Pentagram - in Literature

In Literature

In the medieval romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the pentagram on Gawain's shield is given a Christian interpretation (see above).

In Goethe's Faust, an incomplete pentagram prevents Mephistopheles from leaving a room.

Mephistopheles:

I must confess, my stepping o'er

Thy threshold a slight hindrance doth impede;

The wizard-foot doth me retain.

Faust:

The pentagram thy peace doth mar?

To me, thou son of hell, explain,

How camest thou in, if this thine exit bar?

Could such a spirit aught ensnare?

Mephistopheles:

Observe it well, it is not drawn with care,

One of the angles, that which points without,

Is, as thou seest, not quite closed.

According to Eliphas Levi, the sign of the pentagram is exalted by Goethe in the monologue of Faust:

"... Ah, how do all my senses leap at this sight! I feel the young and sacred pleasure of life quivering in my nerves and veins. Was it a God who traced this sign which stills the vertigo of my soul, fills my poor heart with joy, and, in a mysterious rapture, unveils the forces of Nature around me? Am I myself a God? All is so clear to me: I behold in these simple line the revelation of active Nature to my soul. I realise for the first time the truth of the wise man's words: The world of spirits is not closed! Thy sense is obtuse, thy heart is dead! Arise! Bathe, O adept of science, thy breast, still enveloped by an unearthly veil, in the splendours of the dawning day!" (Faust, Part i.sc.i).

In H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories, the version of The Elder Sign devised by August Derleth is a warped pentagram with a flaming eye or pillar of flame in the center. It was first described in Derleth's novel, The Lurker at the Threshold. (This was, however, different from the symbol that Lovecraft himself had envisaged.)

In T.S. Eliot's The Dry Salvages, reference to pentagrams is made in part V, verse 8:

By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable

With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams

Or barbituric acids, or dissect

The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors

In Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, the pentagram represents Venus, based on the successive inferior conjunctions of Venus against the Zodiac.

The title of Jo Nesbø's novel The Devil's Star, refers to a pentagram.

In Japanese culture, the pentagram (五芒星 gobōsei) is a symbol of magical power, associated with the onmyoji Abe no Seimei; it is a diagram of the "overcoming cycle" of the five Chinese elements. As a predominantly non-Christian country, with a different set of associations attached to the symbol, there is no social stigma associated with it.