The king is surprised as good fortune comes in by the window. (Emblem by Jean Cousin, 1568)
The twin pillars were fashioned by Hiram Abiff, master craftsman and worker in bronze, the architect Solomon had employed to design the Temple and supervise its construction. Called Jachin and Boaz, these pillars stood outside Solomon’s Temple, marking the furthest point of the sun’s rising at the equinoxes. But they also represented smaller human-scale rhythms which interlock with the cosmic rhythms like cogs in a clock—the rhythms of human evolution, life and death, night and day, and breathing in and out.
The red column, Jachin, represented the absorbing of the oxygen in red blood—and also the absorbing of spiritual influence, of Self by self. This had happened freely before humans developed material bodies. Now it happens in between incarnations when the spirit rises up into the spiritual worlds in order to be refreshed, and it happens, too, in a smaller way at night when the spirit emerges from the physical body.
The red column was the Tree of Life, representing the animal life that red blood makes possible. The blue column was the Tree of Knowledge. It represented carbonated blood and what we as individuals contribute to cosmic and human evolution by our thoughts and deeds during our lifetime, during the day and moment by moment, by what we decide to think and do. It is what we take with us into life after death, and what we contribute to the mysterious alchemical process which is the gradual evolution of humankind.
The Temple of Solomon was not indestructible, but it looked forward to a temple that would be indestructible. It was a prophecy in stone. In the future, after the world and humanity had passed through many stages of evolution, and when the human body had been spiritualized, according to the process alluded to in the pillars, and when humanity had rediscovered its ideal nature, then it would be indestructible. This is the Masonic wisdom built into the Temple: as the craftsman carved the stone, divided it with his compasses and penetrated it with his chisel, so will the human being be mastered and made perfect.
Solomon’s wisdom, his wealth and his amazing buildings with strange wonder-working properties, attracted people from afar.
The Queen of Sheba was famous for her beauty. She arrived with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Solomon waited for her in a room made of mirrors—the walls, the ceiling and the floor—and when she first saw him she thought he was standing on water.
Sheba was shy of walking on this glass. She had a secret that a mirrored floor would reveal—that her feet were webbed like the feet of geese.
The king beckoned her forward. She now saw she had to cross a stream to reach him, but as she was about to step on a wooden bridge, something made her hesitate. She stood still for a while. She was having a premonition, and she wanted to wait until she was sure she understood it. A moment later she realized what it was that she was being told: that one day a god would be crucified on this piece of wood.
So she stepped sideways, avoiding stepping on the bridge and choosing to wade through the stream instead. When she emerged on the other side, she was overjoyed to see that her feet had been healed.
Solomon came forward to meet her.
Solomon and Sheba were attracted to each other. “I am black,” she said. “My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth me amongst lilies.”
She teased him with riddles. She gave him an emerald with a curved hole in the middle and challenged him to push a thread through it. Solomon sent a silkworm to crawl through the hole drawing with it a silken thread.
* * *
There is another twist to the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. We are excavating the deeper layers of the human psyche here, aggregates of spiritual turmoil.
Sheba met someone else, another kindred spirit: Hiram Abiff. As queen of the Sabeans, Sheba would have worshipped Venus under the name of Astarte. As a Phoenician, Hiram would have worshipped Astarte too, constructing the Temple so that at certain times the light of Venus rising would shine in through a dormer window into the Holy of Holies. Masonic temples are still built with the same orientation today and as a candidate for initiation is born into the brotherhood his attention is drawn to the rising of the five-pointed star of Venus.
The Temple was nearing completion and, visiting it, Sheba asked Solomon if she could meet the man who had designed this marvel. Solomon was reluctant, but she insisted.
When Hiram was summoned, he gave the queen a glance that melted her inside. Solomon noted this glance, and he also saw the queen look away with downcast eyes, keeping her thoughts to herself.
She then asked Solomon if she could meet the builders too.
“Impossible,” said Solomon. He explained that they were scattered all over the place and, besides, far too busy. But Hiram jumped up on a stone, holding up the sign of the tau cross, and immediately hundreds of men swarmed in front of them.
Solomon knew that Hiram was planning the unveiling of his greatest architectural and alchemical marvel: the molten sea. Knowing, too, that the queen was to be present at its unveiling, Solomon appointed three apprentices to work on this project. He had good reason to believe these three were incompetent, and he hoped they would spoil Hiram’s demonstration.
On the day the molten sea was to be cast, when molten metal and water were to be poured into the mold, Solomon, the Queen of Sheba and many nobles gathered to watch. But because the apprentices poured the molten metal and water in the wrong proportions, the casting went disastrously wrong and a scalding cloud of steam enveloped the crowd of spectators.
Hiram felt humiliated. His reputation was destroyed. But that night he had a vision of an angel who presented him with a hammer and golden triangle. When he awoke he found these artefacts lying next to him and he understood that he was to wear the triangle around his neck. It had a word written on it, and he understood that this was the secret name of God. If pronounced perfectly, it would return humanity to the state of perfection it had enjoyed before the Fall.
His optimism restored, Hiram Abiff set to work again. He would make another attempt to manufacture the molten sea, this time using the hammer that had been given him in his dream.
One day, when this work was well on the way to completion, he met the Queen of Sheba in a courtyard of the palace. They confessed their love for each other and made secret plans to leave the kingdom. They planned to meet up again somewhere they could be safe.
Solomon did not directly ask the three apprentices to kill Hiram. He merely wondered out loud who would rid him of this turbulent man.
That evening they attacked Hiram, demanding to know the secrets of a Master Mason.
“Your life or the secrets!” they cried.
“My life you can take, my integrity, never,” he replied, before one of the ruffians felled him with a single blow to the head.
Just before he died Hiram was able to toss the golden triangle down a well. And that is how the Word came to be lost.
As we shall see, the quest for the lost Word is, like the quest for the Holy Grail, intimately tied up with the mysteries of human physiology.2
The significance of Venus to the writers of the Old Testament is perhaps not obvious. But Psalm 19’s description of the sun coming out of his chamber like a bridegroom is based on an earlier Canaanite passage describing the sacred marriage of the sun and Venus. Perhaps more interesting and more important, as author Robert Lomas has pointed out, is the frequent recurrence of the number forty—the number of years in the Venus cycle—in the Old Testament account of history. For example, Israel wandered in the desert for forty years, Saul reigned for forty years, David reigned for forty years, Solomon reigned for forty years. According to 1 Kings 6.1, the Jerusalem Temple was built 480 years (12 Venus cycles) after the Exodus from Egypt. The historian Josephus recorded the tradition by which Solomon began to build the Temple 1440 years (36 Venus cycles) after the Flood. Clearly this recurrence is meaningful. Either the writers were aware of a tradition that the movements of Venus exerted a controlling influence on the pattern of history and therefore fudged the dates to fit. Or Venus does indeed have such an influence and the authors of the Bible recorded it accurately.3