The altar is quiet before anything is lit.
A cloth laid flat. A cup still empty. Two candles waiting with their wicks white and untouched.
Near the northern edge lies a disc, face up in the half dark, a five-pointed star cut into its surface and holding whatever light the room has left.
It burns nothing. It pours nothing. It cuts nothing.
It only rests there, flat and patient, while everything else on the altar arranges itself around it.
That is the pentacle.
The Flat Thing at the Centre
A pentacle is a disc. Wood, fired clay, slate, beaten copper, a plain glazed tile, a circle of card cut with scissors at a kitchen table.
Most are the width of a saucer or a little less, wide enough to take a ring, a stone, a folded slip of paper.
Upon the face is a five-pointed star, most often held inside a ring.
Every other tool on the altar reaches outward. The wand points. The blade divides. The cup receives and gives back. The censer breathes.
The disc alone stays where it is put.
It is the ground of the working, the one flat and honest surface, the place where a small thing may be set down and left without rolling away into the dark.
Pentagram, Pentacle, Paten
Three words circle the same object, and no two books agree on how to hold them apart.
In common use, the pentagram is the star itself, drawn in five strokes without lifting the hand. The pentacle is the star closed inside a circle, or else the physical disc that carries it.
Some traditions call the disc a paten, borrowing an old word for a flat plate on which something is offered.
Older books of magic used the word for engraved discs and seals that carried no star at all, only letters, rings and names.
The argument over which word belongs where is very old, and it will not be settled here.
What matters at the altar is simpler. One thing is a shape. The other is an object you can pick up, and it is cool and slightly heavy in the palm.
The Five Points
The star is drawn as a single unbroken line. The hand begins at one point and returns to the same point without lifting, and the path it walks crosses itself five times.
Four of the points are commonly given to the four elements. Earth in its patience. Air in its clarity. Fire in its appetite. Water in its long memory.
The fifth, the point that stands uppermost, is given to spirit.
The ring around them is the circle that keeps the whole thing whole, the same ring a witch walks when a rite begins.
So the disc is a small picture of a working, held in the hand before the working starts. Five powers, one line, one boundary.
A star set point downward carries a different meaning again, and in some initiatory lines it belongs to a particular degree rather than to open practice. If you have not been given that meaning, you do not need to carry it.
Why It Belongs to Earth
Of the four quarters, the disc is nearly always given to the north.
North is midnight, deep winter, green and brown, the cold soil under frost, salt and stone and grain and coin.
Earth is the element that receives. It takes the seed. It takes the dead. It takes the weight of everything built upon it and does not complain.
A flat disc that holds whatever is laid on it is the same gesture in miniature, which is why the pentacle sits so easily in the northern quarter beside the dish of salt.
Pick one up when the room is cold and you will feel the argument settled in your hand. It is dense. It is unhurried. It does not want anything.
Where It Lies on the Altar
Placement varies between traditions, and the surface you own will decide as much as any book does.
Many witches keep the disc at the northern edge, or a little back from centre, so the working space stays clear. Others give it the middle of the cloth and let everything else gather at the rim.
The wider question of what stands where belongs to setting up the altar as a whole.
Three practical things are worth deciding before the first match is struck.
- Keep it within easy reach of your working hand, so nothing has to be lifted across a flame.
- Keep it out of the drip line of the candles unless you want it patterned with wax.
- Keep it where a loose sleeve will not pass over fire to get to it.
What Is Set Upon It
The disc is a table for small things.
A stone being held to a purpose. A charm bag not yet closed. A sealed jar left overnight. A ring, a key, a coin, a written petition folded into quarters. Bread and salt for a rite of the season.
Some altars use it as the stand for the censer, and that is where care is owed.
A charcoal disc runs far hotter than it looks and will scorch wood, craze glaze and crack cold stone, so it needs a proper heatproof stand of its own rather than a thin plate of anything.
Burning charcoal also gives off carbon monoxide. Work in moving air, never in a closed room or a sealed car, and keep birds well away, since they are exceptionally vulnerable to smoke and fumes. Self-igniting discs spit sparks as they take. The whole business of resin and smoke on charcoal is worth reading properly before the first ember glows.
Wood, Clay, Metal, Stone
The material changes the mood of the disc more than the design cut into it.
Wood is warm, light and forgiving. It takes a burnt line beautifully and holds the smell of oil for years. It also scorches, and it drinks salt water into the grain.
Clay is the honest choice, because you can make it yourself. A fired tile or a slab of air-dry clay pressed flat under a rolling pin will serve a lifetime of workings.
Metal gives weight and a cold, bright face. Copper and brass tarnish to a soft brown, silver darkens in the damp, and each carries its own long association in the craft of metals. If bread, salt or anything acidic is to be eaten from the disc, do not use unlined copper or brass, which leach into food and drink, and treat antique pewter as unsafe for anything edible, since old alloys may carry lead.
