Damigeron's Dungeon: March 2026

The Pentagram, Its Use in Magic

The Pentagram

01 - Introduction to the Pentagram
02 - Structure of the Pentagram
03 - Pentagram Magic
04 - Pentagram Analogs and Substitutes [PENDING]

In our discussion of the Pentagram, we’ve thrown around the word “magic” a lot. Before we explore the magic of pentagrams in practice, good practice is to remind ourselves of the functional definition from our “What is Magic?” article:

Magic (Generic) - That which circumvents the normal rules of cause and effect by virtue of novelty.

Magic (Craft) - The art and science of circumventing the normal rules of cause and effect by virtue of novelty.

With that out of the way, let’s reacquaint ourselves with what a Pentagram is:

Pentagram (Holotype) - A five-pointed unicursal star, usually placed inside a circle.

Pentagram (Gloss) - Any magical sign or figure.

Pentagram (Religious/Occult) - An abstract representation of the universe (cosmogram), in whole or in part, articulating Totality.

Pentagram (Magician’s Tool) - The stage of magical action.

Pentacle - A pentagram (any of the above), usually (but not exclusively) referring to a worn article.

In our previous articles we considered the history of the pentagram, its historical uses, and its structure. With that and the definitions above out of the way, we can cover in what ways the pentagram is magical and why.

MEMETICS OF MAGICAL SYMBOLS

While we have covered many of the dimensions of its history and construction, we are burdened with the unfortunate task of disabusing you of the fundamental significance of any of that. There is a reason why the Pentagram is considered magical, and it has nothing at all to do with its long history and the boundless creativity of human beings to cleverly bind together associations in rich iconography.

The reason is simple: it looks pretty neat.

The Ancient Sumerians may have observed Venus's 8-year celestial pattern, but the geometric figure was easily divorced from its [astrological] origins. Instead, the icon’s visual qualities grant it traction in the human imagination!

This memetic quality is at the root of the design’s magical function. It is eye-catching and sticks in the brain, therefore is special. Things that catch and hold our attention register as significant, and significant things get attributed magical properties. In short: Special things are magic because they are special. This is true of nearly any easily replicable symbol one could imagine, independent of “original” meaning.

WARDING

The Pentagram’s most ubiquitous magical use is as a ward, an apotropaic that drives away influences harmful to the wearer or the location marked.

The Shatkona and Swastika yantras on the exterior of a house in India.

As identified above in the Memetics section, the Pentagram and its related devices look cool and are therefore magical. Everything that follows after that are post-hoc rationales that transform its visual appeal into a conceptual justification for warding: association with good things and, therefore, the exclusion of bad things.

First, there’s the Sumerian-observed celestial geometry in the Rose of Venus. The Pythagoreans observed its relationship to the golden mean. Elementalism tied it to the five elements. Any of these three analogies render the pattern a harmonious cosmogram. To wear a pentagram or place oneself within one is to align with an icon of a balanced, ideal world, excluding the dangerous influences of chaos and discord. Modifications of this design, identified with more particular forces or intelligences (specific angels, demons, or djinn), tailor the protection.

The seal of Paimon, from the Lemegeton.

SORCERY AND DEMONOLOGY

The contemporary association of the Pentagram with demonology leans heavily into the pentagram-as-stage thesis we put forward in our Magician’s Intruments article, but we’re going to defer that for the moment to focus on its other practical dimensions in sorcery.

Beginning at the beginning, we have its appearance in the Testament of Solomon. This is the seminal work of the Solomonic tradition of sorcery, being a humble collection of medicinal folk-magic from Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, and Syrian Pagan sources, framed within the legendary narrative of Solomon’s construction of the Temple of God in Jerusalem.

In this story, the archangel Michael gives Solomon a silver ring bearing a “pentalpha.” By this ring, Solomon was tasked with being a blessing to all of Mankind by binding demons and removing them from the land, which he did by variously assigning them tasks of construction or sealing them away in jars.

The great and wise Solomon performed this feat of binding by seizing the ring, taking it off of his finger and…throwing it at the demon.

Historically-accurate representation of
1st-3rd Century binding technique.

In fact, in the story the first person to throw the ring wasn’t Solomon but the son of the chief architect of the Temple. Solomon gave him the ring and told him to throw it at a sleep paralysis demon named Ornias. Struck in the chest by the ring and hearing the orders of Solomon from the boy’s mouth, Ornias was obliged to bring one demon after another before Solomon, where the pattern of ring-throwing was repeated.

