The World
Needs Beauty
All it takes is five minutes on social media, two minutes watching a news channel, or a paragraph-worth of online news to feel bombarded with all of the terrible things going on in the world. You don’t have to look very hard to get it. Things are rough.
I’ve got some good news for you. It is even easier to find beauty in the world. All it takes is looking out of a window. It might not pop up immediately, but wait, take a breath, there is magick in the patience. Keep watching out your window and something beautiful will happen. I guarantee it. There is an unlimited amount of beauty just waiting for you to see it. It might be a bird flying by, a cloud formation, the scent of cooking food from a neighbor’s house, the sound of children playing, or the stars twinkling in the sky; beauty is there.
Seeing the beauty is one thing, but there is more to this work than sitting back and passively watching. What makes the Beauty Pentacle a powerful tool is that it needs to be shared. When you see something that strikes you with awe and wonder, show that to someone else. When you witness an act of kindness, tell that story. When you are moved by an interaction with another being, share that interaction. Pay it forward. The gift must move.
Beauty is a power that resides within each one of us. It is a power that is uniquely human. It is also a tool that is uniquely you. The Beauty Pentacle is a spiritual tool that helps us to harness the power of beauty and direct it for healing ourselves and the world around us. Once you learn how to harness that energy it becomes a tool that you can move through your body. It becomes a tool of vision, allowing you to see truth in the world. And it becomes a technique that can aid in meditation and grounding.
This book is an invitation to step into the flow of beauty in your life. Reading this book is an exclamation of, “Yes! I will honor the beauty of the world, and I will share that with others.” The Beauty Pentacle is a tool and technique to help you shift the focus of your eyes and awaken a powerful energy within you. Are you ready to step into the flow?
The Pentacle and The Body
Take a moment to lie down right now. Extend your arms and spread your legs. Stretch out your neck as long as you can and feel the edges of your body. Your body is a living pentagram, a five-pointed star. You already live and breathe sacred geometric energy just by having a physical form. The Beauty Pentacle is made up of five points that overlay your physical body. In the following pages, each point of the pentacle will have its own chapter, giving you the opportunity to dive deeply into that specific point and explore how it fits in your own life.
There are layers to this type of work. There will be your external process with the Beauty Pentacle and your internal process. There will be how you run this energy through your body and how it feels physically. This tool will also change the way you look at the world and how you interact with others. All of these pieces will provide insight on where you may have obstacles, blockages, or places where you need to give some clarity and focus.
The Points
The points of the pentacle are: beauty, devotion, creativity, desire, and expression.
The first point, beauty, is an obvious one, but it is also complex. The energy center of beauty is the overarching point of this book. This “point” is actually more of a sphere of power that resides in the top of your head. It is the connection to your god-self and your third eye. The beauty point is how we connect to the power of this tool. It is from this place that the energy flows to all the other points. This is connected to the beauty in the world, the beauty in your heart, the beauty of your body; all of these things and more are part of the point of beauty.
The second point in the pentacle is devotion. This is your relationship to the greater world around you, both the tangible and intangible parts of it. Devotion also asks us how we spend our energy and what we are willing to put ourselves on the line for. What are you devoted to? Who are you devoted to? How and why are you devoted to yourself? How does that devotion inform how you look at the world? How is that beautiful?
The third point of the pentacle is creativity, which is your personal outpouring of beauty. Creativity asks you to take the beauty that you have seen and do something with it. How does the beauty of the world connect to your creative self? How does your internal beauty spark creativity in your life? Do you feel like a creative person? How do creativity and beauty meet in you? Creativity is the place where you can put the beauty you’ve held.
The fourth point is desire, and this is the spark that calls you to action. When the awe of beauty becomes so full and potent, when you’ve taken in so much beauty that you feel like you just can’t hold it all in, that is the power of desire. It is the pinnacle of input before output is necessary. Desire is the fuel of the pentacle. What do you desire? How does that desire make you feel?
The fifth and final point is expression, which is the release of that desire. Expression gives you a place to share the beauty that you have been holding. It is a sharing of your beauty with the world. Expression allows for what you’ve been holding to be released and become bigger than yourself. How do you express yourself? Are you honest with your expression?