Stone is handsome and demands the most care. Slate and soapstone are soft. Selenite is softer still, is scratched by a fingernail and dissolves in water, so it is never washed, never soaked, never left on a damp windowsill.
Some minerals sold as flat carved discs carry real hazards rather than romantic ones. Serpentine and the stone sold as new jade, nephrite and tiger’s eye may carry asbestiform fibres. Galena, vanadinite, crocoite and cerussite carry lead. Realgar and orpiment carry arsenic. Never cut, sand, grind, drill or tumble a stone disc at home, do not make dust of any of them, and read the fuller account of what stone does in water and what dust does in lungs before you buy anything carved.
Making One With Your Own Hands
A bought disc is a fine thing. A made one carries the evening you made it.
You will need:
- A wooden round, an unglazed tile, or a fist of air-dry clay
- A cup or jar lid to trace the circle
- A pencil
- Pyrography pen, paint, ink or a permanent marker
- Fine sandpaper, for wood only
- A square of dark cloth to wrap it in
Then work slowly.
- Choose the size by your own hand. Rest your palm on the blank and let the width of it decide.
- Trace the outer circle first, so the star has somewhere to live.
- Draw the star in one continuous line, without lifting the pencil, and start again if the hand stutters.
- Cut, burn, paint or ink the lines. This is the face you will look at by candlelight for years, so let the evening be long.
- Sand any raw edge outdoors, wearing a mask, and keep the dust out of the house.
- Oil or seal a wooden disc in moving air and let it cure fully before it meets a flame.
- Wrap it in the cloth and leave it wrapped until the first rite.
The Marks You Cut
A star and a ring are enough. They have always been enough.
Beyond that, witches add what belongs to them: a craft name, a sign of the Lady and the Lord, a rune, a border of small marks like a chalked hem.
The wider vocabulary of signs and symbols is worth walking through before you commit a line to wood.
Some traditions engrave signs that belong to their own initiated line. Those are not decoration and are not yours to copy from a photograph. Leave them where you found them.
Leave empty space, too. A crowded disc becomes unreadable in low light, and the whole point of the thing is that the eye can rest on it.
Making It Yours
A new disc is only an object until it is claimed.
The rite of consecration, the questions raised by a second-hand tool, and what to do with a disc at the end of its service are all treated properly in making a tool yours.
Take the disc there, and bring it back to the altar afterwards.
The Disc as a Working Surface
Once it is yours, the pentacle becomes the place where things are put down on purpose.
This is used when you wish to hold an object still inside an intention: the charm is set upon the star, both hands are held above it, the breath is slowed, and the words are spoken over it while the candle burns down beside.
Nothing dramatic happens. The wax drips. The room stays quiet. The object sits in the middle of the ring looking exactly as it did.
What changes is the attention. A thing left deliberately upon a marked circle is a thing you have stopped carrying in your pocket and started treating as work.
The disc does not hold the power. It holds the object, and it holds you to the object.
Salt, Water, Wax and Oil
The disc will get dirty, because everything at the altar does.
Salt is the great destroyer here. It pits metal, creeps into unsealed grain and eats slowly into soft stone, so keep salt in its own small dish rather than loose upon the face.
Let spilled wax harden completely, then lift it with a blunt wooden edge. Warmth and patience do the work; a blade only scars the surface.
Wipe wood and mineral discs dry rather than washing them, and never soak either. Metal takes a soft cloth and a little polish, though a darkened disc is not a fault and many prefer it.
If you dress the disc with oil, treat oil as ordinary care and nothing more. Dilute essential oils in a carrier, patch test on your inner arm, keep them off the eyes and any mucous membrane, remember that citrus oils are photosensitising on skin that then meets sunlight, keep them away from cats and dogs, and never swallow them.
When There Is No Disc
Plenty of good work has been done on a circle of paper.
A star inked on a white card, a saucer from the back of the cupboard, a coaster, a smooth flat pebble from a permitted place, the lid of a tin turned upside down on a hotel bedside table.
The star is the thing. The wood is only what the star happens to be lying on.
A disc that can be slipped between the pages of a notebook is a disc that will actually be used, which is more than can be said for a heavy carved one kept in a drawer for the right occasion.
What the Disc Does Not Do
It does not ward a house. It does not turn anything back. It does not stand guard at a door while you sleep, and no object on any altar grants an outcome because it was placed correctly.
Claims of that kind sell a great many carved discs, and they are worth nothing.
What the pentacle offers is smaller and more useful. A flat place. A ring that says inside here matters. A weight in the hand at the beginning of an evening, when the mind is still scattered and the candles are not yet lit.
And afterwards, when the flames are pinched out and the smoke has thinned and gone, it is still there in the dark.
Cool. Level. Holding the last small thing you set down.