While this Compiler finds the simplicity of this early text charming, it also highlights the pretensions of later works of the tradition: a self-seriousness that characterizes the European Solomonic tradition. As practices derived from pagan practice, church conventions, and original invention of practitioners, the number of instruments proliferated and the particulars of their use diversified. Affectations of proper procedure and even legalism manifested in conjunction, projecting a rigidity of art that does not exist in the older texts.

In these older texts, the germ of the original idea survives by means of a silver shield ring worn on the left hand, which may bear a pentagram, a hexagram, or the “Mystical Figure of Solomon.” This was worn as a shield against conjured spirits, and to shield the mouth and nose from the “poisonous breath” of the fouler things that answer the sorcerer’s call.

Within the aforementioned diversification was the development of the notion of “seals.” To the best of our reading, the intuitive logic is that a caractere that represents a particular spirit is marked within a circle…or maybe it’s just the symbol.

Sometimes, it’s a circle with a lot of markings around the principal symbol.

Look, this has all the vagaries of any other esoteric meme, so the boundaries are going to be inconsistent. That’s just something we have to deal with.

For our exploration of these symbols, we’ll utilize the fictional Yellow Sign of Hastur, from Chambers’ The King in Yellow (1895).

Kevin Ross's depiction of the Yellow Sign,
as standardized by the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG.

Now, we’ve already brought up the word caractere, which requires some explanation. During late Hellenic Greece, it was very common to find novel symbols in all manner of magical media that had no discernible deductive meaning, and were magic for the sake of being magic. Occasionally accompanying text identifies what the symbol is supposed to reference, and sometimes it was supposed to be the mark of a particular supernatural intelligence. This was often as specific as caracteres got, as their primary function was to vaguely confer “power” to a spellworking.

For lack of a more particular term, for this article we will call the spirit-oriented caracteres “sigils.”

The Yellow Sign would look perfectly at home in the Mediterranean of late antiquity. Such symbols were the forebears of later sigils in Solomonic sorcery, where they were formed into “seals.”

The Yellow Sign as a seal.

Placed inside of a circle, a sigil forms a seal. From our most generous interpretation, given that the circle is both the world and also the referential foundation for the pentagram, the sigil in the circle is the sigil in the pentagram. That would mean that the seal is identifying and acting on “how this spirit actually manifests in the world.”

Or, what is the probable case most often, just, “this guy here.”

Most practitioners and even texts in this field are operating at a lower resolution than this read. However, you, the reader, have no obligation to yoke yourself to the lowest common denominator.

In any case, the sigil acts as a name and the seal as a constraint. This is important for pinning down what is understood to be a disembodied spirit to a specific engagement, hence why it has found strong traction in sorcerous practice.

Lamen are where the “ward” and “binding” meet. The most common form of this is a seal worn as a medallion around the neck. It is characterized most often as a “breastplate” or “gorget” (neck armor) in the texts, but this Compiler’s first exposure to the Lamen was as a “shield.”

The lamen from the Hygromanteia.

While an outlier in the historical description of the lamen, we find it the most useful characterization for illustrative purposes. So, for the rest of this article we will be referring to them as shields.

Sample lamen of the Yellow Sign.

The purpose of a lamen is to protect the sorcerer from the thing described by the seal. The lamen from the Hygromanteia depicts ten seals, an entire protective stack for the magician. In our simplified Hastur-lamen examples, the intuitive logic is clear: “I am protected from [Hastur].” The lamen on the right, which bears the circumscribed sigil, might even be benefiting from its specificity: “I am protected from [Hastur] as it actually manifests in the world.”

Whether that distinction is meaningful or not, we invite the storytellers reading to decide for themselves.

THE MAGICAL STAGE

Returning to our practical thesis of the pentagram, we also touch on the most recognizable intersection of the pentagram and sorcery: the establishment of ritual space.

The pentagram is not the origin of the ritual magical space. As touched on in Pentagram 02, it’s the marriage of a syncretically-dense geometric meme and a universal human ritual behavior. Any specially prepared space or even altar bears all the features this Compiler has identified with the pentagram-as-stage.

Why, then, do we call it “the stage” and not “the altar?”

Because the conflation of the altar with the geometric meme makes the concept of the altar itself more adaptable and portable. This allows engagement with the conceptual features once relegated to the altar or temple space itself in diversified, novel instances.

