kidnapped by Ashmedai, the king of demons. He succeeded in kidnapping the king by stealing his “seal of Solomon”, although according to the Talmud this seal was simply a metal coin with Hebrew letters meaning the name of God, inscribed on it. It is possible that the seal was altered in the Arab tales. The first appearance of the symbol in Jewish scriptures was in oriental Kabbalistic writings, so it is possible that it was an alteration of the pentagram under Arab influence.
Professor Gershom Sholem theorizes[citation needed] that the “Star of David” originates in the writings of Aristotle, who used triangles in different positions to indicate the different basic elements. The superposed triangles thus represented combinations of those elements. From Aristotle’s writings those symbols made their ways into early, pre-Muslim Arab literature.
Usage by Hinduism and Eastern Religions
Diagram showing the two mystic syllables Om and Hrim
Six pointed stars have also been found in cosmological diagrams in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. The reasons behind this symbol’s common appearance in Indic religions and the West are lost in the mists of antiquity. One possibility is that they have a common origin. The other possibility is that artists and religious people from several cultures independently created the hexagram shape, which after all is a relatively simple and obvious geometric design.
Within Indic lore, the shape is generally understood to consist of two trianglesne pointed up and the other downocked in harmonious embrace. The two components are called ‘Om’ and the ‘Hrim’ in Sanskrit, and symbolize man’s position between earth and sky. The downward triangle symbolizes Shakti, the sacred embodiment of femininity,