Out In The Open

[Monica]

yeah but she looks scary in that video. and i don't think ASL has that goat sign.

I guess it's all in the perception. She doesn't look scary at all to me!

Maybe because I've seen her in What the Bleep and can't fathom her being an evil entity...maybe because I don't know sign language so it all just looks like sign language to me. Do you know sign language, Oceania?

Maybe I'm not that freaked out about the 'devil horns' because I've been to so many heavy metal concerts! It's normal for a lot of metalheads to do the horns, and it means nothing to them. They're just having a good time rocking out.

I think words and symbols do carry a charge but a lot of it also depends on how much value we put on them. A great example is the F word. The old generation thought it was the most vile word ever, and nowadays young people say effin this and effin that and it's no big deal. It has just replaced the word very!

The pentagram itself is a sacred symbol but fundamentalist Christians think it's 'satanic'. They don't care whether it's right side up or inverted.

My understanding is that neither is actually evil, but that the pentagram pointing up signifies matter reaching up to spirit, whereas the pentagram pointing down signifies spirit descending into matter.

Being that we've already been stuck in Maya for eons and are attempting to ascend, then the pentagram pointing up is the one we want, whereas the pentagram pointing down would serve only to keep us stuck. That's it. Nothing more sinister than that.

The same thing happened with the swastika. It had meaning similar to the pentagram, but the difference was in which direction it was spinning. Hitler co-opted an ancient symbol and turned it into a symbol for ultimate evil.

I wonder who decided that one's fingers in a certain configuration is evil? Maybe the power elite did use that symbol for something, in which case it's meaningful to them. But I don't think that necessarily makes it meaningful to us.