious-Significance-Across-Cultures.pdf 

• • From A Slip of the Tongue In Salutation, Lucian, 2nd Century CE: The admirable Plato would have us reject the salutation Joy altogether; it is a mean wish, wanting in seriousness, according to him; his substitute is Prosperity, which stands for a satisfactory condition both of body and soul; in a letter to Dionysius, he reproves him for commencing a hymn to Apollo with Joy, which he maintains is unworthy, and not fit even for men of any discretion, not to mention gods. The divine Pythagoras, although he did not see fit to leave us any writings of his own, still, as far as can be judged from the writings of his disciples and other companions, did not begin letters with the traditional ‘be joyful’ or ‘do well’, but exhorted them to begin with ‘be healthy’. All of his followers, at any rate, in writing letters to each other, when they were writing something serious, would exhort (each other) to be healthy at the very beginning, as the thing most fit for the soul and the body. And their pentagram, drawn to each other in five lines, which they used as a token for the like-minded, was called ‘health’ by them. They believed that doing well and being joyful were wholly part of being healthy, but not that being healthy was entirely part of doing well or being joyful. Some also called the tetractys — their greatest oath, which for them completes the perfect number — the beginning of health. And it was true wisdom, in my opinion; that all other good things are worthless if health is wanting. 
  • From The Witch, Ronald Hutton, 2016: The distinctive contribution made by Christian Europe to the magical tradition seems to have been geometric: the use of the consecrated circle as the normal venue for a magical operation, with special significance often given to its four cardinal directions, and the identification of the pentagram as the most potent symbol of magic. Pentagrams are found in ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek and Roman art or on coins, and also in the Christian early Middle Ages, but without any single tradition concerning their meaning and use: in many contexts they seem simply to have been decorative. There is no real evidence that the pentagram had any special association with magic in the ancient world. It appears once on a warrior’s shield painted on a Greek cup, which may have reflected a belief in its protective qualities…or it may just have been a decorative star. The most careful study of its ancient significance concludes (reluctantly) that its wide distribution in ancient times may have been ‘simply a question of decorative motif, with or without any particular meaning. The magic meaning of the pentagram was not yet apparent before the later Middle Ages. 

• As soon as Western Europeans acquired complex ceremonial magic in the twelfth century, seemingly as the result of their translation of Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic texts, they showed their preference for the pentagram, and it was especially associated with Solomon, the wisest of biblical kings, who had been reimagined in the late antique period as a mighty magician. The Sworn Book of Honorius, from its earliest surviving manuscripts of the fourteenth century, put the pentagram at the centre of the ‘Seal of God’ which was the most important work in the achievement of the divine vision. The pentagram also penetrated popular culture, as it appears in many parts of Western Europe by the end of the Middle Ages, on houses, cradles, bedsteads and church porches, as a protective symbol. The reasons for the new importance of the design are easy to propose: One of the prime concerns of the considerable intellectual ferment of Western Europe in the twelfth century was the reconciliation of ancient learning with creative literature, Christian beliefs, and study of the natural world. Honorius asserted that the human body is constructed on a base formed by the number five, having five senses, five limbs (including the head) and five digits on hands and feet. This made the pentagram an obvious symbol of the microcosm that the human form represented, of the divine image in which it had been shaped. 

• From Sir Gawain & The Green Knight, Anonymous, 14th Century, Translated by JRR Tolkien: Then they brought him his shield that was of brilliant jewels, with the pentagram depicted in pure hue of gold. By the baldric he caught it, and about his neck cast it: right well and worthily it went with the knight. And why the pentagram is proper to that prince so noble I intend now to tell you, though it may tarry my story. It is a sign that Solomon once set on, a figure that in it five points holdeth and each line overlaps and is linked with another, and in this way it is endless; and the English, I hear, name it the Endless Knot. So it suits well this knight and his unsullied arms, forever faithful in five points, and five times under each, Gawain as good was acknowledged as gold refinéd, devoid of every vice and with full virtues adorned. So there the pentangram painted new he on shield and coat did wear, as one of word most true and knight of bearing fair. Faultless was he found in his five senses, and in the five fingers he failed at no time, and firmly on the Five Wounds all his faith was set that Christ received on the cross, as that Creed tells us; and wherever the brave man into battle was come, on this beyond all things was his earnest thought: that ever from the Five Joys all his valor he gained that to Heaven’s courteous Queen Mary once came from her Child: free-giving and friendliness first before all, and chastity and chivalry ever changeless and straight, and piety surpassing all points: these perfect five were hasped upon him harder than on any man else, fixed at five points that failed not at all, coincided in no line nor sundered either, not ending in any angle anywhere. Therefore on his shining shield was shaped now this knot, royally with red jewels upon red gold set: this is the pure pentangle as people of learning have taught. 

