Figure 6. Pythagorean pentagram from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s ‘Libri Tres de Occulta Philosophia’ with the word 2g" a or Hygieia, Health, inscribed on its outer circle (30). According to de Vogel, the pentagram was equally used as a talisman in the pre-Christen Northern Europe in the context of health, good fortune and the prevention of disease. Its use may have been associated with the Druids, but de Vogel does not attribute it to the Pythagorean influence. It rather seems to have been used in the context of spell casting, ritual magick and folk healing as a protection against evil and malevolence, and was sometimes worn as an amulet for happy homecoming (25). Today, a pentacle—a pentagram within a circle—remains a nostalgic symbol of Neo- pagan faiths such as the Reconstructionist and the Wiccan traditions. It is widely used in a number of rituals, and often worn as a symbol of recognition among the initiates of New Age witchcraft (Fig. 7). Even in urban shamanism, rave culture and other tribal/urban movements of the information age, the ‘primitives’ wear a pentacle talisman—possibly in defiance of Christianity—while they indulge in Chaos Magick and the sigil rituals of Pentagrammaton and Pentacle body-piercing (31,32). Given this cluster of architectonic similarities, it is not inconceivable that pentic—or pentagramic—thinking in ancient Chinese natural philosophy and medicine is also historically related to pre-Christian Europe, the Pythagoreans and the pentagram. A cultural syncretism between the Greek culture and those of Central Asia started when Alexander the Great conquered Asia Minor and Central Asia in 334 BC. This cultural exchange gave rise to the Greco-Buddhist art and developed over a period of approximately 800 years in Central Asia between the 4th century BC and the 5th century AD. One might argue that this long period of intellectual exchange could also account for the gradual spread of a pentic star-shaped Mesopotamian or Greek archetype of health and wholeness in Central Asia and subsequently in China. The adoption and the addition of this pentic archetype/ prototype to a pre-existing binary model might also be due to an epistemological need, given that the Yin-Yang topological construct is a simple, hierarchical, tree-like and minimum model that only allows for one parental eCAM 2007;4(3) 297 Figure 7. The pentacle as a ubiquitous symbol of Neo-paganism (33). Image used by permission of the publisher, Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. www.llewellyn.com. All rights reserved. dependency-relationship per variable. It is therefore limited to the conceptualization of simple nonlinear structures and is ideal for binary taxonomies and ontologies (34,35). A non-hierarchical, multiparameter fully-connected semantic network, to the contrary, is an associative and ‘rhizomal’ model that allows for multiple dependency-relationships per variable, and is better suited to conceptualize dynamic systems where all com- ponents are inherently interlinked. In this model, discrete network-states can classify non-linear patterns based on the aggregation of parameter-weights and relationship- strengths alone (36,37). It would be interesting to see whether this epistemological shift from a purely tree-like model to a hybrid one, historically corresponds, or not, to a shift in perspectives from a purely ‘ontological’ view of disease as an external ancestral/demonological uni- factorial phenomenon (‘Evil Qi’), to a view that also embraces a ‘functional-individualistic’ (Unschuld) out- look, and equally perceives disease as a multifactorial loss of an internal elemental/organic harmony (4). If this were the case, such a paradigm drift would certainly require the adoption and the integration of an archetype/ prototype of disease that would allow for multiple dependency-relationships per variable, and would also structurally reflect the link between health and wholeness and elemental/organic harmony. The selection of a pentagram would satisfy both requirements. Concluding Remarks This cognitive and epistemological review points to remarkable infrastructural similarities between Chinese Medicine and certain esoteric beliefs of pre-Christian Europe. In both contexts, an associative five-parameter cognitive model paired with occultism, numerology, sacred geometry and magickal thinking underlies the belief system in health and the prevention of disease.