Pantacle and Pentacle

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 7 pages

A record of a small public disagreement, and the liveliest thing in this section. The Path of New York had, with much deference, invited the attention of Lucifer to the grave etymological objections to defining a pentacle as a six-pointed star. Blavatsky's reply, printed in The Path for June 1888, refers her benevolent corrector to Webster's Complete Dictionary of the English Language — the 1880 edition revised by Chauncey Goodrich and Noah Porter of Yale, assisted by Dr Mahn of Berlin — where the entry for pentacle reads: a figure composed of two equilateral triangles intersecting so as to form a six-pointed star, used in ornamental art and with superstitious import by the astrologers.

Her substantive point is that the etymology is a red herring. Webster derives the word from the Greek pente, five, which every schoolboy knows; but pente has nothing to do with it, and Éliphas Lévi — like all Frenchmen and kabbalists — spells the word pantacle, with an a, which she calls more correct than the English form and less puzzling. In old kabbalistic phraseology a pantacle is any magic figure intended to produce results, whatever its number of points. So if anyone is to be taken to task for overlooking the etymological objections, she concludes with the same deference she was shown, it is the professors of Yale rather than Lucifer.

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