Volume X Numbers 4-12

ORIENS

Fall 2013

Solomon and the Royal Art of Love

Mircea A Tamas

There are many links, visible and invisible, between Chivalry and Masonry, and
especially between the Templars and the Masons: both observed the Royal Art, both were
initiatory organizations, both were beyond the common vassalage, free and directly
obeying God, both constituted brotherhoods without women.1 In a world where the
Holy Grail stories worshiped the dame and where the troubadours sang lamour courtois,
the Knights of the Temple living without this love for any dame, the Masons working
without fondness for any lady would seem strange, if we did not know that, for them,
lamour was the supreme love and the dame was the supreme Dame, Notre-Dame, Our
Lady. However, to really understand this love we must go beyond the religious or
exoteric, not to say sentimental, significance, and try to redescover the initiatory
mentality of these particular lovers.2
1

There are today studies giving examples of women that worked beside the medieval masons, which is
something different; also, we are not saying that women did not have suitable mtiers as supports for an
initiaton. Regarding the womenless brotherhoods, Saint Bernard admonished: What likeness do you
bear to them? Perhaps the fact that you take women not as traveling companions but as mistresses?
Companionship does not lay itself open to suspicion in the same way as living together. Who would
entertain dark suspicions about those who raised the dead to life? Go and do likewise, and I will suppose
that a man and a woman together are merely resting. Otherwise, you are insolently abrogating to yourself
the privilege of those whose sanctity you do not possess. To be always in a womans company without
having carnal knowledge of her is this not a greater miracle than raising the dead? You cannot perform
the lesser feat; do you expect me to believe that you can do the greater? Every day your side touches the
girls side at table, your bed touches hers in your room, your eyes meet hers in conversation, your hands
meet hers at work do you expect to be thought chaste? It may be that you are, but I have my
suspicions. To me you are an object of scandal. Take away the cause of scandal, and prove the truth of
your boast that you are a follower of the Gospel Let us return to the question of associating and
cohabiting with women, for all of them have some experience of this. Now, my good man, who is this
woman, and where does she come from? Is she your wife?, No, he says, that is forbidden by my
vows. Your daughter then? No. What then? Not a sister or niece, or at least related to you by birth
or marriage? No, not at all, And how will you preserve your chastity with her here? You cant behave
like this. Perhaps you dont know that the Church forbids cohabitation of men and women if they are
vowed to celibacy. If you do not wish to cause scandal in the Church, send the woman away. Otherwise
that one circumstance will give rise to other suspicions, which may not be proved but will no doubt be
thought probable (Sermon 65).
As Saint Bernard was saying, The brides form must be understood in a spiritual sense, her beauty as
something that is grasped by the intellect; it is eternal because it is an image of eternity. Her gracefulness
consists of love, and you have read that love never ends. It consists of justice, for her justice endures

