An overthinker’s guide: Pentacles.

Clutter isn’t my friend. Occasionally cluttered altars are aesthetically pleasing, but most of the time that’s just more to dust. And mate, I live on a busy road, the dust coming in is ridiculous. So I’ve always been a bit “do I really need both a pentacle and an offering plate?”

Maybe the offering sits on the pentacle until you “give” it. But then, where do you charge your holy water? Where do you put the chalice if you’re doing cakes and ale alone? And all the while the little voice in the back of my head is screaming “Something’s not right!”

Just like the whole “why do we need both an athame and a wand if they are both for directing energy?” thing, I’ve often felt like I wasn’t using my altar pentacle to its full potential. And that leads me to wonder if there’s any difference between the pentacle on my altar and the pentacle on my neck.

Then I was floating around in pagan space and I overheard someone laughing, saying a pentacle isn’t a five-pointed star in a circle it’s a summoning plate, and that clicked with me. Ages back I did a blog wherein I played with the idea that summoning spirits is the core of witchcraft. That you can’t be a witch if you’re not working with spirits on some level and that, though some witches get blasé about it, when you cast your circle to create sacred space you are summoning elemental spirits.

Even a tiny bit of digging confirms that yes, pentacles are for summoning, and no, they don’t always have a five pointed star on them. That idea can be directly traced to Gerald Gardner. You’ll notice I’m not providing sources here, that’s because this information isn’t hard to get once you branch out from Wicca 101 books. Also because we’re just talking and playing with ideas, I’m not trying to become a library or anything. Interestingly, in the earliest references I could find, the pentacles were often parchment, and they would be worn around the neck just for the ritual or otherwise shown to the spirit/demon when it appeared as a reinforcement of control.

Well shit. I’m much too much of a fluffy bunny for all this. I’m not interested. Demonville isn’t the direction I’m interested in traveling.

Now, Crowley said that the pentacle should be a symbol devised by the practitioner to represent the universe. This dude was problematic AF and racist piece of shit besides, but the idea itself is cool. Unfortunately, the end goal was the same – to control demons.

Out of interest, I pulled the four Wicca 101 books I still own to see what they had to say about the pentacle. Two of them didn’t say what the altar pentacle is for AT ALL. Their descriptions were almost word-for-word for what it looks like, but they gave no indication at all why you should care. The third one (the complete idiot’s guide, 2^nd edition) made it clear you should wear one in ritual, but about the tool itself said only that it was for protection. Finally, my teen witch’s guide had some answers, but they were pretty lackluster. “You can rest your athame on it, and it can be used as a small plate.”

That’s it?! No wonder the pentacle is considered the most boring of the four elemental tools! In Wicca, probably because its friendly public image, this once important ritual cornerstone has become little more than decoration.

Meditating on this, I see that part of my problem is that I haven’t used it to its full potential even within the limited sphere Wicca gives it. I do rest my athame on it. And I use it as a small ineffective plate. And I use it as a charging station. But I am very aware I can just rest my athame on the altar, or wear it at my waist. I have other altar tiles and plates that can be used as plates. I have a bowl of quartz and a piece of satin spar, both of which can be used for charging. I haven’t found anything to confirm that the pentacle itself acts as a portal during the summoning either, which is curious seeming Wiccans draw pentagrams in the air specifically as portals through which spirits can enter.

I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with this information or where I’m going from here, but I’d love to hear your thoughts (over on Facebook or Instagram, because I’ve turned off commenting here due to the huge amounts of spam).

If the pentacle is specifically a sign of authority used to keep demons in line (which, I don’t know why they’d care, to be frank. It’s like my kid holding up a picture they drew being like “I command you to set up a play date!” I might do it because they’re cute, but the power and authority contained in the drawing is questionable.) and it offers protection specifically from demons and baneful spirits, what use is it to a witch who already has layers of protection on their house and has no interest in controlling others?

Miriam Cumming is an author, wife, mother, and witch. She loves long philosophical conversations and hates when people argue terminology instead of ideas. Miriam delights in packing salads in her children’s school lunchboxes and making new spells. If you’re into parenting, follow her on Facebook, if you’re more interested in witchcraft, you’ll find daily witch-related content on her Instagram.