There's a Cross Emoji. There's No Pentacle. That's Not Nothing.

I went looking for a pentacle earlier this evening, in the way you go looking for a full stop when you're finishing a sentence – not expecting it to be an event, just expecting it to be there.

It wasn't. What's there instead is a small pile of pentagram-shaped consolation prizes, none of which are actually what I wanted, and I've been quietly annoyed about it since.

What's Actually in the Box

Unicode does have pentagrams. ⛤, ⛥, ⛦, ⛧ – the plain one, the ones with circles round them, the inverted one – all went in as part of Unicode 6.0, back in 2010.

So the shape exists, technically, and has done for sixteen years.

What none of them get is emoji presentation. That's not a small technicality.

It's the difference between a character that renders as a proper coloured glyph on your keyboard – the way ✝️ does, the way ☦️, ☪️, ✡️, ☸️, and ☯️ all do – and one that just sits there as a flat black-and-white symbol, because Unicode never flagged it as emoji-worthy in the first place.

Every major religious tradition with any institutional weight behind it got the colour treatment. Paganism got left in the monochrome pile with the currency symbols and the box-drawing characters.

The Bit That's Actually the Point

None of the existing pentagrams are a pentacle anyway, which is the detail that gets lost every time this comes up.

A pentagram is a shape. A pentacle is a tool – the disc, the talisman, the thing that sits on an altar with the star inscribed inside a circle, consecrated and used rather than just drawn.

Wicca and a fair chunk of the wider Pagan umbrella treat that distinction as load-bearing, not decorative. Getting handed a star with no circle round it and being told that's close enough is a bit like being handed a photo of a communion wafer and told it'll do instead of the cross.

I'd genuinely prefer an actual pentacle character over a fifth variation on the pentagram. What we've got instead is the shape without the object, in a colour palette nobody bothered to finish.

Why the Cross Gets to Be a Cross

The uncomfortable comparison is the one sitting right there in the emoji keyboard already. ✝️ isn't a generic geometric shape that happens to evoke Christianity if you squint.

It's a dedicated, deliberately chosen glyph, rendered in full colour, sitting a few taps away from the aubergine. Same for the crescent and star, same for the Star of David, same for the dharma wheel.

Whoever decided which symbols were common and significant enough to earn a proper emoji drew a line, and Pagan religious practice landed on the wrong side of it. Not through any formal ruling that it doesn't count. Just through the quieter mechanism of nobody with enough institutional pull ever pushing it through.

There have been proposals floating around the edges of the process over the years, informal requests and forum threads asking for exactly this. None of them have gone anywhere near an actual submission that made it to committee.

Unicode's own rejected-proposals archive doesn't even have a pentacle entry to reject. That tells you less about the merits of the case and more about how few people have bothered putting it in front of the people who'd say no to it.

What I Actually Did About It

In the end I didn't wait around for Unicode to sort itself out. My website's got a pentacle and a triskelion sat on it now, both SVGs pulled from Wikimedia Commons's public domain stock rather than typed as characters.

That's the only route that actually gets you the shape you meant instead of the shape Unicode was willing to give you. It's more faff than pasting a code point, obviously – you're hosting artwork instead of typing a glyph – but it's also the only way either symbol shows up looking like itself rather than like a compromise.

There's something a bit pointed about that, building your own icon set because the standard one doesn't stretch to cover you. Not a complaint exactly. Just an observation about where the workaround ends up living.

The Bit That Actually Gets Me

What's more demoralising than the Unicode gap, if I'm honest, is what happens once the symbol does show up somewhere.

A pentacle turns up in a film or a shop window and it's shorthand for something to be afraid of, full stop, no further reading required. That's the real cost of the gap – not just that the symbol is missing from a keyboard, but that when it does appear elsewhere, it's almost never on its own terms.

