7. Seeing Stars

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There are some symbols in horror that filmmakers barely need to explain anymore.
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Imagine a camera slowly moving across the floor of a darkened room until it reveals a five-pointed star.
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Perhaps there are candles burning nearby, or somebody has carefully enclosed the star inside a circle.
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Even before anything supernatural has actually happened, most of us understand what the film wants us to think.
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Something occult is happening here.
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Something out of the ordinary.
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And very often popular culture goes one step further and tells us that means something evil is happening too.
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The pentagram has become so closely associated with Satan, demons, and forbidden magic in Western popular culture that its appearance can do an enormous amount of storytelling before a character has said a word.
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And that really annoys me, because I know the pentagram as a symbol of protection.
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In fact, when Supernatural first appeared, I refused to watch it for six whole seasons because I'd seen the pentagram in its imagery and thought, oh, they're going to tell everyone it's evil, aren't they?
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I wasn't frightened of the symbol.
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I was frightened they were going to get it wrong.
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Then eventually a friend told me, no, they use it as protection.
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So I watched the first episode and I never looked back.
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Several academic papers, numerous supernatural conventions, and four separate photographs with Jensen Accles, Jared Padalecki, Misha Collins, Ruth Connell, and Kim Rhodes, proudly displayed on my bedroom wall later.
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I think we can safely say my boycott ended rather comprehensively.
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But supernatural surprised me because it understood something that screen horror has frequently muddied.
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A symbol that looks occult isn't necessarily inviting something evil in.
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Sometimes it's there specifically to keep something evil out.
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And that idea is considerably older than the Winchester brothers.
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Because the five-pointed star that modern popular culture has taught us to associate with witchcraft, Satanism, and the occult has been used by people who would probably be rather surprised by what we now think it means, including medieval Christians.
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So, how did we get from a symbol associated with protection to something a street preacher once spotted around my neck and used as evidence that I was going to hell?
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And how did the pentagram become so inseparable from our image of the witch?
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My name is Millie Hardy Ashton, and today we're talking about one of the most instantly recognizable symbols associated with witchcraft, the pentagram.
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Although, depending on exactly what you're picturing, you might actually be thinking of a pentacle.
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Don't worry, we'll get to that.
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Our main screen text this week is The Craft, because its portrayal of teenage witchcraft arrived at a particularly interesting moment in the history of the screen witch.
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By the 1990s, filmmakers had inherited decades of visual shorthand, connecting occult imagery with danger, while film and television were increasingly giving those same symbols to witches we were actually supposed to identify with.
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We're also going to return properly to supernatural, because my sixth season boycott aside, the series gives us a particularly useful example of how popular culture can either reinforce or challenge what audiences think an occult symbol is supposed to do.
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And this week's hidden hex takes us somewhere I don't think most people encountering a pentagram in horror film would immediately expect, to King Arthur's court.
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But before we get there, we need to work out what this little five-pointed star was doing before cinema got a hold of it.
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One of the difficulties with talking about the pentagram is that we tend to approach it backwards.
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We now recognize it as an occult symbol, so it's very tempting to look backwards through history and assume that everyone else must have recognized it in roughly the same way.
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Only they didn't.
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The shape itself is incredibly old, and forms of the five-pointed star appear across different ancient cultures.
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That immediately creates a problem for anybody hoping to give the pentagram one neat origin story, because people have repeatedly adopted the same basic geometric form and attached different ideas to it.
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One particularly important chapter in its history comes from the followers of the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras.
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Yes, that Pythagoras.
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If his name immediately transported you back to a maths classroom and the inexplicable importance of finding the missing side of a triangle, I'm sorry.
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The Pythagoreans were interested in mathematics as something much more profound than a school exercise.
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Number and proportion could reveal an underlying harmony within the universe, and the pentagram was particularly fascinating because its intersecting lines create repeating mathematical relationships.
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For people looking at the world in that way, geometry wasn't simply useful.
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It could tell you something about order.
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So already we have a five-pointed star carrying associations that are remarkably different from those it will eventually acquire in horror.
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Nobody needs to be summoning anything.
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The significance is coming from the apparent harmony contained within the shape itself.
