The Sigil of Baphomet and the Satanic Pentagram

Most people know the famous story of the apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head, inspiring him to articulate the law of gravity. But most people don’t know that the Apple logo, released in the 1976, originally depicted this very scene, before it was updated in 1977 to the familiar image of an apple with a bite taken out of it. Yet the idea of an apple as a symbol for knowledge remained, for of course the apple with a bite references the story of the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden. Although there are various practical explanations offered as to why the apple logo has a bite out of it – such as to prevent it from being confused visually with a cherry or a tomato – the symbolism of the icon remains, regardless of what the creators say about their intentions.

Symbols are like this. They have a life of their own in that they connect the world of meaning and spiritual content to the world of physicality, embodying the spiritual in the physical. All throughout human history, symbols and icons have been used to instantiate ideas, ground meaning, and make statements about the nature of reality.

One of the most ominous symbols in the modern west is what’s called the “Satanic Pentagram”. It’s a symbol that’s become so associated with evil, magic, and the devil that many Westerners have become wary of any five-pointed geometric shape. But what is really going on with the so-called “satanic star”?

What is the Satanic Pentagram?

Let’s start with the basic facts surrounding the Satanic Pentagram. The exact image is of a five-pointed star turned upside-down, with two points turned up and three turned down. In the context of Satanist groups, it is often overlaid with the image of a goat’s head, and sometimes features writing in a circle around the star. The goat featured in the image is usually understood to be the figure of Baphomet or the devil. This image was officially adopted as the logo for the Church of Satan, a religion founded in 1966 by Anton LaVey. It’s important to understand that this symbol draws on a long history of uses and associations. The main ones are the traditional imagery of the pentagram and the figure of Baphomet.

The pentagram has been an enduring symbol across a variety of religions and philosophical movements throughout history, most of the time in a positive context. It was a symbol used by ancient near-eastern deities like Ishtar or Marduk. It was used in the Liangzhu culture of China to represent the interaction between the five traditional Chinese elements (fire, water, air, wood, and metal). It was even used as a symbol for Jerusalem by Jews in the fourth century B.C., since “Jerusalem” is spelled in Hebrew with five letters. From a purely mathematical perspective, the pentagram is an interesting shape. For example, the four different line lengths that make up the pentagram exist in a golden ratio to one another. How then did the pentagram become associated with evil and with the church of Satan?

The pentagram: a traditional symbol of good

During the modern period of Western civilization there was a renewed interest in concepts like alchemy and esotericism – basically, the mapping of the universe, not just in scientific terms, but in spiritual or metaphysical terms as well. Alchemists were commonly interested in what is called sacred geometry and other symbolic representations of these ideas. During this time, the pentagram became a symbol that depicted the four traditional elements – earth, air, fire, and water – along with a “fifth” element: spirit. When placed on a pentagram, spirit was placed as the fifth point, the one in the middle pointing up. The idea is that the four physical elements have their place, but must ultimately be guided and oriented by the spiritual, which points up to heaven. In this context, the pentagram became the symbol of the rule of spirit over matter – a sign of the proper ordering of the universe and therefore of goodness and morality.

The Satan star: inverting the pentagram

If you wanted to invert this symbolism, however, you could flip the pentagram upside-down, such that the middle point of the star is pointing downward instead of upward. The symbolism there would be that matter is higher than and triumphs over the spirit, an inverting of the moral order of the universe and therefore an obvious sign of evil and corruption to any traditional religion.

While it’s easy to see why the Church of Satan might want to adopt an inverted traditional image as its logo, why did they choose this particular one? This is where it’s important to understand that the Church of Satan, as founded by Anton LaVey, is in fact not a spiritual religion at all, but an atheist religion. LaVey taught that there were in fact no gods, spirits, or supernatural beings at all. He thought that traditional religion, especially Christianity, was irrational in its belief in the existence of spiritual beings and which taught an equally irrational moral system of compassion, equality, and love. For LaVey, man was essentially nothing but an animal, and Christian morality suppressed man’s natural instincts that were – to him – good impulses, not evil ones. LaVey’s moral system was centered entirely on this materialistic belief, so the symbol he chose to represent it was specifically an inverted pentagram to show the triumph of matter over spirit – in other words, that the physical and the material are the true reality and that spirit is merely an illusion.

