Then while Benaiah slew Adonijah as he clung to the horns of the altar, Solomon and his court in gorgeous array, decked in purple and fine linen and blazing with jewels rare and gold to burn, marched in one grand pageant from the house of cedar and gold, out through the Golden Gate, to the high place of Asherah. When they reached the oval, foliated door between the two great pillars of Baal, beneath the blazing, golden dome of Asher, supported by the circle of monoliths or twelve zodiacal redeemers, they bowed low before the open portal and crossed themselves, and by thus drawing upon their bodies the male symbol, they became themselves male emblems and worthy to enter in, and a worthy offering to a female divinity. The dazzling beauty who stood in the door of the pagoda then ran and threw herself into the arms of the king. He folded her pink and white form to his royal breast and impressed upon her ruby lips a long and loving caress, saying: “My divine one, my goddess, my life, my all, God is love, I know, I feel. Thou art the only angel e’er worshipped by Solomon the Magnificent. Thy lips are like the roses, like the sweet-scented, dew-bediamond roses in the royal gardens of Judea. Thine eyes are fathomless wells of priceless love, at which I drink till my soul is drunk and reels in its maddened delirium. Thy flesh is like the lilies of the valley, pure and white, meet vessel for a soul so true, white as the lilies of Asherah, white as the column of Baal, indeed so tempting and plump and luscious, that in thy divine and radiant neck I fain would bite the name of the King of the Earth and the Sea. “Solomon offered one thousand burnt offerings in the great high place of Gibeon,” a brothel, where they worshipped the pillar and the grove.—1 Kings: 3-4. “And they set them up pillars and Asherim upon every high hill and under every green tree.”—2 Kings, 17-10. “Solomon loved the Lord, and the Lord loved Solomon.” They formed a mutual admiration society, and in Gibeon the Lord said to Solomon: “Ask what I shall give thee.” And “Solomon built a high place before Jerusalem at the Mount of Corruption (Mount of Olives) dedicated to Ashtoreth,” now replaced by the Church of the Ascension, erected over the footprint made by Christ in the rock when he jumped from the earth to Alcyone. The Bible says that Ashtoreth was the abomination of the Sidonians, but it happens that Asher, one of the aliases of the Hebrew god, was the husband of Ashtoreth.