It also catalyzes syncretism, by physically highlighting conceptual through-lines between seemingly unrelated artifacts.

Now I can wear the altar around my neck and do altar-stuff anywhere!

That all might be a bit heady. We’ll rephrase.

The geometric meme of the pentagram is able to appear in many ways, in many contexts. It can be the cloth of an altar, scratches in wood between candles, engraved on the signet of a ring, placed upon a wall, referenced by a splaying on the fingers on the hand, worn about the neck, tattooed, etc., etc.

Because the [Temple] and the Altar are the stage of cosmic action (the Universe) in microcosm, then the pentagram is also the Universe in microcosm. If you are engaging the Universe in microcosm, you can sympathetically recontextualize or act upon the World in macrocosm. And, thanks to the fact you are no longer bound to the specific instance of a temple or literal altar, the stage of magical action can be established anywhere and in any way.

We’ve touched on Hermetic sympathy in Pentagram 02, but the stage of magical sympathy is a common feature of ritual practice the world over. Our Hermetic example focused on the path of Platonic principle through an example of boiling water to boil the blood (induce anger) in another person. However, in Hermetic practice, this action along principle is considered synonymous with the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm.

Diagram of Hermetic Sympathy.

This fastening of Platonic notions onto the axis of scale is not a universal feature of sympathetic magic — or at least, not one that needs to be made explicit. To demonstrate this, we turn to Mesoamerica, and the ritual table of Maya shamans, the ka’an che’.

Diagram and photo of the ka’an che’ and ritual practitioners, from
Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path.

The ka’an che’ is a ritual diorama of arching poles that hold up a table (the earth) and form a vault overhead (the sky). Upon the table are the offerings and a simplified model of an ideal city. “Ideal” here means having all the religiously relevant features that identify it as the axis mundi, or world-navel, rather than a proposed utopia.

Without turning into a dissertation on this ritual table, this simplified diorama of the universe is how the shaman and ritual practitioners engage the gods and other spirits, and their actions in the ideal world of the diorama sympathetically play out in the wider world. It is a stage of action, just as we describe the pentagram.

Ritual actions performed on or before the stage-pentagram follow an identical root logic to the ka’an che’. However, there are other dimensions of action (seemingly) particular to Western sorcery, and the understanding/misunderstanding of these particularities color most engagement with sorcery in our entertainment media.

The first of these is the notion of the “summoning circle.” Most audiences understand the idea through the lens of fantasy and horror media, and have the belief that spirits are summoned inside the circle.

Any excuse to share the Shoebody Bop.

This isn’t wrong per se, as it does exist in the historical record. For a specific example, the Liber Iuratus Honorii tells us that to summon Corniger (“the horned one,” literally the Devil), one must inscribe a circle then dig a hole that he might stick his head up out of Hell. This is in contrast to the summoning of an angel, where one raises a mound in the circle.

Which brings us to the more common historical model: one summons angels inside circles and demons outside of circles.

In John Dee’s angelic sorcery, the angels are summoned in circles so that they don’t have to be sullied by the profane world of matter.

In contrast, the ritual pentagram identifies the harmonious “normal world” of matter and is used to exclude the demon from contact with the sorcerer through the implication and literalization of the demon as a marginal figure. This is the more common pattern of pentagram sorcery: The sorcerer stands inside the pentagram, and the spirit appears outside the edge of the circle, summoned from the fringe of reality.

Sorcerer standing in his summoning circle,
protecting himself from conjured phantasms.

Sometimes the magician is told to say a magic phrase in order to cross the threshold of the circle, without disrupting its ritual sanctity, as seen with the KEFI DHAZEVOM DECHWONT incantation in Kornreuther’s Magia ordinis artium et scientiarum abtrusarum (1515), or “Magic of the Order of the Abstruse Arts and Sciences”.

Some texts further emphasize the boundary by placing the circle inside of other figures, like squares. Fumigation via incense also features prominently, and sometimes these are combined. In the Greater Key of Solomon, the circle is surrounded by a square formation of censers, which elevates the distinction of space from the plane of the floor into the atmosphere, completely transforming the space.

Figure 81 from Book 2, Chapter IX of the Greater Key of Solomon.

Occasionally texts prescribe some kind of secondary manifestation figure outside the protective, “normal” pentagram. In the examples we’ve found, they’re often triangles with circles inside, which are an invitation to manifestation.