• From Medieval Mythbusting Blog, James Wright, 2021: In a recent post on the online forum Mediaeval and Tudor Period Buildings, a user uploaded a photograph of a five-pointed star carved onto a piece of stone at St Mary & St John (Somerset), and asked the deceptively simple question: “Would anyone know what this symbol might mean? If we discard the facetious suggestions by amateur comedians (18.7%), the remaining people had explanations which included: pagan symbol, holy star, Star of David, Satanic symbol, graffiti associated with boredom, builder’s sign to show structural problems, Seal of Solomon, mechanism to express proportional geometry, hobo mark, Knights Templar, Freemasonry or Illuminati symbol, etc. Some of the more outlandish identifications – including signs left by the Knights Templar, Freemasons or Illuminati – can perhaps be laid at the door of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, where Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor in the fictional discipline of “symbology,” intones: “The pentacle is a pre-Christian symbol that relates to Nature worship. The ancients envisioned their world in two halves— masculine and feminine… This pentacle is representative of the female half of all things— a concept religious historians call the ‘sacred feminine’ or the ‘divine goddess.” The pentagram IS a pre-Christian symbol, but in that period it was not associated with the attributes assigned by the fictional Langdon. His explanation seems to more closely align with the thinking of magical practitioners from the late nineteenth century onwards. This went on to influence later neo-pagan and Satanic beliefs. 

• Prior to the introduction of Christianity the pentagram was a symbol variously associated with the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar or Greek notions of health, wellbeing or geometrical purity. However, these explanations do not bear much relevance to how the symbol came to be carved on the walls of a parish church in Somerset. So, what is going on here? In the theology of mediaeval western Christianity, god gave King Solomon a seal ring which had the power to repel demons. This story was originally told by the Jews and, in their iteration, and as the story of the ring passed down through the Abrahamic faiths, the ciphers were subsequently re-interpreted by Arabic Muslims as a six-pointed star and European Christians as a five-pointed star. The mediaeval Christian belief that the pentagram was a powerful repellent of evil was apparently widespread. A reliance on such iconography can also be seen, physically, in fourteenth century ecclesiastical architecture – including pentagrams set out in the great west window of Exeter Cathedral and on the tower at Hannover. The pentagram has been noted as a motif found during historic graffiti surveys of mediaeval buildings. At one site a pentagram has been carved directly over a graffito of a demon – perhaps explicitly linking the symbol to its perceived function of warding off evil. Although the pentagram was an important shape in Classical theories of proportion, its use in mediaeval architectural design was rare. Consequently, when we encounter regular, chisel-cut examples of the pentagram, the symbol is less likely to be part of an architectural drawing and will often be a stonemason’s mark.

• From the Oral Talmud, Gittin 68, Third Century CE: Why was it necessary for Solomon, the author of Ecclesiastes, to gather demons? The answer: As the temple was being built, Solomon said to the sages: How shall I make it so that the stone will be precisely cut? They said to him: There is a creature called a shamir that can cut the stones, which Moses brought. Solomon said to them: Where is it found? They said to him: Bring a male demon and a female demon: It is possible that they know where, and they will reveal the place to you. Solomon brought a male demon and a female demon and tormented them together, and they said: We do not know where to find the shamir. Perhaps Asmodeus king of the demons, knows. He is on such-and-such a mountain. He has dug a pit for himself there, and filled it with water, and covered it with a rock, and sealed it with his seal. And every day he ascends to Heaven and studies, but he comes back and checks to ensure that nobody has entered his pit, and then he uncovers it and drinks from the water. Solomon sent for Benayahu, a member of the royal entourage, and gave him a chain onto which a sacred name of god was carved, and a ring onto which a sacred name of god was carved. What did Benayahu do? He went down the mountain, drained the water, and poured wine into the pit. When Asmodeus came and found the pit to be filled with wine. He said that it is written: “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is riotous; and whosoever wallows in it is not wise, I will not drink this wine.” But when he became thirsty, he was unable to resist the wine and he drank, became intoxicated, and fell asleep. Benayahu threw the chain around Asmodeus, and when he woke Benayahu said to him: The name of your master is upon you, the name of your Master is upon you, do not tear the chain. And they brought him to Solomon after three days. 

