The Iron Pentacle
by Gabriel Carrillo
copyright 2000The pentacle is the tool of Earth, the element whose characteristics are solidity and structure, the element of manifestation; it is thus fitting that the pentacle should be the foundation of the Faery Tradition.
I first encountered the Iron Pentacle on the day of the Spring Equinox, 1970. I was on a longish trip with my friend Gwydion Pendderwen, who introduced me to both the Faery Tradition and Victor and Cora Anderson. He invited me to join him in his observance of the day. What he did was very simple: he went outdoors, offered incense to the directions, and drew a pentacle in the air with his hand, saying: “In the name of Sex, in the name of Pride, in the name of Self, in the name of Power, in the name of Passion”. I recoiled inwardly a little, feeling the mix of excitement, rightness, fear, and revulsion that were characteristic of my early encounters with the Faery Tradition.
The Iron Pentacle is a Witch’s foundation, the ground on which she stands. Each of its points: Sex, Pride, Self, Power, and Passion is a fundamental part of our humanity, and each of them is something we have been taught to deny, repress, feel shame over. In the Faery Tradition, they are holy, and to be embraced with joy. They are in effect the five cardinal virtues of the craft.
Actually, they read like a list of the seven deadly sins, without gluttony and sloth, and there is a reason for that; the seven deadly sins arose in a religious context whose goal was submission, the ready subordination of the individual and the collective to the dictates of authoritarian hierarchy. The Iron Pentacle is a tool for reclaiming our Selves, our bodies, and our personal power; its goal is the whole and fulfilled person.
To reject the points of the Iron Pentacle is to reject fundamental parts of oneself, parts which will not simply vanish, needs which do not go away when unfed. The result is war each of us against ourselves in the spirit which I once saw described as that of the muscular Catholicism of boys who triumphantly mark off on the calendar the days in which they have succeeded in their fight not to masturbate. Locked in a fight against those parts of ourselves in which we are most ourselves, we become powerless, unable to move. To claim the points of the Iron Pentacle is to begin to heal the wounds inflicted on us in that struggle, to begin unlearning the long hard destructive lessons of shame and guilt.
It is unlearning to not feel. To do that is to step outside of the dark room where the “rules” live and hold sway into the bright sunlight of a warm summer day and feel the life moving in your flesh, to say good-bye to a concrete grave and open your arms to embrace the world.
Let me repeat it again; to reject the points of the Iron Pentacle in yourself is to commit to a war against yourself; and when you fight yourself, you always lose.
The christian tradition, as we have seen, is fundamentally transcendentalist, seeing the divine and the world as separate. The war between the world and God, the flesh and the spirit, is fundamental to the historical nature of christianity, and is the same fire of contention that the Iron Pentacle aims to extinguish.
The War is over, or rather it never started, flesh and spirit are one. It is characteristic of pagan/shaman religions worldwide to approach divinity not as transcendent but as immanent, to perceive the divine as omnipresent. The Iron Pentacle proclaims the unity of flesh and spirit and the holiness of flesh; it reminds us that we are divine animals.
Let me repeat that: we are divine animals.
That which is animal within us is not impure, “lower,” less spiritual, less evolved, corrupted, or less worthy; it is sacred, divine, natural, a part and a product of a divine, natural world. Some people have allowed themselves to be driven out of the Garden and civilized — always a very overrated commodity; we still live in the Garden, and my, the apples are tasty.
We are an inseparable part of nature, however estranged from it some of us have sadly become, and it is in that which is simple, natural, untutored, unashamed, guiltless, within us that our divinity is to be sought and found. We are returning to the source to follow the “laws” of nature, to reintegrate ourselves with the great commonwealth of the natural world.
It is said by christian writers that at the moment of the birth of Christ, wailings were heard everywhere; spirits of dale and wood mourning the death of Great Pan, the death in effect of nature. Yet we are here to proclaim that Great Pan has never died, that the Mother still lives.
As Hakim Bey wrote in TAZ,
“Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard.”
“No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good an evil, gave you distrust of your body...., invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization and all its usurious emotions...”
“To shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history demands the economy of some legendary stone age — shamans, not priests, bards, not lords, hunters, not police, gatherers of Paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a sign or painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clocks nowhere.”