From Mathers' Lemegeton, Sloane 3648, and Sepher Maphteah Shelomo.

This is spelled out in Mathers’ translation of Lemegeton I - Goetia:

“This is the Form of the Magical Triangle, into the which Solomon did command the Evil Spirits. It is to be made at 2 feet distance from the Magical Circle and it is 3 feet across. (See Frontispiece Figure 154.) Note that this triangle is to be placed toward that quarter whereunto the Spirit belongeth. And the base of the triangle is to be nearest unto the Circle, the apex pointing in the direction of the quarter of the Spirit.”

Some occultists might suggest that this is secret initiatory knowledge left out of the other texts on purpose, but given that the tradition of Solomonic sorcery is rife with significant breaks, it’s a reasonable inference that many of the anonymous authors of the authoritative texts wouldn’t have the living initiation into the tradition to make this a consistent feature of secret tradition. It could even be a creative and entirely reasonable invention of one of the transcribers of the Clavicula Salomonis.

Modern Fantasy Convention
Returning to the notion of the “summoning circle” as understood in popular fantasy, we would do well to recognize that the historical sorcerer and the fictional storyteller are working with different economies of space.

Wait, what the Hell does that mean?

“Economy of space” here refers to how the space is being used and by whom. The relationship a storyteller has with the space of action is wildly different to how most people in stories engage with spirits.

Our earlier example of Corniger and the summoning of angels actually explains some of this: Corniger is down in Hell and the angels are in Heaven — distinct cosmic layers separated by boundaries that the ritual must bridge. In most of our fantasy and horror fiction, summoned spirits come from “the other side” or another “plane,” where there is a barrier or boundary orthogonal to our perception of space and time.

Ash and the gang summoning the Deadite, Eligos,
in Ash vs. Evil Dead.

Most historical practitioners of sorcery, even if they accept that the spirits they call come from a “realm” above or below, regard the spirits they summon as abroad in the world. If they were to summon the spirit into a magical circle to bind them, then they’d have to walk through the room the sorcerer is in to get to the magic circle. That would be suicidally stupid on the part of the sorcerer.

Contemporary fiction involving summoning circles has very different priorities and presuppositions from historical practitioners, especially in regards to dramatic tension. Building a portal (a la Corniger’s summoning) and then locking the spirit in the circle allows the spirit to be held as a resource. From there the spirit can threaten, bribe, whine, or otherwise contrive the breaking of the circle, allowing it to run free as a threat. It’s also conservative of space, which is convenient for production in film or video games.

The historical is also perfectly viable for modern storytelling, but it’s messier to negotiate. If a sorcerer is summoning a spirit from the margins (as opposed to something natively resident, as in The Ritual (2017)), then they are protected, but the spirit can freely roam outside the circle and even attack those who stumble upon the ritual. It’s perfectly workable, but its payoff is more immediate. The summoning itself is harder to hold as a story device because the tension plays out immediately rather than accumulating. The corpus of commercial fiction has made it clear which of these storytellers find the most comfortable.

LOW RESOLUTION MAGIC AND OTHER STAGES

So far we’ve prioritized the Western Solomonic tradition and microcosmic stages of sympathy. While these serve as an excellent bridge between contemporary storytelling and historical practice, these are far from the most common manifestation of the pentagram in media or even culture.

Most commonly these days you just see pentagrams slapped onto things without much consideration. These might be fashionably Satanic or otherwise counter-culture in expression, or they might be used to signal something related to sincere alternative religious practice.

Much edgy, very ouch.

In any case, this haphazard application of the symbol is usually only engaging it along one of two axes: “this is taboo” or “this is magic.” The second is really the only one we’re concerned with, and its logic is identical to The Star in Pentagram 02: Section III:

Slap a [magic symbol] on it = Magic!

Slap it on a [magic symbol] = Magic!

In these low-resolution applications, damn near any magical symbol could be substituted and operate on the same rationale (or lack thereof). Yes, this also applies to the Cross.

In media and the vandalism of teenagers, the presence of a pentagram on a wall or tree indicates a place as special. Whether hung, painted, scratched, or carved, the pentagram marks the place. In a movie, this might mean that demons walk freely in the house, right at the edge of perception, or in the woods outside the local Baptist church that those weird goth kids who hang out behind the gas station are doing “the Devil worship.”

In any case, the marking of place is what is significant here, and likewise any other symbol could be substituted and achieve the same effect.

