Smearing the Pentacle

As for Brown's claim about the pentacle, even that contradicts historical evidence. The fact is, many Christians actually embraced the pentacle! "The truth is, during the later medieval era (the 1100s to the 1500s), Christians used the pentagram and pentacle as a reminder of Christ's five wounds (hands, feet, side, back, head). They also used it as a symbol for "the five books of Moses" and "the five stones used by David against Goliath," according to page 32 of The Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code.

There is nothing about a symbol, such as the pentacle or pentagram, that is inherently good or evil. Its meaning depends on who is using it and for what purpose they are using it. Some school teachers will mark a student's homework assignment with a star (a pentacle) to show that the student did excellent work. In this context, there is nothing demonic about the pentacle, it simply represents "stellar" work. But, when the founder of the Church of Satan needed a symbol for his religion during the 1960s he chose to use a pentacle, which he turned upside down. A pentacle, then, is what one makes of it.

So who "demonized" the pentacle? According to some scholars, and according to some modern pagan sources, it was a French occultist who lived during the 1800s. In other words, it was a pagan who "demonized" the symbol.