“I am awake only in what I desire to the point of terror.”
Stop once again and consider the points: Sex, Pride, Self, Power, Passion. Observe your emotional reaction to them. Almost every time I have presented them in a class setting, someone has gasped at one or another. I once had a student, a former Trappist monk, who in the moment it took me to speak them, leapt across the room in panic the way I used to when I saw a largish spider on my pillow. Can you look deeply into yourself and not feel a response of rejection, a turning away from them? Let us look at them point by point:
SEX
Sex is at once the keystone of the arch of control and of freedom. Of all the fundamental human drives it is the one that has been most feared, the one that has been subjected to the greatest control and repression; it is also perhaps the most powerful, the most liberating, the most healing. I might cite as examples of the extremes to which this repression has been carried, 19th century texts on hygiene recommending as cures for masturbation needle lined penis harnesses which would cause pain in the event of an erection, circumcision without anesthetic as a punishment, and castration as a last resort.
I know one person who was for years tied into bed at night with his hands bound to the bedposts so he could not pleasure himself. In adolescence my yoga teachers taught me a very Catholic masturbatory guilt, forcing me repeatedly to confess to doing it and to promise to stop, promises which never lasted, but left me paralyzed with guilt and fear about my inability to stop, convinced that it was only my weakness and vice that prevented me from being good and pure like everybody else. I had no real idea that masturbation was a nearly universal practice among my friends and acquaintances.
It was the great psychologist Wilhelm Reich’s thesis that adolescent sexual repression was at the heart of almost all mental illness, and indeed the sickness of western society as a whole. He felt that teenagers should have full sexual freedom, and that there should be places for them to go to follow the instincts and needs of their bodies in freedom and safety.
Here is a good quote I found on a leaflet for Mother Goose’s School of Social Masturbation: “Wilhelm Reich said: ‘I maintain that every person who has succeeded in preserving a certain amount of naturalness knows this: those who are psychically ill need but one thing — complete and repeated genital gratification.’”
Certainly I feel that the lessons of sexual guilt, shame, and ignorance left me scarred for life, and am also certain that the only way those deep wounds began to heal was through both confronting that damage and learning slowly and painfully to be comfortable with my own sexuality, and physically satisfying my desires. Ultimately it took learning to appreciate and feel, subconsciously as well as consciously, the naturalness and sacredness of my own sexuality.
In those terms perhaps the disease and gloom of the middle ages, tainted by the smoke of burning heretics, Jews, and Witches, can be seen as the disease of repression enforced from above, and the sadism of the inquisition as the unhealthy manifestation of monastic celibacy. In those days women were not seen in the Victorian light as vessels of purity, but rather as lust-filled temptresses luring the naturally pure and spiritual male, Sir Galahad-like, to fleshly ruin and perdition, as Eve tempted Adam to eat the forbidden fruit in Eden. The Victorian image simply stood that paradigm on its head; no woman was really interested in sex. Just lie on your back, close your eyes, and think of England....
If sex has been repressed and denied, it has been worshipped as well, celebrated in the ceremonial procession of erect marble phalluses on Delos, in the Lingam/Yoni temples of India, in Tantric mysticism, in the Neolithic phallic and Yonic images of Europe, in Margaret Murray’s Samoa, celebrated everywhere that what Gary Snyder the poet called the Great Heresy, as opposed to the Great Orthodoxy, has flourished. Every primitive “fertility cult” is a celebration of the power and pleasure of sex.
The Catholic church aside, people, like all other animals, do not have sex in order to reproduce; we have sex because it feels wonderful, fills a very deep need, and because our bodies are so designed as to provide regular stimulation to have sex. Children, even for heterosexuals, are in general an afterthought.
Sex is oppressed, repressed and denied precisely because of its power, because it is a door between the worlds, because at the moment of orgasm one is truly and completely free. Above all, sex is completely and perfectly natural; what is unnatural is fear, denial, repression, and avoidance of it.
It is essential to understanding the Faery Tradition to recognize that we perceive sexuality as a holy thing in all its consensual and non-harmful manifestations. Indeed, not merely as a holy thing, but as at once the most holy and most human act possible between people; the epiphany of the holy animal. That holiness must not be allowed to put a long and somber face on things, however; sex is sacred as pleasure, as free, spontaneous, easy, natural things are sacred: holiness with a smile.