Liminality and Other Stages

Not all markings of place are the same in thought or consideration. Another stage of magical action is the crossroads.

Crossroads are the meeting-of-ways, where encounters of significance happen. In mythology, it was where Oedipus met and killed his father, fulfilling prophecy. In Pre-Columbian Mexico, it was where travelers encounter Yohualitepuztli. In modern American folklore, it’s where Blues musicians meet the Devil and sell their souls for incredible musical talent. We’ll leave it at that for now.

That said, included here for completeness in the article, we will consider the veves of Voodoo.

The veve of Papa Legba.

Veves are sigils for the spirits of Voodoo, and their cross shape is chosen deliberately, as they function as literal cross-roads. Drawn upon the ground, veves allow the practitioner to cross paths with the spirit identified by the sigil. The place of the crossroads is a magical stage for engagement with the Loa, who then “mount” the practitioner and “ride” them during the communion.

We bring attention to the veves because they are symbols that act as magical stage without necessarily referencing Platonic principles or the Microcosm/Macrocosm axis. Some might read this implementation as cosmologically unsophisticated because the veves themselves seem to do little in the way of articulating a cosmic model. This Compiler feels that veves more than make up for perceived depth of application with their surprising design efficiency: name-sigil and meeting place and universal format, all rolled into one!

PENTAGRAMS IN MATERIAL AND ABSTRACT

We’ve touched on low-resolution pentagram magic with worn articles in the previous section, so we turn to high-resolution pentagrammic particularity in material media: amulets. The specificity of pentagram amulets also bridges us to the other extreme of spatial magical action: the high abstract of circumambulation.

We do not presume, here, to cover the length and breadth of amulet construction, or even necessarily with the precise definition of what “amulet” is (which warrants coverage in its own dedicated [article]). Our audience is already thinking of worn articles and accessories, so we’re sticking with that for now.

We’ve covered how the holotype pentagram may be altered by the inclusion of characters within its figure or about the outer circle. This features in pentagrams drawn or carved, cast as lamen or rings or pendants. If you’ve read the previous articles of the series, it’s pretty standard stuff. These alterations filter out unwanted influences or particularize desired influence (pick your preferred characterization here). Additionally, they can cement influences.

Seal of the 10th hour of the day,
per Lemegeton III - Ars Paulina.

The late Hellenistic tradition of zodiac phylactery amulets call for constructions at specific times, so that a favorable astrological arrangement can be imbued into the article, that the bearer of the amulet may carry a favorable and protective heaven with them, wherever they go, in perpetuity.

The materials these amulets were made of can also be of great significance, the medium granting character to the pentagram de facto. Intuitively we can discern a difference between the pentagram of bronze (permanent) and the pentagram of virgin wax (temporary). In John Dee’s system of angelic sorcery, many of the pentagrams and other figures are made of wax to avoid the implication of permanent binding to the profane world of matter (offensive to the angels).

You have to stack like five of these under the feet of
your bed so the angels don't smite you for
sleeping on the ground like a degenerate.

The design, medium, time of construction, etc., are all potential vectors of magical consideration in the material art of pentagram amulets. For storytellers this is worth considering, because it’s revelatory of the axes of interface between abstract conception and material reality, each of which is a wellspring of storytelling possibilities. With this knowledge in mind, how much can be done with so little effort, elevating a formula you’ve already contrived in your own storytelling or revealing character through their vector of interpretation?

Circumambulation is the act of walking around a sacred object or space in reverence or meditation.

This might seem odd to include in an article on pentagram magic, as circumambulation is rarely (if ever) characterized by walking in a pentagram formation. What gives? Our broader pentagram thesis is primarily concerned with the “stage-of-action” dimension, so it follows that we discuss behaviors that establish or transform the stage of action. Examining the act of circumambulation, we observe a few key consequences of performance.

First, and perhaps most obvious to the practitioners, it establishes the thing circumambulated as the axis mundi, or world-navel. This may be in the extreme spiritual-political sense, as the Islamic circumambulation of the Kaaba during the Hajj, or in the moment of attention, as in the dancing around the maypole. The object or place is, at the very least, the center of the universe as-recognized by the practitioner.

During the Hajj, Muslims perform the Tawaf,
where they circle the Kaaba seven times.

