THE QUEEN OF SHEBA AND THE FEMININE PRINCIPLE
The Queen of Sheba has not merely been forgotten by male-only Masonry; she has been symbolically displaced. In the deeper grammar of the Temple, Solomon belongs to the East as Wisdom, the initiating and paternal principle, the first conception of the Work. The West, however, ought to be occupied by Sheba, not by another man; for the West is the place of reception, gestation, reflection, and form, the station in which the divine idea is gathered into order by the feminine power. The South then belongs properly to Hiram Abiff, the active and animating principle, the force that labours, enacts, and brings into manifest life what has already been conceived and structured. This is the true esoteric trinity: Father, Mother, and Child; intention, matrix, and living embodiment.
What male-only Masonry has too often done is both simpler and poorer. Unwilling to enthrone the feminine, even symbolically, in one of its principal stations, it has substituted Hiram of Tyre for Sheba and thereby mutilated the triad at its root. One may preserve an outward legend by such means, but only at the cost of inward truth. For no authentic mystery can remain whole when the feminine principle is erased from the sacred architecture. The ancient world understood this with greater subtlety than many modern brethren: Osiris is incomplete without Isis; spirit cannot generate without matrix; wisdom alone does not build, nor does labour alone sanctify. Where woman is excluded from the symbol, the symbol itself is impoverished. Male-only Masonry may congratulate itself on preserving tradition, yet in this matter it has too often preserved only the husk while discarding the generative law that once gave the mystery life.