SOLOMON'S SEAL 



Polygonatum biftoram (Walt.) Ell. 



May Bending in splendid architecture, the stem of Solomon's seal 



Woods curves in a Komanesque arch and, in elegant order, bears 

 leaves above and flowers below. 

 The flowers are green, narrow bells with six slightly recurving flower 

 parts. Inside are the six, polleny stamens and the thin pistil. The leaves, 

 much like those of false spikenard, are oval, tapered, and stand erect 

 above the stem. The fruits, hanging in pairs or trios as the flowers did, 

 are as big as a large pea, at first are green and then turn a dark Prus- 

 sian blue. 



Back of the name given to Solomon's seal is the mystic symbol known 

 as the Seal of Solomon, far back in the davs of the Old Testament. The 

 Seal was composed of two interlacing triangles, one light and the other 

 dark, representing the union of the soul and the body, just as the Chinese 

 mystic symbol of the Yang and the Yin carried out the same idea. In 

 the ancient legend, the Seal of Solomon was actually a finger ring with 

 a miiTor in the center in which Solomon, in a sort of ancient television, 

 could see persons and events far away. Much later, the symbolic repre- 

 sentation of the two triangles forming a six-pointed star was used as an 

 amulet to ward off: fevers and illnesses. 



The days of King Solomon and his mystic seal and the ring in which 

 he saw visions seem to be remote and to have no connection with any 

 plant in an Illinois woods. But the connection is there. Someone more 

 discerning than the rest, in the early days of America, saw the strange 

 knobby rootstocks of the Solomon's seal and discovered in certain scars 

 on the rootstocks a striking resemblance to the fabulous Seal of Solomon. 



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