What magic number has the power to regenerate?

Imagine this: you’re walking in the forest and see a star-shaped flower. And another, flower with five petals, evenly spaced apart. You ask yourself: How do living things regenerate themselves? A living thing can give birth to another, and another, infinitely. What creates the cosmic dance of energy that animates the lifeless substance? The answer is found in the palm of your hand, the leaves of tree, pentagram stars, and symbolism tracing back to ancient times. Let’s enlighten our minds to the power of simple one-digit number.

The number five is an archetype of mysteriousness, life-giving-ness, transformation, and creation. 

The Greek philosophers called the number five “Pentad.” The word is related to the common prefix “penta-“, as penta-gon. To summon fiveness, the essential shapes you want to focus on in your mind are a perfect regular pentagon, a pentagram star, and a dodecahedron. A dodecahdron is the shape of a 12-sided die, made from pentagon-shaped faces.

You’ve probably heard this word in school. Along with some activity where you draw a butterfly or draw lines through pictures. The “fold-in-half” symmetry is just one type. It’s called two-fold symmetry. Five-fold symmetry is when you can draw 5 lines evenly spaced radially (coming out from the middle) and each picture between each of the lines is the same. 

Think of a five-pointed star. Each of the points look the same. You can spin it all the way around and each time a new spike is on top it will look the same again. It’s like slicing a pie for five fairly. Five-fold symmetry has a profound psychological effect on people. Let’s find out why!
So, this five-pointed star. Where and when do you see it in your everyday life? Here’s a few examples: 

• rating systems (i.e. you can give this post 5 stars!)
• hotel ratings
• song ratings
• product ratings
• gold stars on a child’s homework
• famous figures are referred to as  “stars” having achieved “stardom”
• many company logos like Texaco and STARbucks, and 
• many flags worldwide. 

It’s definitely interesting that flags from all over the world- China, U.S.A, and more – have 5-pointed stars on them. The root of star-spangled flags, as the study of flags would tell us, is from ceremonies from millennia ago. The star invokes a feeling of authority and invulnerability as well. The star’s authority explains its use in military and government buildings like the U.S. pentagon. 

Pentagram Stars were a symbol that warded off evil. 

There is evidence of this belief in Babylon, Egypt, China, Africa, and North America! Only a perfectly constructed star has the power to ward off evil, as legend has it. The myth Goethe’s Faust demonstrates this. In the myth, a shield bearing a star was constructed imperfectly and allowed evil to permeate. Now we have computers and anyone can make a perfect star. Most drawing programs have a star stamp you can use with minimal effort. But before digitization and even before stencils, a perfect star took a lot of practice and effort to draw. It took a lot more effort than drawing a square or even a perfect circle (compasses, anyone?) By actually performing the action you move the energy in your hand in that pattern. This is powerful in itself. See my construction series to learn how! One of the simplest ways to make one without digital aid is through knots. To read about how to construct it with paper knots, click here. To read about the magical method of constructing it with a compass, click here.

Where does the star get its authority?

The pentad is the flag of life in nature. We can see it in leaves and flowers. Next time you go for a walk in nature, or just somewhere lined with leaves and bushes, take note. All leaves are a stretched or compressed pentagon. Many flowers have five petals. And every edible fruit has a five-petaled flower! (Note: not every five-petaled flower is edible, though!) Think of some fruits. Apples and blueberries are some examples that have stars build into them. Apples have stars on their bottoms and you can see the star in its seed when you cut into it. Blueberries are called starberries in some languages and have their characteristic star around their stems. The star is the physical manifestation of an energy-web expressing “fiveness”, that is, the cell growth patterns. And we also have some strikingly beautiful stars in the animal kingdom. starfishes, seacucumbers, and sanddollars (which are all related) are some good examples.

We also see 5-fold symmetry in our hands as well as in the human body as a whole.

Raise the dimension: from pentagram to 12-sided die

Now let’s fix our minds on another manifestation of 5-ness: dodecahedrons. When you think of squares and triangles you can easily tile them on a flat surface leaving no gaps. You can’t tile pentagons without leaving gaps! But pentagons can fold up into the three dimensional shape, and many molecules and things on the microscopic level take on this shape. Buckyballs, also called fullerenes are made from five carbon atoms around each of the corners of a dodecahedron. These are found in nature and scientists can make them in a lab.

Self-similarity inside pentagrams

One figure, infinite regeneration. The pentagram star, which can be inscribed perfectly in a pentagon, has a pentagon in its center. Perfectly-proportioned pentagrams can also be constructed in each of its arms, in the negative space of its tilings, and so on, in infinitely varying variations.

Where can we find clues about what five-ness can really do? Let’s look deeper at nature, and the seeds that allow plants to regenerate. A starfish can regenerate new legs, and some leaves send out roots when they’re in the soil. What do we see when we look closely at a leaf? Veins, carrying life. One of the best clues about regeneration is in broccoli and cauliflower. You may have noticed that they look like little trees. When you chop a stem off the bigger broccoli head, it looks like a scaled down version of the bigger head. When you chop a little curd off that guy, he looks like both his parents. Actually, if you look at the bigger head, you can see the five-fold groupings. It’s all fives within fives! 

To get deeper insights, you can read my post about the golden mean. Especially with the number five, the golden mean is an important ingredient. The golden mean (also known as phi ratio, and Fibbonacci’s number), inherently represents life-giving regeneration.

What about upside-down, or inverted pentagrams?

They’re called Drudenfuss and have long been associated with demons. See the myth of rebel Egyptian god Set to learn more. Set represented attributes that need purification. The pentagram star in Egypt represented DUAT, an unseen world, and when inscribed within a circle represented the underworld. In Greece, Pan was associated with the star, and, like Set, had horns and other common devilish attributes. He represented lustful fertility of nature. Artists inverted the star to emphasize the reverse of its positive qualities. Contrary to popular opinions, a five-pointed star, whether inverted or not, has no obvious connections to evil practices or ritual. The pentagram and its association with Satanism is as recent as the last century and does not appear to have any historical ties.

This blog is a part of my developing network of knowledge, including fractals, energy surface visualizations, and historical symbolism. If some of the articles mentioned aren’t published yet, they’re just still in the works. To get updated when I publish fresh content, subscribe to my e-mails!

Notes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_JsG57wMgk [model on mathematica]

Constructing the Universe by Micheal S. Schneider;  http://www.constructingtheuniverse.com/