Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2002 16:05:57 +0000 (GMT)
From: Josh Geller 
Subject: Re: (urth) Quadrifons & Juturna



On Sat, 21 Dec 2002, James Jordan wrote:
> At 08:57 PM 12/20/2002, you wrote:

>> Did anybody ever work out what the deal with Quadrifons is? Going  back

>          Cherubim have four faces. Sphinxes are a one-faced form of the
> cherub. Being cats, they guard crossroads (as you know if you have a cat;
> look where he/she likes to sit: where he can watch up and down the halls
> and into the rooms). Cherubim guard doors, particularly the door into Eden.

My first thought, which apparently did not occur to GW, was Trimurti (the
syncretic Brahma/Vishnu/Shiva: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva being the One God
(or reasonable facsimile of same) in various Indian religions), Who is
always represented with *four* faces rotated ninety degrees from each
other. There are a number of different readings as to why four faces; the
most mundane one is so that three of them will be visible from any point
around a freestanding idol. Some of the more interesting ones have to do
with more-than-three-dimensional geometry (as do some of the more
interesting reasons why Indian gods generally have a multiplicity of
limbs).




















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