• From Transcendental Magic, Eliphas Levi, 1854: The pentagram signifies the domination of the mind over the elements, and by this sign are enchained the demons of the air, the spirits of fire, the phantoms of the water, and ghosts of earth. Equipped with this sign, you will be ministered unto by legions of angels and hosts of fiends. Spirits are subservient to this sign when employed with understanding, and, by placing it in the circle or on the table of evocations, they can be rendered tractable. The intelligence of the wise man therefore gives value to his pentacle, as science gives weight to his will, and spirits comprehend this power immediately. Thus, by means of the pentagram, spirits can be forced to appear by themselves or their reflection, which exists in the astral light. Pregnant women are influenced more than others by the astral light, which concurs in the formation of the child, and perpetually offers them reminiscences of the forms which abound therein. This explains how it is that women of the highest virtue deceive the malignity of observers. The Kabbalistic usage of the pentagram can therefore determine the appearance of unborn children, and an initiated woman might endow her son with the characteristics of Nero or Achilles as much as with those of Louis XIV or Napoleon.

• We must, however, remark that the use of the pentagram is most dangerous for operators who are not in possession of its complete and perfect understanding. The direction of the points of the star is in no sense arbitrary, and may change the entire character of the operation. At this point, let the ignorant and superstitious close the book ; they will either see nothing but darkness, or they will be scandalised. The pentagram, which, in gnostic schools, is called the blazing star, is the sign of intellectual omnipotence and autocracy. It is the star of the magi ; it is the sign of the Word made flesh; and, according to the direction of its points, this absolute magical symbol represents order or confusion, the divine lamb of  St John or the accursed goat of Mendes. It is initiation or profanation; it is Lucifer or Vesper, the star of the morning or the evening. It is Mary or Lilith, victory or death, day or night. 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. The pentagram is the figure of the human body, having the four limbs, and a single point representing the head. A human figure, head downwards, naturally represents a demon ; that is, intellectual subversion, disorder, or madness. Now, if magic be a reality, if occult science be really the true law of the three worlds, this absolute sign, this sign ancient as history, and more ancient, should and does actually exercise an incalculable influence upon spirits set free from their material envelope.

• From the Golden Dawn, Israel Regardie, 1940: The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram: Take a steel dagger in the right hand. Face east. Touch thy forehead and say (thou art). Touch thy breast and say (the Kingdom). Touch thy right shoulder and say (and the Power). Touch thy left shoulder and say (and the Glory). Clasp thy hands before thee and say (forever). Dagger between fingers, point up in the air towards the east and, bringing the point of the dagger to the centre of the pentagram, vibrate the deity name, imagining that your voice carries forward to the east of the universe. Holding the dagger out before you, go to the south, make the pentagram, and vibrate similarly the deity name. Go to the west, make the pentagram, and vibrate. Go to the north, make the pentagram, and vibrate. Return to the east and complete your circle by bringing the dagger point to the centre of the first pentagram. The Uses of the Pentagram Ritual include as a form of prayer: The invoking ritual should be used in the morning, the banishing in the evening. The names should be pronounced inwardly in the breath, vibrating it as much as possible and feeling that the whole body throbs with the sound. Also as a protection against impure magnetism: The banishing ritual can be used to get rid of obsessing or disturbing thoughts. Give a mental image to your obsession and imagine it formulated before you. Project it out of your aura with the saluting sign of a Neophyte, and when it is about three feet away, prevent its return with the Sign of Silence. Now imagine the form in the east before you and do the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram to disintegrate it, seeing it, in your mind’s eye, dissolving on the farther side of your ring of flame. It can also be used as an exercise in concentration. Seated in meditation or lying down, formulate yourself standing up in robes and holding a dagger. Put your consciousness in this form and go to the east. Make yourself “feel” there by touching the wall, opening your eyes, stamping on the floor, etc. Begin the ritual and go round the room mentally vibrating the words and trying to feel them as coming from the form. Finish in the east and try to see your results in the Astral Light, then walk back and stand behind the head of your body and let yourself be reabsorbed.’

