The pentagram is the principal emblem of Wicca and modern witchcraft, adopted through the mid-twentieth-century revival associated with Gerald Gardner and the traditions that followed him. Worn point-up, it identifies the wearer with the religion much as a cross or a star identifies members of other faiths. It is often confused, in popular culture, with the inverted point-down star used by the Church of Satan and other groups from the 1960s onward; the two are distinct in orientation and in meaning, and the association of the point-up pentagram with harm is a modern misunderstanding rather than a feature of the Wiccan symbol. In practice the pentacle, the pentagram within a circle, also serves as a ritual tool representing the element of earth.
The Church of Satan's adoption of the inverted, point-down pentagram enclosing a goat's head, the Sigil of Baphomet, dates to Anton LaVey's founding of the organisation in 1966 and to earlier nineteenth-century occult illustration linking an inverted star with a goat-headed figure, a lineage entirely separate from Gerald Gardner's mid-century Wiccan revival, which used the point-up pentagram without any inverted counterpart in its original ritual material. The conflation of the two in popular culture, treating any pentagram as satanic regardless of orientation, has generated real friction for Wiccan and Pagan practitioners, including a documented case of the point-up pentagram being challenged as a permitted symbol on grave markers in United States veterans' cemeteries before the Department of Veterans Affairs approved it in 2007 alongside other recognised faith emblems.