The Grammar Everyone's Learned Without Noticing

It's a fairly consistent visual grammar once you start noticing it. Horror puts a pentagram on the floor and it means a summoning is about to go wrong, a shorthand so reliable it's become its own TV Tropes category. Crime dramas draw one at a scene and it means the investigators are dealing with something "occult," in the vaguely sinister sense rather than the accurate one. True crime documentaries reach for it as visual wallpaper any time a case gets labelled ritualistic, regardless of whether an actual practitioner was anywhere near it.

The same grammar doesn't stay confined to symbols, either. It swallows entire hobbies. Even the moral panic around Dungeons & Dragons in the eighties leaned on the same shape as proof something dangerous was happening behind closed doors, when what was actually happening was teenagers rolling dice in a garage. The full list of accusations thrown at the game over the years reads like a checklist of exactly the same fears that get pointed at actual Pagan practice, just aimed at a board game instead – which is worth sitting with, because I still play. Currently running a barbarian called Cailean Uen, Forest Wolfkind, 5e, with a character journal that's carried a lot more than dice results: guilt over a mid-transformation killing, Selene as his patron same as mine, a running thread about historical persecution timed to the full moon. When one of the party died, he gave her a proper Pagan funeral and drew a triskelion on the grave. None of that reads like the thing the moral panic was afraid of. It reads like someone processing grief through the nearest available language, which is what it actually was.

So none of this – the horror trope, the crime drama shorthand, the D&D panic – comes from anyone checking what the symbol is meant to do. It comes from decades of the same handful of conventions getting recycled because they're a reliable shorthand for dread, and nobody involved in making them had much reason to ask who they were borrowing the shorthand from.

None of It Was Inevitable

Here's the part that actually matters, though: none of this was fixed in stone. The framing is a choice, and it's a fairly recent, fairly traceable one. Nobody's out here treating the four classical elements plus spirit – earth, air, fire, water, the fifth point holding them together – as sinister in isolation. Say "earth, air, fire, water" to someone and they think GCSE science or a children's cartoon. Draw the same five things as a star with a circle round it and apparently you've conjured something out of a horror film. The symbolism didn't change. Only the framing did, and it did it in 1966, when the Church of Satan adopted the inverted pentagram as its logo and cinema simply ran with it from there.

Which is where a specific hypocrisy sits, once you look straight at it: the assumption that anything Pagan is demonic by default, while the actual demonic – properly, deliberately, theologically demonic – gets treated as a separate and much rarer category that has to earn the label. Pagan doesn't get that benefit of the doubt. Pagan is guilty on sight, and everything downstream of that gets read through the same lens whether it's earned it or not. Sixty years of borrowed shorthand did that. Not five thousand years of the actual symbol.

The Proof It Doesn't Have To Be This Way

If the framing is a choice, the useful question is what happens when someone chooses differently. It turns out plenty has, in ascending order of how deliberately they seem to have done it.

At the accidental end, there's An American Werewolf in London – my favourite film, for reasons that have nothing to do with this post and everything to do with good taste. There's a pentacle painted on the pub wall, in what looks unmistakably like blood, because the film isn't above a bit of theatre. For once it's not played as a warning sign for the audience. It's protection, put there by the locals against exactly the thing stalking the moors outside. Jack clocks it and calls it a pentagram in the moment, the more common slip, but the shape as drawn reads as the fuller pentacle rather than a bare star. It's doing the correct job for once: ward, not threat. I don't think Landis was making a statement. I think he just didn't feel the need to make the symbol sinister when the plot didn't call for it, which is closer to the point than it sounds.

Further along, there's the shows that clearly did the reading on purpose. MTV's Teen Wolf frames its Druids as neutral, balance-keeping figures, and gives the one who goes bad a separate name for it – a Darach, a corrupted Druid, explicitly distinguished from the real thing rather than used as a stand-in for what Druids supposedly are underneath – which, for the record, is a nature-venerating path built around reverence for the land and a fairly pointed lack of dogma, not a farm system for corrupted dark priests. The triskele gets treated with something close to reverence too, tied to the phases of the moon and the three realms. CBBC's Wolfblood, aimed at an audience roughly a decade younger, goes further still: its Wild Wolfbloods get an actual religion rather than a vague gesture at "ancient magic" – a pagan faith with multiple gods, funeral rites performed on the bones of the dead to carry the soul on to what they call the One Pack, fasting on the Night of the Long Moon in memory of an alpha who broke the rule and paid for it. None of it is played as sinister. It's just how these people practise, same as anyone else's faith gets to be just how they practise.