Less obviously, the circumambulation separates the interior and the exterior spaces. That might seem as obvious as the axis mundi recognition, but that’s only if the boundary between the interior and exterior space of ambulation is thought of as traced. It certainly is traced, but, as always, the human dimension is left under-explored: the boundary of circumambulation is lived and performed by the practitioner, embodied as an exercise in spiritual participation.

Why make a distinction between tracing and the performance of walking? Aren’t they the same thing?

Well, yes, because they’re different perceptions of the same action. Tracing suborns the activity to an extant prescription, and the circumambulator is ultimately incidental. It’s a curio of human behavior perceived with an intellectual distance that occludes consideration of the “why” of the activity. One cannot understand the psychology and motivations of another human being solely from a bird’s-eye view.

Seriously examining circumambulation from the perspective of the ambulator reveals the functional dimension of the action: the boundary of spaces and the centering of the object or place is a living performance, with its own animating force.

Which brings us back around to the matter of the pentagram: circumambulation performs the boundary of spaces and establishes the central stage of spiritual action, while also imparting the practitioners’ animation to the object/space.

By their dancing and unfurling of the ribbons,
the May Day ritual imparts the kinetic energy
of the participants into the sexual and
agricultural fertility of the whole community.

That imparted animation can also have its own directionality, and therefore, character.

In present-day practice, it’s common for circumambulators to move clockwise around the circle. While there may be historical reasons for this in many places, an intuitive modern explanation is that the movement clockwise is consenting to and aligning oneself with the normative flow of time, while counter-clockwise would be resisting the flow of things.

That runs at odds with the course of the sun in the sky, if the ritual orientation is to the north. The sun’s course would be interpreted as counter-clockwise, moving from the east (3 o’clock) to west (9 o’clock). This counter-clockwise action might also be interpreted positively in enlightenment religions, where counter-clockwise meditation could be seen as a petition to escape the cycle of worldly suffering.

In modern Wicca traditions, practitioners face the interior of the ritual circle, and move side to side in their ritual performance. The sunwise direction is called Deosil, and is considered benific; counter-sunwise is called Widdershins, and is malefic. Generally Deosil is characterized as clockwise, as in the northern hemisphere the more common interpretation appears to be ritual orientation to the south. However, some sources (including the Watkins Dictionaries cited) characterize the opposite. This could be an error, but the umbrella of modern Wicca is broad enough that the compilers of those dictionaries were working from material that privileged a northward ritual orientation. In either case, directionality proves significant to interpretation of movement.

Another dimension to consider is how motion is participation, and participation with what. The defining character of circumambulation is the circuit. We’ve already touched on Wicca’s sunwise considerations, but there’s a more universal quality to consider: that cosmic motion is cyclical. The sun, the sky, the other celestial bodies, the seasons, the course of life and death in plants and animals, all are cyclical. Circumambulation is a human interface in the grand play of cosmic action!

Circumambulation is an under-explored magical action in popular fantasy fiction, likely because of its high economy of space. However, it’s worthy of consideration because of its high salience with culture and character. What is circumambulated, how, and by whom (or in reverse order, in the case of uncommon activity) can do significant and subtle work in your worldbuilding, and we believe storytellers are doing themselves a disservice by not taking advantage of this common ritual behavior.

TAKEAWAYS FOR STORYTELLERS

The pentagram’s simplicity lends itself to use in magic at all levels of resolution and consideration. This Compiler hopes that this article has assuaged any insecurities our fantasy-writer readership may have had about the viability of their own contrivances, and have been inspired to maximize how they’re already employing this family of symbols alongside any new applications suggested above.

That said, here are some ideas this Compiler has developed during the development of this article, presented for your consideration:

Lecouteux’s survey of magical manuscripts in his Dictionary of Ancient Magic Words and Spells provides us English speakers with some insight into the Scandinavian Svartebok (“Black Book”) tradition. Listed under the title 2 BARULA, Lecouteux relays a spell from the Vinjeboka, discovered in 1796 from under the floorboards of an old stave church, and dated to the late 15th/early 16th century.

Relevant to our audience, the conjuration involves standing in a squared circle surrounded by names of God and calling 2 BARULA (probably “Barula Barula”), cross themselves, followed by a number of other words, and so on (go buy Lecouteux’s book). The invocation made, a “knight” will appear “with a kestrel on his wrist.”

