Sam Harris

There’s a new video adventure game out (Drawn: The Painted Tower—gorgeous).  One puzzle involves lighting up a pentagrammic figure, which the game just calls a pentagram—the one where the points of a star are connected, creating a star inside a pentagon. 

One woman absolutely went off on this in the game forum, complaining about how can she explain to her kids why mom can play games with pentagrams in them when they are forbidden to, and if all of us complain maybe game developers will no longer foist this evil and wicked symbol on the rest of us.

Mind you, this is a game with a witch doctor and ghosts in it also.

I guess I’ve been living under a rock, but what’s wrong with a pentagram/pentagon/pentawhatever?  I pointed out that a star is a pentagram and so is the Pentagon, while this figure isn’t really a pentagram at all (since it has ten lines instead of five).  Nobody responded except one woman who said she likes symbols in magic/fantasy games. 

What is up with that?  Just curious.

In 1983 one of my two dorm-mates at Eastman was a self-proclaimed witch. He claimed to meet the goddess Isis when he did “circles,” and had an older woman mentor/friend in another state with whom he supposedly communicated telepathically. He identified then as bisexual, and referred to other young men at the local YMCA (where he ran), as “toys” who, given just a few weeks, would be following him around like little puppies. Quite disturbing.

Anywho, my other dorm-mate and I thought this kid was just arrogant. One day when I was alone in the dorm room, I drew, with aspirin as chalk, a giant pentagram filling the entirety of our black linoleum dorm-room floor – a five-pointed star inside a circle, with improvised little symbol-like scribbles everywhere. The witch didn’t say much for a couple of days, but then asked if I’d erase it because it “disturbed the energy field of the room.”

I willingly obliged.

We were 19-years-old, and I was kind of a bastard for doing that.

Many Christian religiofied types (mainly conservatives, of course) don’t distinguish any difference between Anton LeVay’s satanic pentagram and others, anything but the cross, with or without the dead guy, being clearly demonic ... well, actually even those with the dead guy are evil to some of the more deeply religiostupidified.