Solomon and the Royal Art of Love

Ren Gunon, who, prompted by Luigi Vallis work about Dante and the Fedeli
dAmore, wrote a series of articles related to Amor,3 stated trs nettement, from the start,
that the main shortcoming of Mr. Valli is not to have the initiatory mentality, which
is appropriate for treating in depth such a subject4; indeed, when Francesco da
Barberino5 mentioned a mysterious widow, symbolizing Sapienza, the Wisdom, we are in
the realm of the initiatory love.6 Barberino said: Io dico a te e chiaramente che vi fu e vi
una certa vedova che non era vedova. Era toccata eppure intatta. Era vergine e la sua
verginit era ignota. Manc di marito. Aveva marito. Per la sua prudenza eccelleva sulle
donne e per la sua eloquenza su tutte le creature terrene.7
Alfonso Ricolfi,8 in his Studi sui Fedeli dAmore, said also: the gemstone or gem
symbolizes the human intelligence at its highest level; at this level, there are two widows
and in opposition: one has Constanza for maid, and the one, being inconstant, has
Facometipiace (Do-as-you-please) as servant. This partition is just one of the multiple
facets of the Maidens symbolism; Meister Eckhart said: The Virgin Mary, before
becoming Mother of God in her humanity, was Mother of God in her divinity, and the
birth in heaven is illustrated by the birth of God as human being,9 and he said about
Christ, that his birth of Mary ghostly was more pleasing to him than that his birth of
Mary in the flesh.10 In the Judaic tradition, the Pharaohs daughter presents the same
dichotomy and so does Solomon himself, as St. Bernard gracefully11 explained.
forever (Sermon 27). We may note that the Bride (which for Saint Bernard is officially the Church) is
not only Madonna Intelligenza (the Love) but also Astraea (the Justice).
3
Latin amor became Italian amore, French amour, but remained amor in Old Provenal, Portuguese,
Spanish and Venetian.
4
Gunon, Ibid., p. 56.
5
Francesco da Barberino was contemporary with Dante.
6
This Dame-Wisdom, sometimes Barberino calls her the Rose: Dogni cosa donna rosa [the Dame is
the Rose] (ponendo vertute lei per quella) e luce bella ed dognun salute [and the beautiful light, and
she is the salvation of mankind]. And, at the question who is this Dame?, he describes Constanza
armato al cuor che ben sai che vuol dire/ porta di donna vedova sua veste (armed to the heart that you
know what it means/ and she wears widows garment) (Valli 242) .
7
I say to you clearly that there was and there is a certain widow who was not a widow. She was touched
and yet untouched (intact). She was a virgin yet her virginity was unknown. She lost her husband. She
had a husband. She, for her wisdom, was the best of all women, and for her eloquence, the best of all
earthly creatures. Valli commente on these lines: Do you understand? But when we say that these
people spoke in jargon, that amore was not amore, that they belonged to a sect, that they mystiqually
celebrated these mystical ladies, that their lady was the lady of the Song of Songs (do not you hear the
clear echo of the Wisdom of Solomon?), those positive critics strongly say that these are fantasies, and
they are capable to waist their time trying to identify from the historical point of view the name and
origin (la paternit) of this widow Francesco da Barberino loved.
8
He followed, completed and sometimes amended Vallis work in his Studi sui Fedeli dAmore (year
1933) (see Pierre Ponsoye, Intelletto dAmore, t. Traditionnelles, no. 371, 1962).
9
Quoted in Jean Hani, La Vierge Noire et le mystre marial, Guy Trdaniel, 1995, p. 112.
10
Quoted in Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power in the Indian
Theory of Government, Munshiram Manoharlal, 1978, p. 36.
11
That is, full of grace.

Solomon and the Royal Art of Love

It is well known how Solomon was criticized for falling from grace at the end of his
life,12 but we must have in view, first and foremost, the symbolic and sacred significance
of Solomons tale, similar with the meaning of Samsons famous story, and, of course,
with that of Adam himself: from a cosmologic viewpoint, the King will decay, eroded,
and at the end of the cycle will become the Dragon13; consequently, there is a celestial
and androgyneous Solomon (moglier e marito of the Fedeli dAmore) and an earthly,
divided and multiplied one.14 His alleged wife, the Pharaohs daughter,15 is very similar
12

