[[geometry:square]]

The Square: 4, Physicality

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The square, its even sides intersecting at the straight perpendicular, suggests stability. The square is rock-solid (and, turned on its point, it becomes a diamond, the hardest of rocks). It’s a special case of the rectangle, and rectangles predominate as the shape of the four walls of the rooms and buildings we live in and indeed of the very building blocks so many of those walls are made from. Metaphorically, the “building” we live in is the world around us. Hence, the square almost always symbolizes the material world: our manifested reality. It is considered grounded, down-to-earth; a symbol of the physical, the tangible.

Like the equilateral triangle, the square is a common symbol in diverse spiritual traditions; for example, Eastern mandalas often incorporate this shape. In many of these representations the sides of the square stand for the four elements and/or the four cardinal directions.

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The square for manifested reality stands in contrast to the circle for the spiritual. Indeed, the impossible task of “squaring the circle” (creating a square that has precisely the same area as a circle, using only a compass and a straightedge) has been pursued by sages for centuries, a geometric attempt to reconcile the material and spiritual realms.

Considering the symbolic importance of the square, one would expect some mathematical significance to emerge from it. It doesn’t disappoint; if each side of a square measures 1, then the measure of the square’s diagonal is the square root of two: an elegant result that’s an irrational number, the eagerly sought prize of sacred geometry.

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The 3-dimensional analogue of the square is the cube.

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Next–The Pentagon & Pentagram: 5, Phi, Harmony
Back to Sacred Geometry intro

  • geometry/square.txt
  • Last modified: 2019/08/05 11:41
  • by RandallS