The Iron Pentacle

by Gabriel Carrillo
copyright 2000

The 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 Witchs 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, theres 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 Reichs 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 Gooses 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 Murrays 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, isnt humility the virtue here, to be humble and know your place and not think too
much of yourself? Isnt 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 Dont 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 dont 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.
Ones 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 its
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 selfawareness 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.