And Solomon made affinity with Pharaoh king of Egypt, and took Pharaohs daughter, and brought her
into the city of David, until he had made an end of building his own house, and the house of the Lord,
and the wall of Jerusalem round about (1 Kings 3:1); But king Solomon loved many strange women,
together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and
Hittites; Of the nations concerning which the Lord said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall not go in to
them, neither shall they come in unto you: for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods:
Solomon clave unto these in love. And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred
concubines: and his wives turned away his heart. For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his
wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the Lord his God, as was
the heart of David his father. For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, and after
Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites. And Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord, and went not
fully after the Lord, as did David his father (1 Kings 11:1-6).
13
See in detail our The Everlasting Sacred Kernel, Rose-Cross Books, 2001. Samson, as an archetypal
solar hero, an avatra, has to play all the scenarios. He has to be the divine king who reigns over a cycle
of existence and changes gradually into a dragon. He has to be the dragon at the end of time. He also has
to be the hero embarked on the initiatory path (p. 29).
14
On a historical level, Solomons legacy was division, considering that, after him, the kigdom was
disastrously divided in two (Rehoboam Jeroboam (he was a widows son), see our Free-Masonry:
A Traditional Organization, p. 167). Maximus the Confessor (who was in his youth an assistant to the
Byzantine Emperor Heraclius), and Eriugena after him, commented on St. Pauls words, There is
neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one
in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28), stating that the primordial man was androgynous, neither male nor
female, and the Fall produced the division of the sexes (rigne, De la division de la Nature,
Periphyseon, Livre I et Livre II, PUF, 1995, pp. 294, 300-1, 452; see also Henry Bett, Johannes Scotus
Erigena, Hyperion Press, 1986, pp. 56, 67, 78).
15
And his house where he dwelt had another court within the porch, which was of the like work. Solomon
made also a house for Pharaohs daughter, whom he had taken to wife, like unto this porch. All these
were of costly stones, according to the measures of hewed stones, sawed with saws, within and without,
even from the foundation unto the coping, and so on the outside toward the great court. And the
foundation was of costly stones, even great stones, stones of ten cubits, and stones of eight cubits. And
above were costly stones, after the measures of hewed stones, and cedars. And the great court round
about was with three rows of hewed stones, and a row of cedar beams, both for the inner court of the
house of the Lord, and for the porch of the house. And King Solomon sent and fetched Hiram out of
Tyre. He was a widows son of the tribe of Naphtali (1 Kings 7:8-14); even though he built a house for
Pharaohs daughter, Solomon brought up the daughter of Pharaoh out of the city of David unto the
house that he had built for her: for he said, My wife shall not dwell in the house of David king of Israel,
because the places are holy, whereunto the ark of the Lord hath come (2 Chronicles 8:11). There is, we
see, a connection between the Temple and the house of Pharaohs daughter. We should not be so much
concerned with the objection of the Egyptologists, who assure us that Egyptian royal women were never
married to a stranger king; like in all the other cases regarding sacred writings, we should remember that
the obvious meaning is the most uninteresting and superficial one (even if it has its own reality).

Solomon and the Royal Art of Love

in this respect: on the one hand, she is the divine virgin-mother16; on the other hand, she
is, like Eve or Noahs wife or Delilah, the strange woman, whose strangeness has
more than one symbolic aspect, related to the prakritian and asurian heritage.17
From an initiatory perspective, the dual aspect was represented by Solomons Amor for
Wisdom, a woman identical to Madonna Intelligenza,18 and his Mors for the strange
woman.19 The Wisdom, she is the Gate of Liberation, the Ianua Coeli, and she is ready
16

And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every
daughter ye shall save alive. And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of
Levi. And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she saw him that he was a goodly child, she
hid him three months. And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes,
and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the
rivers brink. And his sister stood afar off, to wit what would be done to him. And the daughter of
Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the rivers side; and
when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it (Exodus 1:22, 2:1-5). In the Judaic
tradition, Moses has three mothers: a corporeal one, an intermediary one who nurses him, and,
eventually, the divine virgin, the Pharaohs daughter. We have here a sacred scenario: for example, in
the Greek mythology, Acrisius was afraid that his new-born grandson, Perseus, would kill and replace
him; similarly, Laios was scared that his son, Oedipus, would kill him and take his reign. For the same
reason, the Pharaoh ordered, when Moses was born, that all the new-born children to be killed [implying
that Pharaohs daughter is the virgin]; the same scenario could be found in the Gospel (the massacre of
the innocents).
17
In the Romanian traditional vestiges, Satan gives Noahs wife a jar of boiled wine and she, becoming
drunk, betrays Noahs secret and confesses that he was building a boat in the woods. In Qurn (66:10),
Noahs wife is an example of an unbeliever (her name was Wila). The Gnostics also developed the
theme of Noahs wife; she appears under the name of Norea, the daughter of Adam and Eve. Norea set
fire to the Ark, because God (Ialdabaoth for the Sethians, an inferior and arrogant God) did not want to
let her survive the flood and because Noahs God is considered the evil God. In other Gnostic texts, this
God, who sent the flood, is opposed by Sophia, the Wisdom that saved Noah in the Ark (See our The
Wrath of Gods, p. 181).
18
The Wisdom, like Shekinah, like Astraea, is herself a strange woman, because the decadence of the
world makes her a stranger: Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets: She crieth in
the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates: in the city she uttereth her words, saying, How
long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate
knowledge? Turn you at my reproof: behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known my
words unto you. Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man
regarded; But ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I also will laugh at
your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh; When your fear cometh as desolation, and your
destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you. Then shall they call
upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me: For that they hated
knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord: They would none of my counsel: they despised all
my reproof. Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices.
For the turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them. But
whoso hearkeneth unto me shall dwell safely, and shall be quiet from fear of evil (Prov. 1:20-33).
19
The strange woman appears nine times in the Proverbs. To deliver thee from the strange woman,
even from the stranger which flattereth with her words; Which forsaketh the guide of her youth, and
forgetteth the covenant of her God. For her house inclineth unto death, and her paths unto the dead
(Prov. 2:16-18); My son, attend unto my wisdom [Amor], and bow thine ear to my understanding: That
thou mayest regard discretion, and that thy lips may keep knowledge. For the lips of a strange woman
drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as
a twoedged sword. Her feet go down to death [Mors]; her steps take hold on hell (Prov. 5:1-5).

