Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Síða 196

194
Árni Einarsson
The cosmos depicted on the ceiling of the house has a polarity similar to that
expressed by the homily: the divinity is at the centre and the earth at the periphery.
In the crucified figure the head of gold signified divinity (and the reign of King
Olaf) and the legs of wood signified the reign of inferior and more recent kings.
The wooded legs were probably meant to correspond to the trees growing on the
earth in the decoration of the ceiling.
The position of the king between the queen (on his left) and the bishop (on
his right) may well be significant. The symbolism associated with left and right
is extensive. The general idea is that right is good and left is bad. With “right” is
associated spiritual, heavenly, solar and white. “Left” is associated with carnal,
earthly, lunar and black (see Deitmaring 1969). The bishop is evidently spiritual
and can also be associated with the sun: he boasted of being able to sing, without
a book, all the services prescribed for the whole twelve months. The queen, as a
woman, is associated with the moon and carnality. In the cosmological context
defined by other symbols in the house, the bishop and queen may represent day
(sun) and night (moon). If we look at St. Olaf as taking the cosmological seat of
Christ, we can see in him a link between heaven (bishop) and earth (queen), or
divinity and humanity, i.e. the same concept as expressed above in the Icelandic
Homily Book.
The King as Monad41
King Olaf lies single in the centre of the house, in contrast with the ordered arrays
ofother people, whose numbers are precisely stated (see Fig. 1). This arrangement
links him with the concept of the monad. The rnonad is the number “one”, — in
medieval numerology it is considered to be not a number at all, but a source of
all numbers. As One and Unity the monad was analogous to the highest divinity,
the Godhead. Macrobius (Commentary 1.6.9) associated all three of the Neopla-
tonic hypostases (The One, Mind and World Soul) with the monad and later all
members of the Trinity were associated with it (see Proclus, The Elements of
Theology, Schrenk 1993 and Slocum 1993, pp. 13-14).
The monad is also associated with the sun. In The Theology of Arithmetic,
attributed to Iamblichus, the monad is:
a pure light, most authoritative over everything in general, and it is sun-like and ruling,
so that in each of these respects it resembles God. (p. 37.)42
John Scotus Eriugena (Periphyseon II) knew about this association and cites
passages frorn the book of the “Holy Father Dionysius [i.e. Pseudo-Dionysius]
41 For the concept of the monad see e.g. Macrobius Commentary 1.6.7.
If the nionad represents the spiritual sun in the middle of the house the number twenty (pillars,
men) in the outer house might represent the dyad, which Macrobius (Commentary 1.6.18)
connects with the planetary spheres, and which is generally associated with matter (Ps.-Iambli-
chus pp. 42 and 46-47 and Martianus Capella §732-33).