A Five-Pointed Star

During Advent, the window above the main entrace of the larger of the two churches that dominate the Great Square at the heart of the town where we live...

...is decorated with an illuminated five-pointed star, presumably to symbolize the star that appeared in the Heavens to mark the birth of the Messiah:

The star itself shines rather dimly, and is such a lacklustre adornment that one wonders whether the effort of switching it on is worthwhile. At least this year, it's the right way up. Last year, and the year before, the star was inverted:

This was a faintly unnerving sight, as I had recalled reading that, whilst the pentagram or pentacle had been used as a Christian symbol, that the inverted pentacle had been adopted by would-be Satanists as a symbol of the Devil. My imagination ran with this notion and imagined the church on those drearily cold winter nights as having been overrun by some black-robed devil-worshipping sect.

Perhaps though, I reflected, the symbol had not been inverted at all, but had merely been rotated in either direction by 72 degrees: the end result would be the same, and the implicit statement not of diametric opposition to orthodoxy, but of an oblique interpretation of it. And isn't it a simplistic thing in the first place, to suppose that by turning an established symbol upside-down, that one instantly negates its meaning?

Posted by misteraitch at December 16, 2002 04:55 PM