Nine-Pointed Star

The nine-pointed star is the most commonly used emblem of the Baha'i Faith, though it appears in no scripture and has no fixed official design. Its significance rests on the number nine, which recurs in Baha'i usage for two connected reasons. First, nine is the numerical value of the word Baha, glory or splendour, in the abjad system that assigns numbers to Arabic letters, Baha being the root of the name Baha'u'llah, the Glory of God, the faith's founder. Second, as the highest single-digit number, nine is taken to signify comprehensiveness, completeness and unity, which are central Baha'i themes.

The star's specific graphic form is credited to Louis Bourgeois, the French Canadian architect of the Baha'i House of Worship at Wilmette, Illinois, near Chicago, completed in 1953, working together with other Baha'is; nine-pointed stars run throughout the lacework concrete of that building's facade, and one of the design's earliest uses was on the frontispieces of collected volumes of the magazine Star of the West, which ties the emblem to a specific modern circle of designers rather than to any older or scriptural precedent.

Shoghi Effendi, the faith's appointed Guardian in the first half of the twentieth century, is recorded explaining the community's regard for the number in these same two terms, as a sign of perfection and as the value of Baha, which is part of why the star, though undesignated in scripture, became the emblem most Baha'is reach for on gravestones, rings and informal use, leaving the Greatest Name and the ringstone symbol as the forms reserved for more formal or devotional display.

The nine-pointed star should be distinguished from the two symbols that carry formal doctrinal weight: the Greatest Name, a calligraphic rendering of the invocation O Glory of the All-Glorious, and the ringstone symbol designed by Abdu'l-Baha, whose lines represent the worlds of God, the Manifestation and creation. The star is a general emblem rather than a sacred one. Its most conspicuous expression is architectural: Baha'i Houses of Worship are built to a nine-sided plan, each with nine sides, nine entrances and a central dome, the nine doors read as the many paths by which people of all religions may approach one God, a built statement of the faith's core principle of the unity of religion.

The design recurs at every continental Mother Temple raised since Wilmette, including the Lotus Temple in New Delhi, completed in 1986 and built from twenty-seven freestanding marble petals grouped in clusters of three to form its nine sides, where the ringstone symbol and a nine-pointed star are again set at the centre of the prayer hall, carrying the same numerology into an entirely different architectural language despite the two buildings sharing no common architect and being separated by more than three decades and half the globe.