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BMJ No 7123 Volume 315 When I use a word ... Saturday 20/27 December Christmas 1997 issue
Crosses and starsHamish Cameron, Annette RobertsonThe Red Cross was founded in 1864 in pursuance of the aims of the Geneva Convention, and therefore used the Geneva Cross, a red Greek cross on a white ground, as its symbol. Because of the Christian connotations of the cross, similar organisations in Turkey and then in other Muslim countries were called the Red Crescent. And the equivalent modern Israeli term is Magen David Adom, the Red Shield of David. The Magen David (pronounced Mâ-'gen Dâ-'veed), a hexagram, a six sided star formed from two equilateral triangles superimposed, is the symbol associated with Judaism; you can see it on the front and back covers of George Steiner's latest book, Errata. Its origins are unclear. It is not mentioned in Rabbinical texts and therefore presumably originated outside the main stream of the religion. It has been found on tombstones as early as the third century and was first mentioned in a literary text in the 12th century, when it was described as a protective charm, inscribed on amulets. So when M Zasloff discovered a new group of antimicrobial peptides in the granular gland of the clawed toad (Xenopus laevis) he called them magainins, because they shielded the frog from infection when the skin was wounded (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1987;84:5449). The first therapeutic generation of these substances is about to appear, with names that feature the stem -magan. A similar talisman, the pentagram, which was sometimes found side by side with the hexagram, was known by Arabs as the Seal of Solomon, although according to John Aubrey the five points of the pentagram are supposed to symbolise the five wounds of Christ. It is mentioned in Lane's translation of The Arabian Nights as the symbol engraved on the base of a costly cup given by Sindibád to the King of Sarandeeb - as I serendipitously discovered. Solomon's seal is also the name of a plant, Polygonatum multiflorum, so called, according to Gerard, because of the pattern, fancifully pentagrammatical, seen when its thick root is cut across, although he preferred to believe that it was because it was used to "seale or close up greene wounds." Gerard and Culpeper say that it is good for the things that they usually say plants are good for (vomiting, bleeding, fluxes, wounds), but they also recommend it for knitting joints and joining broken bones. Moreover, Italian women, says Culpeper, use it to cleanse their faces of "morphew a scurfy facial eruption, freckles, spots, or marks whatsoever." In the old beggar's oath "by salmon" or "so help me salmon," salmon is supposed to mean an altar or the Mass. However, the only evidence for this is that Thomas Harman defined it as such in the glossary to his book about "vagabones" (1567). And I suspect that just as the Samoans fooled Margaret Mead when she sought to understand their culture, so the beggars fooled Harman, or perhaps gave him the wrong information out of ignorance. It is much more likely that the original oath was "by Solomon." This certainly occurs in one of the Carmina Burana: "Per sigillum Salomonis ... omnes vos coniuro," |mKby the seal of Solomon ... I bind you all by this oath." So perhaps the beggars were simply invoking a early form of the Red Cross.
Jeff Aronson, clinical pharmacologist,
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