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And this is probably the most important thing to understand about the pentagram before we go any further.
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Symbols don't behave like words in a dictionary.
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Their meanings aren't fixed.
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We learned this with the colour green.
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A community can inherit a symbol from somewhere else and reinterpret it.
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Religious change can transform its meaning again, and centuries later, popular culture can take that same image and give it an entirely new emotional charge.
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The pentagram is an unusually good example because it simply refuses to belong to one story.
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As we move into medieval Europe, for example, we find the five-pointed star appearing within Christian contexts.
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This is where our modern assumptions can become particularly misleading.
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We're so accustomed to the pentagram being positioned visually against Christianity that seeing it used within Christian symbolism feels almost contradictory.
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But it wasn't necessarily contradictory to the people using it.
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The five points could be connected with the five wounds of Christ, and the continuous structure of the shape could communicate ideas about perfection and interconnectedness.
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It could also carry protective associations, something that becomes especially interesting when we later look at the way magical and religious symbols develop alongside one another.
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That doesn't mean, however, that medieval Europe was full of secret witches wearing pentacle necklaces underneath their tunics.
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We have to be very careful not to take modern witchcraft and project it backwards.
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The people accused of witchcraft in medieval and early modern Europe did not belong to one organized religion called witchcraft.
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Many of them wouldn't have identified themselves as witches at all.
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As we've already seen this season so far, the witch imagined by demonologists, theologians, and eventually witch hunters was often very different from the person standing accused.
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So when we find pentagrams in historical sources, we can't simply label them witch symbols and move on.
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The connection between the pentagram and witchcraft as we recognize it today developed much later, through a complicated mixture of Western esotericism, ceremonial magic, occult revival movements, and eventually modern pagan and witchcraft traditions.
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Somewhere during that journey, orientation became very important too.
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A point-up pentagram could be interpreted within some occult systems as representing spirit in harmony with or governing the material elements.
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Turn the symbol upside down, particularly within later occult interpretations, and that relationship could be understood differently.
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This becomes especially significant during the 19th century, when French occultist Eliphas Levy wrote about the pentagram and helped popularize a distinction between its upright and inverted forms.
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Later occult imagery would strengthen the connection between the inverted pentagram, the goat, and ideas that would eventually feed into modern satanic iconography.
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And once you put a goat's head inside an inverted pentagram, Horace Cinema is not going to politely leave it alone.
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This is where several histories that began separately start getting tangled together.
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The pentagram has existed within philosophical, Christian, magical, and occult contexts, but popular culture gradually compresses those distinctions.
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Eventually, the audience doesn't need the history, it just needs the star.
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By the time cinema develops its own visual language for supernatural evil, the pentagram is extraordinarily useful.
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Film is a visual medium, and filmmakers frequently need audiences to understand a situation before anyone explains it.
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A carefully placed symbol can therefore do an enormous amount of narrative work.
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The pentagram eventually becomes part of that shorthand.
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This is where the craft, released in 1996, becomes particularly interesting.
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The film follows Sarah Bailey after she moves to Los Angeles and becomes involved with Nancy, Bonnie, and Rochelle, three girls at her Catholic school who are already experimenting with witchcraft.
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And the craft arrives at a moment when the screen witch is changing.
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Earlier horror traditions frequently position occult practice as something audiences encounter from the outside.
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We watch somebody discover the strained ritual or stumble into the forbidden space and understand that they've crossed into something dangerous.
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The craft asks us to go inside with the witches.
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Sarah isn't simply encountering witchcraft, she's learning it.
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That shift changes our relationship with the imagery surrounding her.
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The girls visit an occult shop because they're interested in what it contains.
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Their rituals aren't initially presented as evidence that they're secretly evil.
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Witchcraft offers them the possibility of agency at a point when each girl feels that something in her life is outside her control.
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That doesn't mean the craft is an accurate documentary representation of witchcraft.
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It very definitely isn't.
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The film's central deity, Manon, belongs to the fictional magical system created for the story rather than representing a deity worshipped by one historical pagan tradition.
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The film borrows ideas and aesthetics from different forms of contemporary witchcraft and occult practice, but then reshapes them according to the needs of a supernatural horror film.
