daylies music: Music in the Blood

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Music in the Blood

Posted: 06 Aug 2009 06:09 AM PDT

EVIL

The earliest recorded use of the pentagram as a mystical symbol was by the Gnostics, who called it the Blazing Star. It was also considered by Christians during the middle ages to be a symbol of the Five Wounds of Christ, and used as a protective glyph, generally as a variation on the Seal of Solomon (a Star of David within a circle).
The use of the "inverted" pentagram to denote evil is a quite recent usage, and first appears in the works of Eliphas Levi. He is also the source of the "goat's head" glyph. Before this, neither orientation had evil connotations per se.
The modern pagan movement picked up the pentagram as part of a general borrowing from earlier "occult" usage, and Wicca in particular has taken it up as an explicit denotational symbol, similar to the cross, the Thor's hammer, and so on.
The categorization of the "inverted" (one-point-down) pentagram as "evil" vs. the "upright" (one-point-up) pentagram as "good" originates in the writings of Eliphas Levi in the 19th Century, most notably the works "The History of Magic" and "Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic."
Pentagram as a symbol has been used by a large number of black and death metal bands like venom, trivium, dark funeral, dimmu borgir, etc.