Star Wars,
continued

The Eight

Lest the reader of the previous entry mistakenly take Katherine Neville’s book The Eight more seriously than Fritz Leiber’s greatly superior writings on eightness, here are two classic interpretations of Leiber’s “spider” or “double cross” symbol:

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Aristotle:
The 4 elements and
the 4 qualities
(On Generation and
Corruption, II, 3)

 

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Richard Wilhelm:
The 8 trigrams
(Understanding
the I Ching,
154-175)

The Six

Less impressive, but not
completely without interest,
is the six-pointed star:

This symbol consists of
two triangles

representing
male and female,
fire and water,
up and down,
etc., etc., etc.

For some deeper properties
of the number eight, see a
Log24.net entry of 4/4/03.