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And that distinction is really important.
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A film can draw on real magical practices without accurately representing the religion or practice from which those ideas came.
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But the craft helped do something enormously influential to the visual image of the witch.
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It made occult imagery aspirational.
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The girls don't look like fairy tale witches who have somehow wandered into 20th century California.
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Their witchcraft exists alongside teenage fashion and friendship, which means magical identity can be something contemporary rather than something safely confined to history or fantasy.
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The symbolism surrounding witchcraft therefore begins doing two jobs at once.
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It can still suggest danger, particularly as Nancy's relationship with power becomes increasingly destructive, but it can also represent belonging and identity.
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That tension is one of the reasons the 1990s are so interesting for screen witchcraft.
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The audience has inherited the visual vocabulary of occult horror, but suddenly we're being invited to identify with the people using it.
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Which brings us back to the television programme I very nearly missed entirely.
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Supernatural.
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When the programme began in 2005, I already knew the pentagram as a protective symbol.
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So when I saw the show's pentagram imagery alongside all the talk of demons and possession, I thought I knew exactly what was going to happen.
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I assumed they were going to get it wrong.
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And that genuinely bothered me enough that I didn't watch it for six seasons.
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Eventually, a friend who actually watched the program corrected me and explained that Supernatural wasn't using the pentagram to say evil at all.
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They were using it for protection.
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That was enough to persuade me to watch the first episode, and apparently that was all it took.
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I subsequently went on to write endless academic papers about supernatural, attended numerous supernatural conventions, and currently have four separate photographs on my bedroom wall featuring encounters with Jensen Accles, Jared Padalecki, Misha Collins, Ruth Connell, and Kim Rhodes.
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So thank you to the friend who corrected me.
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You cost me quite a lot of money.
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But academically, what Supernatural does with occult symbolism is genuinely interesting.
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Its universe is filled with symbols that might look sinister if your only frame of reference is conventional horror imagery, yet their function is frequently protective.
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The antipossession symbol is perhaps the clearest example.
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Visually, it looks unmistakably occult, and the pentagram sits at its center.
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But its narrative purpose is the opposite of what an audience trained to associate pentagrams with demonic evil might initially expect.
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It prevents possession, and that creates a lovely reversal.
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The occult-looking symbol isn't inviting the demon into the room.
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It's the reason the demon can't get in.
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And there's another useful example of how television teaches us to read magical symbols in charmed, although its central symbol isn't actually a pentagram at all, it's a triketra.
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And that's precisely why it's useful here.
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Triketra becomes so thoroughly associated with the Halliwell Sisters that the symbol itself can communicate charmed without requiring an image of any of the characters.
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Television has taken an existing symbol and, for millions of viewers, added another layer of meaning to it.
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That's what popular culture does extraordinarily well.
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It doesn't necessarily erase the older meaning of a symbol.
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It puts another meaning on top, and our job is to determine which is which.
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What is the difference between a pentagram and a pentacle?
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The neat answer you'll commonly hear is that a pentagram is the five-pointed star itself, while a pentacle is the star enclosed within a circle.
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And for modern witchcraft, that's a perfectly useful distinction.
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Historically, however, the terminology is considerably messier.
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The word pentacle hasn't always referred exclusively to a pentagram inside a circle, and within ceremonial magic, it could describe magical talismans or figures that didn't necessarily look like the symbol modern audiences now expect.
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So if somebody tells you that pentagram has always meant star, while pentacle has always meant star inside a circle, I'm afraid we're putting that one into fiction.
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It's a useful modern convention.
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It isn't a universal historical rule.
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What about the claim that an inverted pentagram is automatically satanic?
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Again, fiction.
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The inverted pentagram has certainly acquired strong satanic associations, particularly through modern occult imagery and eventually through explicitly satanic uses of the symbol.
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Those associations are real.
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What isn't historically defensible is seeing every downward-facing five-pointed star in every context and assuming it means somebody worships Satan.
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Context matters.
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And finally, is the pentagram an ancient symbol of witchcraft?
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I'm giving this one folklore with quite a substantial asterisk.
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The symbol itself is ancient, and its relationship with religious and magical ideas is also very old.