• From The Purpose of Your Altar Pentacle, Sable Aradia, Patheos, 2018: I make and sell altar pentacles at my Etsy store.  I started doing this several years ago because I noticed that you couldn’t find them anywhere.  There was a plethora of wands, numerous chalices, and even a handful of athames available at most metaphysical stores in the late eighties and early nineties, and there were hundreds of silver jewelry pentacles available, but pentacles intended for your altar were nowhere to be found.  At the time I chalked that up to the Satanic Panic; the pentacle is the most obviously “Wiccan” of the four traditional altar tools, and big pentagrams made people nervous. I was taught that there is a difference between a pentagram and a pentacle, though a dictionary will often give them as synonyms: a pentagram is an equilateral five-pointed star, and a pentacle is such a star within a circle, or a similar object used in magic, such as the Earth Pentacle used by the Golden Dawn and various of the Seals of Solomon. Typically Wiccans and witches use the upright pentacle, and Aleister Crowley made use of the inverted pentagram in Thelema.  The association with the Horned God of Wicca in the inverted pentagram is largely due to tradition, stemming from the Goat in the Star from The Key of Black Magic, an 1897 grimoire. This was [incorrectly] thought to be a secret symbol of the Templars in their (alleged) secret worship of Baphomet.  The pentacle is usually placed at the center of the altar; and some books will tell you to place objects on it when you’re consecrating or enchanting them because you’re using it as a focus to direct all of those energies into your sacred and magickal work; manifesting the powers of the gods and the cosmos into physical reality. Sometimes the pentacle is used as a tangible, magical shield to protect you against danger and attack.  Just as vampire hunters in all the movies present crosses to the Undead boldly in order to drive them away through the power of faith, witches can aim their pentacles boldly against psychic attack. This is a simple method of calling upon the gods and the Universe to lend their formidable powers to your protection. You could use it as a focal point for meditations that make use of the pentagram; such as the Iron Pentacle or an elemental pathworking; you could hold it aloft towards Venus at sunset or sunrise to invoke the Goddess, Lucifer, or any goddess associated with Venus; you could hold it to your body with a point directly facing the ground to invoke the Horned God. It is a holy symbol of the powers of the Universe coming together, a celebration of the integration of spiritual and material. 

• From Satanism Today, James R Lewis, 2001: Richard Ramirez, better known as the Night Stalker, was a sadistic serial murderer who terrorized the Los Angeles area in the mid-1980s. He was captured by civilians on August 31, 1985, following an all points bulletin in which his mug shot was broadcast on television and printed in newspapers. After a fourteen-month trial, he was convicted of thirteen murders and thirty other felonies. A self-identified Satanist who had read Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible, Ramirez’s crime spree was one of the few cases that might legitimately be called “Satanic crime.” His “calling card” was the inverted pentagram, which he left drawn on a wall, or, in one case, carved into the body of a victim. In 1983, he made a special trip to San Francisco to meet LaVey personally. LaVey was later reported as commenting that, “I thought Richard was very nice—very shy. I liked him.” Because Ramirez was a fan of the rock group AC/DC—a group that at one stage of their career adopted Satanic imagery and incorporated infernal references into their music—the case was given special attention from people concerned about the negative influence of rock music. Ramirez would engage in such antics as flashing a pentagram he had drawn in the palm of his hand, shouting “Hail Satan!” and holding up his fingers alongside his head in imitation of devil’s horns. It is clear that Satanic ideology is not an independent motivating factor that somehow transforms otherwise nice people into criminals. Rather, as reflected in the remarks Ramirez made at his sentencing, such individuals are criminals who adopt Satanism as a way of justifying their antisocial actions. Many police officers ask what to look for during the search of the scene of suspected satanic activity. The answer is simple: Look for evidence of a crime. A pentagram is no more criminally significant than a crucifix unless it corroborates a crime or a criminal conspiracy. If a victim’s description of the location or the instruments of the crime includes a pentagram, then the pentagram would be evidence. But the same would be true if the description included a crucifix.

• From No Converse Didn’t Replace Its ‘All-Star’ Logo with a Satanic Symbol, Bethania Palma, Snopes, 2021: In July 2021, Christian news outlets reported that sneaker brand Converse had replaced the iconic “All-Star” label on its shoes with a satanic symbol. “Converse Unveils Designer Shoes with Satanic Symbol Replacing Brand’s Star Logo,” Faithwire reported. “More Corporate Satanism: ‘Converse’ Unveils New Occult Shoe Line,” the Media Research Center reported. Converse hasn’t replaced the All-Star logo, which famously adorns its classic Chuck Taylors. The new symbology is instead the result of a collaboration between Converse and DRKSHDW, the brand run by goth-inspired fashion designer Rick Owens. The logo for DRKSHDW contains a pentagram, or five-point star. A spokesperson for Nike, which owns Converse, told Snopes in an email: “Converse’s collaboration with fashion designer Rick Owen’s DRKSHDW brand incorporates the DRKSHDW pentagram logo design, which has been used in his line for many years. The pentagram, which has many different associations, is in no way a comment from Converse on religion, nor does it replace the iconic All Star logo on our shoes.” In an Instagram post promoting the brand collaboration, Owens explained why he uses the pentagram in his own work: “I’ve been using this pentagram for a long time because obviously, it has adolescent occult associations. But I like geometric diagrams like that because, in a very primal way, they are a culture’s grasp for control. And a way to organize thoughts and systems. And a pentagram, in this day and age with all of its associations… I like the fact that it refers to an alternative system. And that suggests openness and empathy. It suggests the pursuit of pleasure, this pursuit of sensation. But one of the main things that I think it suggests is empathy and a consideration of systems of living that might not be standard. So that leads us to be more accepting and tolerant of other systems, which I think is a good thing.” 

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