Before we move on to some of the more subtle functions of this work, I want to address the difference between the title of the whole pentacle and the specific beauty point, both called by the same name. The Beauty Pentacle is named for the first energy point. The flow of power is rooted in beauty; as it moves through the pentacle it begins at the top of your head, as if an invoking pentacle is being drawn on you. The energy flow starts with beauty and ends with beauty. Therefore, the name of this tool is the Beauty Pentacle. The beauty point—or energy center—is the micro, while the overarching energy of the pentacle is the macro.
Bright Shadow
There is a side effect of the Beauty Pentacle. It is a phenomenon that I was taught by Copper Persephone, one of my mentors, in 2009 called the bright shadow. Working on your bright shadow is not the purpose of this tool, but it is bound to happen because the energy of the bright shadow is closely related to the energy of the Beauty Pentacle.
We Witches and Pagans often talk about exploring our hidden shadows. We talk about our shadows as if they are bad, negative, harmful parts of ourselves (and they could be). We participate in rituals to help us heal our shadows. We meditate on raising our shadows up into our conscious awareness. We take workshops and classes to help us find balance with our hidden shadow selves. By having awareness of our shadows, we become stronger.
The hidden shadows of our spiritual psyche are often connected to wounds, hurts, triggers, and challenges that we don’t quite know how to deal with. They may be issues buried in our subconscious. Facing those shadows, healing what can be healed, and understanding the parts that need more time to heal is powerful human work—work that should lead us to a greater sense of wholeness.
By incorporating the Beauty Pentacle into your life, it is likely that you will be faced with pieces of your hidden shadow that need healing. And conversely, you are just as likely to find yourself facing parts of your bright shadow that need acknowledging.
The bright shadow is made up of the pieces of yourself that are big, talented, skilled, amazing, and wonderful. We all have these parts and pieces and some of us really know it. Some of us know how to own our bright selves. There are folks who can stand tall and accept the acclaim when it comes their way. However, this isn’t true for everyone. Sometimes accepting how powerful we are is difficult. Sometimes we might not think we deserve to shine. We may have wounds, hurts, or triggers that are connected to how strong we really are. Accepting the bright shadows, revealing them, letting them shine, and welcoming them into our consciousness can be just as difficult as facing the hidden shadows.
Owning your bright shadow isn’t about arrogance or thinking you are better than others. In fact, that’s hidden shadow sneaking into the action. When you become aware of your bright shadows, you learn to accept your beauty, your strengths, and your skills in a way that is right sized. Beauty reveals the bright shadows and asks you to accept the parts of yourself that are magnificent. Beauty asks for your bright shadows to shine and glow.
In the book Make Magic of Your Life, author T. Thorn Coyle asks the reader to think of larger-than-life things that take up just the right amount of space.1 She lists objects like a mountain, a humpback whale, and the moon as examples of things that take up a lot of space, but it is the right amount of space, and they do it without apology or playing small. She extrapolates this to looking at the larger-than-life humans in your life. What is it about these types of people that is compelling, irritating, frustrating, or admirable? This is the awareness of the bright shadow.
Part of the bright shadow is living your life to the largest capacity you can. This work asks you to stop playing small and step fully into the light and bask in that glory. This is not done with ego or arrogance but owning your beauty in all its forms.
Imagine what your life could be like if you were able to hold your bright shadow as a badge of success. The Beauty Pentacle asks how you can start to live from that place right now. What are the first steps that you need to take to bring that to fruition?
If you are the type of person that hides your light under a bushel, downplays your accomplishments, or deflects celebration of your skills, owning your bright shadow might be a challenge for you. To test your relationship with your bright shadow, the next time you receive a compliment, notice your first reaction. Can you accept the compliment and step into the limelight?
Shadow vs. Bright Shadow
This is not a subject of “darkness” or shadow being negative and “lightness” or bright shadow being good. Hidden shadows are not inherently bad. There is much that hidden shadows can reveal to us. Our shadows exist for important reasons, both hidden and bright. But ignoring them, keeping them hidden, or blaming them for bad behavior does us no good. All personal or spiritual exploration is about coming into a greater state of wholeness. It is not about delineating what is “good” or “bad.” Ultimately good and bad make up a false binary. Nothing in this world is clearly this or that. Magick is much more complicated than that, and the human spiritual psyche doubly so.
check-in
What is your current relationship with your bright shadow? Are you comfortable and incorporated with your shining parts or is there improvement to be made? How might you start to shine openly and honestly? If you find yourself struggling to see your bright shadow, start by asking your close friends, family, and loved ones what shiny parts they see in you.
1. Coyle, Make Magic of Your Life, 214.