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The number 6 is quite nice. It has a lot of factors and is also the smallest perfect number. Unsurprisingly, it shows up everywhere in a number of religions. People might easily have started with the number 6 and designed the star to go along with it. While it was harder to travel thousands of years ago, people did and it only takes one to bring back a design like this.

We can trace every script in Europe, Africa and Asia back to just three, one from Mesopotamia (3400 BC), another from Egypt (3250 BC) and the third from China (1200 BC). If writing was able to make it's way to almost every single culture on three continents, a 6 pointed star certainly can.

It's not like these societies were completely disconnected from each other (except Japan). Remember even people in the past borrowed things from their history for their beliefs. The entirety of Hermeticism is the fusion of Greek and Egyptian beliefs for example (Hermes and Thoth specifically).

I've been going down a rabbit hole trying to get to the source of the Japanese one. It's a marker at a shrine with the old name of the shrine, apparently, and no longer has the hexagram. That's all the further I could get before work, but it shows up in weird conspiracy-like blogs with arbitrarily-drawn hexagrams on maps (using the location of things today despite, y'know, the shrine variously having been purported to move, and some saying the thing was sealed away for over 2000 years which has a whole host of other issues). I'll report back if I get sufficiently bored. I have a feeling that, short of contacting the actual shrine, I'm not going to get very far. Even the various shrine and tourism websites are mostly dead links that I have to find by searching again on the base tourism site.

edit: This seems like a more sensible site explaining what a hexagram meant previously in Japan (basket weave pattern) https://cultural-experience.blogspot.com/2015/01/blog-post_8.html and addresses the "Japanese people came from the lost tribes" myth that was apparently dreamed up by a Scottsman in the past.

There's no way that more than one culture would figure out that 2 triangles inside each other looks cool

Behind the Bastards – “Behind the Swastika”: Part One, Part Two – one little rejected artist …

I've got an even better one: the circle! Yes, it predates even the enigmatic hexagram! Want your mind blown? Even the Universe follows its laws! Look into the sky and behold the moon! In the holy shape of the circle....

Aww, shit. I can't keep this crap going for long before I lose interest in mocking these asshats.