Quedlinburg, Synods of. Several ecclesiastical councils were held in this German city in mediaeval times. The first took place in 1085. The bishops who sided with pope Gregory VII assembled it immediately after Easter, and it was presided over by the papal leg- ate Otto di Ostia. Among those who attended were archbishops Gebhard of Salzburg and Hartwick of Mag- deburg; the bishops Adalbere of Wiirzburg, Altmannof Passau, Bernard of Merseburg, Guntherof Zeiz, St. Ben- no of Meissen, Albert of Worms, Burchard of Halber- stadt, Herrmann of Metz, Reginhard of Minden, Wigold of Augsburg, Gebhard of Constance, Heinrich of Bam- berg. The council recognised, first, the primacy of the pope, whose decisions it was allowed to no one to alter or to criticise. In conformity with the decrees of for- mer popes, the consecration of the bishops unlawfully established by Henry IV, Wenzel of Mentz, Siegfried of Augsburg, Norbert of Chur, etc., was declared null, and likewise all other ordinations and consecrations of the same kind. The synod rejected the erroneous asser- tions of Wenzel of Mentz in regard to excommunication. Excommunications are only valuable when they are pro- nounced according to the forms adopted by the Church. The six following resolutions are of a general kind : The sixth canon recommends to the priests, deacons, and subdeacons perpetual continence; the seventh canon prohibits the lays from touching the altar-palls and holy vessels ; according to the eighth canon, the lays shall not take hold of the dimes without having the consent of the legitimate owners ; the ninth canon directs that the spring fast of Quatember shall be held in the first week of Lent, the summer fast in the week of Pente- cost; the tenth canon decrees no one shall eat eggs or cheese during the forty days of Lent; the eleventh can- on declares that the choice made by the legate Otto of Gebhard as bishop of Constance, and everything done by the legate in that city, is approved by the council. At the close of the council the anathema was pro- nounced, with burning tapers, against the anti - pope
Wibert (pseudo-Clemens III), the heresiarch ; against the apostate Hugo of Albano, who had presided at the Council of Worms in 1076; against Johannes (Petrus), archbishop of Porto, and against Petrus, late chancellor of the pope ; against archbishop Liemar of Bremen, Udo of Hildesheim, Otto of Constance, Burchard of Basle, Huzmann of Spire, deposed bishops; finally, against the usurping bishops Wenzel, archbishop of Mentz; Sieg- fried, bishop of Augsburg; Norbert, bishop of Chur, and all their followers. See Labbe, Concil. x; Hardouiu, Concil.x'i; Hartzheim, Cone. Germ.; Binterim, De u'tsehe Cone. vol. iii ; Flotho, Koniy Heinrich VT(Stuttg. 1855). Two other synods were held at Quedlinburg — one in 1105, for the reformation of manners; a third in 1121, about the situation of the empire and the investitures. See Wetzer u. Welte, Kirehen-Lex. s. v.
Quedu was, in Hindu mythology, the son of Kas- siaba and Siugfriede. He and his brother Rahu were re- doubtable giants and wicked daemons. They tried to prevent the gods from preparing the beverage of im- mortality, the amrita. The gods having succeeded in j their enterprise, by causing the Mandar Mountain to rotate in the middle of the milk sea, the two giants robbed the vessel which contained the amrita. The sun and moon had been witnesses to the robbery: they denounced it to Vishnu, who cut off the heads of the giants at the very moment when they carried the im- mortalizing liquid to their lips. A drop of the amrita had already made the two heads immortal; they flew towards the sky, and there became planets. They are only visible at the time of eclipses. They are fierce en- emies of the sun and moon, which they pursue and try to swallow. — Vollmer, Worterb. d. Mythol. s. v.
Queen. The Hebrews had no word properly an- swering to our term queen in the sense of a female sov- ereign, neither had they the dignity which that word denotes. Of the three Hebrew terms used as the equiv- alents of " queen" in the A. V. (jTVsbn ; bad : rnT25), the first {malkah) alone is applied to a queen reynant ; the first and second (sheydl) equally to a queen consort; without, however, implying the dignity which in Euro- pean nations attaches to that position; and the third (yebirdli) to the queen mother, to whom that dignity is transferred in Oriental courts. The etymological force of the words accords with their application. Midkdh is the feminine of me'leh, " king ;" it is applied in its first sense to the queen of Sheba (1 Kings x, ]), and in its second to the chief wife, as distinguished from all other females in a royal harem (Esth. i, 9 sq. ; vii, 1 sq. ; Cant, vi, 8) : the term " princesses" is similarly used in 1 Kings xi, 3. Sheydl simply means " wife," i. e. of the first rank, as distinguished from mere concubines; it is applied to Solomon's bride or perhaps mother (Psa. xlv, 9), and to the wives of the first rank in the harems of the Chaldee and Persian monarchs (Dan. v, 2, 3 ; Neh. ii, 6). Gebirdh, on the other hand, is expressive of au- thority ; it means " powerful" or " mistress," being the feminine of I^SS, yebir, " master," or " lord." The fem- inine is to be understood by its relation to the mascu- line, which is not applied to kingly power or to kings, but to general authority and dominion. It is, in fact, the word which occurs twice with reference to Isaac's blessing of Jacob : ;i Be lord over thy brethren ;" and " I have made him thy lord" (Gen. xxvii, 29, 37). It would therefore be applied to the female who exercised the highest authority, and this, in an Oriental house- hold, is not the wife, but the mother, of the master. Strange as such an arrangement at first sight appears, it is one of the inevitable results of polygamy : the num- ber of the wives, their social position previous to mar- riage, and the precariousness of their hold on the affec- tions of their lord combine to annihilate their influence, which is transferred to the mother, as being the only fe- male who occupies a fixed and dignified position. Hence the application of the term yebirdh to the queen mother, the extent of whose influence is well illustrated by the