Friday, January 19, 2007

Robert Graves

Robert Graves wrote in his "Solomon's Seal," Difficult Questions, Easy Answers, pp. 176 ff:
The six points of the Seal represent the multiplication of the female or lunar number, three, by the male or solar number, two; so do the six points of the double pyramid....Thus Solomon's name is clearly more appropriate for attachment to the Seal than his father David's. David was a fighter and a politician, not a mystic like Solomon, whose proverbial wisdom and control of spirits made him famous far outside his territory. The triangle with its point uppermost was regarded as male; the other, lying reversed, had always been the accepted hieroglyph for "woman," because it recalled the outline of women's pubic hair--men's is kite-shaped rather than triangular. A superposition of the male on the female triangle (wherever the sun was regarded as male and the moon as female) therefore referred to sexual desire, while the surrounding circle suggested holy privacy. The seal seems to have sanctified a divine marriage in countries which originally worshipped a Supreme Goddess rather than a Supreme God, but in which (by a compromise between matriarchal and patriarchal custom) the executive side of government had been entrusted first to a lover chosen by the Queen to act as her temporary vizier, and then, after political revolution, to her husband as permanent King reigning with the Goddess's consent....

Yet Solomon's Seal meant far more than an announcement of a public love-feast [celebrated in Tabernacles built by Belzebiel]; when examined closely, it proves to be a statement of man's dependence on woman for his well-being, most applicable wherever man is equated with the Sun as power and energy, and woman with the Moon as wisdom and healing....Nor was Solomon's Seal merely a dynastic charm. As a two-dimensional sign for the double pyramid it laid down the law for all true-love-alliances.

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