They say that in the old days there were many signs by which our people would recognize one another.
This is the story of one of them.
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"Don't draw pentagrams in the bathrooms; it frightens the maids."
(Sybil Leek)
They're big, they're showy, they work well in ritual.
And you don't need an athame to draw one.
I learned how to draw two-handed pentagrams from my friend Volkhvy years ago. (To the best of my knowledge, it was he who originated the practice.)
I've been drawing them ever since.
Poet and novelist Robert Graves (1895-1985), author of The White Goddess, generally eschewed magical practice.
I am no mystic, he wrote in 1960, I avoid participation in witchcraft, spiritualism, yoga, fortune-telling, automatic writing, and the like (Graves 1966, 488).
But we know that at least once, when asked for a magic charm, he complied, with interesting results.
This pentagram is built into a small tower in Presidio Park in San Diego, California. The pentagram is on the tower roof, open to the air, which is reached by climbing a staircase.
The official name of the Witches' Tower is the Pattie Memorial, commemorating the first American to die to California. It is supposed to be built close to where a historical guardhouse and jail used to be. The Pattie Memorial is a storage building. Presidio Park is very convenient to the hotels on Hotel Circle. Multiple layers of candle wax on the pentagram attest to its ritual use.
A pentagram is a five-pointed star, usually depicted as interwoven, or with the lines used to draw it overlapping. A pentacle is a pentagram with a circle around it. Pentagrams and pentacles have long been symbols of protection and warding off evil, and they are used for that purpose by many Wiccans today.
Pentagrams have been used for thousands of years and appear in ancient Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian art. They have been used by Christians, too—perhaps most famously by Hildegard of Bingen, who, along with other twelfth-century Christian scholars, associated the number five with the five senses and the human body (one head, two arms, and two legs; it reminds me a bit of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man), and saw it as the symbol of the microcosm, or the divine reflected on earth. The symbolism of the pentacle plays an important role in the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and of course it is also associated with the Christmas star and sits atop the Christmas tree in many Christian homes.
...This post in honor of the Rose Moon, now upon us.
In Old Craft lore, the Seat of the Lady is said to be the Castle of the Roses.
Robert Cochrane, father of the modern Old Craft movement, used to describe it as a castle on a hill on an island to the west. (It's where our dead go, they say.) He clearly saw it as a classic, high medieval castle: moat, drawbridge, curtain wall with four gates (it's also called the Castle of the Winds), a castle-keep with three towers, and Herself the Lady of the Castle enthroned within. It's called Castle of the Roses because the outer wall is girded with a thick hedge of rose-briars. The hedge is starred with white roses that turn red when one of Ours enters.