This figure addresses the conjurer, asking what is desired of it, and the conjurer is to ignore the figure, averting their eyes. Once the spirit takes the hint and leaves, the conjurer is to turn to the east and repeat the conjuration. A second figure, a golden knight wearing a crown, addresses the conjurer much the same, and the conjurer is instructed to acknowledge this persona.

Relevant to our storytellers, this opens up the process of spirit summoning to complication. What beings are out there that answer the call, either as servants of the thing you are attempting to summon, or as intelligences wishing to co-opt and exploit the other spirit’s prestige? How many false positives might a petitioner go through in order to address the persona they initially set out to consult? What happens if they accept the consultation of one of these interlopers? If one wishes to leverage the procedure as a fixed feature of tradition, following proper procedure could be a gatekeeping device of “true initiation.”

Pentagrams as gateways or portals is well-trod territory, but the character identified by this Compiler in the conjuration of Corniger is worth further exploration. Modern commercial fiction has the extra-planar being rise up into the summoning circle or teleporting in. This omits the dramatic quality of the creature having to dig their way up into the summoning circle, or the comedic quality of the spirit not wanting to.

Consider a sorcerer digging a hole and conjuring forth a powerful demon lord. The demon’s horned brow rises up out of the earth, draped in a caul of gritty mucus.

Demon: “Fuck off, I’m busy.”

Sorcerer: “I call on you, fiend of the Pit-”

Demon: “Did you not hear me, I said ‘fuck off.’”

Sorcerer: “Oh, please? I need-“

Demon: “‘Fuck off’ is a complete sentence. So is ‘no.’ No.”

Sorcerer: “What could you possibly be busy with?”

Demon: “There’s 3 hours left on the Fortnite season pass, and I’ve got 14 levels to go to complete it. Try again tomorrow.”

The demon then sinks back into the ground, and the sorcerer is left trying to work up the nerve to ask his boss for another night off of work.

While more often seen in sci-fantasy like Star Wars or Warhammer 40k, hologram maps find expression in more explicitly fantastical storytelling, especially in visual media like animation.

The Tacticum Display and the Cutie Map are fundamentally the same thing.

With our knowledge of magical tables (as in the furniture), these can become more than exotic maps: they can be the altars of grand action-at-a-distance.

We could take a traditional Big Bad Evil Guy, like Skeletor from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and by means of a magical diorama that maps the realms of Eternia, enact a sympathy of cataclysm!

Skeletor, having a most pleasant day.

Skeletor, likely at the suggestion of his minion Evil-Lyn, could bait He-Man into a weakened position through environmental disaster. By carving out hillsides Skeletor causes landslides, or by lighting up the model forests, wildfires. By creating an exhausting sequence of crises Skeletor could strain the alliance of kingdoms that unite the heroic Masters of the Universe, and keep them distracted enough for him to take more direct actions at his leisure.

While we framed this in a pre-existing IP to leverage familiarity, the villain of an original IP might operate their scheme of the week primarily through such a magical model.

We’ve touched on veves as a viable alternative framing of the magical stage, but we haven’t done much to explore the creative possibilities of the crossroads. Acknowledging that the crossroads warrants [its own article], as already noted above, we share this idea here because it was generated during the penning of this article.

Veves are crossroad-sigils, which invite a meeting with a particular spirit or deity. In Voodoo tradition this is reverential, but a fictional sorcerer is not required to be respectful. Typically sorcerers and conjurers depend on procedure and contract to make spirits appear, ideally in an encounter amicable to the summoner.

Who said that spirit summoning had to be amicable?

Consider a summoner who goes out of his way to contact stupid, aggressive demons and then agitate the hell out of them. They perform these communications with a magical signature, in our example a unique blend of aromatic oils.

Our summoner then makes veve-sigils for each of these spirits on plates of leather, which he carries around as an expendable summoning device. When in a confrontation with an enemy he can’t handle, our summoner wipes his signature oil on the veve-plate and throws it at the feet of his enemy.

The demon identified by the veve smells the signature of his antagonist. Seeking an opportunity for wrathful retribution against the hated summoner, the demon runs horns-first through the crossroads into the realm of mortals, goring the summoner’s enemy.

Meanwhile, the summoner takes advantage of the confusion and escapes, unmolested by enemies, human or otherwise.

Circumambulation has been explored in the reverential and benefic. While malefic motion is recognized in Wicca, this is perhaps the most under-utilized dimension of magical action available to storytellers.

The cataclysmic is recognized biblically, as in the story of the fall of the walls of Jericho, and probably the easiest to grasp. Simple, easy, grand dramatic event, wrap it and stick a bow on it.

