Star Polygons in Art and Culture
Star polygons feature prominently in art and culture. Such polygons may or may not be regular but they are always highly symmetrical. Examples include:
- The {5/2} star pentagon is also known as a pentagram, pentalpha or pentangle, and historically has been considered by many magical and religious cults to have occult significance.
- The simplest non-degenerate complex star polygon which is two {6/2} polygons (i.e., triangles), the hexagram (Star of David, Seal of Solomon).
- The {7/3} and {7/2} star polygons which are known as heptagrams and also have occult significance, particularly in the Kabbalah and in Wicca.
- The complex {8/2} star polygon (i.e. two squares), which is known as the Star of Lakshmi and figures in Hinduism;
- The {8/3} star polygon (octagram), and the complex star polygon of two {16/6} polygons, which are frequent geometrical motifs in Mughal Islamic art and architecture; the first is on the coat of arms of Azerbaijan.
- An eleven pointed star called the hendecagram, which apparently was used on the tomb of Shah Nemat Ollah Vali.
Some symbols based on a star polygon have interlacing, by small gaps, and/or, in the case of a star figure, using different colors.
Read more about this topic: Star Polygon
Famous quotes containing the words star, art and/or culture:
“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called “Sympathetic Nature.””
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)
“Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in the newspapers—and in people’s minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)