Sexuality, creativity, and spirituality are the same energy, with the same origin and the same goal. They are one and inseparable; to deny one is to deny all.
PRIDE
Wait a minute, isn’t humility the virtue here, to be humble and know your place and not think too much of yourself? Isn’t Pride the primal sin itself, the sin of Lucifer for which he was cast down into the pit of fire that burns but does not consume? Well, maybe, but personally I always thought that was a pretty lousy myth.
Now try and see Pride as a virtue. Pride in yourself, in what you do, in how you live: living in such a way that you are never ashamed.
When I teach, I explain Pride after listening to my students affirmations and qualms, by bringing in a lute I made in an informal apprenticeship with a European trained instrument maker. It is a beautiful one, modeled on an original built around 1595 in Venice, which I built from scratch, turning the pegs on a lathe, carving out the rose on the soundboard with tiny tools I converted myself from jewelers engravers, shaping and bending and fitting the ribs, alternately maple and walnut, to form the soundbox, shaping the fretboard of Makassar ebony, endless delicate work which I did to the very best of my ability because, well, that is how such things are done. The pierced rose alone took me about 25 hours of intricate meditative work, doing what I like best, carving.
I built that instrument with Pride. It is the very best work I was capable of, and it is beautiful, and should be long after I am dust on the wind.
Pride is a complete sense of worth, the joy of physical or psychic accomplishment that is not based on comparison or competition.
SELF
How often have you been told “Don’t be selfish”?
There is a Hassidic saying, or at least that is the context in which I encountered it: “If I am for myself alone, then what am I for. But if I am not for myself, who will be?”
Self has to do with knowing who you are, knowing your worth, and accepting it. Taking responsibility for yourself, taking care of yourself. If you don’t take care of yourself, how can you do anything for others?
From awareness of Self emerges the limitations and potentials of your own being, and the psychic integrity to use them as well as possible.
From love of Self grows the ability to truly love others. From knowledge of Self grows the ability to know the Other.
POWER
Power is something most of us try to reject, because with it always comes responsibility. Most of us are carefully taught not to seek or sense some kinds of power, and judge others with the maxim “power corrupts” (lack of Pride and Self), unless our pattern is built around the lust for Power as an end in itself, compensating for a perceived deficiency elsewhere in the Iron Pentacle, usually a rechanneling of energy from Passion and Sex.
Power is energy, Power emerges from balance, and true Power proceeds from within, and is not the same as Power over others. That distinction is clearly made in the Tao Te Ching, in the lines “The conqueror of men is powerful, the master of himself is strong.”
Power comes from within, from the deepest reaches of our selves, and is a result of our work and growth; it has nothing to do with controlling, coercing or manipulating others.
Power is the ability to shape, to create, to manifest, to structure both psychically and physically.
PASSION
Passion is the vibrant expression of life, the intensity that gives color, depth, and vitality to existence, the inner force that drives one on, the driving force of creativity and Creation itself. In a very real sense Passion is the bliss that Joseph Campbell admonishes one to follow.
One’s passions, the things one cares deeply about, are things one must follow; the passionless life is not worth living.
One may be passionate about anything: about sex, about art, about food, about a cause, about writing, about a craft... the important thing is to find what it is that you are about and do it, instead of allowing yourself to talk yourself out of it because it is impractical, or nonsensical, or unrealistic, or inappropriate.
If you surrender your Passion, turn your back on it and abandon it, Passion will abandon you in turn, and you will become one of the dream-dead gray ones who wander the world with hopeless lightless eyes; you will merely exist, and be dead long before your funeral.
If you follow your Passion, there is no knowing where it will take you, only that wherever it is it’s worth the journey.
The Points are the psychic attributes, which channel, modulate, and amplify true will and thought, thus creating the flow of power in a human psyche. When the points are held in balance by strong connections of energy, represented by the lines of the pentacle, they produce a high state of self-awareness and personal integrity. When, through stress, shock, or blockage, the connections are disrupted, the Points become unbalanced, resulting in a distortion of reality which leads to an inability to deal clearly with events of life.
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