No, it’s much bigger than the gays. It’s bigger than religion, too.
So it’s the Beatles fault?
Would you mind cutting out all this mysterious guru crap and straight out tell us what you are talking about?
“Hey, why’d the pavement get so bumpy?”
“That’s not pavement–that’s good intentions!!!”
Pretty close.
The way pentacles are used to today in neopaganism is that each point represents an Element (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) and the final point represents Spirit. So we generally wear our pentacles one point up, and that point is the Spirit point. Because, generally speaking, our religion has us venerate the Spiritual on a daily or near daily basis, and we’re reminded to do so by our “upright” pentacle. Some people consider magick done in pursuit of the Spiritual or evolution of one’s Spirit to be “white” magick.
But there are times when I might want to place emphasis on the material world, and put the Spiritual on hold for a bit. Say I’m trying to get a job, manifest money, or heal from an illness. I might invert my pentacle, temporarily putting Spirit “beneath” the Earthly Elements in importance. My focus is on the material realm, and my “inverted” pentacle reflects that. Some people consider magick done in pursuit of tangible things to be “black” magic - not necessarily a bad thing, but different than “white magick”.
Anton LeVey very probably knew of this practice when he adopted the inverted pentacle as one of the more common symbols for the Church of Satan. It makes sense, really, since the teachings of the Church of Satan emphasize the now over the afterlife (if there even is one) and getting ahead in the mundane “real” world over spiritual (if there is a such thing).
It’s also, y’know, really easy to trace a pentacle on the head of a goat.
Oh, totally, I agree. But it’s sometimes fun to find synchronicity, even if it doesn’t actually mean anything.
Theophane, did you just become a Christian? Is that why everything has hidden meaning and every discussion you participate in has to be derailed with talk about it?
And to actually address the topic at hand, it’s just a star and a particularly non-evil one at that.
I forgot the hardwired, diurnal, comparitive nature of the brain- binary and bipolar. the 24 hour temporal Diurnalism of the planet earth and its evolutionary influence on her lifeforms defines dark and light. In other realities these are much different… consider a multiple star/solar system.
How do you get the goat to stand still while you’re tracing?
You get real good at drawing upside down.
Pentacle porn.
I checked out Theophane’s statistics. He joined the SDMB less than a month ago and he already has 550 posts. They are all over the forums, but mostly, as best I could tell, in threads relating to religion or other “moral” issues. If he’s 32 as stated, and not a tweener who just got his first computer, I think someone just went off of his meds.
You feed him pages from the Bible, of course!
I’m so joking. I’m not actually a member of the Church of Satan (not that there’s anything wrong with that), and such antics fell out of favor even within that church sometime in the '80s.
How do you know if it is inverted or if it was just tilted a few degrees to the left or right? Which point *has *to be the ‘top’ point?
It is just a star. Happy?
(There’s so much evil in this world because people are stupid, greedy assholes.)
It doesn’t have any particular meaning in American iconography. It has a meaning (both good and bad) in several other iconographic traditions, but those meanings are not universal. Just because someone inverts a star, it doesn’t mean he’s making a pentagram. He’s probably just making an inverted star.
And we’re never getting that damage deposit back.
How do we know it’s inverted and not rotated 36 or 108 degrees?
Did you just make this up? It’s hilarious, and I’m gonna steal it, and I want to know from whom I’m plagiarizing…
Thx
That’s what I was going to say; 2 pts up and 1 down, make, what, a triangle? A Trianything? If it is only 3 pts and is supposed to have 5, well, we have an entirely different issue…
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Heh, I’ll give you half a Mars bar for it if you’re still selling that ratty old thing.