Solomon and the Royal Art of Love

to give the Eucharist20; the strange woman, she is the Jaws of Death, the Dragons jaws
and the Ianua Inferni.21 Solomon sacrificed himself to illustrate the two Gates, to prove
that, as a projection of the Universal Man, he is complete only with the both women,
even though the Bible says that, because of this, he is not full(y),22 while Saint Bernard of
Clairvaux, the Templars mentor, illustrated from his vantage point, in almost one
hundred sermons about the Song of Songs,23 how Solomon, Love, and Bride should be
comprehended at the highest spiritual level, an illustration that we could call it
initiatory, in concert with what Ren Gunon wrote to Ananda K. Coomaraswamy:
for me, this person [Saint Bernarnd] is indeed an initiate and not only a simple
mystic.24
20

Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars: She hath killed her beasts; she
hath mingled her wine; she hath also furnished her table. She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth
upon the highest places of the city, Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither: as for him that wanteth
understanding, she saith to him, Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine [our Italics] which I have
mingled (Prov. 9:1-5) (But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind,
see Luke 14:12-24).
21
The mouth of strange women is a deep pit: he that is abhorred of the Lord shall fall therein (Prov.
22:14); For a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow pit (Prov. 23:27). Saint Bernard
alluded to these two women in his 85th Sermon: For where there is love, there is no toil, but a taste.
Perhaps sapientia, that is wisdom, is derived from sapor, that is taste, because, when it is added to
virtue, like some seasoning, it adds taste to something which by itself is tasteless and bitter. I think it
would be permissible to define wisdom as a taste for goodness. We lost this taste almost from the
creation of our human race. When the old serpents poison infected the palate of our heart, because the
fleshly sense prevailed, the soul began to lose its taste for goodness, and a depraved taste crept in. A
mans imagination and thoughts are evil from his youth, that is, as a result of the folly of the first
woman. So it was folly which drove the taste for good from the woman, because the serpents malice
outwitted the womans folly. But the reason which caused the malice to appear for a time victorious is
the same reason why it suffers eternal defeat. For see! It is again the heart and body of a woman which
wisdom fills and makes fruitful so that, as by a woman we were deformed into folly, so by a woman we
may be reformed to wisdom.
22
And Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord, and went not fully after the Lord, as did David his father.
Then did Solomon build a high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before
Jerusalem, and for Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon. And likewise did he for all his
strange wives, which burnt incense and sacrificed unto their gods (1 Kings 11:5-7) [our Italics].
23
He died in 1153, without finishing his commentary on the Solomons Song.
24
Letter of November 1936. In his opuscule, Saint Bernard, Ren Gunon presents, because of the special
circumstances sourrounding the writing of such an essay, a view slightly adapted to the exoteric readers:
Saint Bernards doctrine is essentially mystical; by this we mean that he envisages divine things
especially from the point of view of love, something which, nonetheless, would be wrong to interpret in
a merely affective sense, as the modern psychologists do. Like many great mystics, he was particularly
drawn to the Song of Songs, on which he commented in many sermons, sermons which were part of a
long series that continued throughout almost all of his career; this commentary, which was never
completed, describes all the degrees of the divine love [Amor], up to the supreme peace which the soul
reaches in ecstasy. The ecstatic state, as he understood it, and certainly experienced it, is a sort of death
[Mors] of the things of this world; along with sensitive images [les images sensibles], all natural feeling
disappears; everything is pure and spiritual within the soul itself, as in its love. Naturally, this mysticism
reflected itself in the dogmatic treatises which Saint Bernard wrote; the title of one of the principal ones,
De diligendo Deo (On Loving God), clearly indicates the place that love held in his thought, but it
would be wrong to believe that this was to the detriment of true intellectuality. If the Abbot of Clairvaux

