Above left and right: The eight-point compass rose-like pattern on the wall in Victor Ziegler's home, here represents the Egyptian Ogdoad, a set of four male-female pairs of deities worshiped in ancient Egypt. Each of the eight points on the outer star represents one of the Ogdoad's eight deities. The outer star has four larger points, and each of these represents one of the four male deities of the Ogdoad. As denoted on the right-hand screencap, the four larger points on the outer star can also be taken to be pointing north, east, south, and west, respectively, indicating that Kubrick is here drawing a correspondence between the four male deities of the Ogdoad, and William Blake's four Zoas (from The Four Zoas): Blake associates each Zoa with one of the four major compass directions - north, east, south, and west. Blake, in his later mythology, developed an ogdoad consisting of the four Zoas and their four feminine emanations. Blake called them the Eight Immortal Starry-Ones. Below left: Alice dances with another man at Ziegler's party. Below right: Bill talks with two women at the party. Bill, Alice, the man Alice is dancing with, and the two women with Bill, all taken together, here represent five of the eight deities of Blake's ogdoad. The group of five people is also a reference to the space station meeting in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, as indicated below.
Left: Three women and two men (five people in total) are seen conversing at a table in the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Dictionary of Symbols, under the entry for pentagrams, says that the number five symbolizes the union of the number three (the male principle) with the number two (the female principle), and thus symbolizes hermaphroditism.[a] Therefore, the grouping of five people in the space station meeting represents hermaphroditism, with there being an emphasis on the female principle in this case, since there are more women than men in the group. (All of this symbolism also applies to the grouping of five in Eyes Wide Shut discussed above.) Blake considered real-life hermaphroditic persons to be inherently evil.[b]
a. Dictionary of Symbols. Ed. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Trans. John Buchanan-Brown. London: Penguin Group, 1996. p. 747.
b. That Blake considered real-life hermaphroditic persons to be inherently evil, is indicated by the following quote from his prophetic book, Jerusalem:
"[W]hen the Male & Female,
Appropriate Individuality, they become an Eternal Death.
Hermaphroditic worshippers of a God of cruelty & law!"
(--Blake, William. Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman, with Foreword and Commentary by Harold Bloom (Foreword © 2008, University of California Press). University of California Press, rev. ed., 1982. Google Books, p. 250. URL = books.google.com.)