That said, there’s another take on this that plays into a present fashion popular in role playing and video games: perversion of space.

Disaster
In more standard TTRPG-style storytelling, a wickedness affecting a place such as a town or holy site might be explained by a procession of evil clerics, inviting misfortune to manifest within a large circuit. This might be done formally, with all the pomp and pageantry of a formal ceremonial procession; alternately it could be done surreptitiously by occult practitioners incognito. It might even be a bit of subversive religious infrastructure developed by a false cleric of the faith, convincing lay-members of the faith to follow the course of a false pilgrimage, conning the Church into normalizing a profanation against itself.

To those who play games like Dungeons&Dragons, this can inform an encounter or the course of an investigation that describes an entire campaign!

Environmental Storytelling
For another angle on this, once again we point to FromSoftware’s Souls franchise/genre of games. FromSoft loves its environmental storytelling, and a sizeable portion of its audience loves picking apart that environmental storytelling, judging by the staying power of lore channels on Youtube, like VaatiVidya.

The Souls games love to tease the player by firmly establishing regional factional norms, where there’s an expectation to find certain enemies in certain places, then scatter a few in strange places as context clues to a historical narrative that played out before the player arrived.

An example of this would be the Man-Grubs of the Cathedral of the Deep (from Dark Souls III).

Man-Grubs

The Man-Grubs typically congregate around the figure Rosaria, Mother of Rebirth, but they can be found singly elsewhere. One such isolated Man-Grub can be found in the rafters of the Grand Archive, under the cage of Gertrude, where the player obtains the miracle scroll “Divine Pillars of Light.” Without digging deep into what all that means (we don’t presume the reader has hours to spare on the game’s obscure lore), the narrative innuendo informs the player that there is an interest between the Man-Grubs and Gertrude.

So how do we get that to work for circumambulation?

Because, in these games, there are two relevant dimensions:

The already explored value of the out-of-place encounter; and,
The corruption of space.

Factions (which includes varieties of monsters) have regional preferences on the map, often with context clues as to why that space is favored by that ecosystem of monsters, with physical markers of that variety of corruption. Elden Ring, for example, has the Red Rot swamps, which are lush with noxious, extra-terrestrial fungi, which occasionally erupts elsewhere in dungeons or other novel locations. That, the enemies found, and the items looted all tell a story.

So, if we have eruptions of faction-specific corruption, and processions of out-of-place factional enemies, we can tell a story of how faction A cursed faction B’s space with faction C’s corruption. This would even reveal something otherwise hidden about the relationship between faction A and C that may have otherwise passed below the audience’s radar! This then prompts the audience to look for the influence of Faction A in Faction C's spaces, and vice-versa, as well as to re-examine the design language of either faction through each other's devices.

Now we step back from the overt seriousness of the Dark Souls aesthetic to completely trivialize circumambulation. Let’s consider how to make this fun.

Circumambulation is defined by the circuit. What else leans on circuits?

Racing!

Return to Carradine.

The Deathrace genre is ample ground for exaggerated magical nonsense. Consider the track as a path of circumambulation around some ancient, bound horror. The track itself is an altar of human sacrifice. Racers compete to kill each other, with the first-place survivor being elevated to Champion, acquiring a magical boon from the Keeper of the Seal (or the transfer of the burden of Keeper). The track is loaded with magical trinkets associated with points of interest in the track’s grand seal, providing basis for in-race mechanics, and revealing the character of the dread personage locked just beyond perception!

* * * * * * *

The Magician's Tools

The Pentagram

01 - Introduction to the Pentagram
02 - Structure of the Pentagram
03 - Pentagram Magic
04 - Pentagram Analogs and Substitutes [PENDING]

The Cup [PENDING]
The Wand [PENDING]
The Sword [PENDING]

An Introduction to the Four Elements

Quintessence
Earth

Water [PENDING]
Air [PENDING]
Fire [PENDING]

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-Mathers, Samuel Liddel MacGregor, translator. The Key of Solomon the King: A Magical Grimoire of Sigils and Rituals for Summoning and Mastering Spirits. Edited by Joseph H. Peterson, Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC, 2016.

-Peterson, Joseph H. The Lesser Key of Solomon: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis: Detailing the Ceremonial Art of Commanding Spirits Both Good and Evil. Weiser Books, 2001.

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