And at the far end, past fiction entirely, there's my college. It ran faith slideshows on the monitors dotted round campus, cycling through different religions' holidays, and the Pagan sabbats got put up there alongside everyone else's without any of the usual editorial flinch. Same format every time, whatever the faith: the holiday name, a picture of what it actually looks like in practice, a short description of what it meant, and the relevant faith symbol sat above the name. For Paganism that symbol was the upright pentacle, given exactly the same billing as the cross or the Star of David got on their own slides. No caveats, no "some believe," no visual cue that this one was the spooky one. That's genuinely where I first properly learned what Imbolc and Lughnasadh actually were, from a screen mounted on a corridor wall rather than from anything I'd absorbed by osmosis.

Put those four next to the horror trope and the D&D panic and the pattern's obvious: the demonising version isn't the natural or default reading of the symbol. It's just the version that took less effort. Everything from the accidental pentacle in a 1981 werewolf film to a corridor monitor at a further education college proves the other version was always available. Almost nobody bothered reaching for it.

We Exist, For What It's Worth

Worth saying plainly, since the whole post has been circling round it: this isn't a hypothetical minority-interest gripe.

A decent chunk of the people I'm actually close to – my boyfriend included – are Pagan, and the pentacle is the symbol doing the representing for most of them, same as it does for me. We're not a rounding error. We're just one that Unicode, and most of British institutional life along with it, hasn't got round to accounting for.

The Bit I Don't Like Thinking About

Which is where the thought turns properly bleak, if I let it: without something on record, I'd assume I get filed under Christian burial by default, on the grounds that it's the assumed setting rather than a chosen one. I don't want that.

What I actually want, plainly, is a triskelion and a pentacle on the headstone – both, not one standing in for the other – so that whatever happens is at least legible as mine and not as whatever the local vicar assumed by default.

Guarded by yew, ideally, since that's the tree my own name traces back to whether I asked for the connection or not. There's something fitting about ending up under the one tree that's been quietly watching over churchyards for longer than the churches have.

It's a small, very specific thing to want. I know the odds of it actually happening are slim – headstones aren't really up to the person under them, in the end – but I'm allowed to hope for it regardless. I want it anyway.

The Small, Slightly Annoying Silver Lining

Unicode's currently taking emoji proposal submissions, with the window open until the end of July this year.

Which means the theoretical fix isn't blocked by some multi-year moratorium. It's blocked by the same thing most emoji gaps are blocked by – somebody has to actually write the proposal, make the case for frequency and distinctiveness and multiple-vendor interest, and sit through however many rounds of committee review before anything happens.

I'm not volunteering. I'm just noting that the door isn't locked, it's just never been knocked on properly.

The Version That Doesn't Need Anyone's Permission

Selene doesn't need an emoji to be Selene, and my practice doesn't get less real for running on a plain pentagram and a bit of imagination.

I wear an actual pentacle round my neck most days as it is – stainless steel, off whenever it's too hot to justify metal against skin, on the rest of the time because I'm quietly proud of it. That's the version that was never going to need Unicode's permission.

But it's a strange thing to sit with all the same – that the keyboard sitting in everyone's pocket has room for a wheel of dharma and a Thelema-adjacent inverted pentagram nobody asked for, and still hasn't found room for the actual symbol several hundred thousand people in this country alone would tick a box for, if the box existed.

At least there's the pentagram. I suppose that's the sentence I keep landing on, and I suppose it'll do, right up until it doesn't anymore.