Hair and pillars, and pills

Hillary Clinton

Here's Mrs. Clinton's current blurb on Twitter.

It used to say "pantsuit aficionado" as well. That's gone, but "hair icon" is still there.

And here are her 2008 and 2016 presidential campaign logos.

Both logos turn the letter H into two blue pillars -- with an American flag in front of them (2008) or a red arrow cutting through them (2016).

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Nancy Pelosi

The name Pelosi literally means "hairy" in Italian, and of course there was that hooha about how, whilst publicly professing her support for Satan and all his works, she visited a non-Satan-approved hair salon on the sly.

The Pelosi coat of arms prominently features two pillars.

The Italian pelo, "hair” — whence Pelosi — comes from the Latin pilus. The English word pillar derives from the very similar Latin word pila.

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Joe Biden

Mr. Biden's interest in other people's hair is well known.

His own hair has also occasionally made headlines.

As for his connection with pillars, the guy's initials are JB.

These are Jachin and Boaz -- the two pillars that stood in front of Solomon's temple and later became an important symbol in Freemasonry. The J pillar is typically on the right, as specified in the Bible, but the Hebrews read from right to left, so it's still JB, not BJ.

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Donald Trump

Mr. Trump is very obviously a "hair icon" as well.

His connection with pillars is that he knocks them down. As I have said many times, Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign logo depicts Trump (the red arrow pointing right) slashing through the two pillars of establishment party politics.

What other "hair icon" is known for knocking down pillars? Samson. Just as Samson's strength depended on his never getting a haircut, Trump has kept the same hairstyle for a really long time. And like Samson, who was a Nazarite from the womb, Trump has never had an alcoholic drink in his life -- despite, like Samson, living a somewhat profligate life in other respects.

The name Samson derives from Shamash -- the Sun -- and I have already discussed Trump's connection to the Sun card of the Tarot. The German form of Samson (Trump is of German extraction) is, since Luther's translation, Simson. The TV show "The Simpsons" is known for having predicted a Trump presidency way back in 2000, and it portrays him -- like every other character -- with a bright yellow face.

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Red and blue pillars

The historical Jachin and Boaz, described in some detail in the Bible, were made of bronze and followed the same design, and there is no indication that they differed in any way. As Masonic or occult symbols, though, the two pillars are often represented as contrasting. You can see this in the illustrations I have given above. In one, Jachin is topped by the celestial, and Boaz by the terrestrial, globe. In the other, Jachin is white and Boaz is black.

Another convention sometimes encountered is to make Jachin red and Boaz blue.

In the lower of the two illustrations above, red Jachin is marked with the alchemical symbols of air and fire and is topped with the Sun; blue Boaz, in contrast, is associated with the feminine elements of earth and water, and with the Moon. (The words aesch and maijm written at the top of the picture are transliterations of the Hebrew words for fire and water, respectively.) The Sun is emitting a beam of light labeled pater. The Moon -- which, oddly, has its dark side facing the Sun -- is actually radiating a beam of darkness, labeled with the word mater written upside-down. (The upside-down M is now a W, transforming mater to water.)

This association of Boaz with inversion is reinforced by the alchemical symbols on the pillars; we naturally think of the fire triangle as a "normal" triangle and the water triangle as "upside down." Elsewhere in the picture, the word superius is written right-side up against a white background, thus associating it with Jachin; inferius, written upside down against a darker background, is linked to Boaz.

Strangely, despite both the historical positions of Jachin and Boaz and the universal symbolism of left and right, this picture puts Jachin (father, Sun, air, fire, higher, right-side up) on the left and Boaz (mother, moon, earth, water, lower, upside down) on the right. The only justification I can see for this is to make Jachin the "first" pillar and Boaz the "second" for those accustomed to reading European languages. (Another oddity: Since when is Taurus between Aries and Pisces in the zodiac?)

All these correspondences are consistent with the American political symbolism, current since 2000, of red Republicans and blue Democrats. But in the Hillary Clinton logos, where I have interpreted the two pillars as symbolizing the two parties, both pillars are blue -- and now, in 2020, they both bear the initials of the blue candidate, Joe Biden. And this, too, is appropriate. While the Republicans may be "the party of the right" by comparison to the Democrats, both parties are by any historical (indeed, by any sane) standard very, very far to the left. It's a blue world.

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Red and blue pillers

Can anyone read this discussion of red and blue pillars without being reminded of red and blue pillers -- those who have metaphorically taken the red or the blue pill of Matrix fame?

Pill derives from Latin pilula, a diminutive of pila, "ball" -- which in turn is believed to derive from pilus, "hair" (meaning originally a ball of hair).

Prior to the 2000 election, neither of the political parties in the U.S. was consistently associated with any particular color. "Red states" and "blue states" date back no earlier than the days of Bush and Gore. The Matrix was released in 1999, but it "correctly" puts the red pill in Morpheus's right hand and the blue one in his left.

In the film, taking the red pill means facing reality, and taking the blue pill means staying in a comfortable delusion and "believing whatever you want to believe." In recent years, the term "red pill" has -- again, appropriately -- increasingly come to be associated with the political right, and in particular with anti-feminism. (When Maroon 5 released an album called Red Pill Blues, they had to apologize and assure their fans that "we are all hardcore feminists in the band.") The association of the color blue with what would later be called feminism dates back at least to the time of Lord Byron.

(Ironically, the Wachowski brothers, who created the metaphor, are firmly in the "believe whatever you want to believe" camp; as of this writing, what they currently want to believe is that they are actually the Wachowski sisters.)

Matrix -- originally meaning "womb" -- derives from mater. One of the meanings of matrix is a grid, or anything arranged in rows and columns. Take another look at that Jachin and Boaz picture.

At the bottom is a grid -- a matrix -- and the triangular alchemical symbols on the two pillars can be seen as arrows indicating direction. The blue pill(ar) leads down into the matrix, and the red pill(ar) up out of it.

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But we no longer have a red J and a blue B. Both pillars, both J and B, are now blue. Blue J -- blue jay -- and yes, in case you were wondering, a blue jay is a corvid. There's a Beatles song called "Blue Jay Way," and this is how it begins.

There's a fog upon L.A.
And my friends have lost their way
We'll be over soon they said
Now they've lost themselves instead

What should we do, finding ourselves in Blue Jay World? Well, the Beatles themselves said it best: Please don't belong.