SYMBOLS - GOAT OF MENDES - BLACK PENTAGRAM Symbols from Oswald Wirth, Le Tarot des Imagiers du Moyen Age, 1927. [Left] The development of the black pentagram which formed one of the three pentagrams in Oswald Wirth's triple pentagramme. It represents the infernal fire that burns in each of us. Wirth refers to the demonic pentagrammic head as the 'Red Head of Baphomet', but it is evident in his original schema that the head was to be visualised as being black. [Right] Wirth's visualization of the twelve sigils for the signs of the zodiac within a mediaeval quadrant chart, at the centre of which is what he calls the pentacle of the accomplishment of the Great Work. He links this sigil with the tarot card of the Hanged Man: the structure of the man's body is so arranged as to trace the cross and the triangle. e Divine Spark, the cosmic energy within which Mankind dwells: as Wirth says, it is properly a Glory. [Top right] An arrangement of the eight trigrams of the Chinese Book of Changes, or I Ching, with the Tai Chi in the centre. The Tai Chi represents the ever changing expression of light and darkness (of yang and yin) each of which, of necessity, perpetually changes into the other, in the dance of opposites which is the condition of mutability in the created world. The laws governing this process of change are expressed in the surrounding eight figure (the pa kwa) which contain different conditions of the two basic elements of light and dark. Oswald Wirth does not labour the point, but he suggests a similarity between the Changes of the I Ching, and the changes implicit in the Tarot sequences. [Bottom] The winged solar disk, with the two serpents, associated with the Egyptian god Osiris - Wirth does not ruminate on the meaning of this symbol, but he claims that the two serpents are those found on the hermetic caduceus, and that 'in the eyes of the Hermetists' the entire symbol represents the Philosophic Matter in a state of Sublimation.