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What isn't ancient is the idea that there has always been one continuous universal tradition of witches using the pentagram as their identifying symbol.
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Modern witchcraft has inherited and reinterpreted older symbols.
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That's very different from saying every person accused of witchcraft 500 years ago would have recognized a necklace around my neck as the official witch logo.
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So after all that history, what does the pentagram actually mean to witches now?
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As always, when we're talking about contemporary witchcraft, there isn't a single answer.
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Witchcraft encompasses a huge range of traditions and individual practices, and not every witch uses the pentagram at all.
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Among those who do, one common interpretation, including the one I use, associates its five points with earth, air, fire, water, and spirit, while the surrounding circle of the pentacle can represent their interconnectedness.
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When drawing a circle during a Wiccan rite, that circle must be drawn in clockwise direction and removed counterclockwise from the spirit point at the top.
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Depending on the practitioner and tradition, it might be worn as a symbol of protection or spirituality, or simply as an outward expression of somebody's identity as a witch.
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I have had many conversations or exchanged polite nods in public between myself and somebody sporting the same symbol.
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We recognize each other as a witch and we acknowledge the kinship of wearing the symbol outwardly.
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And this is one of those episodes where I can't pretend to be a completely detached observer because I have no fewer than three pentagrams tattooed on my body, and I regularly wear one around my neck.
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I've also experienced firsthand just how much cultural baggage that little five-pointed star carries.
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Years ago, when I worked as a teaching assistant in a Christian primary school, I still wore my pentagram, but I moved it from my neck to my ankle and kept it tucked away like a naughty little secret so the vicar wouldn't give me the look.
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Nobody actually sat me down and told me that the symbol was forbidden.
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I simply understood that displaying it openly in that environment might be interpreted as provocative in a way that, to me, it wasn't.
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I didn't want to be accused of corrupting the kids with demonic ideals, so I just didn't invite comment, but I still wanted protection.
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I've also experienced the considerably less subtle version.
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I've been stopped by one of those street preachers with a megaphone and a pile of pamphlets in the middle of a city high street.
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He spotted the pentagram around my neck and informed me that I was going to hell.
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I politely informed him my hell has one L and I wished him a nice day, but I digress, which, as conversational openings go, does rather limit your options.
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There's something genuinely interesting underneath both of those experiences, because neither reaction is really about the piece of jewellery I'm wearing.
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It's about what somebody else believes that symbol tells them about me.
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For me, it represents my witchcraft and spirituality.
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I got my first tattooed to keep the goddess close during my mother's battle with cancer and to protect us both.
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She's in remission, I'm happy to say.
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Another witch might interpret it differently, and plenty of witches don't use the pentagram at all.
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But somebody encountering me in the street doesn't necessarily know any of that.
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They bring their own understanding of the symbol with them, and in contemporary Western culture, that understanding has been profoundly influenced by the association between pentagrams, Satanism, and dangerous magic, which makes what we're about to discover particularly delicious.
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Because apparently I've been hiding a pentagram from a vicar and getting threatened with hell with two L's over a symbol that medieval Christians were perfectly capable of using themselves.
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And I really wish I'd known that when the street preacher stopped me so I could properly get my teeth into a theological argument.
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Symbol that modern Western popular culture so frequently uses to tell us that something is anti-Christian has an extensive history within Christianity itself.
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And one of the loveliest examples survives in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
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In the 14th century poem, Gawain carries a pentangle on his shield, and the poet doesn't treat it as something suspicious that needs explaining away.
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Quite the opposite.
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The poem goes into considerable detail about why the symbol is appropriate for an Arturian knight attempting to embody Christian virtue.
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Its interconnected lines allow the poet to construct a whole system of overlapping fives, linking Gawain's physical qualities with explicitly Christian ideas.
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Among those associations are the five wounds of Christ and the five joys of the Virgin Mary.
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The pentangle becomes an endless knot in which each part supports another, making the geometry of the symbol itself part of what it represents.
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Pythagoras would be proud.
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So Gawain isn't carrying the pentagram, despite being Christian.
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He's carrying it in part because he is Christian.
