It is the 1 AND the 5.

What Lawlor says is correct, albeit a bit abstract: the fifth seal indeed symbolizes the PERFECTED MAN, i.e. the first (and lower) degree of IMMORTAL.

I will not spoil other’s meditations on this remarkable construction, but I will add one more thing.

There are TWO kinds of pentagrams: one pointing UPWARD (lifting up the elements), and the other pointing DOWNWARD (the well known mark of the Dark One). When Man, passing beyond the impermanent material plane, reaches the world of the Force, the Path bifurcates….

From Lawlor’s original diagram I excluded 5 — a pentagon inscribed within the initial circle — in order to focus attention on the 4-sided objective.

But let’s not leave your finely presented progression hanging; for your mandalic meditations I include 5’s description here:

The pentagon “is the figure ascribed to the physical and vital aspects of man [i.e., Life], who, through the five senses, perceives the natural world and thus brings it into existence. The star pentagram formed by the diagonals within the pentagon symbolizes transformed or perfected humanity, because all the line segments of the star pentagram are derived from the Golden Proportion” (p75).

1) the passage from the ONE to the TWO always happens by MITOSIS, as it is witnessed innumerable times in the biological world: see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitosis

2) the WORD (logos), aka the number 3, is the MEDIATOR, i.e. the RATIO (it is not by chance that the word reason comes from the latin root ratio). This ratio is well represented by the number phi, the RATIO AUREA, or the eternal harmony inside duality.

3) out of the 3 comes the 4, the FOUR VISIBLE ELEMENTS, the SQUARE of directions (the fifth element being the original circle itself, itself an expansion of the central dot). The 4 externalized is the VISIBLE WORLD, represented by the outer circle. The fact that the square and the outer circle are indeed the same in perimeter, points to their fundamental identity.

A good Mandala for endless meditations….