The Sigil of Baphomet

What about the image of the goat-face in the middle of the pentagram? The figure of Baphomet has a complicated (and disputed) history going back to the Medieval period, but by the modern period he had been adopted as an important symbol in various occult traditions. Baphomet came to symbolize the harmonious balance of opposites: male and female, man and animal, good and evil, sun and moon, and so on. This is why he was depicted by the French occultist Eliphas Levi as a human-like creature with a goat’s head (both man and animal) and with both male and female physical features. Eliphas even made his own drawing of the creature (see the top of the page) which became its most popular representation.

What’s striking about this figure is its goat-headed resemblance to many depictions of the devil or similar figures. The goat-headed or horned god is very common throughout history, including certain ancient near-eastern deities, the horned God of Wicca, and early modern depictions of Satan. The goat in particular has a long history of association with evil or with esoteric gods, from Christ’s parable of the sheep and the goats (where the goats represent sinners) to ancient Greek accounts of religious cults where goats were venerated and even had sexual intercourse with women.

The associations with the devil and other religions antagonistic to the mainline religions of Western civilization make Baphomet a perfect addition to the Satanic Pentagram, as LaVey was trying to subvert not only Christianity in particular but the long-held values of Western civilization in general.

Morality in the Satanic Pentagram

Did LaVey really believe in Baphomet? If we take his atheism seriously, it seems that he didn’t believe in any supernatural creatures of any kind – neither God nor the devil. But he also seemed to be comfortable around other occultists who believed in the real existence of Satan or other spiritual entities of that nature. LaVey may have been an atheist, but that doesn’t mean the Pentagram has to be. As we see with the Apple logo, symbols are extremely powerful, and the meaning they convey can have implications beyond what their original authors intended.

Let’s take the Satanic pentagram seriously for a moment. A religion that focuses on allowing rather than suppressing our natural impulses initially sounds very liberating. But do we really want to live in a world where matter conquers spirit? I don’t think we do, for two reasons: (a) it doesn’t make logical sense; and (b) it leads to a kind of moral doom.

A world where only matter exists – called “materialism” by philosophers – actually makes very little sense. To say that would mean that all art, music, poetry, aesthetic experience, religious experience, beauty, and joy are ultimately illusions, because the nature of those things is that they connect us to something higher than just matter, they connect us to a kind of transcendental meaning. So if you wanted to be a materialist, you’d have to throw out most of the experience of the human race, since every culture in history has cultivated a rich catalogue of these kinds of experiences and held them as the most important elements of its culture – indeed, that’s basically what culture is. This is to say nothing of much deeper philosophical problems, like the very real existence of non-physical things like mathematics, logical laws, and the existence of the human mind itself. Throwing out that much data because it doesn’t fit your model is simply bad science.

But a world where matter is the only – or primary – thing is also very grim, morally speaking. For of course one of the main things you’d have to throw out on this model is morality itself. The laws of physics or the impulses of biology simply are, they don’t tell you anything about how you ought to act in the world. You might feel, for example, a strong impulse to run from danger, which would be a natural part of a biologically-based reaction to fear – but that doesn’t tell you whether or not you ought to run away. Our instincts, in other words, are one thing, but our morality is what helps us determine which of our instincts to obey and which to suppress at any given time. If you have no criteria for making these kinds of choices, then you’re simply at the mercy of your instincts and appetites, which means – in a very real sense – you are their slave.

It might seem freeing at first to give in to your impulses, but the universe prescribed by the Satanic Pentagram ironically leads to less freedom. It claims to offer liberation to man, but in reducing him to an animal it takes away his most profound freedom – the freedom of his spirit, cuts him off from all true beauty, and confines him to the cage of matter. It’s not hard to imagine this as an outcome that the real devil would find particularly appealing.