In this post I would like to share some thoughts I have about one of the Cave Runes. The Rune that’s on my mind is The Rod, you will find it on page 59 of The Tabula Mortem Guidebook. At first sight this Rune my seem simple and in fact that is why I chose it as the first Rune to write about in our new blog. In the book I said that this Rune could symbolize power or fire because of its resemblances to a stick. Here I would like to give you some new ideas regarding this symbol and maybe broaden your interpretation when this rune comes up.
It does indeed, look like a stick but is that the only thing it looks like? To go deeper into this symbolism we must ask ourselves, what would ancient people have seen in their world that would have looked like this and what images does it call to my mind today?
To answer these questions, you may need to leave your modern conveniences, all the lights, sounds, and clutters that tend to build up around us and sometimes inside us in what we call our daily lives. We will need to travel back to the time when daily life was a risk and our place in this world was a mystery.
Imagine a world where everything around you are wild, where trees reach to the very sky, where there is little or no traces of other humans. Maybe it is cold, and the snow is just starting to fall. There is a strong smell of pine trees and dead leaves in the air and a campfire crackling in the distance giving off a smell of smoke. Everywhere you look is nature and everything you see, even the rocks seem green.
Now ask yourself where you see a straight horizontal line, is it a fallen tree, a snake on the ground, or even the horizon dividing the sky from the earth. Now imagine you’re in a dark cave, people are gathered around, and you can hear them dancing and beating on drums in a soft and steady rhythm. The walls are covered with symbolic drawings of fantastic beasts the seemed to come to life in the dancing fire light. You walk over to the wall, and you see this straight line drew out in ochre. Now ask yourself what it is saying to me, what does it mean.
If you did this meditation, then you may want to write down any thoughts that come to your head as they may be insights into this symbol that can help you in the future. From my own point of view, I would like to examine the idea of this rune representing the horizon. If you have ever seen a small child drawing a picture, one of the first thing they do is draw a horizontal line to represent the flat ground. Ancient people had no way of knowing the earth was round, in fact they probably didn’t think of the earth as one thing. To them every rock, every gravel and every grain of sand would have been a completely different entity. On the ground was everything they knew, and in the sky was the unknown, the land of the gods. Looked at this way this rune could represent all, everything, all that we know.
If we relate this rune to the ground, then it can also represent stability and strength. All that is solid and stable in our lives. It could be all that sustains us and what we build our future upon. The concept of the horizon also gives us the idea of distance and things that are far away.
It could be telling us that something is stable. Or it could be speaking of one thing that is made up of many things. It could be telling us that something is far off in the future. Or it could just mean the ground itself.
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- Keywords
- Distance
- Stability
- The collective
- Security
- Solid