Solomon and the Royal Art of Love

For example, in the Sermon 27, Saint Bernard said: What does she mean then by saying:
I am beautiful like the curtains of Solomon?25 I feel that here we have a great and
wonderful mystery [our Italics], provided that we apply the words, not to the Solomon of
this Song, but to him who said of himself: What is here is greater than Solomon. This
Solomon to whom I refer is so great a Solomon that he is called not only Peaceful
which is the meaning of the word Solomon but Peace itself; for Paul proclaims that He
is our Peace. I am certain that in this Solomon we can discover something that we may
unhesitatingly compare with the beauty of the bride. Equally, Saint Bernard interpreted
the phrase the king hath brought me into his chambers26 as referring to the House of
Wisdom, where the chambers compose an initiatory (amorous) hierarchy, aiming at the
same time to the Most High and to the Center: Let the garden, then, represent the plain,
unadorned, historical sense of Scripture, the storeroom its moral sense, and the bedroom
the mystery of divine contemplation. You remember that I said the bedroom of the King
is to be sought in the mystery of divine contemplation27; and then, in the same Sermon:
I feel that the King has not one bedroom only, but several. For he has more than one
queen; his concubines are many, his maids beyond counting. And each has her own
secret rendezvous with the Bridegroom and says: My secret to myself, my secret to
myself. All do not experience the delight of the Bridegrooms private visit in the same
room; the Father has different arrangements for each, which shows how far away (and
how elevating) is Saint Bernards exposition, in comparison to the profane one. With
regard to Solomons many concubines and his Peace, Dante also declared: Moreover,
the Empyrean Heaven by its peace resembles the Divine Science, which is full of all
peace and suffers no diversity of opinion or sophistical reasoning because of the supreme
certainty of its subject, which is God. Christ says of this science to his disciples: My
peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you, giving and leaving to them his teaching,
which is this science of which I speak. Solomon, speaking of this science, says: The
queens number sixty, and the concubines eighty; and of the young handmaids there is no
number: one is my dove and my perfect one. He calls all sciences queens and friends and
handmaids, but this one he calls perfect because it makes us see truth perfectly, in which
our souls find rest.28
always sought to remain apart from the vain subtleties of the academics, it was because he had no need
of the laborious artifices of dialectic; he resolved at a single blow the most arduous questions because his
thinking did not proceed by means of a long series of discursive operations; what philosophers strove to
reach by a twisty route and by fumbling, he arrived at immediately, through intellectual intuition,
without which no real metaphysics is possible and someone can only grasp a shadow of the truth. We
may add that, in this traditional spirit, Coomaraswamy wrote: But there is every reason to believe that
Leonardo, like so many other Renaissance scholars, was versed in the Neo-Platonic esoteric tradition,
and that he may have been an initiate, familiar with the mysteries of the crafts (Cf. Ren Gunon,
LEsotrisme de Dante, Paris, 1925; J. H. Probst-Biraben, Lonardo de Vinci, Initi, Le Voile dIsis,
38, 1933, pp.260-266) (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Iconography of Drers Knots and
Leonardos Concatenation, The Art Quarterly, Detroit, VII. 2, Spring 1944, pp.109-28).
25
Song of Solomon, 1:5.
26
Ibid., 1:4.
27
Sermon 23.
28
Dante, The Convivio, II, 14.