A Hunter's Sigil

enciphered title, January 2022 - Water colour and ink on 300g cold-pressed cotman

The real title is painted in runic code on the reverse of the material.

I painted this about a year ago with the intent of posting it shortly after, however a significant change in priorities caused an expected disruption to that.

The components of the main form are derived from futhark rune staves, as used in some of my other work. The concept came about while meditating on the Way of archery in relation to my own journey self mastery. It coincides with the development of that idea shortly after deciding on [the name]({{ site.baseurl }}/about/) for this website and overarching project. It incorporates the ideas of powerful and enduring forces that rise from ones' darkest depths and ancestral roots, life and death aspects of the four pillars of Being (physical, mental, temporal, and spiritual), the sacrifices required to move ever closer to your highest potential Self, and the knowledge that you can never reach it.

I was torn between having the arrow head where it is or higher than the Sun. In the current context, there is an subtle implication that the Sun is the pinnacle of aspiration. Some people, for example Jack Donovan in Fire in the Dark, propose that the Sun is analogous to or representative of the highest order power we can perceive and is therefore a suitable God form but I think that line of thinking is flawed. While many of our ancestors throughout the world centered their belief systems around the Sun as a central entity, our ability to think beyond the Sun in those terms means that continuing to align thinking and spirituality towards the Sun as the pinnacle is immediately metaphysically limiting. Granted, the Sun is extremely important to our very existence, at the very least physically. Being substantially more powerful and awesome than the brief mortality of human life, the Sun is perhaps a suitable icon to represent what humans can or strive for. However, I believe that it is at best a mere subset of what is truly awesome in, or about, the universe as whole, including the physical, metaphysical, and beyond. All of that is to say, the concept represented here is limited to that of human potential on Earth and, even in its totality, is merely a glimmer of thought in the vastness of infinite Awe.