Dammit! I swear I read the thread beforehand. Second time in two weeks I’ve missed a previous cite.
What, like this?
Death
Any fool know that! 
So, all we really need to do is “The Hokey Pokey”? 666… that’s what it’s all about!
A fork, if it’s the demon’s second summoning, in case it remembered to bring pie.
Being the good, mortal guy, you stand inside of the pentacle, because the five pointed star is a symbol of protection.
Turning the protective symbol upside down, of course, gives it an opposite meaning; and has lately been used moslty by heavy metal bands.
Since it doesn’t have any meaning for just about anybody, the pentacle in itself is now associated with heavy metal, satan worship, and so forth, and thus modern artists wants the demon itself in the pentacle, as if it was of symbol of devilry.
The secret devil sign, made popular by Steve Dallas, Ozzy and Dio, among others, has gone through a similar evolution. Pointing the index finger and the little finger toward somebody or something was a sign of protection in the Old World, especially against “the evil eye” (Italy foremost).
This protective sign too, is now associated with heavy metal, “satan worship”, etc, and if a fantasy artist would have anybody use that sign, it wouldn’t be the white wizard, so to speak, or a good hearted babooshka fending off ghosts.
Taking a tip from Polanski’s The Ninth Gate, when summoning the devil, don’t pour a circle of gasoline around yourself and then empty the jug over your head and then light a match, unless you’re really, absolutely, positively, super-duper sure you’ve got the right incantations and symbols and mojo and so forth. 
Scumpup, let me just say that anyone who knows isn’t going to blab about it on a public message board.
Well after enough coke she sure seemed like a demon
Does that count.
If so, yes.
So does the demon automatically appear on the other side of the pentacle/pentagram as the summoner, or do you have to make some special instructions in the ritual? (It’d kind of suck if you successfully summoned Mephistopheles, but he materialized in the same space that you currently occupied, anihilating both of you in a massive explosion.)
Come to think of it, that brings up some intriguing concepts for power generation…
Are pentacle and pentagram interchangeable? Google images seems to think so.
I like DrFidelius’ explanation best so far. It makes sense that magic would be at least somewhat flexible in having several ways to approach the same problem and that the origins of the demon might have something to do with it.
It also seems likely to me that a prepared and experienced conjuror would likely enchant the ROOM where the summoning takes place as a means to entrap the demon within its walls for the duration of the conjuration and to prevent the demon from escaping elsewhere on our plane of existence until properly dismissed, and the pentacle would primarily be for the protection of the conjuror while inside the room. I think there was a VERTIGO comic about Lady Constantine that touched on that idea a few years back.
The whole pentacle thing is so cliche. Just once, I’d like to see a demon ask, “Nice pentagram. You of course blessed and ensorcelled the entire floor, and not just that tiny circle?” And when the idiot conjuror says no, the demon says, “Pity,” then blasts away the walls and reveals the whole room’s been transported to hell, and the little protective circle surrounding the magician is all that stands between the him and a hell full of demons.
Heh.
I’d make a kickass demon.
Wasn’t it Aleister Crowley who said something like, “Don’t call up what you can’t put down?”
Just remember this Golden Rule:
When summoning a demon stand inside the pentacle.
When summoning God, stand *outside * the lion exhibit
Why not? I didn’t ask for anybody to divulge their superdoublesecret sexdemon summoning methods. A simple “yes” would answer the question.
A few years ago I posted in MPSIMS a description of a spirit evocation ritual I conducted many years ago when I was young and involved in magick. Everyone thought I was joking. No one believed that a Doper would really do ceremonial magick. I really did it, but I’m not going to repeat what happened. It was just really, really weird. I used the circle and triangle configuation described above. But the SDMB is not a forum for talking about this stuff seriously. I read it for the jokes.
Ditto. About the doing, not the posting. I hear ya, sister! I figured out pretty quickly that it’s best not to post of such things around here. I have other message boards for that.
Technically, they are both a 5 pointed star. HOWEVER, in actual use, “pentagram” means just the star, and “pentacle” means the star with the circle around it.
Incidently, there was non-demonic use of the inverted pentacle long before heavy metal existed. The way it’s explained in intro books is that the single point upward pentacle symbolizes Spirit over the earthly elements (because “Spirit” is the top point, and the other four are Air, Earth, Fire and Water), and should be used most of the time, as we’re concerned with the evolution of our spiritual selves and most of the time should be focusing on getting closer to The Divine. The inverted pentacle symbolizes the material world over the spiritual, and would be appropriate when doing a spell for money or a job or finding a home - things existing in the physical world.
Strange that I just noticed this thread. I realized this morning that all the pentagrams on the American flag printed on this shipping box sitting in my dining room are inverted. Printing error or vast Illuminati conspriacy? :dubious:
I thought it was Samuel Orne in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
The first sentence of Ira Levin’s “Rosemary’s Baby” states that Rosemary & Guy had just signed a lease on a five room apartment in a white house before getting the call about the empty apartment available in the Bramford. I suspect Levin deliberately used “white” to suggest goodness, and five room to suggest a pentagram, keeping Rosemary safe from the Devil.
Hey! Yeah! And I notice that the word “apartment” has the exact same number of letters as the word “communist.” Too weird. And the word “white” has the same number of letters as the word “Russia.” Almost. I can see how the author planned all this to summon the devil, himself. Maybe we shouldn’t even be writing about this. Hey, each one of us has…five fingers. The pentadigit! Argh. And on 6/6/6, too. It’s all part of the master plan to have us writing about these things on this date. Da debil made us do it! Da debil made us do it!
Y’all crazy.
I’m pretty sure that guy also played a young Dan Connor in a Halloween Roseanne episode, with the ghosts of Halloween Past, Present & Future.
I think you are right.