Name: The Sun - King Lear

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Dramatis Personae: Lear, King of Britain; Earl of Gloucester.

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Astrology: The Sun, Gemini, Leo

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Hebrew Letter: QOPH

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 Text & Context: The Hebrew letter qoph means "back of the head", or "nape". Originally, it represented an ape, the animal which mimics. Qoph is phonetic cognate with German kopf, meaning "head" or "vessel", and the obsolete Old English copp, meaning "head", but also "to take" - both to plunder and to endure - as well as "spider". As a pictograph, qoph represents the eye of a needle; for reasons of convenience, its original horizontal configuration was turned to point vertically, phallically. Because of this movement heavenward, qoph is the only Hebrew letter to descend below the baseline. Pictorally, qoph represents the spinal cord ascending to the brain, the sympathetic and parasympathetic caduceus branching into the right & left, male & female, day & night sides of the brain - The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Qoph begins kadosh, "holy", repeated 3 times at the end of Solomon's Invocation. It also begins Cain, signifying transgression and sacrifice, and klipoth, where the egos or hasnamussen live. This connects qoph with the ape god Hanuman, and the cynocephalus Thoth, Egyptian God of the mind, sometimes called  Hermes Trismegistus.

 

 The Sun card, cognate with son, representing Sol, the wisdom of Solomon and twining Boaz & Jachin of his temple, is the number 19 - the prime wind of aleph [Magician/Prospero] adjacent the terminal insularity of tet [Hermit/Timon]. Man creates the fires of Hell; his soul a forged furnace. The sun alone, without Binah, is the soul alone. As without water or sleep, man - even in earnest pursuit of the Deity - incinerates in a nightless day. Of the trinity of divine forces present in man, God the Father and God the Son work through Binah, the Holy Spirit, the feminine aspect comprising the top triad of the Tree of Life. Consider the Son's own words: "The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath [Mat. 12:8]", "The Son of Man has no place to lay His head [Mat. 8:20]", "Whosoever speaks a word against the Son of man will be forgiven, but whosoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this world nor the world to come [Mat. 12:32]."

 

 The Sephiroth which relate to the human being [zeir anpin] are 6 - Chesed, Geburah, Tiphereth, Netzach, Hod and Yesod - and these Sephiroth, one's Inner Being, emanate from and are exalted in the Seventh, the Sabbath/Saturday - Saturn at rest. This is Binah, the Holy Spirit, Jahavah-Elohim, which facilitates and crowns through Saturn's feminine aspect Zayin, the 7th letter. As "Darkness was upon the face of the deep" and "God said 'Let there be light'", the eternal aspect of God resides in the feminine - he creates the particular through her - Abba through Aima. As day is nightfall to nightfall, Eve is Adam's sleep. Without Binah, the female Paraclete, The Sun card is the false Sabbath, Sunday, unrelieved by sleep. It is the Roman Saturn and his Greek equivalent Cronos who devoured their children - save only his 7th son, Zeus, who set them all free with the help of Gaia. In Canaan and Carthage he is the patriarchal god Ba'al Hammon, the "Brazier God", mentioned in the Song of Solomon, to whom children were sacrificed by being burned alive. 

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 Lere, from Kentish læran, means "to learn"; Lear, as the personification of the ego, is instructive. The male, outward aspect of the ego, made up of its dominion over things, as Adam over Eve, animals, Eden. In this, as with the light-bearer Lucifer, he has placed himself in the position of God. He reallocates responsibility, subverts humility, makes truth nothing, believes solely in exteriors, becomes exile from himself. His very success blinds him, binds him, and severs him from humanity. Through hegemony of the obdurate, the letter, the yang, the brain, and disavowal of the receptive, the spirit, the yin, the heart, Lear is stripped of his honors layer by layer, his peace of mind dismantled piece by piece. As Edgar must become Poor Tom O'Bedlam to reveal to his blind father his own blind madness, so Lear's cryptic truth-telling Fool apes the king's folly. After Lear's dark night of the soul on the heath, the Fool disappears from King Lear because Lear becomes the fool. Sanity has left him; righteousness gone completely to his head. Lear's wisdom of Solomon is to actually cut the child in half, the child and mother be damned.

 

 At the end of Lear Lear awakes, to the music of his broken heart strings and his true Cordelia; the fires his madness lit rage on. Gloucester, who believed hearsay, has had his offending eyes plucked out and his flmae doused. The Fool and Cordelia die together in the unseen off-stage. And Lear awakes, then, engulfed in an inferno of Truth, to find himself beaten. In rejecting the heart, the anahata, the female core of himself felt in Delia [Diana], Lear's fire becomes trapped, sealed up in his head, until it burns a hole right through the back of it. In his virulence to have it all and to have it his way, Lear's Divine Right staunched the blood flow, cauterized the crown, sewed up the I. Alone, debased, he makes nothing his dower. 

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 Subtext: An anonymous play King Leir existed in Queen Elizabeth's Men's repertoire; The Queen's Men was likely spear-headed by de Vere. Shakespeare's particular spelling of Lear is an anagram of earl. During his banishment, de Vere lived across the street from Bedlam at Fisher's Folly. The Gloucester subplot derives from An Aethiopian Historie by Heliodorus, a source used elsewhere by Shakespeare, first published in England in 1569 and dedicated to the 19-year-old de Vere. Like Gloucester, de vere had one legitimate and one illegitimate son by different women and, like Lear, had three daughters by his first wife. Years before his demise he alienated the seat of the Oxford Earldom, Castle Hedingham, to his three daughters. It was his youngest daughter Susan de Vere who took up her father's mantle, involving herself in the theater and marrying Philip Herbert, one half of the "Incomparable Brethren" who produced Shakespeare's First Folio.  

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 At the Accession Day tilts of 1581, the Earl of Oxford appeared in the tiltyard in rich gilt armor beneath a bay tree itself gilded over in gold. In a speech to Queen Elizabeth, he told how, forsaking the wood, he took to the campus plain where, when "the Sun blazed, he could find the shadow of nothing but himself". That is until he was shown The Tree of the Sun by a hermit - the lone gold tree of the lone Phoenix of Heliopolis, "cooling those that be hot with a temperate calm, and heating those that be cold." Here the knight Oxford found in this tree's "sweet perfumes, which feedeth the Bee," “such content, as nothing could be more comfortable,” and "as the night slipped away in golden Dreams [cf. Endimion]" he “made a solemn vow, to incorporate his heart into that Tree [cf. Ariel], and engraft his thoughts upon those virtues, swearing that as there is but one Sun to shine over it, one root to give life unto it, one top to maintain Majesty, so there should be but one Knight, either to live or die for the defense thereof. Whereupon, he swore himself only to be the Knight of the Tree of the Sun."

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Intertext: Staffs 5 Edgar; Swords 5 Edmund; The Star XVII Cordelia.

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