THE COMPANY OF HANDS

… take your hand and put the tips of your fingers and thumbs on a piece of parchment, keeping your palm a good thumb’s height from the surface. Take a quill, dip it in the ink and make a mark at the end of each one, and then join each mark to the others with a straight line. You have just drawn an irregular pentagram, or a five-pointed star, inside an outer boundary. The star is for power. The boundary is for protection. It keeps the power within, and stops it spilling out into the world unchecked.

The ignorant, or those who would chain you to a superstition cloaked as a religion, will tell you a pentagram is a thing of darkness, a tool of black magic, the sign of any number of devils.

It is precisely the opposite. It contains and protects the light, and it does so within a symbol based on the earthly, upon the human hand–not on something unearthly and superstitious. A pentagram says humankind has the ability to contain power and not be consumed or corrupted by it…

… Gawain, one of the most virtuous of Arthur’s knights, carried the pentagram on his shield, not only representing duty but also generosity, fellowship, honesty and compassion. These same virtues inform the Free Company for The Oversight of London, who arrange themselves in “Hands” of five in memory of this…

Extract from The Great and Hidden History of the World by the Rabbi Dr Hayyim Samuel Falk