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Which means somewhere between medieval England and a street preacher informing me that my necklace had booked me a one-way ticket to hell with two L's, the pentagram underwent an extraordinary cultural transformation.
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And that's our hidden hex.
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The pentagram didn't begin as the sinister calling card of the witch, nor has it always functioned as a universal symbol of Satan.
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Its meanings have been repeatedly rewritten by the people using it, and eventually by the stories we tell about it.
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Film and television inherited some of those later occult associations and amplified them until the pentagram became one of the quickest ways of telling an audience that forbidden magic was taking place.
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Eventually we became so fluent in that visual language that the symbol itself could revoke a reaction without anybody stopping to ask where it came from.
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The shape barely changed.
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We did.
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Throughout this season, we've been looking at how audiences learn to recognize witches before a story necessarily tells us that somebody is one.
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Costume can do it, physical appearance can do it, the spaces witches inhabit can do it.
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Symbols can do exactly the same thing.
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Put a pentagram around a character's neck and an audience begins making assumptions.
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The fascinating part is that those assumptions aren't inherent in the shape.
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We've inherited them for centuries of changing religious and occult thought, and then popular culture has strengthened some interpretations while allowing others to disappear from common knowledge.
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That's why the craft is such an important text for this episode.
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Its witches inherit imagery that horror audiences have already been taught to find unsettling, but the film asks us to experience that imagery through the witches themselves.
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We understand why Sarah is attracted to this world.
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We understand why Nancy wants power.
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And even when the magic becomes frightening, the film doesn't reduce witchcraft itself to a simple indication of evil.
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That matters because it helps move the witch from being somebody the audience watches to somebody the audience can imagine being.
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The symbols come with her.
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And then something interesting happens outside the screen.
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Viewers begin wearing them.
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Occult aesthetics become part of fashion.
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People who encounter witchcraft through popular culture sometimes become curious about actual witchcraft.
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Meanwhile, practitioners who are already using these symbols find themselves negotiating the meanings that films and television have attached to them.
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Which brings me back, rather inevitably, to supernatural.
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I spent six seasons refusing to watch a television program because I cared about how it might represent a symbol that mattered to me.
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Then I discovered that the program understood the protective function I was worried it would erase.
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Years later, I'm still talking academically about that program.
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That's a tiny example of the relationship between representation and audience reception, but it's also precisely what Heck's position is interested in.
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The screen doesn't simply reflect what we believe about witches, it participates in creating those beliefs.
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Sometimes it perpetuates an old misconception, sometimes it rehabilitates an older meaning, whether deliberately or accidentally.
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And sometimes it creates an entirely new association that becomes so culturally familiar that we forget it came from fiction at all.
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The pentagram has survived all of those transformations.
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Perhaps that's why it remains such a powerful symbol.
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Not because it always meant one thing, but because it has meant many.
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The ancient symbol that could communicate mathematical harmony later appeared within Christian symbolism.
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Western occult practices subsequently developed other interpretations, while contemporary witches adopted and adapted the pentagram and pentacle within a diverse range of practices.
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Film and television then inherited that complicated history and did what popular culture does extraordinarily well.
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They simplified it into something audiences could recognize almost immediately.
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For some stories, the pentagram becomes a warning that something evil was happening.
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In others, including supernatural, the very same visual language could represent protection from that evil.
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And somewhere in between those interpretations sits the modern witch, wearing a symbol whose meaning may change depending entirely upon who is looking at her.
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Sometimes that person is another witch.
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Sometimes it's a television audience.
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And sometimes it's a street preacher who's extremely concerned about your eternal soul.
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If you enjoyed this episode, you can find more hexposition witches on screen wherever you get your podcasts.
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For centuries, Christian demonology insisted that the witch's power had to come from somewhere, and eventually, one particular suspect became almost impossible to avoid the Christian devil.
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And when cinema inherited that relationship, it gave us some rather memorable versions of him, including Jack Nicholson.
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So, next time, we're asking what happens when the witch makes a deal with the devil, and why popular culture became so convinced that the two belonged together.
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And you can find the show online at hexpositionpodcast.co.uk.
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Theme music is Holderfolk, Hidden Folk by Jamie Sims.
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And this has been a familiar footsteps production.